The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, John Charles Dent [read a book TXT] 📗

with all formalities, his functions were restricted to cases where one or both of the parties to be joined together belonged to his own religious society. Ministers of other denominations, including those of the Methodist body, which was the most numerous religious community in the Province, were not allowed the privilege of solemnizing marriage rites till the year 1831. The ignominous disqualification was removed by the statute 11 George IV., chapter 36, which was passed in 1830, but which did not receive the royal assent until the following year. A similar measure had repeatedly been passed by the Assembly in former sessions, but had as often been rejected by the Upper House. Before the law was finally and equitably settled as above mentioned, several ministers of religion had been tried and banished from the Province for having ventured to solemnize matrimony without legal authority. It is said that in one case where a minister was tried on a charge of this kind, the accused protested against his sentence, alleging that the Chief Justice, who presided at the trial, had himself sanctioned the performance of the ceremony. The Chief Justice, being called upon to descend from the judgment seat and give evidence as to this fact, declined to do so; but he afterwards procured a pardon for the prisoner.[50]
The Compact always contained within its ranks a few persons of more than average ability. Some of them doubtless believed that the course pursued by their organization was for the advantage of the colony, though, reasoning by the light of present knowledge, it is difficult to comprehend how men of even moderate perspicacity and judgment could have brought themselves to such a conclusion. It was, however, inevitable that persons of such narrow and contracted views--persons to whom self and pelf were the mainsprings of life--should degenerate, mentally as well as morally. The persons composing the second generation were, with very few exceptions, striking illustrations of the doctrine of the descent of man. Their sires had been men of energy and force of character. They themselves were--to borrow a phrase from the acting drama--the mere walking gentlemen of the colony. The sires had originated a bold and determined policy, and had from first to last pursued it with consistent vigour. The sons had neither brains to conceive nor discretion to carry out the conceptions of others. The sires had been persons whom it had been possible for the commonalty to respect. The sons were persons whom it was impossible not to despise. Surely a more superlatively commonplace and contemptible race of human beings has seldom been seen on the earth than four-fifths of the second generation of this bastard aristocracy of Upper Canada. It bore no resemblance to any other aristocracy whereof history has preserved any record. The old Roman commonalty, while they groaned beneath the iron heel of tyranny, were one and all conscious of a secret pride in their imperial oppressors. For the Roman aristocracy was an aristocracy of nature. The Roman patricians made foreign rulers to crouch and tremble at the name of Rome. Their triumphs were the triumphs of the nation. Caius of Corioli, Furius Camillus, Titus Capitolinus, were names the mere utterance of which stirred the Roman blood like the blast of a trumpet. For many a long year after one haughty dictator had slept his last sleep beneath the walls of Praeneste, and after another had taken his final plunge beneath the yellow Tiber or from the Tarpeian rock, their exploits furnished themes for tale and song around the Roman camp-fires. These puissant representatives of the dominant class had shown little sympathy for the plebeians, upon whom they had looked down from a lofty height, and towards whom they had ever borne themselves with haughtiness and disdain. But their pride was a something to be tolerated by Romans of every degree, for they had achieved much glory for the Roman name. In the words of one who has interpreted the sentiment of those times with rare felicity, Rome could bear the pride of him of whom herself was proud. The old French noblesse, again, were not devoid of redeeming qualities. Their galling yoke would not have been borne from reign to reign, and through century after century, even by such seeming reconcilables as constituted the bulk of the French populace during the ante-Revolutionary period, if they had all been like the wicked St. Evremonde of Mr. Dickens's tragic story. As a class, they had a subtle French grace about them which rendered their most grievous exactions less hard to bear than were the exactions of their eastern neighbours. They were an unmistakable _haute noblesse_, ever polished and dignified. Some of them, like Philippe Egalite, had the cunning, when the time of trial arrived, to bend to the popular storm, and even to affect a zeal for citizenship. Comparatively few of them were at once _blase_ and brainless. It may be doubted if a single one of them combined--as did many of the rank and file of the second generation of the Family Compact of Upper Canada--the pretensions of an aristocrat with the sentiments of a boor and the intellectual development of a child. Yet further. The feeling of veneration with which the English commonalty have for centuries regarded the House of Lords is easy enough to understand. That feeling seems to be rapidly passing away, if, indeed, it has not already departed. But it would not have endured from the time of the Plantagenets to the time of Queen Victoria if it had not had some substantial foundation to rest upon. The House of Lords has always contained a number of men of high integrity and ability. Take it for all and all, it is probably the most just-minded and intellectual aristocratic assembly the world has ever seen. This may not be very high praise, but it may at least be taken for what it is worth. Its individual members are seldom brought sufficiently near to the lower order of the commonalty to enable the latter to detect their weaknesses. Their wealth, prestige and social position give them a vast influence, while at the same time their legislative powers are held in check by the direct representatives of the people. Most of these conditions were directly reversed in Upper Canada, where the members of the dominant faction were brought into the closest relations with the people generally, insomuch that their many deficiencies could not be concealed. Such wealth as they had they were too often known to have obtained at the expense of the rest of the community. The Lower House formed no efficacious check upon them, for they either managed to return a sufficient number of their tools to control the vote in that body, or else they rendered the Assembly's operations of no avail by means of their influence in the Legislative Council. They had none of the graceful suavity of the Lower Canadian seigneurs. Nor could they boast of the superiority derived from a liberal education. Many of them--even including some of those who held high public offices--were so illiterate that they were unable to write a simple business letter without committing errors of orthography of which any one but Artemus Ward or Jeames de la Pluche might well feel ashamed.
