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“I put not my faith in Princes, for that would be forgetting the rules of Holy Writ; but, begging your pardon, I still put my faith in Peers.”

“ ‘I am glad I am not the eldest son,’ said the younger Pitt when he heard of his father’s elevation to an earldom; ‘I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa.’ ”

“A politic caution, a guarded circumspection, were among the ruling principles of our forefathers.”

The man who wrote the letter calculated to create trouble and promote that already begun was quite a personage in the Radical wing of the House of Commons. A Scotchman from Montrose, born in 1777, he was son of a captain of a trading vessel; the father’s early death left this Joseph and numerous brothers and sisters to the care of a mother who was a woman of extraordinary perseverance and energy. She kept a small stand on market-day in Montrose, and Fox Maule, afterwards Lord Panmure, seeing young Joseph there, was seized with the whim to apprentice him to a druggist. A subsequent apprenticeship to surgery and a voyage to India led to his study there of the native dialects, a knowledge of which he made such good use that in the war with the Mahrattas he became interpreter, an office of emolument and honour. He returned to Britain at the peace of 1807, and began a tour there so minute and exhaustive that he visited every manufacturing town. He then went as thoroughly through Southern Europe, and with his head thus equipped entered the House as Tory member for the borough of Weymouth in 1812, calculated to make a figure there and carry much weight through native ability and wide experience. Once more he tried his rôle of interpreter between those who could not or would not understand each other. His opponents found it impossible to tire or baffle him; repulses were thrown away on him, and he returned to the charge, unconscious, ready to repeat a hundredth time that which they had declared unreasonable.

“What manner of man is Joseph Hume?” asks The Noctes. “Did you never see him?” says North. “He is a shrewd-looking fellow enough, but most decidedly vulgar. Nobody that sees him could ever for a moment suspect him of being a gentleman born. He has the air of a Montrose dandy at this moment, and there is an intolerable affectation about the creature. I suppose he must have sunk quite into the dirt since Croker curried him.” “I don’t believe anything can make an impression on him. A gentleman’s whip would not be felt through the beaver of a coal-heaver.” He was, in fact, short, broad, stiff, square and copperfaced. He exhibited the uncouthness of the Scot in relief, and his speech, in all the worst of the Scotch brogue, “barbarous exceedingly,” baffled description. “Depend upon it, Joseph will go on just as he has been doing.” And he had been going on from his place as Radical member for Montrose. Added to all, he was a master of detail. In spite of his earnestness, he often convulsed the House with his Scotch bulls when he intended most to impress. Expatiating on the virtues of the French-Canadians, he exclaimed, “I say, sir, they are the best and gentlest race in Europe (laughter), aye”—waxing hotter—“or in Africa” (roars of laughter). Sir Francis Bond Head did not scruple to say that Hume was the greatest rebel of the lot, and, in his turn, Hume made a furious attack on Sir Francis. However, he was just as vigorously answered by Lord Grey, and then the morning papers said “that Hume had not been able to make Head.” Politics were so bitter then that all Reformers were rebels. Hume’s letter of March 29th, 1834, in which he says, “Your cause is their cause, your defeat would be their subjection. Go on, therefore, I beseech you, and success, glorious success, must inevitably crown your joint efforts,” sounds as if Sir Francis might have had reason for his opinion. By 1839 a public dinner had been given this erstwhile Tory, in testimony of his eminent public services and constant advocacy in the cause of reform. Says North, “Why, a small matter will make a man who has once ratted rat again. We all remember what Joe Hume was a few years ago!”

“A Tory?”

“I would not prostitute the name so far, but he always voted with them.”

“At the Whigs it was then his chief pleasure to rail,

He opposed all the Catholic claims tooth and nail. …”

“Why, no wonder … he hates the Tories. They never thought of him while he was with them, and now the Whigs do talk of Joe as if he were somebody. But, as John Bull says,

“ ‘A very small man with the Tories

Is a very great man ’mong the Whigs.’ ”

It was a time of general unrest and suspicion, just from the likelihood of change and the alarming precedents set up. No two men could be seen anywhere in the same neighbourhood without arousing ideas of coalition, hope, suspicion and a host of feelings—as, for instance, when “Mr. Roebuck was seen in a quarter which left little doubt that he had been with Lord Brougham. It is very generally thought that something is about to happen.” Mr. Roebuck, like Mr. Hume, was a marked man and an out-and-out Canadian sympathiser. He, according to a well-known and accredited newspaper, “was paid by the Lower Canadian House of Assembly to expatiate on grievances, and to declare at all times and in all places to those who have no personal acquaintance with the Canadas that the people there are restless, dissatisfied, yearning for republican institutions, and that unless the never-ending, still-beginning concessions they require are granted, another American war must be the result.” The effect of his words was weakened by his appearance, which was that of a boy of eighteen. “If we do not immediately take active measures,” was Sir John Colborne’s antiphon from across the sea, “to arm and organize our friends, the province (Lower Canada) will be lost to us.”

