Canada under British Rule by Sir John George Bourinot (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📕

retarded improvement and the best means of developing the resources of the province. An answer from Sandwich virtually set forth the feeling of the rural districts generally on these points. It stated that the reasons for the existing depression were the reserves of land for the crown and clergy, "which must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, and a hindrance to compact and good neighbourhood; defects in the system of colonisation; too great a quantity of lands in the hands of individuals who do not reside in the province, and are not assessed for their property." Mr. Gourlay's questions were certainly asked in the public interest, but they excited the indignation of the official class who resented any interference with a state of things which favoured themselves and their friends, and were not desirous of an investigation into the management of public affairs. The subsequent treatment of Mr. Gourlay was shameful in the extreme. He was declared a most dangerous character when he followed up his circular by a pamphlet, attacking the methods by which public affairs generally were conducted, and contrasting them with the energetic and progressive system on the other side of the border. The indignation of the officials became a positive fever when he suggested the calling of public meetings to elect delegates to a provincial convention--a term which recalled the days of the American revolution, and was cleverly used by Gourlay's enemies to excite the ire and fear of the descendants of the Loyalists. Sir Peregrine Maitland succeeded in obtaining from the legislature an opinion against conventions as "repugnant to the constitution," and declaring the holding of such public meetings a misdemeanour, while admitting the constitutional right of the people to petition. These proceedings evoked a satirical reply from Gourlay, who was arrested for seditious libel, but the prosecutions failed. It was then decided to resort to the provisions of a practically obsolete statute passed in 1804, authorising the arrest of any person who had resided in the province for six months without taking the oath of allegiance, and was suspected to be a seditious character. Such a person could be ordered by the authorities to leave the province, or give security for good behaviour. This act had been originally passed to prevent the immigration of aliens unfavourable to England, especially of Irishmen who had taken part in the rebellion of 1798 and found refuge in the United States. Gourlay had been a resident of Upper Canada for nearly two years, and in no single instance had the law been construed to apply to an immigrant from the British Isles. Gourlay was imprisoned in the Niagara gaol, and when his friends attempted to bring him out on a writ of _habeas corpus_ they failed simply because Chief Justice Powell, an able lawyer of a Loyalist family and head of the official party, refused to grant the writ on a mere technical plea, afterwards declared by the highest legal authorities in England to be entirely contrary to sound law. Gourlay consequently remained in prison for nearly eight months, and when he was brought again before the chief justice, his mental faculties were obviously impaired for the moment, but despite his wretched condition, which prevented him from conducting his defence, he was summarily convicted and ordered to leave the province within twenty-four hours, under penalty of death should he not obey the order or return to the country.

This unjust sentence created wide-spread indignation among all right-thinking people, especially as it followed a message of the lieutenant-governor to the legislature, that he did not feel justified in extending the grants of land, made to actors in the war of 1812-15, to "any of the inhabitants who composed the late convention of delegates, the proceedings of which were very properly subjected to your very severe animadversion" This undoubtedly illegal action of the lieutenant-governor only escaped the censure of the assembly by the casting vote of the speaker, but was naturally justified in the legislative council where Chief Justice Powell presided. Gourlay became a martyr in the opinion of a large body of people, and a Reform party began to grow up in the country. The man himself disappeared for years from Canadian history, and did not return to the province until 1856, after a chequered and unhappy career in Great Britain and the United States. The assembly of the United Canadas in 1842 declared his arrest to be "unjust and illegal," and his sentence "null and void," and he was offered a pension as some compensation for the injuries he had received; but he refused it unless it was accompanied by an official declaration of the illegality of the conviction and its elision from the records of the courts. The Canadian government thought he should be satisfied with the action of the assembly and the offer of the pension. Gourlay died abroad, and his daughters on his death received the money which he rejected with the obstinacy so characteristic of his life.

During these days of struggle we find most prominent among the official class Attorney-General Robinson, afterwards chief justice of Upper Canada for many years. He was the son of a Virginian Loyalist, and a Tory of extreme views, calm, polished, and judicial in his demeanour. But whatever his opinions on the questions of the day he was too discreet a politician and too honest a judge ever to have descended to such a travesty of justice as had been shown by his predecessor in the case of Gourlay. His influence, however was never in the direction of liberal measures. He opposed responsible government and the union of the two provinces, both when proposed unsuccessfully in 1822, and when carried in Upper Canada eighteen years later.

