At the Colonial Office he was simply a person interested in Canadian affairs, and useful as one able to furnish information. 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 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 satisfaction with affairs as they then existed in the Upper Province. The customary despatch followed. Some of Mackenzie’s arguments were treated 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 had spent six days and six nights in London, with only an occasional forty winks taken in his chair, while he further expressed himself 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 government 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 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 Solicitor-General were left free to make as many contemptuous expressions as they pleased concerning the Colonial Secretary 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 Assembly. 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 Mackenzie’s papers contained such an amount of falsehood and fallacy, the best way to expose such was by publication. 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 “political mountebank—fools and knaves—all fools and knaves who listened to the silly complaints of the swinish multitude against 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 members 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; moreover, “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.
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 Lord Ripon, “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 presenting 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 Secretary 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, Newfoundland. 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’.