Canada and the Canadian Question/Chapter 6

Had the Americans been as wise and merciful after their first as they were after their second civil war, and closed the strife as all civil strife ought to be closed—with an amnesty—British Canada would never have come into existence. It was founded by the Loyalists driven by revolutionary vengeance from their homes, who at the same time settled in large numbers in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. These men were deeply wronged, and might well cherish and hand down to their sons as they did the memory of the wrong. They had done nothing as a body to put themselves out of the pale of mercy. They had fought as every citizen is entitled and presumptively bound to fight for the government under which they were born, to which they owed allegiance, and which as they thought gave them the substantial benefits of freedom. They had fought for a connection which, though false, at all events since the colony had grown able to shift for itself, and fraught with the peril of discord, was still prized by the colonists generally, as might have been shown out of the mouth of all the revolu​tionary leaders, including Samuel Adams, the principal fomentor of the quarrel. The constitutional means of redress had not been exhausted, nor was there any reason to despair of obtaining a repeal of the Tea Duty as a repeal of the Stamp Tax had been obtained. A group of Boston republicans, who had been bent from the first, notwithstanding their disclaimers, on bringing about independence, laboured to excite the people and prevent reconciliation. The intelligence and property of the colonies, the bulk of it at least, had been on the loyalist side till it was repelled by the blundering violence of the government and its generals; nor would it have been possible to fix upon a point at which the normal rule of civil duty was reversed and fidelity to the Crown became treason to the commonwealth. Outrages had been committed on both sides, as is always the case in civil war. England, at all events, was bound in honour to protect the refugees in their new home;^[2] otherwise she might have listened to counsels of wisdom and withdrawn politically from a continent in which she had no real interest but those of amity and trade. If an empire antagonistic to the United States is ever formed upon the north of them, and if trouble to them ensues, they have to thank their ancestors who refused amnesty to the vanquished in a civil war.

British Canada, when it was severed from French Canada received by Pitt's Act the same Constitution. It was provided with a Governor, called in the case of the younger province Lieutenant-Governor, to represent the Crown; an Executive Council to represent the Privy Council; a Legislative Council nominated by the Crown to represent the House ​of Lords; and an Elective Assembly to represent the House of Commons. This was called "the express image and transcript of the British Constitution." But though it might be the express image in form, it was far from being the express image in reality of Parliamentary Government as it exists in Great Britain, or even as it existed in Great Britain at that time. The Lieutenant-Governor, representing the Crown, not only reigned but governed, with a ministry not assigned to him by the vote of the Assembly, but chosen by himself, and acting as his advisers, not as his masters. The Assembly could not effectually control his policy by with-holding supplies, because the Crown, with very limited needs, had revenues, territorial and casual, of its own. Thus the imitation was, somewhat like the Chinese imitation of the steam-vessel, exact in everything except the steam. But in the new settlement there was other business than politics on hand, and perhaps Parliamentary Government, party, and the demagogue came quite as soon as they were needed.

