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

likely to stand higher than a clever and aspiring man who was at once editor and proprietor of the leading organ of Liberal opinion in the Province? Such a personage might command anything within the power of his party to grant. That he would soon be able to write his way into Parliament was a foregone conclusion; and a seat in Parliament appeared a very proud distinction in the eyes of one whose past surroundings had been so far removed from such a sphere.
That these, or something like these, were among the chief motives whereby Mr. Mackenzie was actuated in establishing _The Colonial Advocate_ seems tolerably certain. Nor is there anything unusual or censurable in such an ambition. The labourer is worthy of his hire, and no labourer is better entitled to a full recompense than is the man who, through long and weary years, struggles to win success for a depressed and righteous cause. That he was not devoid of a spirit of sincere patriotism is evident, alike from his words and his deeds. He had amassed a few hundreds of pounds, and was in no dread of poverty, being sanguine and self-confident to an uncommon degree. He ardently longed to see this fair colony rescued from the thraldom under which it groaned. In a letter[65] written many years afterwards, when he was an outlaw and an exile, he gives his own version of the motives which impelled him to embark upon what he calls "the stormy sea of politics." "I had long," he writes, "seen the country in the hands of a few shrewd, crafty, covetous men, under whose management one of the most lovely and desirable sections of America remained a comparative desert. The most obvious public improvements were stayed; dissension was created among classes; citizens were banished and imprisoned in defiance of all law; the people had been long forbidden, under severe pains and penalties, from meeting anywhere to petition for justice; large estates were wrested from their owners in utter contempt of even the forms of the courts; the Church of England, the adherents of which were few, monopolized as much of the lands of the colony as all the religious houses and dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church had had the control of in Scotland at the era of the Reformation; other sects were treated with contempt and scarcely tolerated; a sordid band of land-jobbers grasped the soil as their patrimony, and with a few leading officials, who divided the public revenue among themselves, formed the Family Compact, and were the avowed enemies of common schools, of civil and religious liberty, of all legislative or other checks to their own will. Other men had opposed, and been converted by them. At nine-and-twenty I might have united with them, but chose rather to join the oppressed, nor have I ever regretted that choice, or wavered from the object of my early pursuit."
A man entertaining such views as these, more especially a man of energy and intelligence, with a newspaper at his back, could not fail to be acceptable to the little knot of politicians who formed the nucleus of the Reform Party of Upper Canada. Mr. Mackenzie was cordially welcomed into the ranks, and was soon recognized as a most useful and valuable acquisition thereto. He could make no pretence to the various learning, fine presence, subtle intellect or polished eloquence of Rolph, nor even to the high but less marked qualities of the Bidwells, but the time was at hand when he was to prove that he possessed the power to move audiences, by his voice as well as by his pen. In person he would have been pronounced by a casual passer-by to be rather insignificant, being exceedingly short in stature, and not well proportioned as to his figure, which was slight, wiry, and--owing to a restless habit and a highly-strung nervous system--seldom in repose. Still, no one who contemplated his features with attention would ever have dreamed of pronouncing him commonplace. His intellectual vigour and determination were attested by his large head, massive brow, keen, light-blue eyes and firmly-set mouth. His physical energy was placed equally beyond doubt by the nervous activity above mentioned. Until he was long past the prime of his manhood he was never still for many consecutive moments during his waking hours. When labouring under any unusual excitement his frame seemed to be set on steel springs. As his temper was easily aroused, it was no uncommon thing to see him in one of these phases of excitement. But though he was thus quickly moved to anger, it could not with justice be said that his temper was bad, for, so far from being implacable, he was readily appeased, and always quick to forget and forgive. Altogether, he had an active but ill-balanced organization. His sympathies were too quick and strong for his judgment, and he frequently acted from impulse and hot blood. From his cradle to his grave he was never fit to walk alone and without guidance through any great emergency.
