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Maps, plates, charts, etc., may be filmed at different reduction ratios. Those too large to be entirely included in one exposure are filmed beginning in the upper left hand corner, left to right and top to bottom, as many frames as required. The following diagrams illustrate the method: Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent dtre film6s A des taux de reduction diff^rents. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtre reproduit en un seul clich6, il est film6 A partir de Tangle sup^rieur gauche, de gauche d droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images n6cessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la m^thode. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 H EOB c \ HUMOURS OF '37 GRAVE, GAY AND GRIM REBELLION TIMES IN THE CANADAS. BY PiOBINA AND KATHLEEN MACFARLANE LIZARS, Authors of "In the Days of the Canada Company : the Story of the Settlement of the Huron Tract." " The humours are commonly the most important and most variable parts of the animal body." TORONTO : WILLIAM BRIGGS, Wesley Buildings. C W. COATES, Montreal. S. F. HUESTIS, Halifax. 1897. 42986 Entered, aocording: to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand eight hundred and ninety -se ven, by Kathlbbn MacFar- LAMB LiZARS, at the Department of Agriculture. \ I I ^ PREFACE. V The title of this book is built upon the assumption that humour is a sense of incongruity, not that there was anything specially humorous in the affairs of '37 beyond that which arose from the crudeness of the times. A medium between the sacrifice of detail attendant on com- pilation, and the loss of effect in a whole picture through too close application of the historic microscope, has been attempted. True proportion is difficult to compass at short range, yet the motives, ideas and occurrences which produced the animosities leading to the Rebellion were the mheritance, the special property, of the men who lived then ; and of them few remain. To those who do and who have so kindly given their remini- scences special thanks are due. The works of the documentary and the philosophic historian lie on the shelves ready to one's hand; but those who were "Loyalist" and "Rebel" are quickly dropping into that silence where suffering and injustice, defeat and victory, meet in common oblivion. Like lichens on rocks, myths have grown about that time ; but the myth is worth preserving for the sake of the germ of truth which gave it birth. Historians sometimes tell the truth, not always the wliole truth, certainly never anything but the truth, and nothing is to be despised which gives a peep at the life as it really was. For complexion of the times, the local colour of its actif^n, there can be nothing like the tale of the veteran, of the v/^hite-haired, dim -eyed survivor, whose quaking voice tells out ihe story of that eventful day. A page from Pepys or Bellasys lifts a curtain upon what really took place when the historic essence fails ; then some morsels of secret PREFACE. history come to light, and motives and actions hitherto puzzling stand revealed. Were all contributed sentences herein to have their rights in inverted commas the publisher's stock would be exhausted. The prejudice in favour of Italics has not been observed in certain cases. ''A bas les prejudices;" in Canada French is not a foreign language. It is also assumed that every Canadian is familiar with Cana- dian history, and that some one or other of its masters is well fixed in school memories. To those masters, and to many others, an apology is tendered for wholesale appropriation of their matter. If every statement made herein were substanti- ated by the customary foot-note many unsightly pages would be the result ; therefore, as no statement has been made with- out due authority, we commend our readers to the writings of Parkman, Gameau, Dent, McMullen, McCarthy, Macaulay, Michelet, DeGasp^, LeMoine, David, Morgan, Carrier, Bonny- castle, F. B. Head, George Head, Macgregor, Bender, Lindsay, Rattray, Scadding, Thompson and others ; to the writings and biographies of the statesmen and, governors quoted ; to Govern- mental Journals and House of Commons Debates ; for the record of events as they daily took place to innumerable manuscripts, pamphlets Hiid newspapers, written or published between Samia and Quebec and in many American cities, covering in particular the years '36, '37, '38, '39, '40 ; and to various sources where Canada is treated as a side issue and not as a main point. Theller and McLeod have been used where the corroborative testimony of others warrants a transcription of their humours. " Whether an eagle or ant in the intellectual world seems to me not to matter much," says Joubert. The work of the humble ant is to gather fragments, and, as the humblest in the tribe, the collectors of the data from which this melange has risen offer it to the public, and as humbly hope they have come within the same writer's further observation : "A small talent, if it keeps within its limits and rightly fulfils its task, may reach the goal just as well as a great one." Stratfobo, October, 1897. U h n^ Several score of authorities, known or comparatively unknown, have been drawn on in the compilation of Gallows Hill. Bill Johnston and Colonel Prince, as they appear here, are derived from twenty-one and twenty-six authorities respectively. Therefore when the hundredth, and the twenty-second, and the twenty-seventh, shall arise to contradict, or disagree with, each and every word herein, the authors beg to be allowed to see nothing but a humour in the situation. mmc4 r 4 1 1, < NEW WORDS TO AN OLD SONG; OR, JOHN GILPIN TRAVESTIED. [We are indebted to Miss FitzOibbon for a copy of the Cobourg Star of February 7th, 1838, in which appears, under the above title, an epitome, from one point of view, of Rebellion events. Its humours make it a fitting introduction for the papers which follow.] " Now puny diaeord firtt broke out. And fools rebelled ; but what about Thiiy could not Ull." 4 TnERK lived in famed Toronto town A man not very bijf, A belted knight was he likewise, — Kniicht of the old bay wig. Mackenzie was this hero called, From Scotia's land he came. To sow and reap - if e'er he could— The seeds of future fame. Well taught was he to broil and scold. To slander and to lie. The good to libel— but the bad Around him close to tie. A precious clan this hero got To join him in the cause Of Freedom, which but truly meant Upturning of our laws. He travelled all the country round, With grievances his cry ; Then off to father John, at home. Right quickly did he hie. And then he told so many lies That John began to stare ; And eke he talked so very large That John began to swear. Then out Mackenzie pulled the roll Of those who did complain ; And for redress of grievances He bawled with might and main. Now John a so-so clerk had got — A Janus-looking elf, Who cared for nothing else of earth But sleeping and himself. Olenelg was snoring in his chair - His custom every day — Then up he got and rubbed his eyes To brush the sleep away. Said he, " Rebellion is our love, In it we do delight ; So now you may go back again, We'll soon set things to nght ; " For you and all the world must know, By it our place we keep," But scarcely had he spoke these words When he was fast asleep. And when he'd slept teh months or so, He csalled him for a pen ; But long before it ready was He'd sunk to sleep again. Now goodman Stephen, in his ear In whispering accents said — " Both pens and paper now, my Lord, Are on your table laid." So quick he took the gray goose-quill. And wrote a neat despatch ; Says he, "I think that that, at least. Their Toiy wiles will match. '4 6 NEW WORDS TO AN OLD SONG. I. " JiiHt an my naint>, it may l)u read Whichever way you like, Or WhlR or Tory, oh may best The readcr'8 fancy Mtrike. " So find me now Sir Krancis Hootl,— A learned kni(fht iH he,— Su(H:e88or to the bravo Hir John I vow that mar. Hhall be." Sir FranciH came, but lonjc declined The profferend, that the national, religious and intellectual ideas of the French Canadians, their whole mental attitude, were dominated by the Quebec Act ; and the motto given them by Etienne Parent, " Nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois," had become a kind of fetich. They looked upon themselves as the agents of their mother country and the Church in the New World ; and they argued did they give up these laws, institutions and language, and become Angli- cized, their nationality would be forever lost. The toast among oflicers en route to the Conquest had been, " British colours on every fort, port and garrison in America." For many years after the British flag had first 2 f 16 HUMOURS Of 'J7. waved on the citadel the habitant on the plain lifted his eyes to where he had seen the lilies of France, and with heavy heart said to himself that which has become an historic saying, " Still we shall see the old folks back again " — words as pathetic in their hope as the High- landers' despairing "We return no more, no more." It is doubtful if at this period the old folks bothered themselves much about their late colony. Like their own proverb, " In love there is always one who kisses and one who holds the cheek," French Canada was expending a good deal of sentiment upon people who had forgotten that tucked away in a remote corner of the new world was " a relic preserved in ice," a relic of France before the Revolution, its capital the farthermost point of manner and civilization, a town with an Indian sounding name, which yet bore upon its front the impress of nobility. For Quebec is and should be the central point of interest for all Canadians ; the history of the old rock city for many a day was in eifect the history of Canada. History speaks from every stone in its ruined walls — walls that have sus- tained five sieges. The Revolution did not create the same excited interest in Canada that might have been looked for, yet there were those who " wept bitterly " when they heard of the execu- tion of the King. The patois, ignorance, superstition, devotion of its inhabitants, were identical with a time prior to the Revolution; and with them were the same social ideas and the same piety. But the power divided in France among king, nobles, and priest, in Canada was confined to priest alone ; and when the dream of a republic was dreamt it was the priest and not the British soldier who made the awakening. The British soldier and those who sent him seem to have been I f BANEFUL DOMINATION. 17 not a whit bettor informed about the colony gained than France was about the colony lost. Some London journal- ists were not sure whether Canada formed part of the Cape of Good Hope or of the Argentine Republic. For a long time the English Government annually sent a flag- pole for the citadel, probably grown in a Canadian forest. Nor did time improve their knowledge, for as late as the Trent affair one statesman in the House of Commons informed his more ignorant brethren that Canada was separated from the United States by the Straits of Panama. The acts of Regicide France inspired jiorror in Canada, yet were not without their fruits. Despite his title of the "Corsican ogre" and their horror of revolution, the submission of all Europe to Napoleon did not make the French of Canadian birth more submissive. Nor did the nation of shop-keepers, whom he despised and who were to cut his ambition and send him to his island prison, become more plausible, courteous or conciliatory, through their sense of victory. Many a thing, had the positions been reversed, which would have been passed unnoticed by a phlegmatic Briton, was to the Gailican a national insult. And LeMoine, that past grand master of the Franco- Anglo-Canadian complexion, says all too truthfully that conciliation was not a vice-regal virtue ; and one of the singers of the day, a Briton of the Britons, confirms the opinion : " So triumph to the Tories and woe to th« Whigs, And to all other foes of the nation ; Let us be through thick and thin caring nothing for the prigs Who prate about conciliation." A, w^ 18 HUMOURS OF '.?; V ■ But, under its fossil simplicity, Quebec, the " relic pre- served in ice," untrue to its formation, burned with a fear- some heat and glow in the years '37-'38, and those prior to them. The thoughtless words of such birds of passage as commandants and governors were not calculated to put out the fire. The very origin of the name Jean Baptiste, applied generically, arose from a Jean Baptiste answering to every second name or so of a roll called in 1812, when he turned out in force to defend the British flag. Getting tired of the monotony of them, said the officer in his cheerful English way : " I> them, they are all Jean Baptistes." And so the name stuck. General Murray, out- raged at any gold and scarlet apart from his own soldiers, lost all patience at the sight of French officers in the streets of Quebec. " One cannot tell the conquering from the conquered when one sees these Frenchmen walk- ing about with their uniforms and their swords."* But the French-Canadians did not struggle against indi- viduals except as they represented a system considered vicious. With the British Constitution Jean Baptiste was a veritable Oliver Twist. He was not satisfied with the morsels doled out, but ever asked for more. True, there were many — at any rate, some — of the higher class French whose horizon was not bounded by petty feelings regarding race and religion. These men accepted * " Among French as well as among English military men, swearing on every trivial occasion was formerly so common that it was considered as quite the pro- per thing. A witty French author asserted that ' God Damn ^tait le fonds de la langue anglaise ' — the root of the English language ! whilst the Vicomte de Pamj*, an elegant writer, composed a poem in four cantos bearing that profane title. Long before and after the British soldiers ' swore so dreadfully in Flanders ; ' long before and after Gombronne uttered his malodorous ' Juron ' on the field of Water- loo—though it must be confessed in extenuation the incidents of that day were ugly enough to make any of Napoleon's vieiUea nuntstachea swear most emphati- cally.— swearing was indulged in all over Europe."— J. M. LbMoinb. . J \y.' BANEFUL DOMINA TION. 19 British rule as one of the fortunes of war and enjoyed its benefits. An old seigneur, when dying, counselled his grandson, "Serve your English sovereign with as much zeal and devotion and loyalty as I have served the French monarch, and receive my last blessing." And that king in whose reign insurrection was on the eve of breaking — irreverently called " Hooked-Nose Old Glorious Billy " — strangely enough had great sympathy with French-Cana- dian feeling, a sympathy which did much to hearten the minority who counselled abiding by the fortunes of war. But " Old Glorious " was also called the " People's Friend," and the Quobecers had lively and pleasant memories of him. In the nine years preceding the fateful one of '37 there had been eight colonial ministers, the policy of each differing from that of his predecessor, and all of them with at best but an elementary knowledge of colonial affairs and the complexities arising from dual language, despite the object-lesson daily under their eyes in the Channel Islands. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Each Colonial Secretary had that little, and it proved the proverbial pistol which no one knew was loaded. By them Can- adians were spoken of as " aliens to our nation and con- stitution," and it was not thought possible that Lower Canada, any more than Hindostan or the Cape, could ever become other than foreign. It was popular and fashionable in some quarters to underrate the historic recollections which were bound up in religion and lan- guage; and as for Canadian independence, that was an orchid not yet in vogue. By 1837 he who sat in state in the Chateau St. Louis (says LeMoine) in the name of majesty had very decided views on that subject. H. M. William IV. 