British Canada had as her first Lieutenant-Governor, Simcoe, and save in one respect she could not have had a better. Local history still fondly seeks to identify the spot where he pitched his tent—a tent which had belonged to Captain Cook—when the shore of Lake Ontario, on which the fair city of Toronto now stands, was a primeval forest, and the stillness of the bay, now full of the puffing of steamers and the hum of trade, was broken only by the settling of flocks of waterfowl or by the paddling of the Indian's canoe. Simcoe had a good estate in England, and had sat in the House of Commons. He might have lived at home at his ease when he chose to live under canvas in a Canadian winter and struggle with the difficulties of founding a commonwealth in Canadian wilds. The love of active duty must have been strong in ​him. But the love of fighting Yankees was strong also, and it led him at last into relations with Indians hostile to the United States which alarmed the Home Government and cut short his useful career. As colonel of the Queen's Rangers in the revolutionary war he had served the Crown gallantly, and at the same time had commanded the respect of his opponents. His character in itself would have been enough to prove that a patriot might be opposed to the revolution. His intercourse with the better men on the other side reminds us of the letter of Sir William Waller, the Parliamentary general, to a Royalist friend at the outbreak of the Civil War in England, praying that the war, since it must come, might be waged without personal animosity and in a way of honour. The Duc de Rochefoucauld Liancourt, the paragon of French liberal aristocrats and of landlords, driven into exile by the revolution, looks in on Governor Simcoe and reports of him that he is "just, active, enlightened, brave, frank, and possesses the confidence of the country, of the troops, and of all those who join him in the administration of public affairs, to which he attends with the utmost application, preserving all the old friends of the King and neglecting no means of procuring him new ones. He unites," says the Duc, "in my judgment all the qualities which his station requires to maintain the important possession of Canada, if it be possible that England can long retain it." The governor's face, in his portrait, bespeaks force of character, honesty, and good sense. His good sense he showed by admitting, in spite of his prejudice against the Americans, settlers from the United States, though he was careful to guard his frontier with a line of U.E. Loyalists, placing the Americans in the rear. With all his fervent attachment to Great Britain, he knew at all events that Canada was on the American continent.

​At Niagara, then the capital, in a log-house which De Liancourt describes as small and miserable, but which if it were now standing would be venerated by Ontario as much as Rome venerated the hut of Romulus, Simcoe assembled for the first time the little yeoman Parliament of British Canada with all the forms of monarchical procedure, and in phrase which not unsuccessfully imitated the buckram of a Speech from the Throne, announced to his backwoods Lords and Commons the reception of the "memorable Act," by which the wisdom and beneficence of a most gracious Sovereign and the British Parliament had "imparted to them the blessings of our invaluable Constitution," solemnly enjoining them faithfully to discharge "the momentous trusts and duties" thereby committed to their rough hands. The meeting being at harvest time, and the harvest being of more consequence than politics, out of the five legislative councillors summoned two only, and out of the sixteen assemblymen summoned five only, attended. The good sense of those present, however, seems to have risen to the level of their legislative functions. Probably it showed itself now and for some time afterwards by letting the governor legislate as he pleased. The session over, they wended their way homeward, some on horseback through pathless woods, camping out by the way, or using Indian wigwams as their inns, some in bark canoes along the shore of Lake Ontario and down the St. Lawrence. It was not easy, as Simcoe found, to get a Parliament together in those days.

This was the heroic era before politics, unrecorded in any annals, which has left of itself no monument other than the fair country won by those obscure husbandmen from the wilderness, or perhaps, here and there, a grassy mound, by this time nearly levelled with the surrounding soil, in which, after their ​life's partnership of toil and endurance, the pioneer and his wife rest side by side. "The backwoodsman," says history,^[3] "whose fortunes are cast in the remote inland settlements of the present day, far removed from churches, destitute of ministers of the Gospel and medical men, without schools, or roads, or the many conveniences that make life desirable, can alone appreciate or even understand the numerous difficulties and hardships that beset the first settler among the ague-swamps of Western Canada. The clothes on his back, with a rifle or old musket and a well-tempered axe, were not unfrequently the full extent of his worldly possessions. Thus lightly equipped he took possession of his two hundred acres of closely-timbered forest land and commenced operations. The welkin rings again with his vigorous strokes, as huge tree after tree is assailed and tumbled to the earth; and the sun presently shines in upon the little clearing. The best of the logs are partially squared and serve to build a shanty; the remainder are given to the flames. Now the rich mould, the accumulation of centuries of decayed vegetation, is gathered into little hillocks, into which potatoes are dibbled. Indian corn is planted in another direction, and perhaps a little wheat. If married, the lonely couple struggle on in their forest oasis like the solitary traveller over the sands of Sahara or a boat adrift on the Atlantic. The nearest neighbour lives miles off, and when sickness comes they have to travel far through the forest to claim human sympathy. But fortunately our nature, with elastic temperament, adapts itself to circumstances. By and by the potatoes peep up, and the cornblades modestly show themselves around the charred maple stumps and girdled pines, and the prospect of sufficiency of food gives consolation. As winter ​approaches, a deer now and then adds to the comforts of the solitary people. Such were the mass of the first settlers in Western Canada."

