The ex-Chancellor was ready to fight any number of duels, rhetorical or conversational, of black-letter law or black-mouthed insinuation, upon any conceivable occasion. He now pounced upon the word outlaw and twisted it through all the maze of meaning. The “mealy-mouthed” Sir George Arthur’s opinion and the exculpation by court-martial availed not; nothing but insanity could excuse Colonel Prince. In his opinion he, Prince, was guilty of murder; he had made assurance doubly sure by anticipation of legal proceedings and results. That there was great support given Colonel Prince throughout Canada, advanced as a mitigating circumstance by Lord Ellenborough, seemed but to justify the ex-Chancellor in his sweeping condemnation. The Duke of Wellington drew attention to the fact that it was not Colonel Prince’s commission that was involved, or even his life alone, but the conduct of the Upper Canadian government; that if all alleged were true, another gallant friend of his, Sir John Colbome, whose duty it was to have brought Colonel Prince at once to court-martial and punish him, would have been remiss, and (evidently) warming to his subject, his Grace predicted that a system of retaliation would be followed, that if Her Majesty had not the power to protect her Canadian subjects the colony ought to be abandoned. “Is there a single spot,” he asks, “except that on which a soldier stands, in which Her Majesty’s authority is enforced?”
Brougham’s reputation when travelling was that at Inverness he was Conservative, but, changing his opinions as often as his horses, he was downright revolutionary by the time he reached Dundee; there at the full, at Edinburgh he waned. By the time the Duke of Wellington had finished Brougham’s sympathies were modified, and he ends with an opinion that if the Government of the United States had not power to repress such warfare they could hardly be called a civilized nation.
Upheld by the Duke, with the approval of the Imperial Parliament, rewarded by a commission in the 71st for his son—a gift straight from the hand of the great man himself—Colonel Prince held his head high for the rest of his life, took good care to keep out of Detroit, fought his remaining enemies to the last, and might well have said, “Honour and policy, like unsevered friends, i’ the war do grow together.” Always manly, he was ready to meet his former vilifiers half-way in a reconciliation in which Sir Allen MacNab, the Rector of Sandwich, Major Lachlan and John Hillyard Cameron undertook the rôle of mediators. All reflections contained in the skit upon the colonel’s valour were withdrawn, and on his side he expressed, in writing, his regret for his many hasty expressions. It was, in fact, a true amnesty, in which each party had to pay its own costs, for more than one bit of litigation had begun.
Well might a temperate New York newspaper say, “With all our hearts we wish those who feel themselves oppressed in Canada might have the liberty they seek, if they could get it without resorting to measures endangering the peace of the whole Anglo-Saxon race.”
“Come, Mighty Must!
Inevitable Shall!
In Thee I trust;
Time weaves my coronal.”
Huron’s Age Heroic.
“Huron, distinguished by its lake,
Where Manitoulin’s spirits wake,”
before ’37 had but one central point, which, to use a Paddyism, was on the very confines of the still primeval forest. The mysterious wilderness had a few spots between Goderich and the other limit of the Canada Company, Guelph, in which woodmen, thinking solely of the grain and roots to be grown in the cleared spaces, were unconsciously ameliorating the climate of their continent by the patches of sunlight their axes were letting in through the green gothic above.
At the one end Galt, “churning an inarticulate melody,” with shoulders straight and upright, caught his foot in a tree root. Pryor, his right-hand man, said, “Look after your feet, man, and keep your head out of the stars.” In a moment Pryor hit his head against a branch. “Man, keep your eyes frae your feet,” rejoined Galt, “or else you’ll damage all the brains you’ve got.”
They jested; but they made the way of the pioneer. And the pioneer is the Canadian man of destiny. He is in a thousand valleys and on a thousand hillsides, sometimes cold and hungry, but he swims on the crest of the wave, and sees the beginning of a new thing. The spirit of adventure which bore Columbus, Cabot, Cartier, and Champlain into untrodden paths, sustains him and makes him brother to them, even if his scope is but the patch cleared by his own axe.