's Attorney-General, Charles Ogden, by virtue 20 HUMOURS OF \i7. of his office " the King's own Devil," who was an uncompromising foe to all evil-doers, held it to mean a hempen collar. The question of British or French rule grew steadily for a half century, until Melbourne's cabinet and Sir John Colborne marie effort to settle it in one way and forever. " Les sacres Anglais " was, in consequence, the name applied to the followers of the latter ; and as to the former, probably the illiterate habitant, who could not read the papers but who had an instinct wherewith to reach conclusions, had his own patois rendering of an English colonial's opinion that the politicians comprising the cabinet might " talk summat less and do summat more." All classes, indeed, of all sections, were not backward in giving opinion as to the quality of ministerial despatches ; for a titled lady, writing from a far off land where she did much work for the Home Government, dipped her pen in good strong ink and wrote, " My Lord, if your diplomatic despatches are as obscure as the one which lies before me, it is no wonder that England should cease to have that proud preponderance in her foreign relations which she once could boast of." A humorous naturalist had said that the three blessings conferred upon England by the Hanoverian succession were the suppression of popery, the national debt, and the importation of the brown or Hanoverian rat. Strange to say, one of the complexities of the Canadian situation was the position taken by that very popery which in England was still looked upon with distrust and suspicion. In 1794, not a decade's remove from when the streets of London ran alike with rum and Catholic blood, through Protestant intolerance and the efforts of a mad nobleman, Bishop Plessis had thanked BANEFUL DOMINATION. SI God in his C lu-i'lian Cafcholic Cathedral that the colony was Englisli aiul free from the horrors enacted in the French colonic of the day. "Thank your stars," cried another from the pulpit, "that you live here under the British flag." " The Revolution, so deplorable in itself," wrote Bishop Hubert of Quebec, "ensures at this moment three great advantages to Canada : that of sheltering illustrious exiles ; that of procuring for it new colonists ; and that of an increase of its orthodox clergy." "The French emigrants have experienced most consolingly the nature of British generosity. Those of them who shall come to Canada are not likely to expect that great pecuniary aid will be extended ; but the two provinces offer them resources on all sides." Many of the French officers whom the fear of the guillotine sent over in numbers to England found their way to that country which the Catholic Canadian priest- hood so appreciated. Uncleared land and these fragments of French noblesse came together in this unforeseen way. But there was another view of their position when Burke referred to them as having " taken refuge in the frozen regions and under the despotism of Britain." Truly has Britain shouldered many sins, made while you wait in the factory of rhetoric ; nor is it less true that glorious sunny Canada has suffered equally unjustly as a lesser Siberia from a long line of writers, beginning with Voltaire, ending — let us hope — with Kipling. The French Revolution over, and a mimic one threaten- ing in the colony, the clergy did not hesitate to remind one another of the fate of their orders in France, to con- gratulate themselves they were under a different rj^gime, nor fail to remember that the War Fund to sustain British action aiHHHifa 22 HUMOURS OF '57. against the Republicans of France in 1799 had been sub- scribed to heavily by many of their brethren and them- selves. Le Seminaire stands in that list, in the midst of many historic names, against the sum of fifty pounds "per annum during the war." One point of great difference between new and old was that the habitants, who were more enlightened and more religious than their brother peasants left behind in France, had, with the noblesse, a common calamity in any prospect which threatened sub- jugation. The variance 'twixt priest and people could only end in one way where the people were devout ; and the Lower Canadian has ever been devout and true to Mother Church. But the " patriot," who was more apt in diatribe against Tories than in prayers, spared not the priests in their historical leanings. " Who was the first Tory?" cries a patriot from his palpitating pages. "The first Tory was Cain, and the last will be the State-paid priest." But if the British Government had in some things acted so kindly and justly to those of French extraction as to merit such words, in other matters there had been much of harshness increased by ignorance and indifference, and the time had come when all had to suffer for such inconsistencies, and, unfortunately, those most severely who already were the victims of them. " C'est la force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans le monde." Said one of their own writers, "la force en attendant le droit.' In both Canadas " la force" was local supremacy. The painful development as to when it should be superseded proved "le droit" and British supremacy identical. It was a political struggle prolonged beyond endurance, more than a real wish to shake free from Britain; a '! <«■ BANEFUL DOMINATION. 23 4 political struggle, where the combatants were often greedy and abusive partisans who appealed to the vilest passions of the populace and who were unscrupulous in choosing their instruments of attack. Capital was made out of sentiment most likely to appeal to the suffering : ** Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow " and Papineau, by speech, manifesto and admission, looked toward the seat of vice-royalty and made plain the homely sentiment, " Ote toi de \k que moi je m'y mette." He did not agree with the humble habitant saying, " C'est le bon Dieu qui nous envoya 9a, il faut I'endurer." His opinion leaned more to that of O'Connell, who said the French were the only rightful inhabitants of the country. How much baneful domination had it taken to so change the Papineau of 1820, when on the occasion of the death of George III. he says, " ... a great national calamity — the decease of that beloved sovereign who had reigned over the inhabitants of this country since the day they became British subjects; it is impossible not to express the feeling of gratitude for the many benefits received from him, and those of sorrow for his loss so deeply felt in ihis^ as in every other portion of his extensive dominions. And how could it be otherwise, when each year of his long reign has been marked by new favours bestowed upon the country ? . . . Suffice it then at a glance to compare our present happy situation with that of our fathers on the eve of the day when George III. became their legitimate monarch . . . from that day the reign of the law succeeded to that of violence. . . . All these advant- ages have become our birthright, and shall, I hope, be the lasting inheritance of our posterity. To secure them let us only act as British subjects and freemen. Ml mtmmmmtmmmmmimmitmH^m^^ ^^^^— ^^»^"^W. pi I -Mil 1 24 HUMOURS OF '37. About '31 the Lower Canadian Assembly received a lot of new blood ; and very hot, adventurous and zealous blood it was. Young men like Bleury, Lafontaine, and their confreres, were not backward in naming what they considered their rights ; and they had somewhat unlimited ideas. The most ardent of the group centred round Papineau and excited him still further. They scouted Lord Goderich (Robinson) and his concessions so long as his countrymen formed a majority in their government. This was a "demarcation insultante " between victor and vanquished. Lord Dalhousie, "glowing with scarlet and gold," and followed by a numerous staff, had brought a session to a close in a peremptory manner, with words which might have furnished a cue to himself and others. " Many years of continued discussion . . . have proved unavailing to clear up and set at rest a dispute which moderation and reason might have speedily terminated." To the Loyalist Papineau was the root of all evil. A French loyal ditty attributed every calamity of the era to him, cholera morbus, earthquakes and potato-rot in- cluded, each stanza finishing with the refrain, "C'est la faute de Papineau." " It is certain," said the latter, " that before long the whole of America will be repub- licanized. ... In the days of the Stuarts those who maintained that the monarchic principle was paramount in Britain lost their heads on the scaffold." This, surely, was the proverbial word to the wise. Naturally, such sentiments made him receive cool treat- ment in Downing Street, even when his Ninety-Two Resolutions embodied much truth and called for affirmative answers. Nothing but the most absolute democratic rule would satisfy the irreconcilables. Their act in the House had led to Lord Aylmer being forced to advance the i "I'. BANEFUL DOMINATION. 25 supplies from the Military Chest, and to embody his dis- approval in a resolution of censure. They in turn voted his censures should be expunged from the journals of the House. Then Fapineau, from the Speaker's chair, in- veighed against the Mother Country. After the presen- tation of the Resolutions, Lord Aylmer, alluding to them, imprudently said that dissatisfaction was mostly confined to within the walls of the Assemblv rooms, that outside of them the country was at peace and contented. The men who framed them lost no time in giving him a practical denial. Resolutions from many parishes approved of the acts of the Assembly, and the newspaper columns teemed with accounts of popular demonstrations. Lord Aylmer, however, supposed himself within his rights. After his recall, at his interview with the King, and supported by Palmerston and Minto on either side, the monarch de- clared he entirely approved of Aylmer's official conduct, that he had acted like a true and loyal subject towards a set of traitors and conspirators, and as became a British officer under the circumstances. Lord Glenelg sent to the rescue that commission of enquiry, the prelude to the later Durham one, whereof Lord Gosford was chief. This nobleman, who became governor of the province, was Irish, and a Protestant, an opponent of Orangeism, a man of liberal opinions and de- cisive in speech and action. He tried every means to make friends in the French quarter ; visited schools and colleges, enchanted all by his charming politeness of man- ner, gave a grand ball on the festival day of a favourite saint, and by his marked attentions at it to Madame Bedard showed at once his taste and his ability to play a part. He made a long address to the Chambers, breath- ing naught but patriotism and justice ; so some still had 26 HUMOURS OF '57. m hope. "To the Canadians, both of French and British origin, I would say, consider the blessings you might en- joy but for your dissensions. Offsprings as you are of the two foremost nations of the earth, you hold a vast and beautiful country, having a fertile soil with a health- ful climate, whilst the noblest river in the world makes sea-ports of your most remote towns." He replied to the Assembly first in French, then in English. There is a possibility of doing too much, and the Montreal Gazette censured this little bit of courteous precedence so far as to deny the right of a governor to speak publicly in any language but his own, and construed this innovation by the amiable Earl into one that would lead to the Mother- Country's degradation. Then what of the Channel Is- lands, where loyalty was and is above suspicion ; where the Legislature declared that members had not the right to use English in debate, and "that only in the event of Jersey having to choose between giving up the French language, or the protection of England, would they con- sent to accept the first alternative." Matters progressed till rulers were burned in effigy, and bands of armed men, prowling about the most dis- affected parts, confirmed M. Lafontaine's saying, "Every one in the colony is malcontent." " We have demanded reforms," said he, "and not obtained them. It is time to be up and doing." "We are despised!" cried M. Morin, "oppression is in store for us, and even annihi- lation. . . . But this state of things need endure no longer than while we are unable to redress it." " It is a second conquest that is wanted in that colony," said Mr. Willmot in the House of Commons, when he heard the Canadian news via the Montreal Gazette. So Lord Gosford asked for his recall, got it, stepped in I niirii-iiirnnr. BANEFUL DOMINATION. 27 into a canoe after a progress through streets lined with guards of honour composed of regular and irregular troops, amid "some perfunctory cheering," and was pad- dled to his ship, the band of the 66th playing "Rule Britannia." She might rule the waves, but many of those who listened were more than ever determined that she should not rule Canadians. The Gosford report was vehemently protested against by Lord Brougham and Mr. Roebuck, who did not mince matters, but predicted the rebelHon and outlined a probable war with the neighbouring republic. But Ijord John Russell, like Sir Francis Bond Head, did not anticipate a rebellion. Lord Gosford had found his task more difficult than he expected. His predecessor, Sir James Kempt, had done his best and failed, through no fault of his own but because there was a determination in the majority of his subjects not to be satisfied. Lord Gosford tried the effect of a proclamation as an antidote for revolutions. But the habitants tore it to shreds, crying, "A bas le proclama- tion ! Vive Papineau, vive la liberty, point de despotisme," and made their enthusiasm sacred by holding their meet- ings at parish church doors. Papineau was omnipotent ; one would imagine ubiquitous, for he seems everywhere. He made the tour of the northern bank of the St. Law- rence, while his supporters, Girouard and Lafontaine, took the southern, making the excited people still more discontented. In after years, as a refugee in Paris, Papi- neau disclaimed any practical treason at this time : " None of us had prepared, desired, or foreseen armed resistance." Yet the pikes were further sharpened, and the firelocks looked to; and at St. Thomas (Que.) alone sixty men on horseback, carrying flags and maple boughs, preceded him, < f- i 28 HUMOURS OF '57. li !: and following him were several pieces of artillery and the remainder of the two thousand people who formed his procession. Bishop Lartigue, a relative of Papineau, warned his people to beware of revolt, declaring himself impelled by no external influence, only actuated by motives of conscience. Addressing one hundred and forty priests, he used unmistakable terras as to how they were to resist rebellion in the people ; no Roman Catholic was permitted to transgress the laws of the land, nor to set himself up against lawful authority. He even speaks of " the Govern- ment under which we have the happiness to live," while his relative was contending that the yoke on the necks of the Canadians was made in a fashion then obsolete — the Stuart pattern. But he spoke too late ; his people were beyond his control, and they in turn condemned clerical interference in politics, and the cur^ in charge at the combustible Two Mountains had his barns burned in answer to his exhortation. On the first Monday of every month these sons of Liberty, organized by Storrow Brown, met — "Son projet rduissoit a merveille, chaque jours le corps augmentoit en nombre et dej^ de pareilles soci^tes se formaient dans la campagne." The chronic state of eruption in unhappy Lower Canada had intervals of quiet only when some governor, with manners of oil and policy of peace, made an interregnum. All time was not like that of the little Reign of Terror, full of fear and arbitrary measures, after the suppression of Le Canndien and the arrest of the judges ; but the country felt itself to be a plaything of not much more veight than the cushion dandled by Melbourne or the feather blown about by that minister of deceptive manner. The famous Ninety-two Resolutions embodied the Canadian view of what was wrong, and the remedy for it. Papineau, i ft t BANEFUL DOMINATION. 29 their author, owed much in their construction to his col- league, M. Moria, a gentle, polite man of letters, with the suave manners of a divine, who neither looked nor acted the conspirator, despite his many fiery words — as fervid as those of the idol of the people, the eloquent leader in Canadian debate, who was nightly carried home to his hotel on the shoulders of the enthusiastic crowd. " Since the origin and language of the French-Canadians have become a pretext for vituperation, for exclusions, for their meriting the stigma of political inferiority, for depri- vation of our rights and ignoring public interests, the Chamber hereby enters its protest against such arrogant assumptions, and appeals against them to the justice of the King and Parliament of Great Britain, likewise to the honourable feeling of the whole British people. The numerical though not dominant majority of this colony are not themselves disposed tp esteem lightly the con- sideration which they inherit from being allied in blood to a nation equal, at least, to Britain in civilization and excelling her in knowledge of the arts and sciences — a nation, too, now the worthy rival of Britain for its institutions." Certain it is, the policy of the British Clique, so called, was moulded more upon old than new country needs and ideas, and was suited to the times of George I. and Louis XIV. more than to the dawn of the Victorian era. But 'tis always darkest the hour before day, and the torch lighted by Papineau was unfortunately to make conflagra- tion as well as illumination. It was the old, old story of theorists and political agitators exciting popular discontent and alarm more than the occasion warranted, by exaggera- tions retarding instead of speeding a cause, with another story of procrastination and cross-purposes from the 80 HUMOURS OF '37. Mother Country. Further, history was corroborated in that a demagogue ends as a tyrant. A super-loyal news- paper did not hesitate to say that the only way to calm Canada was to purge the Colonial Office from King Stephen down to Glenelg, and to do so by one huge peti- tion to Majesty signed by every Canadian from Quebec to Amherstburg. For Lord Glenelg, with the best inten- tions in the world, had a positive genius for doing the wrong thing. But even such evidences of ignorance as did arrive by despatches and otherwise did not warrant, in the minds of many Liberals, the overthrow of a monarchy. They made allowance for good disposition in the abstract, and spoke of " want of knowledge and characteristic apathy." The influence of these men cannot now be overestimated. They were then looked upon with suspicion by either side, for they recognized that gigantic obstacles and class exclu- sions were to be met ; a recognition which lessened the credit of their heartfelt " Je suis loyal." On the other hand, a good many French Canadians were made to join the rebel side by intimidation. If the assurance of " Je suis loyal " did not come quickly enough some inoffensive Frenchman would find himself popped into the guardhouse, and the results of jealousy and over-zeal have left us many absurd stories. A county M.P., at the Chateau one sultry evening, seeing the rest all busy at ice-cream, asked for some. The Canadian Solon took a huge spoonful, his first taste of such a delicacy. With a feeling of rage at what he thought an insult, or at least neglect, he cried out what is translated into, ''You abominable rascal, had this been for an Englishman you would have taken the chill off." No. more condemnatory record exists of the British I- w rt»!SJamiaA^v^-■s^v .v |5 tT,V^l^^ ^ iMfiaff» T'-^n^ ri"'f" "' 'r-^"-^"'^rm,-i ruiriimiii BANEFUL DOMINATION. 81 ' Clique than that left of it in its earliest days by Governor Murray, a man not likely, to judge by the personal anecdotes we have of his reign, to be accused of French proclivities. For a time everything was given a French turn, and " Don't mousihify me" in the words of an eminent literary man, showed the essence of British feel- ing of the day. Although Murray said the ignorance of the French- Canadian and his devotion to his priest ran together, and that the veneration was in proportion to the ignorance, he has to say also that, with the exception of nineteen Pro- testant families and a few half-pay officers, most of the British population were traders, followers of the army, men of mean education. All had their fortunes to make : " I fear few are solicitous about the means when the end can be obtained. . . . The most immoral collection of men I ever knew, of course little calculated to make the new subjects enamoured with our laws, religion and customs, and far less adapted to enforce these laws which are to govern." Canadians were then a frugal, industrious, moral set of men, noblesse and peasantry alike, knit to each other by ties made in the time of common danger ; the former as much contemned by Murray's compatriots for their superior birth and behaviour as the latter were by him for their ignorance. In his despatch to the king's advisers he is particularly hard on the judge and attorney-general, neither of whom knew the French language, — nor, indeed, did any of the men to whom offices of greatest trust were bestowed by the sub-letting of posts whose property they became through favour. In a word, a more worthless set of officials could not be gathered together than that which carried out the beginning of British rule in Lower Canada. 