The rough lot, we trust, was cheered by health and hope, while the loneliness and mutual need of support would knit closer the tie of conjugal affection. To the memory of conquerors who devastate the earth, and of politicians who vex the life of its denizens with their struggles for power and place, we raise sumptuous monuments to the memory of those who by their toil and endurance have made it fruitful we can raise none. But civilisation, while it enters into the heritage which the pioneers prepared for it, may at least look with gratitude on their lowly graves.

With clergy the people in those days were very scantily provided,^[4] and their work, with their home affections, must have been their religion, the solemn and silent forest their temple. When the clergyman came his life in going round to settlements through an uncleared country was, as survivors of the primitive era will tell you, almost as hard as that of the backwoodsman himself. In due time the English of Canada showed their kinship to those of New England by setting up common schools, and their civilisation, though backward and rude at first, developed itself generally on the lines of their race.

Simcoe was followed by Hunter and Gore, about whom not much is known, but who were evidently weaker men, and failed to restrain wrong-doing which Simcoe had restrained. Even of these, however, and of the whole line of Royal Governors in both Provinces, it may be said that whether they were strong or weak, wise or unwise, popular or unpopular, there rests not upon the name of any one of them the stain of ​dishonour.^[5] Neither British Canada nor French Canada in British hands ever had an Intendant Bigot. The errors and misdeeds of the Governors arose chiefly from their ignorance of the country which they were sent to rule. On their arrival they almost inevitably fell into the hands of the dominant clique. The Home Government, from which they took their orders, was if possible more ignorant than they were, and its councils changed with every change of a party administration. It was their doom, in short, to be the instruments of that futile and pernicious attempt of the Old World to regulate the lives of communities in the New World which is now happily drawing to its close. For the character of the people, and perhaps even for their material welfare, the imported rule of men of honour, had they only been better informed and more impartial, might in itself have been not less desirable than that of the party leaders who have succeeded them. But party government, we will hope, is not the end.

The colony was filling up with settlers from different quarters. There came in, besides Englishmen, Scotchmen who brought Presbyterianism and usually Liberal ideas with them, Americans who had lived under a Republic, and Irishmen, both Orange and Green. Political life began, though it was still of little importance compared with the axe and the plough. Even so early we hear of an 'independent' Member of Parliament who is killed in a duel, though we are not told that the duel was owing to his difference of opinion with the Treasury Bench. On the more active and democratic spirits the neighbourhood of the American Republic could ​not fail to tell. An independent Press was born in a log hut, the embryo editorials being no doubt written and printed by the same hand. Under Hunter and Gore abuses had grown up, especially in the land department and in the administration of justice. Reformers arose. Reform had its proto-martyr in Thorpe, an English barrister sent out to a Canadian judgeship, and apparently an upright man, who for protesting against wrong was deprived of his place through the influence of Governor Gore, misadvised probably by the Council. Willcocks, an immigrant journalist, whom the Governor had learned to regard as "an execrable monster who would deluge the Province with blood," also testified in prison to the liberty of the Press. But political conflicts were suspended by the War of 1812.

