[189] In the preceding February Dr. Baldwin had thus written in reply to a notification to attend as a delegate at the District Convention: "This honour I beg leave to decline, and for this reason: that having heretofore served the country to the utmost of my humble abilities as their representative in Parliament, with the sincerest integrity of purpose in maintenance of popular rights, unspotted, I trust, by one single vote of a contrary tendency, I, together with many others of the staunchest friends of those rights, experienced such extreme fickleness of popular opinion that this conclusion has long been formed in my mind: that the great body of the people of this Province (without doubt there are many honourable exceptions), in no wise ignorant of their rights or the great value of them, are nevertheless shamefully indifferent into whose hands they commit their preservation and due exercise. Experience alone must teach the people. This experience is coming to them by painful lessons.... Under these circumstances I beg you will make my apology," etc. The letter appears in the Advocate of March 13th, 1834, following one to a similar purport from Dr. Rolph.
[190] It was continued for some time after by another hand, under the name of The Correspondent and Advocate.
CHAPTER XIV.
SEE, THE CONQUERING HERO COMES!
1835.
Parliament met on the 15th of January, 1835, when the Reform majority in the Assembly were able to once more elect Mr. Bidwell to the Speakership. The vote stood thirty-one to twenty-seven. Among the minority were five or six Conservative members who repudiated the name of Tory, and were opposed to the policy of the official party, to whom, as has been seen,[191] they merely yielded a qualified support as the less of two evils. Such being the state of affairs in the Assembly, the Compact party were of course precluded from making any further serious attempts to keep Mackenzie out of the House. The proceedings of previous sessions relative to the several expulsions were upon motion of Mackenzie himself expunged from the journals of the House. The baneful domination letter was made the subject of a long discussion, in the course of which Mackenzie received some exceedingly hard hits from Solicitor-General Hagerman; but as he had been manifestly in the wrong in giving publicity to that letter, and as he had been disciplined by members of his party to keep silence in the event of an attack on that score, he sat quietly through the Solicitor-General's onslaught.