TORONTO OF OLD, 233 



in triumph, on a kind of pyramidal car, and wearing round his neck and across his breast a 

 massive gold chain and medal (both made of molten sovereigns), the gift of his admirers and 

 constituents : in the procession, at the same time, was a printing-press, working as it was 

 conveyed along in a low sleigh, and throwing off handbiUs, which were tossed, right and left, 

 to the accompanjang crowd in the street. 



The existing generation of Upper Canadians, with the lights which they now possess, see 

 pretty clearly, at the present moment, that the agitator just named, and his party, were not, in 

 the abstract, by any means so bad as they seemed : that, in fact, the ideas which they sought 

 to propagate are the only ones practicable in the successful government of modem men. Is 

 there a reader nowadays that sees anything very startling in the enunciation of the following 

 principles ? — " The control of the whole revenue to be in the people's representatives ; the 

 Legislative Council to be elective ; the representation in the House of Assembly to be as equally 

 proportioned to the population as possible ; the Executive Government to incur a real respon- 

 sibility ; the law of prunogeniture to be abolished ; impartiality in the selection of juries to be 

 secured ; the Judiciary to be independent ; the military to be in strict subordination to the 

 civil authorities ; equal rights to the several members of the community ; every vestige of 

 Churcli-and-State union to be done away ; the lands and all the revenues of the country to be 

 ■under the control of the country ; and education to be widely, carefully and impartially dif- 

 fused ; to these may be added the choice of our o^vn Governors." — These were the political 

 principles sought to be established in the governments of Canada by the party referred to, as 

 set forth in the terms just given (almost verbatim) in Patrick Swift's Almanac, a well-known 

 popular, annual brochure of Mr. McKenzie's. It seems singular now, in the retrospect, that 

 doctrines such as these should have created a ferment. But there is this to be said : it does 

 not appear that there were, at the time, in the ranks of the party in power, any persons of very 

 superier intellectual gifts or of a wide range of culture or historieal knowledge : so that it was 

 not likely that, on that side, there would be a ready relinquishment of political traditions, of 

 inherited ideas, which their possessors had never dreamt of rationally analyzing, and which 

 they deemed it all but treason to call into question. And moreover it is to be remembered that 

 the chief propagandist of the doctrines of reform, althou^ very intelligent and ready of speech, 

 did not possess the dignity and repose of character which give weight to the utterances of public 

 men. Hence, with the persons who really stood in need of instruction and enlightenment, his 

 words had an irritating, rather than a conciliatory and convincing effect. This was a fault 

 which it was not in his power to remedy. For his microscopic vision and restless temperament, 

 while they fitted him to be a very clever local reformer, a very clever local editor, unfitted him 

 for undertaking the grand role of a national statesman, or the heroic conductor of a revo- 

 lution. Accordingly, although the principles advocated by him finally obtained the ascendancy, 

 posterity regards him only as the Wilkes, the Cobbett, or the Hunt of his day, in the annals of 

 his adopted country. In the interval between the outbreak or feint at outbreak in 1838, and 

 1850, the whole Canadian community made a great advance in general intelligence, and states- 

 men of a genuine quality began to appear in our Parliaments. 



Prior to the period of which we have just been speaking, a name much in the mouths of our 

 early settlers was that of Robert Gonrlay. What we have to say in respect to him, in this our 

 retrospect of the past, will perhaps be in place here. Nothing could be more laudable than Mr. 

 Gourlay's intentions at the outset. He desired to publish a statistical account of Canada, with 

 a view to the promotion of emigration. To inform himself of the actual condition of the young 

 colony, he addressed a series of questions to pei-sons of experience and intelligence in every 

 township of Upper Canada. These questions are now lying before ns : they extend to the num- 

 ber of thirty-one. There are none of them that a modem reader would pronounce ill-judged or 

 irrelevant. But here again it is easy to see that personal character and temperament marred 

 the usefulness of a clever man. His inordinate self-esteem and pugnaciousnesss, insufficiently 

 controlled, speedily rendered him offensive, especially ui a community constituted as that was 

 in the midst of which he had suddenly lighted ; and drove, naturaUy and of necessity, his oppo- 

 nents to extreme measures in self-defence, and himself to extreme doctrines by way of retalia- 

 tion : thus he became overwhelmed with troubles from which the tact of a wise man would 

 have saved him. But for Gourlay, as the event proved, a latent insanity was an excuse. 



It is curious to observe that, in 1818, Gourlay, in his heat against the official party, whose 

 headquarters were at York, threatened that to^vn with extinction ; at all events, with the oblit- 



