The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion Part 3

Among other drawbacks, sufficiently serious in themselves and in their ulterior consequences, but of minor importance when compared with the all-permeating grievances already referred to, may be mentioned the quartering of military men upon the colony in the capacity of Lieutenant-Governors; the unequal representation of the people in the a.s.sembly; the exorbitant salaries of certain public officials; the union of judicial and legislative functions in the same persons; the appointment of judges, sheriffs, magistrates, and other officials during the pleasure of the Executive, and not during good behaviour.

The evils attendant upon placing the local administration of the colonies in the hands of military officers, who were inexperienced in const.i.tutional government, and unfitted by training for such duties as were demanded of them, have already been glanced at.[44] Such persons naturally enough found themselves altogether out of their proper element upon their arrival in the colony, and looked to the Executive Councillors for advice and instruction. That they should follow the instruction received, and that they should surrender themselves to the judgment of those enemies of the public weal, followed almost as a matter of course. In this way the strength of the oligarchy was consolidated and enlarged, and its members rendered more and more independent of public opinion. All that can be urged on behalf of the Home Ministry, by way of excuse for committing the direction of our affairs to such persons, is that the position of Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada was not a sufficient inducement to make it sought after by really capable men. The office, in at least one instance to be hereafter recorded, went a-begging.

Unequal representation was a fruitful source of discontent, though Upper Canada was no worse off in that respect than the mother-country prior to the pa.s.sing of the Reform Bill of 1832. For years before the Rebellion, the little district towns of Niagara, Brockville and Cornwall each enjoyed the privilege of sending a representative to the a.s.sembly. All three of them were notoriously rotten boroughs--as rotten as Gatton, Grampound or Old Sarum--and always returned Tory members prepared to do the bidding of the Executive. By such means was the a.s.sembly corrupted, and the elective franchise turned into an instrument of oppression. Some of the salaries of public officials were altogether out of proportion to the state of the revenue, and to the nature and extent of the duties performed. Certain highly-paid offices were the merest sinecures, and had been created for no other purpose than to provide for serviceable tools of the Administration. The practice of permitting judges to sit and vote in the Legislature needs no comment. Whatever justification there might have been for such a union of functions in the first infancy of the Province, when educated men were few in the land, there was certainly none in the days when Chief Justice Robinson was Speaker of the Legislative Council. The effect of making the tenure of office of judges and other dignitaries dependent on the will of the Executive was such as has attended upon such a system in all countries where it has been in vogue. The officials were selected almost entirely from one political party, and had always an eye upon the nod of their taskmasters, who had the power to make or unmake them. Whenever it was desirable, in the supposed interests of the Executive, that the authority of the courts should be strained to the perversion of judgment, the dispensing of even-handed justice was altogether a secondary consideration. Mr. Gourlay's case, to say nothing of that of Bartemus Ferguson, affords a sufficient ill.u.s.tration of the extent to which the traditions of the Star Chamber were revived in Upper Canadian practice, when it was thought desirable to crush a champion of popular liberty and equal rights.

Such were a few of the burdens which the people of Upper Canada were compelled to bear in the by-gone epoch when tyranny reigned supreme throughout the Province: when

"the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes,"

were the all too frequent portion of such of the inhabitants as dared to call in question the righteousness of existing ordinances. There was a further intolerable grievance which was closely bound up with, and which, so to speak, grew out of or sustained all the rest: which comprehended within itself all the evils affecting the body politic, and which left traces of its existence that have survived down to the present time. This was the Family Compact--a phrase which is in everybody's mouth, but the significance whereof, I venture to think, is in general but imperfectly understood. The subject deserves a chapter to itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Being somewhat doubtful as to the truth of this oft-repeated story, I have taken the trouble to consult the records in the Crown Lands Office, where I find that Mr. Russell on several occasions made grants of land to himself. Among other such grants I may mention lot number twenty-two, in the third concession of the towns.h.i.+p of York, which was made on the 16th of July, 1797. See Liber A., folio 382, Provincial Registry Office. He also granted various tracts of land to his sister, Miss Elizabeth Russell, the first of which bears date the 15th of December, 1796. See Liber B., folio 334. So that the President appears to have begun to "do good unto himself" and his family before he had been three months in office as Administrator of the Government. Further investigation would doubtless prove that he kept up the practice until the arrival of Governor Hunter.

[25] See his speech at the close of the first session of the First Parliament of Upper Canada, on the 15th of October, 1792.

[26] The property qualification for a voter was, in counties, the possession of lands or tenements of the yearly value of forty s.h.i.+llings sterling or upwards, over and above all rents and charges; and in towns or towns.h.i.+ps, the possession of a dwelling house and lot of the yearly value of five pounds sterling or upwards, or the having been a resident for twelve months, and the having paid a year's rent at the rate of ten pounds sterling or upwards. See the twentieth section of the Const.i.tutional Act.

[27] The latter part of this clause has no application to Brock, who was made of manlier stuff. Brock, however, was not Lieutenant-Governor, but merely Provisional Administrator of the Province.