Into that war the weak and unconscientious Madison was forced by the violent party whose leading spirit was Henry Clay, not for the reasons alleged, about which nothing was afterwards said in the negotiations for peace, but mainly in the hope of conquering Canada, and furthering the ambitious ends of the party. England had the war with Napoleon on her hands; victory seemed likely to rest with the oppressor of nations, and the United States, it was thought, might share with him the glory and the booty. Let it never be forgotten that the best part of the American people opposed the war. Their attitude was marked by the comparative absence of attacks on Canada along the line of Vermont and Maine; though the loss and suffering fell most on the maritime states of New England, and little on the West, which had driven the country into the war. Unprincipled aggression met with its due reward. The American invaders were repeatedly beaten by handfuls of Canadians, and the names of Sir Isaac Brock, and his comrades​in-arms, including the Indian chief Tecumseh, were endeared by heroic exploits to the country which they successfully defended against tremendous odds. The first invader, General Hull, and his army capitulated to a Canadian force not half their number, and the Canadians conquered Michigan. On Queenston Heights, the scene of Brock's death and his army's victory, the idol of Canadian patriotism sleeps beneath a monumental column which challenges by its stateliness respect for Canadian art. Of the share which French Canada and De Salaberry had in the defence mention has already been made. As the war went on it became more ferocious, and the inhuman burning of Niagara by the Americans in mid-winter was avenged by havoc not less inhuman, and by the burning of the Capitol at Washington. The Americans learned in time to fight well, and the battle of Lundy's Lane, near the close, was the most desperate of all. Till midnight the struggle went on, the roar of the cannon and the rattle of the musketry contending with the thunder of Niagara, and the loss on both sides was terrible. The superiority of American resources also showed itself upon the lakes; the Canadian flotilla on Lake Erie was totally destroyed, and Toronto, then called York, twice fell into the hands of the enemy. When Napoleon had fallen, the hands of Great Britain were free, the better party among the Americans prevailed, and they were ready for peace. Their aggression would have ended more disastrously than it did had not Pakenham blindly dashed his army against the cotton bales of New Orleans, and had the large force which England was at last enabled to send to Canada been placed under the command of a better soldier than Prevost. Americans say that the war did them good by consolidating the Union. A nation has hardly a right to consolidate its ​union by slaughtering and despoiling its unoffending neighbours. But slavery, from which the real danger of disruption arose, was not weakened in its political influence; on the contrary it was strengthened by the war. Whatever attraction American institutions might before have had for Canadians was counteracted or weakened by American aggression. Worst of all was the effect which the fratricidal conflict inevitably had in renewing and envenoming the schism of the Anglo-Saxon race. Before that time British Canadians and Americans had hardly looked upon each other as foreigners. Americans had freely settled and been received as citizens in British Canada. Two generations have not sufficed to efface the evil memories of 1812. Ministers of discord, seeking to fan the dying embers of international hatred, still appeal to the names of Brock and his companions-in-arms, whose glory they sully by such misuse.^[6]