3 I- 82 HUMOURS OF W. Haphazard circumstance placed them where they were, and they scrupled not to make themselves paramount. This oligarchy, made up " of the driftwood of the army and manned by buccaneers of the law, knew how to seize occasion and circumstance;" and the governors, " fascinated by these official anacondas, fell into their folds and became their prey, were their puppets and servants, and made ministers of them instead of ministering to them." Papineau contended that when all the people in any country unanimously repudiate a bad law it is thereby abrogated. To which sentiment Mr. Stuart responded, " This is rebellion." Unfortunately, viith many high in office, some governors included, any measure of opposition meant rebellion, and, like Mr. Stuart, they did not hesi- tate to say so. Papineau, and those whom he represented, looked upon the British Government as a melange of old usages, old charters, old fictions, and prejudices old and new, new and old corruptions, the right of the privileged few to govern the mass. The boasted " image and transcript " in Canada was called by them a veritable Jack-'o-lantern, a chameleon that assumed colour as required. In Papineau's interview with Lord Bathurst some years before rebellion, that nobleman, after allowing that diffi- culties existed, blaming remoteness from England and nearness to the United States as aggravating circumstances, asked for only twenty-five years of patriotic resignation to what he considered a hard but, under ■ the circumstances, natural state of things. But Papineau's Utopia diflFered from Lord Bathurst's ; and he told him so. It was now that it came to be acknowledged there was something more powerful than Parliament, governor, or priest. That was opinion after it had spoken in print. iiitttii 1 BANEFUL DOMINATION. 88 # On being asked how much treason a man might write and not be in danger of criminal prosecution, Home Tooke replied : "I don't know, but I am trying to find out." Where anything belonging to Majesty, even so remotely as an article in the military stores, was irreverently treated, the article in question became of importance through the importance of its royal owner, and treason could lurk in a misused garment. " For grosser wickedness and sin, As robbery, murder, drinking gin," the penalties were then heavy indeed ; but the nature of treason, according to the Common Law of England, is vague, and judges were sometimes put to rare shifts to find it. Evidently it did not always dwell in the heart alone, but on occasion could be found by a diligent judge con- siderably below that organ. A tailor, tried for the murder of a soldier, had the following peroration tacked on to his death sentence by a judge who was loyal enough to have been a Canadian : "And not only did you murder him, but you did thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propel the lethal weapon through the belly-band of his breeches, which were His Majesty's ! " " To slay a judge under specified circumstances " was also a count in treason, and this knight of the bodkin doubtless longed to thrust his tool into his wordy antagonist. But as a phrenologist has told us, the judge could best illus- trate his bump of veneration by the feeling with which Tories of the old school regarded their sovereign. In Canada a man had not to show sedition in order to be suspended; for there was a law to banish him if he were " about to endeavour to alienate the minds of His 34 HUMOURS OF W. Majesty's subjects . . . from his person or Govern- ntient." She foreshadowed the methods of the Mikado ; when it was desired to punish a man "a crime was in- vented to suit his case" — an inversion of the punishment fitting the crime. Sir James Mackintosh succeeded in passing two bills lessening the list of crimes punished by hanging ; but Lord Eldon demurred at the noose being done away with in case of five shillings worth of shop- lifting, as the small tradesmen would be ruined. Then, why not quartering and other horrors for treason 1 They certainly left no stone unturned in Canada to find out details in matters of treason or libel. The John Bull and other English papers handled some cases without gloves ; but it was reserved for Canada to show^ what could be done with printers' ink. The type fairly fiew into place under the willing fingers of compositors who were also politicians. Minerva in the printing office is oftentimes undignified. She seems to have been particularly so in the case of Le Canadien, a paper founded in 1806. Its wood- cut frontispiece had the arms and emblems of Canada, with two beavers hard at work biting the slender tie which attached the scroll to the insignia of Great Britain, and, of course, a suitable motto. Two reporters of that stormy time added to the excitement of the Assembly by throwing assafoetida on the stoves. The odour was insupportable, and the too enthusiastic scribes were taken in charge by the sergeant-at-arms. Like many others whose freedom that functionary sought to curtail, they could not be found when wanted. When the type, paper and presses of Le Canadien office, under a warrant from Judge Sewell, were seized in 1810, the magistrate, attended by a file of sol- diers, removed all to the vaults of the Courthouse. This act, with the long imprisonment without trial which followed, ■e? liANEFUL DOMINATION. 35 was considered one of the most arbitrary committed since Hanoverian rule began. The printers were arrested, as were also the leading members of the Assembly, Messrs. Pierre Bedard, Tachereau and Blanchet. When some of these memliers had been admitted to the bar, M. Perrault, one of those discreet men who were the saving of their country, patriotic but prudent, made the caustic remark : " So many men forced to steal in order to make a living ! I shall certainly yet see some of you hanged." It was quite easy to hang a man in days when the death penalty covered an incredible number of offences, when a boy could receive that sentence for killing a cow or a child for stealing sweets from a pastry cook's window. So M. Perrault had a margin for his prediction. This half-jocular condemnation of the legal profession was prevalent to a degree which made many believe that in a corner of the Protestant hell, which was separate from and hotter than the Roman Catholic one, was a place reserved for lawyers. " There they will have a little hell of their own, and even well lighted for them to see each other the better ; and there, after having deceived their poor clients on earth, they will tear each other to pieces without the devil having the bother of helping them." In '37, when three of the members had become judges, Perrault made his pun by saying, " I have often pre- dicted that I should see some of you hanged (pendu) ; there are now three of you suspended (suspendu), which is nearly the same thing." Those who were partners in guilt in the writings of this "seditious paper" were sent to gaol, and we learn that the article which gave chief offence was one entitled " Take hold of your nose by the tip." Maladministration was evidently malodorous. Such pro- ceedings naturally caused excitement, and the fears of 36 HUMOURS OF '37. those in power made them redouble the city guards and patrols. But if Le Canadien had been conducted with animosity, it was also marked by much ability. Nor had it a monopoly of the former. The Anglo-Canadian papers, too, knew how to be bitter and violent. The press of those times indulged in wonderful prophecies. But the future is in the lap of the gods, so said the more knowing ancients ; and if any of those '37 prophecies had the flavour of truth it is to be found in those of the contemned Reformers. Early in the century Judge Sewell had got into trouble. He was accused of usurping parliamentary authority, by undue influence persuading the Governor (Craig) to dissolve the House and also to address the members in an insulting manner ; and later there were the Bedards' affairs. Judge Monk was also accused. Judge Sewell went to London to defend himself, which he did to such good purpose, backed by the influence of Prince Edward, that he gained the ear and confidence of Lord Bathurst. His explanations were accepted, and fresh favours were in store for him from the incoming Governor Sherbrooke. Although " each new muddler " blamed his predecessor for his own misgovernment, tjie tasks falling to the Governors were not easy. Under Kempt came up the question of giving legal status to Jews and Methodists, the question regarding the former going back some twenty years, when, under the administration of " little king Craig," there was endless trouble over Mr. Ezekiel Hart's presence in the House. Expelled and returned alternately. Hart was doubly obnoxious as a Jew and an Englishman. BANEFUL DOMINATION. 37 Methodism had an equally hare time since the First Gentleman in Europe had said that that faith was not the faith of a gentleman. The characteristics of the personnel of the House of Assembly in the years of the century prior to the Rebellion could doubtless fill volumes of humours. Most of the members from the Lower St. Lawrence arrived in schooners, sometimes remaining in them as boarders ; or they put up at some Lower Town hostelry, content with their cowpacks and scorning Day & Martin. The members from down the Gulf were sure to be of the right political stripe, from a clerical point of view, or their constituents stood a chance of being " locked out of heaven." One head of a house who dared to be a Liberal in those illiberal times, an educated man, and likely to have possessed weight in character as well as by his appointments in his native village, so locked himself out. His child of seven came home from school in tears one day, and after much coaxing to disburden his woe confided to his mother that in seven years his father, a parent much-bcjloved, would be a loup- garou. The end of this persecution was a removal over the border. But there were not many who had the courage of their convictions in the face of the Church's No — they were all too good Catholics then. Stories of their religious life provide material for a picture whose beauty cannot be surpassed. A niche was hollowed in a wall of most Canadian homes to hold a figure of the " Blessed Lord," or His equally dear Mother ; and it is recorded of one of the first of Canadian gentlemen of his time that he never passed [a wayside cross without baring his head, saying once in explanation, "One should always bare the head before the sign of our redemption and perform an act of li I 38 HUMOURS OF '37. penitence." The humbler sort began no dangerous work, such as roofing, without a prayer. With heads uncovered, the workers knelt down, while some one of the oldest of the company recited the prayer to which all made response and Amen. Nor was thanksgiving omitted when the harvest firstfruits were sold at the door of the parish church. Close by the housewife's bedhead hung her chaplet, black temperance cross and bottle of holy water ; from the last the floor was sprinkled before every thunder- storm. And nothing was done by natural agency. Even the old, worn-out cure, who met death by the bursting of the powder-magazine on board the ship in which he was returning to France, was " blown into heaven." But once the primitive ones left their village they were much at sea, and we have a member for Berthier, whom we shall credit as being both pious and Tory, arriving in Que- bec with his wife 0;>e winter's evening in his traineau. They drew up at the parliamentary buildings and surveyed the four-and-twenty windows above them, wondering which one would fall to their lot for the season. They descended, boxes and bundles after them, rapped at the door and pre- sented their compliments to the grinning messenger. " He was the member for Berthier, and this was Madame his wife;" they had brought their winter's provisions with them, and all in life needed to allow him to pursue his work of serving his country as a statesman was a cooking stove, which he looked to a paternal government to supply. When told that not one of the four-and-twenty windows belonged to him, and that family acccnmodation did not enter into the estimates, the member from Berthier stowed his wife and bundles back in the traineau, gave his steed a smart cut, and indignantly and forever turned his back upon the Legislative walls of his province. BANEFUL DOMINATION. 3d What did he not miss? Within them Papineau was making rounded periods, holding men entranced by his eloquence ; Andrew Stuart was defending British rights ; yet another Stuart thundered against the tyranny of the oligarchy, the privileged few \ and Nielson and other dis- creet Liberals sought to steer a middle course of justice without rebellion. No wonder that from this concert dis- cords met the ears of the audiences without. Peculiarities and eccentricities were not confined to the rural populace and members of Parliament. " Go on board, my men, go on board without fear," w^as a magis- trate's dismissal to two evil-faced tars who had deserted their ship at sailing time because they thought her unsea- worthy j " I tell you you are born to be hanged, so there- fore you cannot be drowned." " If anyone has a cause," said one dignified prothono- tary, " let him appear, for the Couit is about to close." " But," said the judge above him, " the law states we must sit to-morrow." Turning to the public the prothonotary made further announcement : " The judge says he will sit to-morrow, but the prothonotary will not be here." And in his Louis XIV. costume, cut-away coat with stiff and embroidered collar, knee-breeches of black cloth, black silk stockings, frills on shirt-bosom and cuffs, the silver- buckled shoes of the prothonotary bore their somewhat stubborn wearer away. At the beginning of the century it was only occa- sionally that foreign news reached Canada. With time postal matters improved ; but news was still only occa- sional. At the advent of a vessel at Father Point the primitive telegraph of the yard and balls was used, and at jiight fires were lighted to carry the tidings from cape to 40 HUMOURS OF '37. cape. The means of intercommunication depended upon the size of the post-bag, the fidelity of the carrier, and on the state of the storm-strewn paths or trackless wastes which had to be crossed. The bag for Gasp^ and Bale des Chaleurs was made up once in a winter and sent to Que- bec, dark leather with heavy clasps and strapped on an Indian's back. The man travelled on snowshoes, and when tired would transfer his load to the sled drawn by his faithful Indian dog. There were others whose mode of transit was much the same, but whose beats were shorter and trips more frequent. " Do not forget," would say a cer- tain old Seigneur, " to have Seguin's supper prepared for him." Seguin was postman for that large country-side, and generally arrived during the night at the manor house. The doors, under early Canadian habit, were unlatched ; Seguin would quietly enter, sit down, take his supper, and produce from his pockets the letters and papers which made the Seigneur's mail, leave them on the table, then as quietly let himself out into the night again, to pursue his journey to the next point. Such latitude in trust was possible in a country where law in its beginning was a matter of personal administration aided by keep, and four- post gibbet whose iron collar might bear the family arms. Nor was other travel in a very advanced state. The palm of beauty was then, as now, accorded the St. Law- rence, but one traveller from abroad wrote, " 'Tis a sad waste of life to ascend the St. Lawrence in a bateau." By 1818 "a first-class steamer" made its exhausted way from Quebec to Montreal ; aided by a strong wind it covered seven leagues in nine hours. This exhilarating motion caused the historian Christie, one of the pleased passen- gers, to open his window and hail his friends, " We are going famously ! " By the third day's voyage they were at the foot of the current below Montreal, and with tl^e ■•jafc.vtfomaUJi»i BANEFUL DOMINATION. 41 united aid of forty-two oxen they reached the haven for which they wore bound. With news so transmitted and the bulk of the popula- tion unable to read or write, and with only the compara- tively wealthy and the adventurous able or willing to travel, it is not surprising that " the focus of sedition, that asylum for all the demagogic turbulence of the province," the Assembly rooms at Quebec, had not succeeded in dis- seminating their beliefs and hopes among the most rural of the population. One thing which made remote villages loath to be disturbed was that they had more than once seen noisy demagogues and blatant liberators side with the alien powers when opportunity for self-aggrandizement came. Also, in many cases their isolated lot precluded feeling governmental pressure. But in the county of Two Mountains, at St. Denis, St. Charles, and also at Berthier, they were alert enough, and the most stirring pages in the coming revolt were to be written in blood in these localities. There secret associations flourished ; open resistance only waited opportunity. There the Sons of Liberty drilled and wrote themselves into fervour, with pikes made by local blacksmiths and manifestoes founded on French and Irish models for outward tokens of the inward faith : " The diabolical policy of England towards her Canadian sub- jects, like to her policy towards Ireland, forever staining her bloody escutcheon." The history of " my own, my native land," inspires all words written from this point of view ; one patriot, " plethoric with rhethoric," had many fine lines, such as " the torch, the sword, and the savage," and pages devoted to the " tyrannical government of palace pets." Away back in 1807 many militia officers of fluctuating loyalty had been dismissed, and the precedent established by Governor Craig was continued. Fapin.eau was one of 42 HUMOURS OF '37. \ I I '' these officers ; he had made an insolent reply — " The pre- tension of the Governor to interrogate me respecting my conduct at St. Laurent is an impertinence which I repel with contempt and silence " — to the Governor's secretary, and had to suffer for it. The political compact called the Confederation of the Six Counties was governed by some ox hose so dismissed, and they all grew still more enthusi- astic from the sight of such banner legends as " Papineau and the Elective System," " Our Friends of Upper Can- ada," " Independence." The Legislative Council was pic- t,»jnft'^y rrpresented by a skull and cross bones, and the dtjclf V «n of the rights of man was voiced. lu adckit'oii to present troubles there was a perpetual har' rnr, bacK v ^hese meetings to old scores, impelling " the pe- /^ lo uO •. -^stle with the serried hordes of their oppressors in the bloody struggles which must intervene " before " the injured, oppressed, and enslaved Canadian " could escape from "the diabolical policy of England." There was a liberty pole, and Papineau, burning, ener- getic, flowery of speech, promised all things as crown to laudable eflfort " in the sacred cause of freedom." It was a Canada " regenerated, disenthralled, and blessed with a liberal government " which the prophetic speech of Papineau had foreshadowed ; and the " lives, fortunes, and sacred honour " of his hearers were there and then pledged with his own to aid in that regeneration. That "Frenchified Englishman," Dr. Wolfred Nelson, also spoke; and Girod, — a Swiss, who taught agriculture in a Quebec school for boys, got up by that true patriot Perrault, — destined shortly for a tragic fate, was there. At this meeting Papineau thought he had set a ball rolling which would not easily be stopped. Already it was careering in an unpleasantly rapid manner. He deprecated the use of arms, and advised as punishment to BANEFUL DOMINATION. 