He did organize—“Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.” “Very likely,” came the answer, “ ’tis in our power, then, to be hanged and scorn ye.”

What in Canada were called Roebuck’s “remarques ordinaires” were constant philippics against administrative abuses there. He wanted some means to be found as remedy for the defects. He laboured unceasingly. In speeches, writings in journals and pamphlets and periodicals, in season and out of season, he lost no chance to plead the cause of the Canadas. Naturally, he was “abusive and ridiculous” in these letters to such as did not agree with him. Had his nomination been properly confirmed, his income as agent would have been £1,000 a year; but the want of it did not slacken his efforts. “While such is the nature and conduct of this petty and vulgar oligarchy, I beseech the House to consider the peculiar position of the people over whom they domineer.” He then goes on to draw a picture of the superior scene across the St. Lawrence; a natural enough picture to be drawn by an American, born with prejudices in favour of his native land. He goes on: “With such a sight before them it is not wonderful that the Canadian people have imbibed the free spirit of America, and that they bear with impatience the insolence, the ignorance, the incapacity and the vice of the nest of official cormorants who, under the festering domination of England, have constituted themselves an aristocracy, with all the vices of such a body, without one of the redeeming qualities which are supposed to lessen the mischiefs which are the natural attendants of all aristocracies. It is of a people thus high-spirited, pestered and stung to madness by this pestilential brood, that I demand your attention.”

But the Canadians, though grateful, were aware he did not always act with prudence in their behalf. He and Mr. Hume together had presided at a meeting where the latter declared that Canada was of no advantage to Britain. But they gave him and all who mentioned them kindly in the House of Commons—O’Connell, Pakington and others who had spoken for them—their heartfelt thanks.

Labouchere, French by descent, stood up in their defence and vindicated their claims. “I look upon the Act of 1791,” said he, “as the Magna Charta of Canadian freedom,” and contended that a more rigid following of Pitt’s intentions would have resulted in better things. He denounced the prejudice of one race against another, nor deemed a council so altogether British wholesome government for people so entirely French. The French had many champions in that historic chamber. Sir James Mackintosh, author of “Vindiciæ Gallicæ,” a man whose whole bias of mind had been turned and held fast by French revolution, equipped by nature with all the powers and attributes of statesmanship, and who had brought all to bear on home politics and legislation in the broadest imperial sense, was not the least of these. He had undertaken, years before the blooming of that bitter blossom, the Canadian aloe—tenacity of life is one of its virtues—the successful defence of a French emigrant for libel on the consul; his residence in Bombay, as Recorder, had been famous for his wholesome administration between British and native rights; he had strongly opposed “the green bag and spy system;” had voted against the severe restrictions of the Alien Bill, and had moved against the existing state of the criminal law; so that he did not speak, as many did on Canadian affairs, without special or collateral experience. He wanted the dependency governed on principles of justice, few and simple; protection against alien influence, and freedom to conduct their own affairs and manage their own trade. “A British king see now assume Judicial sovereignty, ‘coutume,’ And that of Paris cease to reign Throughout the Canada domain.”[2] He even allowed merit to that old coutume in comparison with affairs as they existed under British law, and in sarcastic humour ran a parallel between them.

When “Quebec first raised the legal courts

For Does or Roes to hold their sports,”2 the spirit of the Conseil Souverain was one which did not at the Conquest migrate to the new body: “Nous avons cru ne pouvoir prendre une meilleure résolution qu’en établisant une justice réglé et un Conseil Souverain dans le dits pays, pour y faire fleurir les lois, maintenir et appuyer les bons, chatier les méchants, et contenir chacun en son droit.”

Sir James now held the Governor responsible for the existing state of affairs; he accused the Colonial Minister of appealing to the sympathies of the House in favour of British interests only. Were the twenty thousand British to be privileged at the expense of the four hundred thousand French? Were the former to be cared for exclusively, their religious sympathies so fostered as to bring about Protestant domination? Again he draws a parallel between what Ireland was and what Canada might become, and in the name of heaven, his eloquence aided by large grey melancholy eyes, adjured them solemnly that such a scourge fall not a second time upon any land under Britain’s sway. “Above all, let not the French-Canadians suppose for a moment that their rights or aspirations are less cared for by us than those of their fellow-adult colonists of our own blood. … Finally, I look upon a distinction in the treatment of races and the division of a population into distinct classes as most perilous in every way and at all times.”