The war over, the political struggle began again—with all the more intensity, perhaps, because the war had unsettled the people and excited their combative propensities, while, farming having been neglected, depression ensued as soon as the military expenditure had ceased. In the course of the next fifteen years a regular Reform Party was born. It had reason enough for its existence. The Government with all ​its patronage and influence, including the disposal of the Crown lands, had fallen into the hands of a Ring called the "Family Compact"—a nickname borrowed, it seems, from the diplomatic history of Europe rather than suggested by the number of family alliances among the members. The nucleus of the Family Compact was a group of United Empire Loyalists who might not unnaturally deem themselves a privileged class. To this was added a number of retired officers and other British gentlemen who had received grants of lands but found themselves ill fitted for farming in the bush, and better fitted for holding places under Government, together with scions of genteel families in England, sent out sometimes for the family's good. The Compact formed a social aristocracy as well as a political ring. It had, like all such political bodies, a tail less aristocratic than itself. Its strongholds were Government House, the occupant of which was all the more under its influence because he had no other gentlemen with whom to associate; the Executive Council, which was entirely in its hands, and the Legislative Council or Upper House of Parliament, which it also engrossed, and through which it was enabled to veto any bills passed by the Elective Assembly. The Elective Assembly, it will be borne in mind, could not effectually coerce the Government and the Upper House, as the British House of Commons had done, by stopping the supplies, the Government having a fixed civil list and a territorial revenue of its own, with the Imperial treasury whereon to fall back in extreme need. In the Assembly itself the Family Compact was able to control many seats, and sometimes a majority, through the influence of the Government, aided by irregularities in the representation. Its adherents filled the Bench, the magistracy, the high places of the legal profession, and those ​of the Episcopal Church, which at that time was virtually established and endowed by the State. By grant or purchase, its members had got into their hands nearly the whole of the waste lands of the Province, they were all-powerful in the Chartered Banks, and at last shared among themselves almost all offices of trust and profit.^[7] By the appropriation of the public lands the Compact not only robbed the commonwealth, but, as the lands were held for a rise, obstructed settlement and retarded the progress of the country. It enhanced its unpopularity by giving itself social airs, though the account of its grand mansions, its trains of lackeys and its banquets, found in some historians, are certainly overdone. Of its mansions some remain and are of modest dimensions, nor did its chief members leave great wealth. The Compact showed its exclusiveness even towards British immigrants, excluding them by jealous restrictions from free practice in the legal and medical professions, "so that an Englishman emigrating to Upper Canada found himself almost as much an alien in the country as he would have been in the United States."^[8] The politics of the Compact were Tory, of course, and it was ardently loyal to British connection, so long, at least, as Toryism reigned at home. Like its counterpart in England, it was closely allied with the Established Church. Not all its leaders were jobbers: some were sincere lovers of prerogative. Sir John Beverley Robinson, for example, Attorney-General, afterwards Chief Justice, and the ruling spirit of the Executive Council, was a high-minded as well as very able man, though it is impossible to disconnect his name from a system of administrative jobbery, or from some acts of partisan injustice. At his side was Dr. Strachan, Archdeacon and afterwards Bishop of Toronto, a clerical ​aspirant who had passed from Presbyterianism to Anglicanism, as was generally believed, with a view to the advancement of his fortunes—a man of remarkable force of character, able and shrewd, though not wise, the type of a clerical politician, and, like all clerical politicians, even more mischievous to the Church for whose interests he fought than to the State. Beside the Family Compact there was gradually formed a Conservative party, in which the Compact ultimately merged, of men who had no desire to abet the oligarchy in its abuses, but recoiled from revolution. The Reform party was in like manner divided into an extreme and a moderate wing. Of the moderate and constitutional wing the chief was Robert Baldwin, a man whose renown for integrity and wisdom is such as to make him a sort of Canadian Lord Somers. Of the extreme and covertly republican wing the chief man at the time was William Lyon Mackenzie, a wiry and peppery little Scotchman, hearty in his love of public right, still more in his hatred of public wrongdoers, clever, brave, and energetic, but, as tribunes of the people are apt to be, far from cool-headed, sure-footed in his conduct, temperate in his language, or steadfast in his personal connections. With Mackenzie were Dr. Rolph, a man of more solid ability, of deeper character and designs, whom his admirers call sagacious, his critics sly; and Bidwell, the son of a refugee from American justice, but himself apparently a man of virtue as well as sense. War was declared on a number of issues—the constitution of the Legislative Council, which the patriots wanted to make elective and to purge of placemen; the administration of the Crown lands; the independence of the judges, which was compromised both by their liability to removal at pleasure and by their holding seats in Parliament; the control of the ​revenue and the civil list, besides a number of personal questions, such as always present themselves in the heat of party war. Among all the special subjects of controversy most stir was made by the Clergy Reserves. Pitt, as we have seen, had set apart an eighth, or, according to the clerical interpretation, a seventh of every land grant "for the support of a Protestant clergy." This, by tying up blocks of land all over the country and standing in the way of close settlement, created an economical grievance, besides the jealousy excited by the favour shown to a particular Church, and a Church which, looking down upon all her sisters, treated their members as dissenters. To complicate the question, the term "Protestant clergy" was ambiguous. The Presbyterians, then equal in number to the Anglicans, claimed a share on the ground that their Church in Scotland was recognised by the State; the other Churches not Roman Catholic claimed a share on the ground that they also were Protestant, while thorough-going Reformers and Roman Catholics united in demanding complete secularisation. But all the special grievances and demands of the Reformers were summed up and merged in their demand for "Responsible Government." By Responsible Government they meant that the government should be carried on, not by an Executive nominated by the Governor and independent of the vote of Parliament, but, as in England, by a Cabinet dependent for its tenure of office on the vote of the Commons. They meant, in short, that supreme power should be transferred from the Crown to the representatives of the people. It was nothing less than a revolution for which they called under a mild and constitutional name. Mackenzie, who had for some time been spitting fire through his journal, having been borne into the Assembly on the shoulders of the people, the ​battle began in earnest, and with all the bitterness which his tongue could lend to it. The oligarchy from the outset defended itself furiously with every weapon at its command. It had before harried Gourlay—a benevolent and inquiring Scotchman who came among its lieges taking notes and printing them—out of his mind. It had persecuted the elder Bidwell under an Alien Act. It shut up Collins, another patriot, in gaol on a charge of libel. It now, having a majority in the Assembly, five times lawlessly expelled Mackenzie and still more lawlessly voted him incapable of re-election. The hot-blooded youths of the oligarchy were hurried into actual outrage: they wrecked Mackenzie's printing press, and the party paid the fine by subscription. The Governors during this period were two soldiers, Sir Peregrine Maitland and Sir John Colborne, neither of whom understood politics. Sir Peregrine was weakly subservient to the oligarchy, and he got himself into a scrape by using military force in a civil case. Sir John Colborne was a strong and upright man as well as a good soldier, and was by no means inclined to wink at abuses; but he had a military leaning to prerogative, deemed it his duty to hold the fortress for the Crown, and was eminently devoid of popular arts. His gracious reply to an Address was, "I receive your Address with much satisfaction and thank you for your congratulations." His less gracious and more succinct form was, "Gentlemen, I have received the petition of the inhabitants." He welcomed a patriotic deputation with artillerymen standing to their guns and troops served with a double allowance of ball-cartridge. Mackenzie went to England, showing thereby, as in fact did the Reformers generally, that they did not regard the Home Government as wilfully oppressive, but the reverse, though it might be sadly misinformed. In ​England itself a revolution had by this time taken place. Since the close of the war with Napoleon, the current of political life, long frozen, had begun to flow. The winter of Liberalism had ended; its sun rose high again, and Parliamentary reform had come. The change extended to the Colonial Office, though there Liberalism was still limited by lingering tradition. Even from the Canningite Lord Goderich the agitator received a degree of attention which scandalised the Tories of the Canadian Assembly. Among other things Lord Goderich laid it down in his despatch that ecclesiastics, if they were to keep their seats in the Council, ought to abstain from interfering with secular affairs; intimating his opinion at the same time "that by resigning their seats they would best consult their own personal comfort and the success of their designs for the spiritual good of the people." The Legislative Council treated the despatch with open contempt. By the Liberal Lord Glenelg a catalogue of grievances drawn up by the Reformers with Mackenzie at their head was respectfully considered, and a reply was written promising important reforms and concessions, though not the one great concession, Responsible Government. The law officers of the Compact, Boulton and Hagerman, were also dismissed for rebellion against the liberal policy of the Crown, whereupon the loyalty of the Tories gave way and they began to throw out hints of "alienation" from "the glorious Empire of their sires," and of "casting about for a new state of political existence." On a liberal policy congenial to that which prevailed in England the Home Government was now bent. But to carry it out through a warrior like Colborne was impossible, and he was recalled, though only to command against the rebels in the French Province. Before leaving, ​however, he set the house on fire by authorising the creation of fifty-seven Rectories out of the disputed Clergy Reserves Fund. Though the number actually carved out was only forty-four, it gave to the Church a substantial slice of the endowment which she claimed. This measure produced intense exasperation.

