inventory of major and minor royalties. But, although it had sent forth a Hagerman, the Bidwells were there too, all champions in the coming struggle for what each loyally believed to be the right. Every town and hamlet along that immense waterway had heard the call of Mackenzie from either lips or pen, and some dwellers in each had responded.
With York is reached the centre of grievance, the house of hate, where the principals in the coming struggle dwelt in a succession of patched-up peace, revolts, domineering unfairness, harsh punishments and secret reprisals, a panoramic play in which the first act was tyranny and the last revolution. Some of the by-play reads childishly enough. Mackenzie’s stationery shop in King Street contained window decorations of the most soul-harrowing kind, and all belonging to the era of belief in eternal punishment. The asperities of Mackenzie’s truly Presbyterian enjoyment had not yet been softened by a Farrar or a Macdonnell. The prints there displayed depicted Sir Francis Bond Head, Hagerman, Robinson, Draper and Judge Jones as squirming in all the torments of a realistic hell, relieved by sketches of a personal devil whose barbed tail was used as a transfixing hook for one or other of these Tories, the more conveniently to spit and cook him. The Canadian ejaculations of former times, “May an Iroquois broil me,” or “Tors mon âme au bout d’un piquet” (Twist my soul on the end of a fence rail), were forever routed. Like Pope and an interrogation point, Mackenzie was a little thing who would ask questions, any crookedness about him being the peculiar twists and turns made possible by nature to his rapier-like tongue. His paper heralded the day of Carlyle and Doré, anticipating the former’s “gloomy procession of the nations going to perdition, America the advance guard.” When he thus bearded these lions in their dens they promptly called—through the government organ—for the suppression of the first issue of this obnoxious paper; further, that the editor should be banished, and the entire edition confiscated. Vituperative, he had a command of uncomfortable words fitted to every circumstance, his ability to scent out abuses phenomenal. But he was not banished, nor his pen and pencil confiscated, nor yet did his influence stop at this point in the long journey from Glengarry to Windsor. And why should such a pen be confiscated? While the Family Compact were expelling Mackenzie, imprisoning Collins, and hunting to death any poor stray printer who dared put his want of admiration of them in type, no less great a person than their King was feign to be out of his wits because he was not only libelled but had no redress. He laments the existence of “such a curse … as a licentious and uncontrolled press,” and of a state of things which renders the law with respect to libellers and agitators a dead letter. Poor King, happy Family Compact; Canada had no dead laws if the people who administered them wished them quick. “The Irish agitators, the reviews and, above all, the press, continue to annoy the King exceedingly;” but Earl Grey said the only way with newspaper attacks was the Irish way, “to keep never minding.” Also Lord Goderich writes to Sir John Colborne in ’32: “I must entirely decline, as perfectly irrelevant to any practical question, the inquiry whether at a comparatively remote period prosecutions against the editors of newspapers were improperly instituted or not.” It is needless to look beyond Mr. Mackenzie’s journal to be convinced that there is no latitude which the most ardent lover of free discussion ever claimed for such writers which is not enjoyed in Upper Canada. Had he looked beyond Mr. Mackenzie’s journal he would have found the Reformers called “juggling, illiterate boobies—a tippling band—mountebank riffraff—a saintly clan—Mackenzie a politico-religious juggler.” The Reform Parliament was “the league of knave and fool—a ribald conclave;” and Mr. Ryerson, when under a temporary cloud, was called “a man of profound hypocrisy and unblushing effrontery, who sits blinking on his perch like Satan when he perched on the tree of life in the shape of a cormorant, to meditate the ruin of our first parents in the Garden of Eden!”