43 England that nothing should be bought from her. This reprisal on the nation of shopkeepers Nelson thought a peddling policy ; that the time was come for armed action, not pocket inaction. Papineau's opinion was disappoint- ing to the fiery wing of the Confederation. Again did Bishop Lartigue warn generally against evil counsels, re- minding his flock that a cardinal rule of the Church was obedience to the powers that be ; and every one of his clergy echoed him. " II n'y a que le premier pas qui coute " was once oddly applied by a lady who heard a canon of the Church say that St. Piat, after his htidd was cut ofi*, walked two leagues with it in his hand. She could not gainsay such an authority, so said, " I can quite believe it. On such occa- sions the first step is the only difficulty." Alas, many at these meetings were to exhibit the price of a first step ; heads were to come off and necks to be broken, and every step in that blood-stained via doloroso which led to the Union, to the righting of Englishmen's and Frenchmen's wrongs, to establishing Canadian rights to be French or British, was to cost bitterly, — cost how bitterly only one can know who reads the story in its human aspect, not politically alone. It is a strange thing that privileges so purely British as those asked for, the aboli- tion of the death sentence except in case of murder, *' that chimera called Responsible Government," the unquestioned use of a national language in public affairs, freedom of the press, should have been asked for by Frenchmen, denied by Englishmen, and fought for to the death by many of each nationality. All time from the Conquest to the Rebellion seems to belong to the latter event. For the causes of it reach back by perspective into Misrule, making a vanishing point in Mistake. Ii /l^ore JSanctul Domination. ** Aioay with those hateful distinctions of English and Canadian." ' —Edward Dukk of Kknt. Treason always labours under disadvantage when it makes preliminary arrangements ; and it is often obliged to found combinations on defective data, not reckoning upon disturbing forces and the sudden appearance of the unforeseen. But if so in ordinary cases, what must it have been when, in Upper Canada, sympathy with the French and dissatisfaction with existing Upper Cana- dian institutions ended in a determination to combine forces and make a common cause. Each province had its distinct enemies ; but distance was one common to both. They were divided from the metropolis and arsenal of the Empire by ocean, storm, and wooden ships ; and tracts of native roadless wilderness, long stretches of roads of mud and corduroy, and the in- tercepting reserve, helped to keep man from man. A huge place ; and the badness of its affairs was in proportion to its size. With no hint of the future iron belt from Atlantic to Pacific, all travel was by stage, a painful mode, and costing some $24.00 from Montreal to Toronto ; or if by water, in long flat-bottomed bateaux rowed by four men, Durham boat, barge, or the new ventures, steam- boats, where as yet passenger quarters were in the hold. The element of Upper Canada was crude, and the home- sick letters of the new-come emigrants sighed over the rude ./ . L MORE BANEFUL DOMINA TION. 45 surroundings. But perhaps the rudest thing which the settlers of '37 found was the apology for a form of govern- ment then offered to them. An idea had prevailed in the home countries that Canada was the best of the colonies. But this idea was dispelled by Mackenzie ; those of his earlier writings which reached Britain rendered such a sorry account of Canadian happiness that people who had confidence in his book thought twice before they risked fortune in what evidently had become his country through necessity. Some time previous to the publication of his book ("Sketches of Canada and the United States"), he had been good enough to write Lord Dalhousie, " So far, your Lordship's administration is just and reasonable." To him Canadian affairs were like a falling barometer, soon to end in storm, and there was every ground for the statement of a United States editor that Mackenzie constituted himself the patron or the censor of the race. "Oh, England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high, But England is a cruel place for such poor folk as I." There was no iron hand in a silken glove about the oli- garchy ; the hand was always in evidence to Mackenzie and his kind, and Canada was not a whit better than Kingsley's apostrophized land. It is easy at this time of day to cast reflections upon the ruling class of that period, a class chiefly composed of sons of officers in the army and navy, for the most part gentle- men in the conventional sense of the term — a crime laid to their charge by some who could not forgive it. They naturally came to centre in themselves all offices of honour and emolument; and the governors, all gentle if some foolish, looked to them for counsel and support, before 46 HUMOURS OF \"i7. time was allowed for reflection, the governors so cleverly governed that they knew it not. Gifts of the Crown naturally followed, and the great Pact grew richer, along- side of that older Compact of the sister province. It is a case for " put yourself in his place." The burden and heat of the day had fallen on these men ; they but followed the instinct to reap where one has strawed, and carried out to the letter the axiom that unlimited power is more than mortal is framed to bear. " The tyrannical government of palace pets " furnishes pages of misgovernment. It took a clear head, a steady will and a true heart to cling to British connection and the Union Jack, when desperation made some determined to be rid of the Toronto rule, which was to them odious, unjust, intolerable. And yet, when we review that epoch of dissolution and transformation, the errors and short- comings of either party, the two sides of the dispute stand out so clearly that we wonder anyone could then think he was altogether right. " Flayed with whips and scorped with scorpions," one side said, " there is no alternative but a tame, unmanly submission or a bold and vigorous assertion of our rights as freemen ; " while the other, by the mouth of its governor, likened Canada, standing in "the flourishing continent of North America," to a "girdled tree with drooping branches." Certainly, the simile was good; and with all justice to the side of Tory or Reformer, Royalist, Rebel, Loyalist and Loyalist, a retrospective glance discloses a knife on either side busy at the process of girdling. " What is the best government on earth ? " asks a school-book in use in Buncombe's District and printed in Boston for Canadian schools; "A Republican Government like th6 United States," is the unqualified next line. " What is the worst government on earth ? " MORE liANEFUL DOMINATION. 47 — *' A Monarchical Government like that of England and Canada." "Can the King of England order any man's head cut off and confiscate his property ? " — " Yea." " Will you, if the occasion arrives, rise up and rebel against such a government as yours, and join the States % " — ♦' Yes, with all my power and influence." The Yankee school -master, a chief agent of this propaganda, was one of the first prisoners. The Family Compact believed the chief beauty of govern- ment to be simplicity, the foremost tenet loyalty to one another. But men outside the Pact, every whit as much gentlemen and each in turn bearing his part of that heat and burden, awoke to a sense of individualism, each to realize that he was a unit in the commonweal. The forerunner of the new dispensation was Robert Gourlay. And what and if his sorrows had so overwhelmed his wits, he yet was the founder of public opinion in Upper Canada ; nor is it less true that the first outcome of his martyrdom was that life was made harder for those who dared to follow where he had failed. " Whaur ye gaun, Sawndie % " '* E'en to the club just to conthradick a bit ; " and Mackenzie, right as he was in many points, leaves us in no doubt as to his descent and his ability to " conthradick " for pure love of so doing. Also his club covered a wide area, and his influence over a tract as wide as his ability to contradict was phenomenal. Passing the line between the Canadas, Glengarry showed the change from French to British ways. Not only were the features and tongues of the inhabitants different, but there was an entire absence of that thrifty, snug cot- tage comfort which distinguished the half-brother below. With outsides unfinished, no taut lines about them, both houses and original huts proclaimed a people undaunted 1 ! ill ! 48 HUMOURS OF '37, by obstacles and surmounting them by indifference to detail. Here all were loyal. Stories of the famous Glengarry Fencibles of 1812 took up the leisure hours, and the spirit of the Loyalist fighting bishop war -""ra- mount. That prelate would not tell his people . to vote, but he talked of " these radicals who aim at the destruction of our Holy Religion ; " and this word to those already wise was sufficient. Next came Prescott, once La Galette, well built on a rocky prominence, the site of a former entrenchment, a place mentioned in old French diaries from the time of La Salle, the white of its tall, massive tower, roofed with a tin dome and built out on a rounding point covered with evergreen, making an abrupt feature in the river bank. Enormous sails flapping in the breeze proclaimed its 'unc- tions, and a fort in process of erection, not ha • a moiety of its aggressive strength of appearance, lay in.> it. Here the people were of two minds, many ready to be sympathisers in a movement though lacking the force to be leaders ; prominent men, some of them, and wishing for a lead, while others, living in the remote shadow of the dominant party, were so securely attached to crown and flag that they were ready to defend that party for the sake of the flag whose exclusive property it seemed to be. Farther on, as the river broadened towards the chain of lakes, came Kingston, its " agreeable, genteel society accommodated in houses of stone and wood," also much divided by party. In the harbour ships of war stood close to the shore, where blockhouse and fort com- manded the entrance. Fort Henry, begun in '32, had by February, '36, cost England more than j£50,000 ; its area did not exceed an acre, the wails, massive mm MMHNH ssssssss mm MORE BANEFUI. nOMINATION. 49 outworks and aspect evidently conveniently designDd for the success of the enemy. A few more years were required for its completion and to level the glacis ; hut although unfinished it was to he the theatre of a tra- gedy. In its finished state it has been described as a •colossal monument to military stupidity. From the top of the inner fort lie in view the famous "cow pasture," Dead Man's Bay where some fourteen men were drowned during construction of the fort on Cedar Island, and Shoal Tower, all points of arrest to the eye in that ever-beautiful scene. Several old war-ships left from 1812 were in 1831 kept at the dockyards, shingled over and protected, some fated later to be sunk as useless, one to be burnt to the water's edge. Hard by there was a dockyard, furnished with every article of naval stores required for the equip- ment of ships of war. Two seventy-fours, a frigate, a sloop of war and eleven gunboats reposed under cover on stocks. They were not plank iJ, but men employed for the purpose replaced decaying bits of timber, and it was estimated that in little more than a month they could be got ready for sea. Immense sums had been expended during that war upon unnecessary things, unaccountable ignorance having sent the woodwork of the frigate PaycJie to a country where it could have been provided on the spot at one- hundredth of the expense and in one-tenth of the time necessary to convey it there. Even wedges had been sent, and the Admiralty, full of salt-water notions, was paternal enough to include a full supply of water casks for use on Lake Ontario, where a bucket overboard could draw up water undreamed of by Jack tars, from a reservoir through which flowed nearly half the fresh water supply of the globe. Clearly, details of geography were not included in the lists for those bright youths who were 50 HUMOURS OF '3: IK j preparing for the Admiralty, and nowhere in Canada was the foolish touch of a prodigal-handed parent seen to more ad\ antage than in Kingston. Across the lake at Sackett's Harbour was a ship of 102 guns, apparently put together in a substantial manner in forty days from the day the first tree used in her construc- tion was cut down. Peace declared, she was never launched ; and, agreeably to the terms of the treaty, which called for the abolition of an armed force on the lakes, six or seven more American vessels were sunk in the harbour and, in the parlance of their owners, were " progressing to dissolution." Green timber might have proved as good a vehicle for the squandering of money as imported wedges and water-casks. But although there was then this show of vessels in Kingston, a practical military man of '37 records that the dockyard was a grazing ground, that the Royal Engineers' department did naught but patch up barracks in much the same state as the ships, not a ship, boat, sail or oar was available, and that sad havoc had been made by the twenty- two years of profound peace and disuse in harness, waggons, carriages, limbers, wheels, drag-ropes and other munitions of war. The powder would not light, and moths had destroyed blankets and bedding. Artillery with no horses to the guns, and part of the 66th regiment, represented the military force at the half-finished fort. At Kingston Her Majesty's accession was proclaimed on a certain Monday in August of '37 by Mr. SheriflF Bullock and the other authorities, but " the procession was meagre and pitiful in the extreme." And this state of afiairs was because of the dislike " manifested by many to petticoat government." Farther on, the peninsula of Prince Edward should have MORE BANEFUL DOMINATION. 51 been the very paradise of loyalty if any inference were to be made from its nomenclature : Adolphusburg, Maryburg, Sophiasburg, a transatlantic 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 pano- ramic 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 ame 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 i 52 HUMOURS OF \n. Carlyle and Dor^, 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 obnox- ious paper ; further, that the editor should be banished, and the entire edition confiscated. Vituperative, he had a command of uncomfortable words fitted to every circum- stance, 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 MORE BANEFUL DOMINATION. 53 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. Ryeraon, 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 remem- bered 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 be- tween 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 dark- ness 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 54 HUMOURS OF 'S7. ■«i 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 ten- dency 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." MORE BANEFUL DOMINATION, 55 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. 'HMtuch may be done without blood " was the keynote of its temperate tone. Yet, as where Papineau's own disclaimers of physi- cal 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 domi- nant 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." 50 HUMOURS OF '57. ! 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 pre- vent 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. Every- thing is lawful when the fundamental liberties are in danger." In his newspaper Mackenzie calmly discussed the probability of their success under the question : " Can the Canadians conquer ? " drawing a picture of two or three thousand of them, headed by Mr. Speaker Papineau, muskets on shoulders, determined to resist and finally throw off British tyranny. He argued that they could conquer, everywhere, except that " old fortalice, Que- bec," i/he daily sight of whose sombre walls, no doubt, was instrumental in keeping her own citizens the quietest in those troublous times. He pointed out how their or- ganization was better than dreamed of by Lord Gosford, how as marksmen they were more than a match for the British Atkins, how the garrison might possibly desert rather than fire, how blood would tell and Britons over the border come flocking to the Canadian standard ; how no House of Commons would spend fifty or sixty millions to put down rebellion in what was already " a costly encum- brance," and how the men who commanded these malcon- tents were, as already shown, renegade regular or dismissed militia officers. At one of these outside meetings emblems, devices and mottoes were even more significant than words. On one flag was a star surrounded by minor stars, a death's head in the centre, with " liberty or Death ; " another showed " Liberty " surrounded with pikes, swords, muskets and Ukm MORE BANEFUL DOMINATION. 