The choice of a man to take Colborne's place, and give effect to the new policy, which the Colonial Office made was so strange that to account for it recourse has seriously been had to the hypothesis of mistaken identity.^[9] Sir Francis Bond Head, a half-pay major, an assistant Poor-Law commissioner, the hero of a famous ride over the Pampas, and the writer of light books of travel, was awakened in the dead of night at his lodging in Kent by a King's messenger, who brought him the appointment of the Lieutenant-Governorship of Upper Canada, with a summons to wait on the Colonial minister next morning. In justice to him be it remembered that he declined, and accepted only when pressed in a manner which made acceptance a duty. He was recommended no doubt by the manner in which he had done his work as Poor-Law commissioner, by his genial temper, his knowledge of the world, and the plucky and adventurous character shown in his ride, which was likely to make him a favourite with people whom the Colonial Secretary might think more back-woodsmen in character than they really were. Nor was he ​wanting in discernment or in force; he did a great service by forbidding the Canadian Banks to suspend specie payment in a commercial crisis, and inducing them to ride out, at a sound anchorage, the financial storm which was sweeping over the United States. But he was very impulsive, very vain, and under the influence of success became light-headed. Joseph Hume and other Liberals commended him to their brethren in Canada, perhaps taking on trust the nominee of a Liberal government. He brought with him as the chart for his course Mackenzie's catalogue of grievances, with Lord Glenelg's commentary promising, as has already been said, practical reforms and an administration in accordance with the reasonable wishes of the people, but not promising Responsible Government, that is, the surrender of the power of the Crown to the representatives of the people. If the Colonial Office itself was still undecided on the vital point, it could not find fault with a Governor for taking what to him was the natural line. If it was itself still with hesitating hand fingering the keys of the fortress, it could hardly expect its delegate, such a delegate, above all, as the horseman of the Pampas, to perform for it the act of capitulation. Sir Francis was appointed in 1836. In March 1837 Lord John Russell, speaking in the House of Commons, pronounced Cabinet Government in the colonies incompatible with the relations which ought to exist between the mother country and the colony. "Those relations," he said, "required that His Majesty should be represented in the colony not by ministers, but by a Governor sent out by the King, and responsible to the Parliament of Great Britain. Otherwise," he said, "Great Britain would have in the Canadas all the inconveniences of colonies without any of their advantages." This seems enough to justify the resistance of Sir Francis ​Bond Head to Responsible Government. Glenelg himself was verbose and ambiguous, but the upshot of his mandate was that "in the administration of Canadian affairs a sufficient practical responsibility already existed without the introduction of any hazardous schemes," and that the last resort of the Canadians, if they were discontented, was to carry their complaints to the foot of the throne, whose occupant (then King William IV) "felt the most lively interest in the welfare of his Canadian subjects, and was ever ready to devote a patient and laborious attention to any representations." Such was the atmosphere of constitutional fiction in which these statesmen lived!