Then Melbourne rose to reply that nothing was as unsafe as analogy, particularly historical analogy.

And Lord Aylmer thought, after an extensive tour of the French province, giving all these questions earnest consideration, that the best way to settle the question was to bring in thousands of the Irish to the colony; the Eastern Townships he estimated could take five hundred thousand, and the valley of the Ottawa one hundred thousand. These painstaking, conscientious governors generally left England laden with minute instructions, and came on the scene with exact directions as to their action. The Canadians, first credulous, afterwards wary and lastly suspicious, shrewdly guessed that many of the “impromptus” were in the Governor’s pocket; they also knew that Lord Glenelg was a Reformer in London and a Conservative in Quebec. They believed that orders publicly given carried with them secret advice not to have them enforced, as they were meant “only to blarney the Radicals.” And Papineau had told them that the same hand which wrote the King’s speech penned the answer to it. When the Irish emigrant did come he brought the cholera with him, and Jean cried out again that legislation and emigration only meant fresh trouble.

The amount of thought bestowed upon the Canadas by these statesmen no one, not even the most discontented Canadian, denied. But the mistaken data from which many of the arguments were drawn maddened some; and aristocratic mannerisms, when brought into contact with the democratic Upper Canadian, gave offence. There was a great deal of the picturesque about Jean Baptiste, and of him much was known; retiring governors and officers took with them bulky note-books full of anecdotes. In Upper Canada there was nothing of the picturesque, and the same note-books, developed into goodly volumes, tell us it in print without flinching. True, those intent on learning had Basil Hall’s Sketches, with accounts of Hall’s five thousand two hundred and thirty-seven miles of travel; but though the former were beautifully done the latter were meagre, and with the exception of Niagara make the Upper Province as uninteresting as its own crows. For foundation they had Charlevoix; but, says Charlevoix, “The horned owl is good eating, many prefer his flesh to chickens. He lives in winter on ground mice which he has caught the previous fall, breaking their legs first, a most useful precaution to prevent their escape, and then fattens them up with care for daily use.” Could housewife with Thanksgiving turkey do more!

Now a good many of those who came after Charlevoix and reported on us took him—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps conscientiously, for Charlevoix was a good man—for a literary model, pushing to the extreme limit their rights and privileges as travellers. They read, did these mighty and well-meaning statesmen, in their leisure hours. Nor in later years were the English less credulous when Canadian curiosities came to them bodily. When a party of Indians were nightly attracting large and wondering masses of the classes, one of the Royal Household, with two others as white as himself, one of the trio six feet two of apparent savagedom, arrayed themselves as magnificent Bois Brûlé, a Sac and a Sioux respectively, to appear before a brilliant array of fashion, wealth and beauty, carry out an unusually thrilling programme and be loaded with gifts by the spectators. The “interpreter” of the three got into rather a mess through his attempt to interpret too much, and in a final frenzy of dancing they danced off some paint made liquid by their desire to be honest in giving enough for their lavish remuneration. An earl in the audience failed to recognize his brother in one of the chief actors, voice and speech being disguised by a rifle bullet held in the mouth. The sequel was the return of the presents and a chase home to lodgings, followed by a yelling crowd of ragamuffins who turned out to be truer savages than those whom they termed Hopjibbeways. The Indian came first in romantic interest to the Englishman, particularly when got ready for an audience by a clever manager. To hear a handsome, strapping Bois Brûlé sing “To the land of my fathers, white man, let me go,” was enough to draw tears. Next in point of interest to this link between red and white came the habitant. The Upper Canadian was very tame after these two, and Toronto was but “a place of considerable importance … in the eyes of its inhabitants.”

Another writes of travel by water as he finds it in America: “There is no toothbrush in the country, simply I believe the article is entirely unknown to the American toilet. A common towel, however, passes from hand to hand, and suffices for the perfunctory ablutions of the whole party on board.” No man in England would take the trouble to contradict this; it was much easier to buy the book, read, be amused, and believe—as he did with the Indian party.

Much as Mackenzie was instrumental in doing for his country, he was scarcely a person to make his province interesting when he presented himself in London.

“Now Willie’s awa’ frae the land o’ contention,

Frae the land o’ mistake and the friends o’ dissension;

He’s gane o’er the waves as an agent befitting

Our claims to support in the councils o’ Britain,”

sang a Canadian bard in 1832, when Mackenzie, with his monster grievance book under his arm, set sail for the Home Office.

The quiet of the vessel after his late life in Little York was irksome; so this stormy petrel went aloft one night in a howling tempest, no doubt in a fit of home-sickness, and remained for hours at the masthead. Scarcely had he descended when one of the sails was blown away.