The elections of 1825 had a very important influence on the political conditions of the upper province, since they brought into the assembly Peter Perry, Dr. Rolph, and Marshall Spring Bidwell, who became leading actors in the Reform movement which culminated in the concession of responsible government. But the most conspicuous man from 1826 until 1837 was William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scotchman of fair education, who came to Canada in 1820, and eventually embraced journalism as the profession most suited to his controversial temperament. Deeply imbued with a spirit of liberalism in politics, courageous and even defiant in the expression of his opinions, sadly wanting in sound judgment and common sense when his feelings were excited, able to write with vigour, but more inclined to emphatic vituperation than well-reasoned argument, he made himself a force in the politics of the province. In the _Colonial Advocate_, which he established in 1824, he commenced a series of attacks on the government which naturally evoked the resentment of the official class, and culminated in the destruction of his printing office in 1826 by a number of young men, relatives of the principal officials--one of them actually the private secretary of the lieutenant-governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland. Mr. Mackenzie obtained large damages in the courts, and was consequently able to continue the publication of his paper at a time when he was financially embarrassed. The sympathy felt for Mr. Mackenzie brought him into the assembly as member for York during the session of 1829. So obnoxious did he become to the governing class that he was expelled four times from the assembly between 1831 and 1834, and prevented from taking his seat by the orders of the speaker in 1835--practically the fifth expulsion. In 1832 he went to England and presented largely signed petitions asking for a redress of grievances. He appears to have made some impression on English statesmen, and the colonial minister recommended a few reforms to the lieutenant-governor, but they were entirely ignored by the official party. Lord Glenelg also disapproved of the part taken by Attorney-General Boulton--Mr. Robinson being then chief justice--and Solicitor-General Hagerman in the expulsion of Mr. Mackenzie; but they treated the rebuke with contempt and were removed from office for again assisting in the expulsion of Mr. Mackenzie.

In 1834 he was elected first mayor of Toronto, then incorporated under its present name, as a consequence of the public sympathy aroused in his favour by his several expulsions. Previous to the election of 1835, in which he was returned to the assembly, he made one of the most serious blunders of his life, in the publication of a letter from Mr. Joseph Hume, the famous Radical, whose acquaintance he had made while in England. Mr. Hume emphatically stated his opinion that "a crisis was fast approaching in the affairs of Canada which would terminate in independence and freedom from the baneful domination of the mother country, and the tyrannical conduct of a small and despicable faction in the colony." The official class availed themselves of this egregious blunder to excite the indignation of the Loyalist population against Mr. Mackenzie and other Reformers, many of whom, like the Baldwins and Perrys, disavowed all sympathy with such language. Mr. Mackenzie's motive was really to insult Mr. Ryerson, with whom he had quarrelled. Mr. Ryerson in the _Christian Guardian_, organ of the Methodists, had attacked Mr. Hume as a person unfit to present petitions from the Liberals of Canada, since he had opposed the measure for the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies, and had consequently alienated the confidence and sympathy of the best part of the nation. Mr. Hume then wrote the letter in question, in which he also stated that he "never knew a more worthless hypocrite or so base a man as Mr. Ryerson proved himself to be." Mr. Mackenzie in this way incurred the wrath of a wily clergyman and religious journalist who exercised much influence over the Methodists, and at the same time fell under the ban of all people who were deeply attached to the British connection. Moderate Reformers now looked doubtfully on Mackenzie, whose principal supporters were Dr. Duncombe, Samuel Lount, Peter Matthews, and other men who took an active part in the insurrection of 1837.

In the session of 1835 a committee of grievances, appointed on the motion of Mr. Mackenzie himself, reported in favour of a system of responsible government, an elective legislative council, the appointment of civil governors, a diminution of the patronage exercised by the crown, the independence of the legislature, and other reforms declared to be in the interest of good government. The report was temperately expressed, and created some effect for a time in England, but the colonial minister could not yet be induced to move in the direction of positive reform in the restrictive system of colonial government.

Unhappily, at this juncture, when good judgment and discretion were so necessary in political affairs, all the circumstances combined to hasten a perilous crisis, and to give full scope to the passionate impulses of Mackenzie's nature. Sir John Colborne was replaced in the government of the province by one of the most incapable governors ever chosen by the colonial office, Sir Francis Bond Head. He had been chiefly known in England as a sprightly writer of travels, and had had no political experience except such as could be gathered in the discharge of the duties of a poor-law commissioner in Wales. His first official act was an indiscretion. He communicated to the legislature the full text of the instructions which he had received from the king, although he had been advised to give only their substance, as least calculated to hamper Lord Gosford, who was then attempting to conciliate the French Canadian majority in Lower Canada. These instructions, in express terms, disapproved of a responsible executive and particularly of an elected legislative council, to obtain which was the great object of Papineau and his friends. Mr. Bidwell, then speaker of the assembly, recognised the importance of this despatch, and forwarded it immediately to Mr. Papineau, at that time speaker of the Lower Canadian house, with whom he