Sir Francis laughed when, on entering Toronto, he found himself placarded as "the tried Reformer," he who had never given a thought to politics, who had scarcely ever voted at an election. By the Reformers he was received with glad expectation, by the Conservatives with sullen misgiving; but both parties soon found themselves mistaken. He showed his weak side at once by a theatrical announcement of his mission, and by indiscreetly communicating to the Assembly the whole of Lord Glenelg's letter of instructions. Presently he had interviews with the leading Reformers, Mackenzie and Bidwell. In them he thought he detected designs reaching beyond the redress of the particular grievances which they had laid before the Colonial Office—Republican designs in short, such as he deemed it his special vocation to combat. Nor was he far wrong, for their aim, once more be it noted, was nothing less than to take away the Government from the Crown and hand it over to the representatives of the people. It cannot be doubted that the example of the neighbouring Republic was in their minds. By Lyon Mackenzie the baronet and man of society was personally repelled. ​"The tiny creature," he says, "sat during the interview with his feet not touching the ground, and his face turned away from me at an angle of 70 degrees." That Mackenzie had been a "pedlar lad" and an "errand-boy" was all against happy relations with the Lieutenant-Governor. Head soon found himself in the arms of the Compact, and fighting against Responsible Government as democratic, American, and subversive of British institutions. This he now deemed his grand mission. Hard hitting ensued between him and the Reformers both in the Assembly and out of it. He even forgot his social tact and cut Toronto to the heart by telling her deputies that he would talk down to the level of their understandings. The Opposition played into his hands by identifying itself with Papineau and the agitators in the Lower Province, whose object clearly was revolution, and by giving publicity to an indiscreet letter of Joseph Hume talking of "independence and freedom from the baneful domination of the mother country." These mistakes threw the force of the Conservative party decisively into the scale of the Government. Loyal addresses came in. The Lieutenant-Governor seized the advantage and went to the country crying Treason. The cry prevailed, with the help of Government influence unsparingly used, corruption, mob violence, and the inequalities of the representation. A large majority in favour of the Government was returned. Head was beside himself with exultation, and fancied that his spirited policy had put all his enemies under his feet and made him perfectly master of the situation. "In a moral contest," he wrote to the Colonial Office, "it never enters into my head to count the number of my enemies." "The more I am trusted," he said, "the more cautious I shall be; the heavier I am laden, the steadier I shall sail." The Colonial Office had begun to ​suspect what sort of an instrument it had in the man who wrote to it in this style, and told it that he was aware his gasconading answer to an address "might be cavilled at in Downing Street, as he knew it was not exactly according to Hoyle, but it must be remembered that revolutions could not be made with rose-water." Still it could not be denied that he had succeeded. The Colonial Office waited with mingled curiosity and anxiety for the result.