“Then there the Reformers shall cordially meet him,

An’ there his great namesake, King William, shall greet him.”

He lost no time in putting himself in communication with Hume, Roebuck, Cobbett and O’Connell, and with Lord Goderich, then Colonial Secretary; but just how far the meeting was cordial, with those from whom cordiality was expected, only a long comparison of data can show. Even then our opinions had weight, as in ’31 when Brougham wrote: “Dear Lord Grey, the enclosed is from a Canadian paper; they have let you off well, as being priggish and having a Newcastle burr, and also as not being like O’Connell.” Mackenzie was in the nick of time to see that wonderful sight for eyes such as his—a great aristocracy bowing to the will of a great people—to hear the third reading of the Reform Bill. He was lucky enough to get into that small gallery in the House of Lords which accommodates only some eighty persons. He noticed that but few peers had arrived, and that a number of members from the Lower House stood about. To stand they were forced, or sit upon the matting, for there were neither chairs nor benches for them—a state of things highly displeasing to the fiery little democratic demagogue perched aloft, anxious to hear and determined that others should yet hear him.

At the Colonial Office he was simply a person interested in Canadian affairs, and useful as one able to furnish information. But he furnished it in such a discursive manner and adorned it with so much rhetoric that the Colonial Secretary found his document “singularly ill-adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and importance to a definite issue.” The impression Mackenzie might have made was nullified by the counter-document adroitly sent in ahead of his own by the Canadian party in power, wherein a greater number of signatures than he had been able to get appended to dissatisfaction testified to satisfaction with affairs as they then existed in the Upper Province. The customary despatch followed. Some of Mackenzie’s arguments were treated with cutting severity; but an impression must have been made by them, for the despatch carried news most distressing to the oligarchy, which was modelled after the spirit of St.Paul—that there should be no schism in the body, that the members should have the same care one for the other.

To these Tories of York it was all gall and wormwood. Nor could they accept it. Mackenzie had spent six days and six nights in London, with only an occasional forty winks taken in his chair, while he further expressed himself and those he represented. His epistolary feat was regarded by the Upper Canadian House with unqualified contempt, and Lord Goderich’s moderately lengthy one as “not calling for the serious attention of the Legislative Council.” Mackenzie had ventured to predict in his vigil of ink and words that unless the system of the government of Upper Canada was changed civil war must follow. But peers also sometimes have insomnia and know the distressing results; so he was warned: “Against gloomy prophecies of this nature, every man conversant with public business must fortify his mind.” The time was not far distant when he might say, “I told you so.” The Home Office listened with great attention, but observed close reticence in regard to itself. The Colonial Minister looked upon such predictions as a mode to extort concessions for which no adequate reason could be offered. Nevertheless, the two Crown officers who were Mr. Mackenzie’s most particular aversions at that time had to go. The weapon of animadversion sent skipping across seas for the purpose of his humiliation had proved a kind of boomerang, and the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General were left free to make as many contemptuous expressions as they pleased concerning the Colonial Secretary and his brethren, being looked upon by the last-named as rebels themselves, since they had, “in their places in the Assembly, taken a part directly opposed to the assured policy of His Majesty’s Government.” Such is the strength of point of view; for the libellous rebel doing his busiest utmost against them was to them “an individual who had been twice expelled” this same House of Assembly. Under the first affected hauteur of the dismissed officials there had been many qualms; the Attorney-General thought it ill became the Colonial Secretary to “sit down and answer this rigmarole trash” (Mackenzie’s hard work of seventy-two sleepless hours), “and it would much less become the Canadian House of Assembly to give it further weight by making it more public.” One, a little more sane, thought that if Mackenzie’s papers contained such an amount of falsehood and fallacy, the best way to expose such was by publication. But a large vote decided that it should not go upon the Journals, and the official organ called Lord Goderich’s despatch an elegant piece of fiddle-faddle, … full of clever stupidity and condescending impertinence. The removal of the two Crown officers was described as “as high-handed and arbitrary stretch of power as has been enacted before the face of high heaven, in any of the four quarters of this nether world for many and many a long day.” The organ’s vocabulary displayed such combinations as “political mountebank—fools and knaves—all fools and knaves who listened to the silly complaints of the swinish multitude against the honourable and learned gentlemen connected with the administration of government.”

Whenever time dragged withal in the Upper Canadian House they re-expelled Mackenzie and fulminated anew against “the united factions of Mackenzie, Goderich, and the Yankee Methodists.”

Mackenzie’s friends lost no time in celebrating what was to be a short-lived triumph: