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 abolition 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.
More Baneful Domination.
“Away with those hateful distinctions of English and Canadian.”
—Edward Duke of Kent.
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 Canadian 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 intercepting 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, steamboats, where as yet passenger quarters were in the hold.
The element of Upper Canada was crude, and the homesick letters of the new-come emigrants sighed over the rude surroundings. But perhaps the rudest thing which the settlers of ’37 found was the apology for a form of government 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.”