32 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



had been gradually accumulating means, threw themselves into 

 manufacturing enterprises and speculations of many kinds. 



The contrast between the United States and Canada was clear. 

 The surviving United Empire Loyalists and their friends, who formed 

 the superior layers of society in Upper Canada, were not much 

 interested in business. Many of them were cultivated people, but 

 they lacked enterprise and energy. Above all, they had no money. 

 Even the best of them were heavily indebted to the government and 

 to other creditors. Mackenzie unconsciously represented the new 

 commercial spirit,'*^ however ineffective he might have shown himself 

 in expressing it in organizing capacity. He represented it in the 

 same way as Simcoe and Lord Durham had represented it. 



The merchants of Kingston, who had promoted the bank in 

 opposition to the group at York, represented it also as did very 

 many of Mackenzie's sympathizers. Out of about 900 persons 

 accused of complicity in the rebellion who were arrested or who 

 were able to abscond in 1837, more than 140 belonged to the pro- 

 fessional, mercantile and industrial classes, and the remainder were 

 farmers in the immediate neighbourhood of the urban centres and 

 labourers living in the towns or indirectly dependent upon them,^" 

 most of the latter being probably unemployed. The attacks upon 

 the executive were nearly all in respect to finance — to the provincial 



*^The following extract from the Colonial Advocate illustrates the text and is 

 given here because there is only one known set of the newspaper, which set is in the 

 possession of the family of the late Mr. G. G. S. Lindsey, of Toronto. Mr. Lindsey 

 was good enough to furnish me with the extract : 



"Lands and tenements are a drug in the market; property does not average 

 one-fifth of what its value is on the opposite side of the lake; sheriff's sales increase 

 in number and value; .'.the province, beautiful, fertile, well-watered and extensive as 

 it is, fails to attract or retain population; men of capital and enterprise, if possessed 

 of manly feelings, remove from a petty tyranny they cannot but dislike, and 

 mechanics from Europe find no rest for the sole of their feet until they enter the 

 territories of the Republic. . . . Domestic manufactures of every kind, unless 

 perhaps in a few extraordinary cases, where favourites of the executive have been 

 deeply concerned, are directly and indirectly discouraged; and bills passed by the 

 local Assemblies for promoting Canada manufactures are thrown under the table 

 by the peers, as interfering with the main object of a colony, to wit, the promotion 

 of the trade, and enlargement of the patronage of the Mother Country. Attempts 

 to pass acts for the improvement of the roads and bridges have been equally un- 

 successful, although our roads are in general in a wretched condition, and the situa- 

 tion of many of the back settlers so miserable as to render them objects of pity and 

 commiseration in the eyes of any government other than a colonial one. The only 

 bank in the colony is virtually under the control of the executive. . . ." — Colonial 

 Advocate, 2nd July, 1829. 



"See the lists of persons involved in the Rebellion, printed as an appendix in 

 Lindsey's Life of Wm. Lyon Mackenzie, Toronto, 1862, vol. ii, pp. 373-400. 