Following the frontier line, Niagara, looking like a “dilapidated hennery,” had not much in the aspect of its feeble fort to awe the rebellious spirits. They remembered the cruel sufferings of Gourlay, the demolition of Forsyth’s property, and could not be awed back into what had technically come to be known as loyalty by any associations of “Stamford,” or by the leavening power of the U. E. Loyalism which abounded in that district. Thence on to the hamlets of Dunnville and Port Dover, past the Dutch settlement called the Sugar Loaves—six conical hills rising from the low ground near the lake—to where that old lion, Colonel Talbot, perched midway between Niagara and Detroit, on Lake Erie, dared any among his many settlers to name a grievance. Thence to Amherstburg and Windsor, and on to Goderich, youngest of them all, and beyond which was primeval wilderness, a matted and mighty forest on which clouds and thick darkness still rested—known only to the savage, the wild beast, or perhaps to some stoic of the woods who was hustled out of his dream of quiet by the hunt after that ever-receding point of the compass, the West. Over such an area did the influence of this small, almost childish figure of a man extend. And up and down the land within this water-bound border, in outlying interior townships, did his message penetrate until, as the seasons advanced and the times grew ripe, he seemed to hold within the hollow of his small palm—a palm never crossed with gold—the power for which Governor and Council schemed without tiring or maintained by the right of might.
As early as ’34 the Canadian Alliance had been formed, not local in aim, but “entering into close alliance with any similar association that may be found in Lower Canada or other colonies.” The democratic tendency of its resolutions caused it to be called revolutionary by the governmental party; but then anything outside of that party was “rebel.” When matters focused between Sir Francis and that which he called his “low-bred antagonist, democracy,” evenly balanced persons became “notorious republicans;” Postmaster Howard, who came of ultra-loyal stock, was deposed from office chiefly because his son, a lad of ten, read a radical newspaper; and we find an “old dyed-in-the-wool Tory, a writer of some note,” afterwards saying: “When I look back over events which were thought all right by the Loyalists of those times, I only wonder there were not thousands of Mackenzies and Papineaus.” Might with the Loyalists made right; Mr. Hagerman would not “stoop to enquire whether this act was right or wrong, it was sufficient for him the House had done it.” It was clear, too, that the Chief-Justice himself was no student of George III. in the meaning of the word “mob,” and it was exasperating to the last to hear themselves spoken of as “a few individuals,” their serious conclaves as “casual meetings,” their petitions as “got up by somebody or other.”
The Alliance was pledged to disseminate its principles and educate the people by gratuitous issues of political pamphlets and sheets. The series of meetings organized to bring the people together showed sympathy with Papineau throughout. Lloyd was the trusted messenger sent to convey that sympathy; but at first it was not a sympathy backed up by physical force. “Much may be done without blood” was the keynote of its temperate tone. Yet, as where Papineau’s own disclaimers of physical force were heard, in Upper Canada the meeting ended in drill; Brown Besses were furbished up, and the clink of the blacksmith’s hammer might be heard in any forest forge busy fashioning into shape the pikes which were made in such shape as to be equally happy in ripping or stabbing.
In November, ’37, Papineau sent despatches to Upper Canada by the hands of M. Dufort, with an appeal for support as soon as they should have recourse to arms there. The mission carried Dufort still farther west, and in Michigan a Council of War was held, embracing many names prominent in that section. Cheers for Papineau and “the gallant people of the sister province” were tempered in their enthusiasm by fears in some minds that there was a disposition to establish the Roman Catholic as a dominant or State Church in the Lower Province. State Church, they said, was one of their own most formidable enemies. At one meeting those composing it were called upon to divide, those in sympathy with Papineau to go to the right of the chairman. Only three remained on the left. The sympathy, which was general, grew more enthusiastic over common woes. “They,” (the British) said Papineau, “are going to rob you of your money. Your duty then is plain. Give them no money to steal. Keep it in your pockets.” The women of the country, handsome and patriotic, were exhorted to clothe themselves and their children in a way to destroy the revenue, and to assist the men to prevent the forging of chains of undue taxation and duty. “Henceforth there must be no peace in the province, no quarter for the plunderers. Agitate, agitate, agitate. Destroy the revenue, denounce the oppressors. Everything is lawful when the fundamental liberties are in danger.” In his