No two human beings could well be more unlike than were William Lyon Mackenzie and John Rolph. They were compelled to work together in a common cause for many years, but the two entities were thoroughly antagonistic, and there was never much personal liking between them. The structure of their bodies was not more dissimilar than was that of their minds. The one, slight, wiry, and ever in motion, seemed as though it might be blown hither and thither by any strong current. The other, solid almost to portliness, was suggestive of fixity--of self-dependence, and unsusceptibility to outside influences. The one was suggestive of being in a great measure the creature of circumstances; the other of being a law unto himself--one who would be more likely to influence circumstances than to be influenced by them. Mackenzie's nature, though it could not strictly be called a shallow one, at any rate lay near the surface, and its characters were not hard to decipher, even upon a brief acquaintance. There were depths in Rolph's nature which were never fathomed by those nearest and dearest to him--possibly not even by himself. Mackenzie seems to have long regarded Rolph with a sort of distant awe--as a Sphinx, close, oracular, inscrutable. Rolph evidently estimated Mackenzie correctly, as one whose politics were founded upon deeply-rooted convictions, and not upon mere opinions, although he would probably have found it difficult to subject those opinions to a rigid analysis; as one whose energy and journalistic resources might be turned to good account in the cause of Reform, but whose discretion was not always to be relied on. This estimate, indeed, was sufficiently obvious to any one who maintained frequent or familiar relations with Mackenzie, and was concurred in by most, if not all, of his friends. His earnestness and good faith, however, were manifest to all who knew him, and these were sufficient to cover much more culpable weaknesses than any which he had hitherto displayed.
Having now become acquainted with some of the FATHERS of Reform, it is desirable to cast a momentary glance at the material which went to the composition of the Reform Party generally. That material was of the most heterogeneous character imaginable. It included a few U. E. Loyalists of advanced opinions, and their descendants; but the bone and sinew were made up of more recent immigrants from Great Britain and the United States. The organization of the party, such as it was, was of too recent a date at this time to admit of any absolute unanimity of opinion on all questions of public policy having been arrived at among so numerous a body. On one cardinal point, however, all were agreed: it was in the highest degree desirable that the Canadian constitution should be more closely assimilated to that of the mother-country, and that the Executive Council should be made responsible to the popular branch of the Legislature. True, there was a small element--almost entirely made up of immigrants from across the border--who held republican theories, but no class of the community clamoured more loudly for Responsible Government than did the advocates of republicanism, very few of whom regarded their opinions as coming within the domain of practical politics in Upper Canada. On the question of the Clergy Reserves there was less uniformity of sentiment. Many sincere Reformers disapproved of the voluntary principle, and believed in a State provision for the Clergy,[66] though very few of them went so far in that direction as to defend the exclusive pretensions of the Church of England. On this and other important public questions, however, the diversity of opinion henceforth became less and leas from year to year. In point of numbers the adherents of Reform principles constituted a majority of the inhabitants of the Province.
The _Advocate_ was only six months old when its proprietor removed to York. If any good service was to be done to Reform by his means it was clear that the Provincial capital must be the seat of his operations. The removal took place in November, 1824, and in the following January the new Parliament met for the first time. Much of the interval was spent by the Reformers in preparations for organization. In all these proceedings Mr. Mackenzie took an active and prominent part. He also assumed, to a greater extent than he had previously done, the _role_ of a public censor, and, in the columns of his paper, opened a hot fire upon the official party and their myrmidons. His writing was "personal journalism," with a vengeance, for he usually expressed himself in the first person singular, and directed his animadversions against any one who, for the time being, happened to have attracted his notice. He wrote very erratically, and from the impulse of the moment; in one number lauding some particular personage in extravagant terms, and in subsequent numbers assailing the self-same individual in language which certainly reflected no credit upon the writer. Sometimes he even extended his attacks to the friends and relatives of those who had become obnoxious to him. In all this he merely followed the example of his opponents, from whom better things might have been expected, but he certainly lessened his influence, even among his friends and fellow-labourers, by his onslaughts upon particular individuals. There can be no manner of doubt, however, that he achieved his object of holding some of his opponents up to public ridicule, and that in at least one or two instances he was the means of affecting votes in the Assembly thereby. To what extent, if at all, his efforts in this direction contributed to the election of Mr. Willson, the Reform candidate for the Speakership in the Assembly, already referred to, is not easy to say. That his deliverances may have produced an effect upon one or two waverers, and thereby have brought about the desired result--the vote, it will be remembered, was a close one, standing twenty-one to nineteen[67]--is possible enough. It is at all events certain that the combined action of the Reform Party in and out of Parliament produced early and specific consequences. On a number of questions the Government found themselves confronted by a hostile majority considerably greater than they had encountered on the Speakership. But these seeming triumphs were of no immediate advantage to the Opposition. Let the majority against the Government be ever so great in the Assembly, the official policy remained the same. The Upper House rejected Bill after Bill which had been passed by the Lower, and the Executive clung to their places in undisturbed serenity.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] _Ante_, p. 44.
[58] The repealing statute is 1 Geo. IV. chapter 4. The statute repealed is 59 Geo. III., sess. 1, chapter 2.
[59] It was however a bare majority, the vote standing 17 to 16.
[60] See Stat. 2 Geo. IV. chapter 4, passed 17th January, 1822.
[61] Six