57 cannon, " by way of relief to the eye." In another deco- ration Father Time discarded his scythe and rested his hands in an up-to-date fashion on a cannon. A Liberty Pole one hundred feet high was contemplated in imitation of the Papineau pole ; but methods likely to be successful under skilful French management came to naught with the clumsier Anglo-Saxon. Certain it is, no poet had yet arisen from that hot-bed of poesie, treason, though dog- gerel adorned many flags. The concluding lines in one effort show Pegasus' actempt to settle into a steadier trot : " Ireland will sound her harp, and wave Her pure greon banner for your right ; Canadians never will be slaves — Up, Sons of Froedom, to the fight ! " But Ireland's other arm was waving a banner of a dif- ferent colour. Orangeman followed Liberal with the usual results, fights and many black eyes ; horsemen then escorted the organizers of the meetings ; and after threats of assassination and guns snapping in the pan, angry cavalcades of hundreds of carriages and mounted men, quiet at the shilelah's point was in most instances gained. The pretended constitution was announced a humbug, the people living under the worst of despotism. Discontent, vengeance and rage were in men's hearts. Two years before this period Mackenzie had visited Quebec, one of a deputation to cement the fellowship exist- ing between Reformers of the two provinces. They found many of their grievances identical, and their oneness in determination to overcome them would, it was hoped, prove to Canadian and English authorities alike that " the tide was setting in with such unmistakable force against bad government that, if they do not yield to it before long. I '■ i\ 58 HUMOURS OF \r^ it will shortly overwhelm them in its rapid and onward progress." Truly the progress had been rapid and onward. It was now " Hurrah for Papineau " in every Upper Canadian inn where the two hundred meetings held in this year of '37 might happen to rendezvous. And yet th^re were some who opined that Mackenzie's bark was worse than his bite ; who, with Lord Gosford and the Provincial Governor, did not apprehend a rebellion. The province was, in the words of its Governor — in his opinion — more tranquil than any part of England ; and because there was a demand for Union Jack flags it was argued that if people loved that flag they would willingly die for the oligarchy. To many minds, the Pact was the most untrue and disloyal element in the province ; and according to the point of view the sides unfurled these signiflcant bits of red and blue bunt- ing, each man defining to his own satisfaction the meaning of that vexed word loyalty. The Hon. Peter McGill had said at a loyalist meeting, " . . . the organization (to repel rebels), that it may combine both moral determination and physical force, must be military as well as political. There must be an army as well as a congress, there must be pikes and rifles as well as men and tongues." The answer to these wise words, useful to either side as containing solid truth for each, was a miserable attention, an exhibition of incompetence on the rebel side towards that necessary military wing, and on the Governor's side the answer was the removal of all the troops in the province. The one party was no longer the superior of the other ; with the dreadful difference that there was unanimity on the loyalist side, as against jeal- ousies and multiplicity of leadership on the other. It so happened that in the year '34, partly in com- MORE BANEFUL DOMINATION. 59 pensation to him for his expulsion from the House of Assembly, Mackenzie had been raised to the dignity of first Mayor of York, and, as in the words of his own rhyme, changed the name to the far better Canadian one of Toronto : " Como hither, come hither, my little dog Ponto, Let's trot down and see where Little York's gone to ; For forty big Tories, assembled in jmita, Have murdered poor Little York in the City of Toronto." Calendars tell us that the pillory was abolished in '37. "When reading the life of Mackenzie one would imagine the statement a mistake, so popular did pillory methods seem. So far as unmerited obloquy, misrepresentation at home and abroad from those who pretended to despise and at heart feared him, personal insult, outrage, hard words, kicks from men who made up in inches what they lacked in justice, could constitute a pillory, Mackenzie had for years stood in it metaphorically, the old conditions being carried out faithfully, since practically it had been a pun- ishment thought meet for authors and publishers of sedi- tious pamphlets. ' A wise man has said : " Whereas before, our fathers had no other books but the score and tally, thou hast caused printing to be used ; and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper mill." In certain cases, too, the persecution was unpopular, and the intended disgrace became a species of triumph. A public pillory and stocks were still part of the actual machinery of government in Little York, and unfortu- nately for his own good name Mackenzie celebrated Toronto's first year by using the stocks and otherwise conducting himself in a way mortifying to his friends, most satisfac- tory to his enemies, and calculated to still further alienate I 60 HUMOURS OF '37. those members of the Reform party to whom he seems to have been personally objectionable even when his mistakes of judgment did not run the length of seditious writing or putting women in the stocks. But extraordinary acts and extraordinary words were not confined to Canada. It was reserved for a member of Parliament, a British statesman, to pen words the repeti- tion of which alone was sufficient to overturn the feelings of the majority of the thinking and well-intentioned por- tion of the colony. Never did Tory press or Tory lips tire of abusing saddle-bag doctors and saddle-bag ministers as the purveyors of treason, the latter, in guise of Methodist preacher, supposed to scatter seeds of faith and sedition with the same hand. Strangely enough. Dr. Ryerson, the most prominent Methodist in the country, was Tory enough to provoke the wrath of the radical Mr. Hume. In a letter to Mackenzie, so abusive that all must wonder a gentleman could write it, Hume made the clergyman an object of abuse in words which stamped the receiver as well as the writer everything their most ardent enemies desired and believed them to be. That letter did more for Loyalism in Upper Canada than the concentrated action of Governor, oligarchy, and Tory press could ever do to hurt it. Mackenzie, to work oflFa private spleen of his own against Dr. Ryerson, pub- lished the obnoxious document without comment. Vain was it for its author to hasten to say *' that the misrule of the Government of Canada, and the monopolizing, selfish domination of such men as had lately (though but a small faction of the people) resisted all improvement and reform, would lose the countenance of the authorities in Downing Street, and leave the people in freedom to manage their own affairs." The mischief was done. On the one hand. MORE BANEFUL DOMINATION. 61 many of the most reputable of that body through which amelioration of condition might be hoped to come were forever divorced from a party that could voice such sentiments ; and on the other, it placed a weapon ready to the hand of those men who, the incarnation of Toryism, honestly believed themselves to be the only conservers of loyalty left. By noon of that day, in May, '34, when the " copious extracts " were published by Mackenzie, he and the writer of them were execrated by many who, an hour before that electrical sheet was issued, had been friends or silent sympathisers. The whole country was under baneful domination ; but not of the mother-land. Great provocations had brought just condemnations, and the match was about to be put to the torch. The rights of the people and the prerogative of the Crown bade fair to become parallel lines that could not meet. Some still believed in a brighter future ; but the few streaks of light which they declared they could discern in that darkest hour before dawn were blood-red. Day was to be ushered in with much woe, although more than one writer has been found to call Rebellion " a mag- niloquent word " as applied to all the unsettled humours of the land in that episode of Canadian history. Had Shakespeare, born to still further glory, tarried till Canadian times, he might have added a syllable or so when he wrote " The devil knew what he did when he made men politic." But then, a contemporary diary of his time tells us : "I have heard it stated that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, but had not any art at all ; " and he would have needed both to do justice to the Canadian question. That which was called '* the almost romantically loyal Canadian population " had diverse ways of showing loyal enthusiasm, when (to quote Mackenzie in after 02 //UAfOURS OF '.?r. yoar«), a " porHon known aw Victoria, the sovereign of England and tho CanadaH," camo " to keep up the dignity of tliat article called a crown." Te Deutim were sung in the French cathe !i I 'I mmfmm immmmnatmm THE CAN AD AS AT WESTMINSTER. 65 ed bh ;h ce 10 o- 8 h a 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 Hur 3 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 Ip :i very great man 'mong the Whigs. ' " It was a time of general unrest and suspicion, just frc*m the likelihood of change and the alarming pre- cedents set up. No two men could be seen anywhere 66 HUMOURS OF '37 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 sympa- thiser. 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 J^ 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 Colbome'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 adminis- trative 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 period- icals, 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 THE CAN AD AS AT WESTMINSTER. 67 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 them- selves an aristocracy, with all the vices of such a V)ody, 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 68 HUMOURS OF 'S7. M deemed a council so altogether British wholesome govern- ment for people so entirely French. The French had many champions in that historic chamber. Sir James Mackintosh, author of " Vindicite Gallicoi" 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 hone politics and legislation in the broadest imperial sense, was not the least of these. He had under- taken, years before the blooming of that bitter blossom, the Canadian aloe — tenacity of liie 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. " * He even allowed merit o that old coutume in comparison with affairs as they existed under British law, and in sar- castic humour ran a parallel between them. When " Quebec first raised the legal courts For Does or Roes to hold their sports," * * Curia Canaden$$s. aa£s THE CAN ADAS AT WESTMINSTER. 69 the spirit of the Conaeil Souverain was one which did not at the Conquest migrate to the new body : " Nous avons cru ne pouvoir prendre une meilleure rt^solution qu'en ^stablisant une justice r^gl^ et un Conseil Souverain dans le dits pays, pour y faire fleurir les lois, maintenir et appuyer les bons, chatier les m^chants, et contenir chacun en son droit." Sir James now held the Governor responsible for the ex- isting 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 thou- sand 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 be- tween 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 leas 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 divi- sion 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 Alymer 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 East- ern Townships he estimated could take five hundred 70 HUMOURS OF '37. I ! thousand, and the valley uf 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 " impromp- tU8 " were in the Governor's pocket ; they also knew that Lord Glenelg was a Reformer in London and a Conserva- tive 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 Pro- vince as uninteresting as its own crows. For foundation BX THE CAN A DAS AT WESTMINSTER. 71 they had Charlevoix ; but, saya 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 pre- caution to prevent their escape, and then fattens them up with care for daily use." Could housewife with Thanks- giving turkey do more ! Now a good many of those who came after Charlevoix and reported on us took him — perhaps unconsciously, per- haps 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 Cana- dian 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 magnifi- cent Bois Brule, 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 inter- pret too much, and in a final frenzy of dancing they danced o£P 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 72 HUMOURS OF \37. Indian came first in romantic interest to the Englishman, particularly when got ready for an audience by a clerer manager. To hear a handsome, strapping Bois Brul^ 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 To- ronto 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. i •• 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 Candian 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 i.'snti THE CAN A DAS AT WESTMINSTER. 73 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 iwt 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 accom- modates 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 infor- mation. 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 74 HUMOURS OF V?r. 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 satis- faction with affairs us they then existed in the Upper Province. The customary despatch followed. Some of Mackenzie's arguments were treatetl 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 hud spent six days and six nights in London, with only an occasional forty winks taken in his chair, while he further expressed him- self 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 govern- ment 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 THE CAN A DAS AT WESTMINSTEK. 76 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 Soli- citor-General were left free to make as many contemptuous expressions as thoy pleased concerning the Colonial Secre- tary 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 Assembl}!. 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 Mac- kenzie's papers contained such an amount of falsehood and fallacy, the best way to expose such was by publica- tion. 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 76 HUXfouRs OF \rr. 11 "political mountebank — fooln and knaves — all fools and knaves who listened to the silly complaints of the swinish multitude agninst 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 : ** They sneered at Mackenzie and quizzed his red wig ; That the man was too poor they delighted to show, Nor dreamed with such triumph the future was big, As chanting the death song of Boulton and Co. Rail on, and condemn the corps baronial, Lord Goderich and Howick despatched at a blow, Those peers who knew nothing of interests colonial, In proof read the march route of Boulton and Co." Lord Goderich's polite wish not to hamper any nor coerce — that these gentlemen might be " at full liberty, as mem- bers of the Legislature, to follow the dictates of their own judgment " — ended in the dictates of anger appearing in hard words in the official press. The affections of these tried Loyalists were said to have been estranged ; more- over, "they were casting about in their mind's eye for some new state of political existence " which would put them and their colony beyond " the reach of injury and insult from any and every ignoramus whom the political lottery of the day may chance to elevate to the chair of the Colonial Office." Now Mackenzie himself could not have done better than this, nor had he yet gone even thus far. THE CAN A I) AS AT WESTMINSTER. 77 But the official in that chair was used to many hard knocks, and the individual was changed so often that the blows had no time to take effect. Nor was the incomer ever anxious to avenge the woes of his predecessor. " Prosperity Robinson," alias " Goosey Goderich," soon to be Ijord Hipon, " the dodo of the Reform party," stepped out. Mr. Stanley, " Rupert of debate," stepped in. The two dispossessed of Canadian power lost no time in pre- senting themselves at the Colonial Office, one of them going in as his small adversary, Mr. Mackenzie, happened to be coming out, and the personal interview with the possessors of " alienated affections " made the new Secre- tary make a bid for the return of these valuables by reinstating the ex-Solicitor-General, and giving the ex- Attorney-General the Chief-Justiceship of " Some place abroad, Where sailors gang to fish for cod," in what was called the Cinderella of the colonies, New- foundland. History is silent, as far as we can learn, on the state of his affections thereafter, transplanted and uprooted so often. We presume they withered and a' wede awa*. Now this Chief -Justice had formerly called Mackenzie a reptile, and the other gentleman had dubbed him a spaniel dog — quite a leap from the general to the special, had but Darwin, then somewhere near American waters casting his search-light of enquiry from H. M. S. Beagle^ known of it. Mackenzie was in despair : " I am disappointed. The prospect before us is indeed dark and gloomy." But rally- ing from this despondency, in his usual peppery style he told Mr. Stanley the appointments would be " a spoke in the wheel in another violent revolution in America." 78 HUMOURS OF '37. Hume wrote that he judged the disposition of the Secre- tary was to promote rather than to punish for improper conduct, and thereby encourage the misgovernment in Canf-vda, which Lord Goderich's policy had been likely to prevent. Well might a Canadian paper, announcing the advent of the new Attorney-General, Jameson, say : " It is to be hoped he will view the real situation of the people of this province from his own observation." The Iroquois was always ready to drink to the King's health, be he a George or a William ; Stanley might declaim about " the most odious and blood-thirsty tyranny cf French republicanism;" but this little Canadianized JScoiehman, with his clever pen and tongue, misty con- ceptions of statesmanship, real grievances and revolu- tionary speech, was more than the Home Government could "thole." The Earl of Ripon, in 1839, stated that Mackenzie in his correspondence of 1835 sought to make himself appear a very great man, whereas in reality he was a very little man. In his apologetic we find : " Well, he saw Mr. Mackenzie. He did not know that Mr. Mackenzie was a broken-down peddler. He knew that Mr. Mackenzie was an exceedingly troublesome person. He was perfectly satisfied, from the conduct of the individual, that M.. Mackenzie was as vain and shallow a person as he had ever encountered. If the conference alluded to by Mr. Mackenzie was of only two hours' duration, he must say it was the longest two hours he had ever known." How to make a common unity, a compact and har- monious people, out of their uncommon ancestors V>ecarae the problem. " Not that our heads are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald," said the Canadian melange, " but that our wits are so diversely coioured." Some \ » t MM THE CAN A DAS AT WESTMINSTER, 79 of the men who were to solve the problem do not read as if equipped by appearance or culture to handle with their delicate fingers such homely subjects. Scarcely a week paased without a fresh turn up of the cards in Canada ; and although Mr. Warburton wondered if the colony were worth retaining, the game worth the candle, the young Queen, in that part of her speech which dealt with the Canadian question, had an undertone of determination " to maintain her supremacy throughout the whole of the North American colonies," and how the game would finally turn out became daily involved at Westminster in greater doubt and difficulty. At this time an editor in the United States uttered prophecy : " We do earnestly believe that the Virgin Queen of England is destined to be one of the most extraordinary characters of the present age or any country. She is a little Napoleon in pei,ticori*.s— as deter- mined, as lofty, as generous, as original as he was. Wait and see." "My Lords," said the Great Duke, refe'^^ring to her speech quoted from, ** I could ha <• wished that this declaration of Her Majesty had been accompanied by cor- responding efforts to enable Her Majesty to carry those intentions into effect." " Sir Rol>srt Peel, wh- > played upon the House as upon an old fiddle," regretted that there was not also in that speech a stronger expression of sympathy for the sufferings of their brave and loyal fellov subjects in the colonies — at whicli there were cheers from both sides of the Ifouse. He could not too much admire the bravery, the loyalty, the devotedness of the Canadians. Nor did this arise from interested motives; it was sincere .attachment to monarch ioal principles, and sincere opposition to a republican form of government. 6 80 HUMOURS OF '37. There were many men, interesting in themselves, in debate on us then ; but individually, and as he borrowed interest from his position towards that centre of all obser- vation, the young Queen, came Melbourne. While still William Lamb he had hated what he called the creeping palsy of misgiving, tried hard to resist it, and developed into one of those not afraid to advance with the age. He had no '* extreme faith in religion, politics, or love." Accordingly, to him patriotism and wisdom were not confined to the Whigs alone. The oh-oh's and ironi- cal cheers from what he knew to be a powerful majority moved him not ; he was as easy, comfortable, good- humoured, as ever. Quaintness, originality of a manner fitful, abrupt, full of irony, at times of a tenderness almost feminine, distinguished him, together with an insuperable aversion to "platitudes, palaverings," — and bishops. In an age when swearing was as common in drawing rov)ms as in the field, England's Prime Minister was an acknow- ledged past-master in the art, and by inflections gave a dozen changes to the small familiar four-lettered Bi-itish adjective in most common use. In ordinary transactions he loved a chirpy oath ; but in his dealings with the bishof s was forced to coin a "superdamnable." The Order of the Garter was a great favourite with Mm, "because there was no damned merit about it." Utilitarian levelling like Bentham's he regarded as nonsense ; state parsimony like Hume's, a "pettifogging blunder ; " radicalism after the manner of Cobbett and others he called mere ragamuf- finism ; but he told his peers plainly that the time hml gone by when any .set of men could put themselves up {is a check against national opinion, that antiijue usages could not prevail against reasoix and argument — truths spoken with the voice of the Commons in that place where such I THE CAN A DAS AT WESTMINSTER. 81 a voice was almost unknown, seldom heard. Yet rancour was foreign to hi« nature : " The great fault of the present time (1835) is that men hate each other so damnably; for my part, I love t'iem all." And all with the air of a good- tempered, jovial gentleman. '* If something of his amiable spirit could be caught by others," said a friend, "and grafted on Ijord Wellesley's counsel to ' demolish these people,' matters would not be difficult." (Called upon frantically by friend and foe at a time of crisis '*'cile rulers." William the Fourth had called him "a great gentleman," although he and his government had been *' kicked out " by that obstinate, morbid, prejudiced and somewhat imaginative monarch. Naturally, Melbourne refused an earldom and a garter ; but in his final advice to the sov- ereign he was as tactful as ever in making th^ lattor par- tially modify the note of dismissal, thereby averting a storm of popular fueling and irujividual rest-ntment of ministei-s. '* Mind what you are about in Canada," said the King wheti final instructions were giv«!n to Lord Gos- ford before he left England, and Molbourne arxl (Jlenelg — the Sleeping Beauty — found the monarch a-, hard to man- age as the colony itself. " By I will never consent to alienate the Crown Lrfinds of the people, dreading the consequences of refusal. " Every- thing about him seems to betoken careless desolatior ; anyone would suppose from his manner that he was play- ing at chuck-farthing with human happiness, that he was always on the heels of fortune, that he would giggle away the great Charter. . . . But I accuse our Minister," said his critic, " of honesty and diligence ; I deny that he is careless and rude ; he is nothing more than a man of good understanding and good principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political rou^." Perfectlv courteous to others, it was impossible for others to be discourteous to him, always excepting Brougham. But even before Brougham he did not quail, and always could give tit for tat, much to the delight of the audience of peers who, like schoolboys, exulted when- ever their terror, the bully of the class, got a drubbing. The tongue which Brougham sarcastically spoke of as attuned to courtly airs, made to gloze and flatter, flayed him so completely with its quiet polish that he winced under its lash and betrayed, by his own increased violence of invective, the weight of the punishment. Soon after the accession the press said Lord Melbourne was about to puMish a work on chess — the best method of playing the THE CAN ADAS AT WESTMINSTER. 83 Queen, of getting possession of the castle, an entire disre- gard of the old system as to bisliops, being points in the book. This genial, indolent statesman, who fearlessly told the truth irrespective of party, was rubicund, with the aquiline nose of the aristocrat ; his large blue eyes some- times flashed with fire, but oftener brimmed with merri- ment. The noble head, sturdy plainly clad and careless- looking figure, consorted well with the laisser aller expres- sion of face. Strange to say, he, like Lord John Russell, usually stuttered out his speeches, thumping the table or desk iKjfore hi»n as if to work out the sentences that would not get themselves delivered. The Reform Bill made him specially energetic. Sitting next to him was a very noble earl who wore his hat well over his brows, weighing the pros and cona of too much liberty — for other people. Melbourne in his heat took his own white hat in his right hand, beat the air with it in inarticulate struggle, and brought the white 1(3 bear, crown to crown, upon the black one. The blow was fair, the arm muscular ; the very noble earl looked like the ancient White Knight, with head apparently wedged between his shoulders. He sat speechless for a moment, and then nimbly springing to his feet, amid roars of laughter, twisted his head free and regained his vision. And when the roar subsided, the Duke of Buckingham thought that the great statesman so suddenly beclouded could scarcely see his way out of the difficulty, and the laughter was renewed. To see a way out of the Canadian difficulty was to find a clue in a maze. Canadian Tories were triumphant over the fall of the Ministry on the Jamaica question. " We cannot guess," says one editor, ** into what hands Her Majesty may be pleased to commit the trust which Lord Melbourne has 84 HUMOURS OF '37. declared his unfitness to administer." The incoming man, Peel, quoted the state of Canada as among the trying questions which made the ottice of premiership the most arduous, the most important that any human being could be called upon to perform . . . the greatest trust, almost without exception, in the whole civilized world, that could fall on any individual. A few moments lat'T he had to confess that there was one question worse than the Canadian one, greater than colonial politics, a " question de jupons." So the Government, after forty eight hours' attempt at change, reverted to its former holders ; Canadian Tories were as glum as ever, and said Melbourne was again the governor of the petticoatocracy. The St. Lawrence alone made the colony worth keep- ing ; also, Canada by its confines came in contact with Russia ; it was the seat of the most valuable fur trade in the world, and England would not be out of posses- sion of it for two months before a French fleet would be anchored in the Gulf. These were thoughts impossible to think with calmness, worse even than annexation to the United States. The least calm of these men who debated upon what we were worth, and just what should become of us, was Brougham. Like most who love to torment, he himself was easily tormented. How does this champion of liberty look as he rises to condemn the policy on the Canadian question as " vacillating, imbecile, and indolent;" as he puts his awkward (|uestions to those whom he calls his "noble friends " or " tlie noble lords," all looking marvellously uncomfortable when their names are in that merciless mouth. We ht»ar of him as absent from his place, ill in Paris through having swallowed a neeflle ; yet after his return, one could imagine, in spite of his pointed replies, that his gastronomic feat had been to THE CAN A DAS AT WESTMINSTER. 85 swallow a flail. "The foolish fellow with the curls has absolutely touched him," says a contemporary writer. . . . " Make way, go(.Ml people, the bull is coming — - chained or loose, right or wrong, he can stand it no longer; with one lashing bouad he clears every obstacle— there he is, with tail erect and heml depressed, snorting in the middle of the arena." The eyes flash, the brows gather, the dark iron grey hair stands up rigid, his arm is raised, his voice high ; he is well out of the lush pastures of rhodo montade and diffuseness. The display of his power and the fertility of his mind amazes friend and foe ; for the genius of his fervent intellect includes French cookery, Italian poetry, bees and cell building, and a host of subjects seemingly far renioveetoiG, standing 86 HUMOURS OF '37. ! I i! in that place, denounced the policy of the Government. More, he had entered his protests on the journals, warning, distinctly warning, the Government that their proceed- ings would lead to insurrection ; and to mark the falseness of the quotation, more marvellous still, he had never twitted them when the event was o'er by saying he had warned them. There were, however, occasions and com})ination8 which dismayed even Brougham. He, Ellis, Hume, Papineau and Bedard, happened to meet in Paris. Much to the satirical disgust of some Canadian papers. Lord Brougham declined a dinner invitation and remained in bed in order to be quite incapacitated, as he had good reason to fear that his seat at table would be opposite Papineau. But there is a grave in the Benchers' Plot at Lincoln's Inn which tells the tale of the one vulnerable spot, the wound which would not heal, in this extraordinary, audacious, eloquent man, this free lance, the critic of administrations, so prone to wound others. There he laid his only remaining child, a girl of seventeen, his applica- tion to have her so buried listened to by tiie Benchers because he too wished to be laid there in the same grave with her. The third in this trio who faithfully laboured to abolish or mitigate " toil, taxes, tears and blood," — who all for their pains were burned in effigy in Quebec and other places — was Lord Glenelg. The following is a travesty on what were supposed to be the instructions given by him, when debates as to what would prevent rebellion were followed by debates on what would cure it. Lord Durham chosen the Physician Extraordinary for colonial ills. The document was intended to regulate the Canadian Govern- ment, and showed the zeal and watchfulness of Lord Glenelg : -< Ll 4*^ llM^l^l WH l l llll THK CAN A DAS AT WESTMINSTER. 87 " First of all, endeavour to diHCOver of what rel>ellion consists ; it is not exactly murder or manslaughter, or precisely highway robbery or burglary ; but it may, in a measure, consist of all." The witty gentleman who wrote thus far was quite right, but his words were two-edged. Lount's death has more than once been called murder, and rel)ellion losses discovered some pretty kinds of robbery. '^ I have looked into all the dictionaries, and I find that the definitions given are pretty much alike; but I would not be (juite certain that they are right." Lord Glenelg had personally written Sir F. B. Head on his appointment a year or so before, " You have been selected for this office at an era of more difficulty and importance than any which has hitherto occurred in the history of that part of His Majesty's dominions. The expression of confidence in your discretion and ability which the choice implies would only be weakened by any mere formal assurance which T could convey to you." Now any man who could ascribe discretion and ability to Sir Francis Bond Head had need of recourse to dictionaries. The bogus Lord Glenelg then continues his theorizing, on the basis that a mascot is a mascot. " A rebel is undoubtedly a person who rebels, and rebellion is unques- tionably the act of a rel)el ; you will therefore ascertain whether there is a rebel, whether that rel)el rebels, and if he does rebel whether it be rebellion. Having decided the point, you will then consider what is to be done. I ain strongly of opinion that as long as rebellion lasts it will continue. Now, it would be requisite to learn the prolmble duration of the rebellion, which, I should think, would depend in some measure on the causes which excited it. Your object will be, therefore, to make its continuance as short as possible ; and if you cannot suppress it all at once, i I 88 HUMOURS OF 'J7. you will do it as .soon as you can. Thtui, as to the metluxl of suppressing. I know of no way so efficacious as that of putting it down. I would advise neither severity nor concili- ation, but only measures which will deter the bad or win them over. I would neither hang, pardon nor fine a single rel)el, but let the law take its course, tempered with mercy." The last Sir (Jeorge Arthur did. " By following these general instructions you will most assuredly set the Canadian (juestion at rest, and I comfort myself with the idea that my rest will not be broken up again while I hold the colonial seat. Should any dith- culty occur, I beg of you to send to me for further instructions ; but I place such confidence in the advice I have already given that I shall not anticipate any appli- cation to disturb my slumbers." At the date of this ironical issue there were questions, seriously enough put, as to why Lord Gosford should be decorated with the Order of the Bath, the inference from the wording btnng that, unlike the Garter, it had some " merit " in it ; merit which this Tory sheet failed to discover : " Given in a mad spirit of democratical arrogance to make rank and honours mere butts for public derision . . . they generate a swarm of obscure baronets " — poor Sir Francis ! *' Last, and worst, they bestow that distinc- tion, which was intended for the highest military and civil merit, on Lord Gosford, who found a colony in peace (!) and left it in rebellion." The colony did not think so : il <5tait un excellent homme. L. O. David says that only where he found it impossible to work out his mission of pacification he took vigorous measures, which were forced upon him. He left l^ehind him, says the legend, le trop-celebre Col- borne. I have laboured with all my wits, my pains and strong THE CAN A DAS AT WESTMINSTER. 