The result was that the Reformers were driven to despair, and the more violent of them to rebellion. Under the leadership of Mackenzie, the malcontents armed and drilled. Confident in the power of his moral thunderbolts, the Lieutenant-Governor scoffed at danger, sent all the regular troops to the Lower Province, neglected to call out the militia, or even to put his capital in a state of defence, and turned a deaf ear to every warning. Toronto all but fell into the hands of the rebels. Mackenzie, who showed no lack either of courage or of capacity as a leader, brought before it a force sufficient for its capture, aided as he would have been by his partisans in the city itself, and he was foiled only by a series of accidents, and by the rejection of his bold counsels at the last. Just in time however help arrived, the rebellion collapsed, and its leaders fled. A filibustering war was for some time kept up by the American "sympathisers" along the border, and the burning of the Caroline, a piratical steamer which the Canadians sent flaming over Niagara, gave rise to diplomatic complications. The American authorities were slow in acting; but they acted at last, and there is no reason to believe that the American people in general strongly sympathised with the rebellion in British Canada, much less with that in the French Province. After all, these raids, reprehensible as they are, may be regarded, like the trouble given ​to diplomacy about the Fisheries and Behring's Sea, as so many blind efforts of the New World to shake off European interference.

On the other hand, when it is said that the Canadian rebellion was put down by British bayonets, let it be borne in mind that in Upper Canada there was not a single British bayonet when the rebellion was put down. In both Canadas it was, in fact, not a rebellion against the British Government, but a petty civil war, in Upper Canada between parties, in Lower Canada between races, though in Lower Canada the British race had the forces of the Home Government on its side. "We rebelled neither against Her Majesty's person nor her Government, but against Colonial misgovernment," were the words of one of the rebel leaders in Lower Canada. The two movements were perfectly distinct in their origin and in their course, though there was a sympathy between them, and both were stimulated by the general ascendency of Liberal opinions since 1830 in France, in England, and in the world at large.

The rebellion was the end of Sir Francis Bond Head. Now came Lord Durham, the son-in-law of Grey, and an Avatar, as it were, of the Whig Vishnu, to inquire into the sources of the disturbance, pronounce judgment, and restore order to the twofold chaos.