Nearly all the leading spirits of this strangely-assorted oligarchy were either wealthy or on the direct road to wealth. Being comfortably provided for at the public cost, in the form of fat offices or wild lands, or both, they assumed a swelling port, and aped, as best they knew how, the manners and customs of the upper classes in Great Britain. They built their dwellings in imitation of old-fashioned English manor-houses, with a variety of wings and gables, and with broad entrance halls which in an emergency might have served the purpose of presence-chambers. They dined long and late, and with much old-world pomp and ceremonial. They drove out in coaches emblazoned with heraldic bearings, and attended by broad-calved flunkeys in family livery. Certain social observances of the early Georgian era, long since effete and worn out in England, flourished in the social life of Little York down to a period within the memory of many persons who are still living. The aristocratic clique which preserved these customs was in the highest degree rigid and exclusive. No outsider was admitted into the charmed circle unless he came duly ticketed and accredited. The attempt to transplant the usages of an old and advanced state of society into the primitive streets and lanes of such places as York, Kingston, and Woodstock was for a time more successful than might be supposed. Such of the families as had been to the manner born carried off these observances with considerable grace. They had brought their traditions with them across the Atlantic, and though such traditions were not well suited to the genius of a young and sparsely-settled colony, they were at least maintained with some regard to the sources whence they had been derived. With the pretenders who formed a portion of the clique, and who had been admitted into it for special political reasons, the attempt to copy the habits of their social superiors was, generally speaking, less satisfactory. There was, in truth, an inner social circle which these latter were never invited to join. They, however, enjoyed all the political and pecuniary advantages arising from their connection, and were not easily distinguishable by outsiders from the very head and front of the organization.
So far as to the wealthy members of the ruling faction. But there were a good many of them who not only were not wealthy, but who were in positively indigent circumstances. These, for the most part, were members of old country families who had sent them to Canada with the sole object of getting rid of them. Others were half-pay officers who had spent their whole fortunes in settling on land, after which they had found themselves unable to make a livelihood, and had then sold their property for as much--or as little--as they could manage to get. These latter, after having disposed of their lands, generally repaired to the towns, and most of them sooner or later found their way to the Provincial capital. There they became obedient slaves of those in authority, and picked up a precarious livelihood by making themselves useful in various ways. The Executive could always find a certain amount of work for such persons, though, if the truth must be told, the supply was often greater than the demand. The code of social ethics in vogue among this class was such as might have been expected from persons who had been reared to regard themselves as the objects of a special dispensation of fortune. They looked upon manual labour as degrading. Any person, no matter what his abilities, who earned a livelihood by the sweat of his brow, or even by honest trade, was considered as no fit company for the brood of parasites who hung on to the heels of the Compact, and who nevertheless did not hesitate to perform tasks from which the average costermonger would have shrunk in disgust. Their employers occasionally admitted them to their tables, and even to some degree of social intimacy. More frequently they presented them with their cast-off clothing, with new gowns for their wives at Christmas, or--when things were at a remarkably low ebb--with a hundredweight of flour or half a barrel of mess pork. Yet the recipients of these favours piqued themselves upon their good birth and high connexions, and would have felt themselves insulted if anyone had ventured to hint that they should visit, upon terms of equality, with the grocer or the butcher in the next street.
The reader now has before him a sufficient array of facts to enable him to form a pretty accurate conception of the state of social life in Upper Canada during ante-Rebellion times. It was a matter