89 enrleavours, said oach debater : and Canada, Shakespearian in turn, replied, " Pray you, let us not be the laughing- stocks of other men's humours." There wore many winter nights of '37 made anxious to the colonies, when "Goderich, amiable but timid, . . Lord Glenolg, sleepy, . . Howick, mischievous, . . and the reMl Judas^ Mr. Stephen, debated leisurely, and ]Mr. Disraeli began his romance of politics." " Well, Mr. Disraeli," said Lord Melbourne, " what is your idea in entering Parliament ? " " To be Prime Minister, my Lord," was the daring answer ; not (|uite as, in their minor world of politics, Papineau and Mackenzie dreamt of presidency in new republics. On the night of Gallows Hill, December 7, *37, while Toronto was in a flutter of excited wonder and self-con- gratulation, while Mackenzie was speeding one way, Rolph another, and Papineau had already crossed the lines, the British House of Commons echoerl to the sonorous brogue of the Celtic Thunderer and to Mr. Disraeli's famous failure of a maiden speech. *• A failure is nothing," said the man destined to Ije great ; " it may Ik) deserved or it may be remedied. In the first instance, it brings self- knowledge ; in the second, it develops a new combination which may Xm triumphant." Words as prophetic for the failure in Canada as for his own. If, with Henry VI., we can say of Mackenzie, a y)edlam and ambitious humour makes him oppose himself against his king, so might these I^ords and Commons, Governors and Commanders, have taken pains with the habitant to " attend him carefully and feed his humours kindly as we may." The French were such very children. "Oh mon Dieu," cried one from the bottom of a boat while he and his companions looked momentarily for destruction, IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT.3) * <0 X° /. ^P :/. I/. ■^ 1.0 I.I 11.25 2.5 f !f Ilia •' lis lllllio 18 lA. Ill 1.6 Photogiaphic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) 872-4503 ) %^ i/.. ^ 90 HUMOURS OF '37. " if you mean to do anything, do it quickly ! Once we are at the bottom it will be too late. AUons mon Dieu ! just one little puff of wind, and we shall escape ! " Far back as the times of the beloved Murray, M'hen they had at his recall petitioned the King to send him back to them — for he and his military council " were upright officers, who, without prejudice and without emolument," did their best — and received as answer the arrival of Carleton in his stead, they were satisfied. For Oarleton " was chosen by your Majesty." Even the Duke of Richmond, in his short and stormy encounter with the Houses of Assembly, was beloved ; why ? They hailed the prestige of his ex- alted rank, for he was not only Duke of Richmond but Due d'Aubigny, direct from the Duchess of that title, who had been invested with it by Louis Quatorze, their own Grand Monarque, as his other ancestors had been by Charles. Why did not some quick wit in the year '37 follow the Scotch plan of providing a monarch for England instead of allowing that that place provided rulers for Scotland, and draw a parallel between James, who was Sixth of Scotland before he added England to his domain, and the young Queen whose claim to anything and every- thing came straight down from France 1 " The Norman- French of Quebec may well feel proud when they remem- ber that they can claim what no other portion of the Empire can assert — that they are governed by a monarch of their own race, who holds her sceptre as the heir of RoUo, the Norman sea-king, who first led their ancestors forth from the forests of the north to the plains of Normandy." H Call to xambreUas. " We must have bloody iwaea, and cracked croivns, and poM them current, too." In 1837 people did not do things by halves. De mortuis nil nisi bonum doubled its meaning from the fervour of the abuse and obloquy cast upon the subject of it during life. William IV. found even his Queen — to whom, by the way, though she was jostled on the edge of accession by Mrs. Jordan and others, he seems to have been devoted — satir- ized, lampooned, vilified, by press and tongues alike. No sooner is he himself dead than his demise becomes "mournful intelligence," "melancholy event," "aflTecting news," " distressing circumstance of the death of our be- loved monarch." Out of the chaos left behind him steps a girlish figure, not unlike, in her bare feet and streaming hair, to some picture of early Italy, a Stella Matutina. Her head and hands are touched with the holy Chrism ; Melbourne redeems the sword of state with a hundred shillings ; two archbishops and some peers lift the tiny figure into the throne ; no champion throws the glove ; the acclamations of thousands proclaim her crowned, peers and peeresses put on their coronets ; trumpets blare above the boom of cannon ; the heads of a nation are bowed in the silence of prayer ; " Stand firm and hold fast," adjures His Grace ; the old do homage and become her liege men 92 HUMOURS OF '57. of life and limb and of earthly worship, and of faith and truth which they will bear unto her, to live and die against all manner of folk. All the romance of the Middle Ages seems crowded round that small figure in St. Edward's chair, and Stella Matutina becomes Queen Regnant. When she opened her first Parliament the Repeal Cry and disturbed Canada were vexing elements in discussion ; but the young sovereign placed her trust " upon the love and affection of my people;" and that trust, as we see, was not misplaced. The Far West was long in hearing of her accession. "There was a deep slumberous calm all around, as if Nature had not yet awoke from her night's rest; then the atmosphere began to kindle with gradual light ; it grew brighter and brighter ; towards the east the sky and water intermingled in radiance and flowed and glowed together in a bath of fire. Against it rose the black hull of a large vessel, with masts and spars rising against the sky. One man stood in the bows, with an immense oar which he slowly pulled, walking backwards and forwards ; but vain seemed all his toil with the heavy black craft, for it was much against both wind and current and it lay like a black log and moved not. We rowed up to the side and hailed him, * What news % ' What news indeed, to these people weeks away from civilization, newspapers and letters. * William Fourth was dead, and Queen Victoria reigned in his stead.' " "Canada will never cost English ministers another thought or care if they will but leave her entirely alone, to govern herself as she thinks fit." Then came the division of opinion as to what was fit, to be followed later by the opinions of Lords Durham and Sydenham upon the dominant party, to be in the meantime fought for by all. I m A CALL TO UMBRELLAS. 98 id St es Some held it wisdom to say that a despotic government was the best safeguard of the poorer classes. A certain gentleman aired this idea in Canada, saying a governor and council was the only thing for that country. His Canadian listener looked at him fixedly for a moment, asking again if that were really his opinion, — " Then, sir, I pity your intellects." There was an ominous smoke from the fire in Canadian hearts over this question of class prejudices. Those were the days when a barrister would not shake hands with a solicitor, nor would a "dissenting" minister be allowed within the pale of society. Governor Maitland had been particularly hard upon this latter so-called shady lot of people. A store-keeping militia officer refused a challenge because the second who brought it was a saddler. The honourable profession of teaching was looked at so askance that to become a teacher was an avowal of poverty and hopelessness. Yet joined to this Old World nonsense, transplanted to a world so new that the crops sprung out of untilled ground, was the fact that many of the noblesse, indigenous as the burdock and thistle, drew their rent rolls from the village stores, and with the rearing of the head of what was called " the hydra-headed democracy," Froissart's fear was shared "that all gentility was about to perish." Under these circumstances military life naturally gave scope for much originality in uniform, accoutrement, and deportment. At one drill three or four hundred men were marshalled, or rather scattered in a picturesque fashion hither and thither. A few well-mounted ones, dressed as lancers, in uniforms which were anything but uniform, flourished back and forth over the greensward to the great peril of spectators, they and their horses equally wild, disorderly, spirited and undisciplined. Occasionally , » 94 HUMOURS OF '37. 1 a carving or butcher knife lashed to the end of a fishing pole did good duty for lance, — not a whit more astounding in appearance and use than the coqcert of marrow-bones and cleavers which some years before had nearly frightened the Duchess of York to death on her arrival in England. But the lancers were perfection compared with the in- fantry. Here there was no attempt at uniformity of dress, appearance or movement; a few heui coats, others jackets ; a greater number had neither coats nor jackets, but appeared in shirt-sleeves, white or checked, clean or dirty, in edifying variety. Some wore hats, some caps; some had their own shaggy heads of hair. Some had fire- locks, some had old swords suspended in belts or stuck in waistbands; but the greater number shouldered sticks. An occasional umbrella was to be seen, but umbrellas were too precious to allow of liberties; some said, "But for these vile guns I myself would have been a soldier;" some were willing to enlist for gardin*, but not for shootin'. The word of command was thus given : — "Gentlemen with the umbrellas, take ground to the right ; gentlemen with the walking-sticks, take ground to the left." They ran after each other, elbowed and kicked, stooped, chattered ; and if the commanding officer turned his back for a mo- ment, very easily sat down. One officer made himself hoarse shouting out orders which no one thought of obey- ing with the exception of two or three men in front. But the lancers flourished their lances, galloped and capered, curvetted (and tripped) to the admiration of all. The captain of the lancers was the proprietor of the village store, and shortly after the military display might have been seen, plumed helmet in hand, vaulting o^ ^r his counter to serve one customer a pennyworth of tobacco and another a yard of check. The parade day ended in 9^m, A CALL TO UMBRELLAS. 95 • a riot, in which the colonel was knocked down and one or two others seriously, if not fatally, injured. " Most ele- gantly drunk," " superbly corned," the gallant lancers, for want of an enemy, fought with one another. One inven- tion of '37 was a fuddleometer, an instrument designed to warn a man when he had taken his innermost utmost. But it does not seem to have been adopted at the War Office. Be that as it may, " these were the men who were out in '37, and they did good work too." A glance at the method of preparation at times employed by their enemies shows a uniformity in style. One cap- tain, in calling his company together, enumerating " You gentlemen with the guns, ramrods, horsewhips, walking- canes and umbrellas, and them that hasn't afi//," could not get his men together, because at the time most of them happened to be engaged either as players in, or spec- tators of, a most interesting game of fives. The captain consulted his hand-book of instructions to see what was proper to do in such circumstances, and exhorted them persuasively and politely : " Now, gentlemen, I am going to carry you through the revolutions of the manual exercise, and I hope, gentlemen, you will have a little patience. I'll be as short as possible; and I hope, gentlemen, if I should be going wrong, one of you gentlemen will be good enough to put me right again, for I mean all for the best. Take aim ! Ram down cart- ridge — no, no, fire — I remember now, firing comes next after taking aim ; but with your permission, gentlemen, I'll read the words of command." " Oh, yes, read it. Captain, read it, that will save time." " 'Tention, the whole then. Please to observe, gentle- men, that at the word 'fire,' you must fire, that is if any of your guns are loaded ; and all you gentlemen fellow- 7 96 HUMOURS OF '57. soldiers, who's armed with nothing but sticks and riding switches and cornstalks, needn't go through the firings, but stand as you are and keep yourselves to yourselves. . . . Uandle cartridge t Pretty well, considering you done it wrong end foremost. . . . Draw rammer ! Those who have no rammers to their guns need not draw. . . . Hand- somely done, and all together too, except that a few of you were a little too soon and some a little too late. . . . Charge hagonet ! " (Some of the men) " That can't be right, Captain. How can we charge bagonets without our guns ? " " I don't know as to that, but I know I'm right, for here it is printed, if I know how to read — it's as plain as the nose on y ur — faith, I'm wrong! I've turned over two leaves at once. I beg your pardon, gentlemen, — we'll not stay out long, and we'll have something to drink as soon as we've done. Gome, boys, get oflf the stumps. . . . Advance arms ! Very well done ; turn stocks of your guns in front, gentlemen, and that will bring the barrels be- hind ; and hold them straight up and down please. . . . Very well done, gentlemen, you have improved vastly. What a thing it is to see men under good discipline. Now, gentlemen, we come to the revolutions — but Lord, men, how did you get into such a higglety-pigglety ? " The fact was, the sun had come round and roasted the right wing of the veterans, and, as they were poorly provided with umbrellas, they found it convenient to follow the shade. In a vain attempt to go to war under the shadow of their own muskets, and huddling round to the left, they had changed their crescent to a pair of pot- hooks. The men objected to the captain's demand for further " revolutions," as they had already been on the ground for three-quarters of an hour, and they reminded \ J A CALL TO UMBRELLAS. 97 >g It e >f \ J him frequently of his promise to be as quick as he could. He might fine them if he chose, but they were thirsty and they would not go without a drink to please any captain. The dispute waxed hotter, until he settled it by sending for some grog, and the fifteen guns, ten ramrods, twelve gun- locks, three rifle-pouches and twenty-two horse-whips, walking-canes and umbrellas, fortified themselves for fur- ther exertions. The result of the next order or two was doubly groggy. " 'Tention to the whole. To the left, no — that is the left — I mean the right — left wheel — march." He was strictly obeyed, some wheeling to the right, others left, and some both ways. " Halt — let's try again ! I could not just tell my right hand from my left — long as I have served, I find some- thing new to learn every day — now gentlemen, do that motion once more." By the help of a non-commissioned officer in front of each platoon they succeeded in wheel- ing this time with some regularity. " 'Tention the whole — hy divisions — to tlie rights wheel — march ! " They did wheel and they did march, and it seemed as if Bedlam had broken loose ; every man took the command : " Not so fast on the right ! " " Haul down those umbrellas ! " " Faster on the left — keep back in the middle ! " " Don't crowd so ! " " I've lost my shoe ! " And by this time confusion was so many times confounded that the narrative had to cease perforce. There is a Sherlock Holmes-like story told of a deserter from the British army who tried to enlist in Bufifalo. His good manner and address were noticeable, M 98 HUMOURS OF \rr. and he was supposed to be no common recruit. A surgeon who suspected hira suddenly called out " Attention ! " and as the man's hands dropped by his side he stood confessed a soldier. At Fort Brady, with its whitewashed palisades and little mushroom towers, was a castle, unrivalled in modern architecture. On the greensward in front were drilled an awkward squad of matchless awkwardness, in that way the superiors of any Canadians whom they might propose to attack. On occasion one would give his front file a punch in the small of the back to speed his movements, another would aim a kick for the same purpose ; each had a humour to knock his neighbour indifferently well. The sentinels, in flannel jackets, were lounging up and down, looking like ploughboys ready to shoot sparrows, quite in keeping with their surroundings. But on the Cana- dian side there were not even these vivid demonstrations of power. Enthusiasm, however, made up for many shortcomings. In all the newspapers of the two provinces such produc- tions as that shown in reduced fac-simile on the opposite page might be seen ; age has robbed the original, now lying before us, of a few words, but the lettering and alignment are unaltered. The chronicler has it that Brockville's corps began with twenty-three inoffensive and respectable men of small merchandise, who essayed to hearten themselves and terrify the French by adopting the name Invincibles. This amused Kingston, and a corps was accordingly turned out from there, called the Unconquerables, in order not to be behind " the paltry little village down the river," and in a bogus notice from one '* Captain Focus, commanding," there was an N.B. : "No Unconquerable permitted to attend /f CALL TO UMBRELLAS. 99 •ify be muster without hiu shues well blacked and his breeches well mended." One colonel issued instructions that alK)ve all things solid form must be preserved, — should a man fall, close LO¥ALMTS TO VOVR DVTT. ^s^mMAtmrnm sr i^iIbijt. MuNvei. bow Ami WattCed 4MIIiO jrfd ¥•! vnteerttror e above C^p«r for iizjBoatlii ner* ▼Ice only* EHeh inao Will get 8 dollan tomi- iff a ae w tult elotbee, and a great oat A pair f Bootn, aliMi a fireo ht$fM.9fM «/ ^ye piiy when dfo> erllns^HlMe, per pA¥v«it*fr«« y I^ei m^ Vliaitoreteiidlng 9m IJpir* AtTY HAIvetoACR;«ltM« «me^ JPORWARDitt«»«»*^'^^^*^' APPLY TO fclpUTEflANVoi •NKUOOWAM. AT BROCKVILIX OOD 8Af|B THE 4I1JEEPI* and cover the vacancy. An Irishman with a bass voice and sepulchral delivery gravely asked, " And would your honour have us step on a did man ? " The word "halt" had little power to make some militia corps stationary ; it rather accelerated their speed. -Kf 100 HUMOURS or w. " Halt — halt — halt ! " criod a perspiring ofllcer as ho chasod \m men, and a» near explosion point as his own gun ; " if you don't halt I'll walk you five miles ! " The threat prevailed, and they halted. But they were peremp- tory enough when individually they had to give the same order. Both sides, loyalist and patriot, saw an enemy in every bush and were always ready for a spy. Excitement was running high in a Yonge Street village one day, when a lad, young Jakeway, hearing an unusual noise in the street, walked out to see what it was. One of a number of armed men before the village inn called to him to halt, taking him for a spy. But the lad turned away and did not hear. The man, upon no further provocation, raised his gun to shoot, but another, less ardent, knocked the weapon up and contented himself with Jakeway's arrest. The leader recognized him as an inoffensive onlooker, and dismissed him with an apology. No one was to pass certain out- posts out of Kingston without passport, the parole and countersign. The Montreal mail with four horses dashed to the bridge at Kingston Mills as the militia sentry's halt rang out. But the coachman, as fit as himself, paid no heed ; so the sentry's bayonet pierced the breast of one of the leaders. Complaint was made to the Postmaster- General, but the sentry was promoted and Government would afford no redress. It knew a good man. That same night brought commanding officer and men, clothed and armed, to parade. By lantern light they were made load and told " tlie time was come.