“Glory is not a very productive appanage, it is true, but in the absence of everything else it is better than nothing”—but these impoverished lads had little or no glory, and they returned without having seen what was technically known as active service. Dunlop’s illustration of the ne plus ultra of bad pay was Waterloo, where each private there performed the hardest day’s work ever done for a shilling. Now he thought the brave Hurons in a still worse plight. By the time pay day did arrive they were not few who expressed the opinion that the Canadian rebellion was due to the machinations of a “parcel of poor rogues and a few, a very few, rich fools, one party deserving accommodation in the penitentiary and the other lodgings in bedlam.” Dunlop did not allow himself such free speech in regard to the policy of the Colonial Office, which let numbers be brought to the scaffold or to the foot of it; but he used no circumspection in words when he dealt with local mismanagement.
“As syllabubs without a head,
As jokes not laughed at when they’re said,
As needles used without a thread,
Such are Bachelors,”
says an old song. Now Tiger Dunlop might have said, “And when I fell into some fits of love I was soon cured.” But bachelor as he was, the well-springs of fraternal love were not dried up in him; nor were his syllabubs wont to be without a head, nor his jokes unlaughed at. When he spoke others listened, and his dissatisfaction ended in his resignation, upon which he addressed the following letter to his brave Hurons:
“Comrades,—When I resigned the command of the St. Clair frontier in March last I endeavoured to express to you in my farewell Order my gratitude for the generous confidence you had reposed in me, and my thanks for the steady soldier-like conduct with which you had borne every privation and met every difficulty. I have now to explain to you the reason why I voluntarily abandoned a situation in every respect gratifying to my feelings as the honourable command I then held.
“From the day that I resigned the command to the present hour I have, at great expense and total neglect of my own personal affairs, been travelling from one commissariat station to another in order to get something like justice done you. To the superior military officers my best thanks are due—Sir John Colborne, Sir F. B. Head, and latterly Sir G. Arthur, Colonel Foster, and our immediate commanding officer, the Hon. Colonel Maitland, have treated me with the greatest kindness and you with the greatest consideration. From men of their rank we might possibly have submitted to a little hauteur; on the contrary we have met with the most courteous condescension. The Commissariat, on the other hand, men infinitely inferior to many of us in birth, rank, and education, have treated us with the most overweening arrogance and the most cruel neglect. They have never personally insulted me, for I am six feet high and proportionately broad across the shoulders; but the poor farmers have to a man complained to me of their treatment by these Very magnificent three-tailed Bashaws
of Beef and Biscuit. I grudge none of the labour I have spent, nor any of the pecuniary sacrifices I have made in your service. My life and my property are my country’s, and I am willing cheerfully to lay either or both down when my Sovereign may require them, but my honour is unalienably my own, and I cannot submit to be made, as I lately unwittingly have been, the instrument of the most cruel and grinding oppression, to snatch, without remuneration, his pittance from the peasant or the bread from his children’s mouths. I have therefore submitted my resignation, but with no intention of leaving you; I shall stand with you in all danger, shoulder to shoulder, but it shall be in the ranks.
“I have to warn you not to judge of a government by the meanest of its servants, nor let the upstart insolence of a body so contemptible alienate your affections from your Queen and country; the people of England are both liberal and just, and were your case fairly represented to them there is not the slightest doubt immediate steps would be taken to redress your grievances. The Queen, like other people, has dirty work to do, and must have dirty fellows do it. The royal chimney-sweepers who exercise their professional functions in Buckingham Palace and St. James’s may be very pleasant fellows in their way, but I doubt much if they are the kind of people that either you or I would borrow money to drink with, as Shakespeare’s fat Knight says.
“Some little excuse must be had for the poor fellows after all. That the Commissariat are ‘saucy dogs’ we all must allow, have felt it; but that they are not too saucy to eat dirty puddings we know, for cursed dirty puddings they are obliged to bolt, without even daring to make a wry face at them. Witness the correspondence which the House of Assembly last winter elicited between the arrogant, insolent, empty-headed coxcomb at the head of that department and the Commissaries at Toronto and Penetanguishene. To this the poor devils are obliged to submit for their piece of silver or morsel of bread. It is natural, therefore, that the people who have studied so long in the school of arrogant ill-breeding should be anxious to exhibit the proficiency they have attained when their turn comes; and it is possible they may suppose that a Canadian yeoman, who is afraid of losing all that has been taken from him by offending their High Mightinesses, may for a time submit to it.
“A broken head or two might remove this delusion and convince them that a man is still a man though clad in a homespun coat, and that to get rid of their redundant bile safely they must make it go as hereditary property does by law, downwards, and alight on the heads of clerks and issuers, who, living in the hope of one day having it in their power to abuse their inferiors, will probably submit with more equanimity.
“In applying to the British Parliament for redress, I give you warning that the Commissariat is the most powerful body you can well attack. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Grey, Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst, Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Daniel O’Connell may talk, and all, when in their turn of power, have provided for the sons of faithful butlers and respectable valets in the Commissariat—a department particularly favourable for the offspring of the lower orders (the pay being good and the work little or nothing), the attainments necessary for its duties being easily acquired in any parish school, they being comprised in writing a legible hand and a tolerable acquaintance with the first four rules of arithmetic. The experiment, however, is well worth trying, and I trust will be successful.
“With best wishes for your prosperity and hope that you may henceforward, under the protecting arm of a just Government, cultivate your fields in peace, I subscribe myself, my comrades and fellow-soldiers,
“W. Dunlop,
“Your late Colonel,
“Commanding the St. Clair Frontier.”