38 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
lost by a too scrupulous attention to forms, and when the civil adminis- 
tration of justice is found inadequate to our protection in times perilous 
and unusual as the present, recourse must be had to measures more 
efficacious and the necessity must and will justify their adoption. . These 
measures Your Honor seems resolved to take and in another part of the 
Province where certainly the reasons are not more urgent, they have 
been acted upon and the public have felt the beneficial result. I would 
suggest that Your Honor should by private letters of instruction, 
something in the form of that which I presume to enclose, beg several of 
the most respectable gentlemen of the place to report to you what 
characters they deem suspicious and transmit as regular and full infor- 
mation as they can obtain of any act committed by those persons in 
opposition to the Government and our common cause. 
“These reports Your Honor will see are to be merely private for 
your information and enable you to deliver to Major Stuart the neces- 
sary orders respecting the characters concerned. It will be satisfactory 
to yourself to be sure that you are acting upon the opinion of unpre- 
judiced persons, and will show that your are governed by the purest 
intentions in the necessary execution of an irregular power. Of the 
persons liberated from our gaol, some are gone off in their fleet. I shall 
see that the sheriff does his duty in apprehending the rest and recom- 
mitting them for trial and whenever acts admitting of legal proof have 
been committed, the offenders, I think, if circumstances make it pos- 
sible, had better be regularly charged and detained until the assizes.’’! 
No record of the names or number of persons thus arrested and ~ 
removed to Lower Canada has been fund, but it is known that one of 
them was Abraham Markle, a resident of the township of Ancaster 
and a member of the Assembly who was suspected of giving information 
to the enemy respecting the defenceless situation of the depot at Burling- 
ton Heights in the latter part of July. 
In a letter from Downing Street under date of August 11, the 
Secretary of State for the Colonies directed the Governor General to 
instruct the officer acting as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada to 
take the most effectual measure to induce the Legislature to pass an 
act for the banishment of all persons who had aided the enemy and con- 
fiscating their property to form a fund in the first instance to be applied 
to the imdemnification of all persons who had suffered loss by the war 
within the limits of the province. It wasrecommended that all persons 
who had voluntarily withdrawn from the province into the United 

* John B. Robinson to de Rottenburg, August 20, 1813. Can. Arch. Sundries 
U.C. 1813. 