** On the principle of first fire, then enquire, a man in the front rank — of course an Irishman — discharged his musket in his officer's face. "Be jabers," said he, when asked for explanation and congratulated on the harmlessness of his aim, " Colonel, I wuz that full of fight I cuddn't help it." A CAU. TO UAfnRELLAS, 101 But at the grand inspection in and about KingHton, which took place chiefly before 8t. George's church, with the same hearty bluff Englishman, Colonel Bonnycastle, in command, the troops, six hundred and fifty in number, newly clothed and equipped, made a handsome showing, and considering their rawness performed their evolutions creditably and without damage to themselves or him. " Are these British soldiers ? " asked an onlooker who was shrewdly guessed to be a military spy from the other side. " Oh, no, not at all, only the Frontenac militia." " Then if they are militia," returned the American, " all I can say is they must be regular militia." Old Peninsula officers, remnants of Brock's army, veterans from everywhere British, helped from Quebec to Sarnia to leaven this mass of raw colonial fighting material, and they developed it into something very ugly to tackle. But even veterans want substantial recompense for service, and in *37 Sir Francis received a strong appeal from one of them : ^nd I " May it please your Honor and Glory, for iver more, Amen. "I, -, formly belonging to the 49 th Regt of Foot was sent to this country in 1817 by his Majesty George the Forth to git land for myself and boys ; but my boys was to small, but Plase your Honor now the Can work, so I hope your honor wold be so good to a low them Land, because the are Intitle to it by Lord Bathus. I was spaking to His Lord Ship in his one office in Downing Street, London, and he tould me to beshure I wold Git land for my boys. Plase your Honor, I was spaking to Lord Almor before he went home about the land for my 102 HUMOURS OF '37. boys, and he sed to beshure I was Intitle to it. Lord Almor was Captain in the one Regt that is tlie Old 49th Regt foot. Plase your honor I hope you will doe a old Solder Justis. God bless you and your family. " Your most humble Sarvint "N.B. Plase your Honor I hope you will excuse my Vulgar way of writing to you, but these is hard times Governor so I hope you will send me an answer." Not one of them was too far off to hear the despatchmen as they rode along the half-made roads, with bugles blow- ing the call to arms. Spear in boot, sword clanking by his side, the despatchman was an impressive figure which still lives in the memory of some of those who in their youth answered to his call. No one disputed his word ; at his behest the farmer had to go, and the farmer's horses had to be harnessed to furnish tiansport for recruits. " Four of us were out, 'cause why, we had to. Two of us were stacking cornstalks, one was at the creek with the horses, and I was mending the fence. It was a beautiful day, and the air was clear enough to hear anything, let alone that bugle. The tooting was followed by the appearance of a lot of men, and we were ordered to fall in. It took me only a minute to run into the house for some things ; none of us had a gun, and on the way we cut ourselves cudgels. There was not any volunteering about it, for it was a regu- lar press. I was the youngest, and mother she did cry like sixty." E\'erywhere the rigours of barrack life, drill, and life generally were lightened by practical jokes and bogus challenges. John Strachan, junior, once gravely challenged a cow, gave her one more chance to answer, and then, in A CALL TO UMBRELLAS. \m me lone jels. 3gU- icry ;us red in defence of his country, took her life. What is more, he had to pay for her. In Quebec the volunteer days of '37-38 were festive times. With population that followed a thin line of river border and condensed at the two cities, and with superior means of equipment and drill, the period of formation was not so lengthy as in Upper Canada. Lieutenant- Colonel the Honourable James Hope was chosen by Lord Gosford as commander of the volunteer force. In December, '37, the garrison at Quebec was reduced to one company of Royal Artillery. No greater compliment could be paid Major Sewall, late of the 49th, Brook's own — with his regiment in uniforms of " blue coat and buff breeches, white blanket coat and green facings, blue cap and light band" — than to put him in charge of that important post. He had some veterans among them, Henry Lemesurier, a captain minus his right arm, which had been carried away by a round-shot at the battle of Salamanca when bearing the colours of his regiment — the 74th — for one. The militia force in the beginning of the year was incomplete and inefficient, looking formidable with its list of every officer from colonel to corporal, but with many, officers and men alike, who had never handled a musket. But they were to get used to the smell of powder. "Lord love your honour, the smell of gun- powder, did you say ? Divil a bit do we care for it — it's the balls we do be moindin'." And well he might say so, for not even H. M. Regular Rocket troop was to be entirely trusted. At St. Eustache, under the impression that rockets like wine improve with age, one, a relic of the Peninsula, was fired. It was a mellow old fellow, slow in making up its mind. Instead of rising it fell, failed to clear the unaccustomed snake fence which lay in the track, 104 HUMOURS OF '37. broke off its tail and sent its huge head whirling and whizzing, twirling and sizzling, over a ploughed field, with Head-quarter staff, Rocket troop and all before it in mad flight to escape. It seized upon one volunteer to play particular pranks with, and chased him round and round the field, until, exhausted, he fell between the furrows, and the rocket, balked of its prey, went out with a final bang. Convinced that his enemy was defunct the man got somehow to his feet, and never drew breath — so the story goes — until Montreal was reached. The first paid corps raised at Quebec was named the Porkeaters, a regiment some six hundred strong, able- bodied, resolute fellows, mostly Irish labourers, mechanics and tradesmen, who did no discredit to their supposed diet. These bacon-fed knaves began by looking the awkward squad; but drill by the non-coms, of the regulars, aided by strict discipline, soon made them perform their evolutions with the regularity and precision of their instructors. It is easy to fancy this regiment going into action under Colonel Rasher, with the wholesome advice, Salvum Larder, floating to the breeze in the hands of Ensign Flitch — "Charge, Sausage, charge; On, Bacons, on," the last words of some local Marmion. A fine cavalry corps, well-mounted, muscular fellows, under Major Burnet, did good work ; yet temperate withal, not like Strange's troop in Kingston. The latter had been in semi-activity since '34 — that is to say, they were drilled on foot, with sticks for sabres. The consequence was that when they were furnished with arms and mounted on steeds of many sizes, difficulties ensued. Calm Sergeant Nobbs, sword in hand, all his neighbours equally hard at work mastering horse and weapon, unfortunately drew the curb at an inopportune moment as he was demonstrating his A CALL TO UMBRELLAS. 105 mode of parrying. Up came the horse's head, and off went its ears. Also at Quebec were the Que itv's Pets, composed of sea- faring men, under Captain Rayside, a veteran naval officer, in long blue pea-jackets, blue breeches, round fur caps with long ears, and red woollen cravats — evidently the young Queen was supposed to be fond of novelty — their arms, horse pistols, broad cutlasses and carronade. Companies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 in this regiment had blue loose coats with red collars, blue breeches, and high fur caps with long ears'; the Highland company had Rob Roy tartan trews, Scotch bonnets and dark frock coats. The Fauch-a-Ballaughs were gayer still, in white blanket coat, red sash, green buttons, green facings and green seams, high cap with green top falling over — an old hat and the humour of forty fancies pricked int' it for a feather — and blue breeches with a red stripe. One corps had a euphonious and suggestive Dahomean title from corporations gained in forty years of piping peace and good dinners. They were chiefly Lower Town merchants, veterans in business if not in war, who soon brought their cognomens under the discipline of black leather belts,, cartouche box and twenty rounds of ball cartridge ; good Brown Besses rested on the shelves pro- vided by a kindly Mother Nature ; and with much puffing and blowing, their eyes fronted and righted until a per- manent cast was threatened. All corps dined much, whether they were to fight or not. Military dinners were frequent, and rjways went off with great ^dat^ the local excitement lending " go " to them all. Even in that time of ferment there were, as there had been since the Conquest, sensible men, French and English, of the better classes who had made the fact of a common 106 HUMOURS OF '37. enemy — the American assault of Quebec — a ground for a common patriotism. History has handed down a glow- ing account of one St. Andrew's dinner given in '37, in Quebec, and Mr. Archibald Campbell's lines, sung by himself in a clear and mellow voice, are worth reproduc- tion as indicative of the Scottish spirit : Men of Scotia's blood or land, No longer let us idly stand Our ' origin ' which traitors brand As ' foreign ' here. By gallant hearts those rights were gained, By gallant hearts shall be maintained, K'en tho' our dearest blood be drained Those rights to keep. On the crest of Abram's heights, Victorious in a thousand tights, The Scottish broadsword won our rights, Wi' fatal sweep. Then when the Gaul shall ask again Who called us here across the Main, Each Scot shall answer, bold and plain, ' Wolfe sent me here. ' Be men like those the hero brought. With their best blood the land was bought. And, fighting as your fathers fought. Keep it or die. " There were men then in Quebec whose denunciations of British rule were given with a vim not exceeded by Papineau himself, who were destined, fermentation over, to be like the wine kept for the end of the feast. It so hap- pened that Sir E. P. Tach^, aide-de-camp to the Queen in after years, was then Patriote — to be spelled in capitals and A CALL TO UMBRELLAS. 107 ;o rolled with the reverberation of the Parisian R. He was subjected to an unexpected domiciliary visit, as a cannon was supposed to be hidden under his winter supply of pro- visions. The searchers were rewarded by a pair of duelling pistols, then a part of every gentleman's outfit, and a veri- table Mons Meg, six inches long, which belonged to a small boy of the same number of years. As history counts, it was not long before Etienne Tacht^, in the fold and one of our Queen's knights good and true, declared '* the last gun fired for British supremacy in America would be fired by a French-Canadian." From survivors, and from a few printed memorials, one finds that what was known as Training Day seems to have been a great farce in Upper Canada. The 4th of June, King George's birthday, was its date. Descrip- tions of it take one back to the Duke of Brunswick's lament over his army — that if it had been generaled by «■' iakers and tailors it could not have been worse, for lune Duke's general marched with his division like cab- bages and turnips in defile. Here there was no likeness to anything so formal ; the army manoeuvres partook of the wild luxuriance of native growths. If twelve were the hour for muster on the common at Fort George, it was sure to be after one before the arduous work of falling in began. "The men answered to their names, as the rolls of the various companies were called, with a readiness and distinctness of tone which showed that, in spite of the weather, they were wide-awake," says the chronicle. Once they became more active a scene ensued which could not fail to gladden the eyes of the onlookers. In time, either slow or quick, the men did not seem to be guided by any rule of book, but exemplified home-made tactics, present- ing lines for which mathematicians have yet furnished no 108 HUMOURS OF \n. - ) II , 1 !■ M 1 '. V.'' » name, putting out flanking parties at either end, and as nearly squaring a circle and circling a square as possible. " Though many jokes were passed, fewer sods were thrown than usual." Even later than '37, once men had been out and had come home veterans their services were in demand by officers newly appointed. As in the days of the good Duke of York, ignorance was an officer's perquisite ; then some intelligent sergeant whispered the word of command which his officer was ashamed to know ; here, the poor officer was willing, but perhaps had a ser- geant as ignorant as himself. However, he was not too haughty to search for some private to help him. " Say, they tell me you were out," said one of these officers to a private ; " I suppose you know something of military train- ing. Now, I am a captain and don't know anything, and I believe I'll appoint you my sergeant." The scene of initiation was by the Little Thames, on what was later to be a Court House site, thenceforward to be known as Stratford. The captain wore the battered remains of a tall silk hat, a black tailed coat, white linen trousers about six inches too short, and hose a world too wide for his shrunk shanks. The hastily-made sergeant, Tom Stoney, a blue-eyed young Irishman with a spice of fun but kind at heart, armed his superior officer with his own cavalry sword, and taking him into his small saddler-shop made himself military tailor as well. The captain never would have rested without spurs had he known that the late King on his first appearance in military uniform, although unmounted, wore a pair of gold ones that reached halfway up his legs like a gamecock. Stoney drew down the white pantaloons as far and as tight as possible, sewed on buttons, and cut and sewed two leather straps to aid in keeping the captain together. The men were got into line ; i A CALL TO UMBRELLAS. 109 a the captain meekly took his place among them. " Right face ! " cried the sergeant, and off flew a button, up went the trouser-leg to the knee — " pursued my humour, not pursu- ing his" — rejoicing in regained freedom, relented and came down again. Clump-clarap wentthe leather ^trap with every step. The sergeant's commands came quicker than ever, the captain perspired, and toiling behind his men removed his silk hat to wipe his streaming face. Then he ventured his first " command " : "I think we have had enough drill ; we'll march down to the distillery, boys, if you like." And they did. In the Talbot District, Training Day since 1812 had been kept up with constancy. In spite of that, the inhabi- tants were somewhat unprepared when '37 came. But the gathering of the Loyalists, however isolated they were from one another, was willing and surprisingly quick. Old ofiicers of the army sought for and gathered up volunteers ; they had neither drum nor fife, but there was a ready response from willing hearts, and from hands equally will- ing, however uncouth and unused to arms. The most embarrassing hindrances, sometimes, to everything like organization and drill and obedience to orders were those same old soldiers when, as was generally the case, they knew more than their officers. They stood ip the ranks, and at the same time found fault with every word of command, so that they demoralized that which they had brought together. No set of volunteers was more difficult to handle than the old soldiers who had settled in Adelaide. Captain Pegley, although himself a retired regular officer, found them almost unmanageable when mixed with the more docile farmers and farmers' sons. After much adjur- ation he at length broke out into exclamations which, on the whole, suited his mixed audience better than set no HUMOURS OF 'd7. military phrase. " Haw, man ! gee, man ! " cried he, a start- ling contrast to the studied politeness of some of the subs, who, with nothing whatever of the drill-sergeant tone, when- ever the openings in the ranks were too wide, would say, '* Won't you be kind enough to step nearer this way ; now, you men, be good enough to keep your places." The sharp- est order delivered by these subs was, " Halt ! and let the others come up, can't you ! " Wheeling into line disclosed a line looking like the snake fence surrounding the stubble field which contained the wheel. Marching in quick time with one bagpipe and a fiddle, or with a single drum and fife, was not antidote enough to the stubble as they passed the gallant Lieutenant-Colonel in blue frock coat, white trousers shoved up from his boots, a round hat above his fat face, seated in unostentatious dignity on his venerable white mare, whose sides were blown out with grass and her neck adorned with a rope halter. " Now, men, wori't you fall in," he would patheti- cally inquire, while they showed every disposition to fall out. For, instead of the drum boy, in the centre of the panide-ground was a keg containing that liquid which in Lower Canada, when carried in a seal skin covered bottle, was known as Lac dulce, or sometimes as old man's milk. Then would Captain Rappelje command to drink the Sovereign's health, which was done con amove ; trials of strength, boxing and wrestling, would follow, when " Abe would knock Jehial as straight as a loon's foot." What would men not do to keep these kegs full. Once Colonel Bostwick and Captain Neville were temporarily absent at the same time, while certain points on the river were guarded against surprise ; the rebels were hourly expected, but failed to appear. Advantage was taken of the officers' absence to cross at one of these A CALL TO UMBRELLAS. Ill points, to replenish the canteen. The boat, showing lights, returned before the expected time. Those on the pier bethought them of a Yankee boast to come across and eat the small village before breakfast. They prepared to fire into the boat, but changed their minds, and rushed to where their Captain and a companion were soundly sleeping. The pile of discarded clothing by the couch had been rather mixed, and the Captain measured six foot odd ; his companion's valour was contained in few inches. " Come, come quick, quick, the rebels are upon us ! " brought them to their feet, the big Captain thrr.dting him- self as far as he could, and farther than the garments bar- gained for, into the unmentionables of the smaller man. They refused to cover below the calf ; he tried to with- draw, they were obdurate, and in an agony of thought the enemy's knock was heard. The small man had meanwhile decamped with a train at either heel. The Captain seized a jacket which matched the rest of his suit ; in desperation he took the quilt, and in toga arrayed, like "that hook-nosed fellow of Rome," reached the wharf in time to receive the whiskey kegs, where he delivered a lecture on breach of discipline and ordered the men to the guard-house. This Captain was a formidable figure out of his quilt, in his own red uniform with white fac- ings and girt with a sword whose hilt of ivory and brass was further decorated with two beavers conventionalized beyond even the requirements of modern art. The sash, of double twisted silk, strange to say had been the pro- perty of John Kolph, who, during his life in Middlesex, had made his home in Captain Neville's house — a queer foregathering, for we all know the one, and the latter was after the pattern of the U. E. Loyalist definition in 1777 : 8 112 HUMOURS OF '.H7. •• By Tory now is underntooil A man who seekn his country's goo