[28] _Report on the Affairs of British North America_, English folio edition, p. 29.

[29] _The Const.i.tutional History of Canada_, by Samuel James Watson, Vol. I., p. 128.

[30] The abuses specified in the present chapter were not confined to Upper Canada. They existed, with certain local variations, throughout all the British North American colonies, and produced similar results in each; viz., ever-recurring conflicts between the Executive and the popular branch of the Legislature, followed by more or less alienation of loyalty to the mother country on the part of the more radical element in the community. In the Maritime Provinces the alienation was not sufficiently widespread to manifest itself in actual rebellion, though the conflict between the oligarchy and the popular tribunes sometimes produced a very disturbed state of feeling. In Lower Canada, where the element of race-hatred was added to all other sources of disturbance, the conflict attained an intensity far beyond what was reached in any of the other colonies, and left traces behind it which are not even yet wholly obliterated.

[31] _Statistical Account_, Vol. II., p. 296.

[32] _Canadiana_, by W. B. Wells, p. 103.

[33] Ib.

[34] Ib., p. 104.

[35] These grants of five thousand acres to members of the Executive Council were in direct violation of the instructions framed by the Home Government for the regulation of land-granting in Upper Canada. They continued to be made down to 1807, when they were stopped by a peremptory order to that effect from the Colonial Secretary. There is one instance on record of a reserve being applied for and made on behalf of the child of a member of the Legislative Council, though the child was not three days old. See the evidence of John Radenhurst, Chief Clerk in the office of the Surveyor-General, in Appendix B. to Lord Durham's _Report on the Affairs of British North America_.

[36] Most of these facts with reference to the granting of public lands may be obtained from the archives of the Crown Lands Office in Toronto, and from the newspapers and official reports of the period. They may also be found, together with a vast acc.u.mulation of other important facts bearing on the same subject, in Charles Buller's Report on Public Lands and Emigration, forming Appendix B. to Lord Durham's _Report on the Affairs of British North America_.

[37] _Canadiana_, p. 130.

[38] In 1796 or thereabouts the Executive offered to grant entire towns.h.i.+ps to persons who would undertake to settle them with a certain number of colonists within a specified time. The number of colonists required was made proportionate to the extent of territory to be settled. This offer was taken advantage of by ten different individuals.

The grants were not actually made, but the respective towns.h.i.+ps were allocated in the official books to the various persons concerned. Upon the faith of the pledge of the Executive, several of the ten a.s.signees proceeded to carry out the conditions imposed. Among them was Mr.

William Berczy, who, having obtained an a.s.signment of the towns.h.i.+p of Markham, went to great expense in bringing over a number of German families, whom he settled according to the conditions of the contemplated grant. After he had spent a sum of money variously stated at from twenty to thirty thousand pounds sterling, the Executive coolly announced that they had determined to abandon the towns.h.i.+p system, and that they did not even intend to carry out the grants to those who had complied with the conditions. The compensation offered for this unparalleled breach of faith was a grant of twelve hundred acres to each a.s.signee. Nine of the individuals concerned a.s.sented to those terms, but Mr. Berczy refused to accept any such inadequate recompense, and he remained for the rest of his life a ruined man. He shook the dust of Upper Canada from his feet, and took up his abode in Montreal, whence he subsequently repaired to New York, where he died in the year 1813.

[39] See Appendix B. to Lord Durham's _Report_, folio edition, p. 99.

Mr. Charles Rankin, Deputy-Surveyor in the Western District, in his evidence before the Commission (_ib._ pp. 120, 121), says:--"The system of making large grants to individuals who had no intention of settling them has tended to r.e.t.a.r.d the prosperity of the colony by separating the actual settlers, and rendering it so much more difficult, and in some cases impossible, for them to make the necessary roads. It has also made the markets more distant and more precarious. To such an extent have these difficulties been experienced as to occasion the abandonment of settlements which had been formed. I may mention, as an instance of this, the towns.h.i.+p of Rama, where after a trial of three years, the settlers were compelled to abandon their improvements. It should be noticed that the settlers in this instance were not of a cla.s.s fitted to encounter the privations of the wilderness, being half-pay officers. In the towns.h.i.+p of St. Vincent almost all the most valuable settlers have left their farms from the same cause, the towns.h.i.+ps of Nottawasaga and Collingwood, the whole of the land in which had been granted, and which are almost entirely unsettled (Collingwood, I believe, has only one settler), intervening between them and the settled towns.h.i.+p, and rendering communication impossible. There have been numerous instances in which, though the settlement has not been altogether abandoned, the most valuable settlers, after unavailing struggles of several years with the difficulties which I have described, have left their farms." This witness further states his belief that nine-tenths of the lands in the Western District were still--in 1838--in a state of wilderness.

[40] See his _Report, pa.s.sim_; also see the portion of Appendix B.

relating to Upper Canada.

[41] See the Special Report of Mr. R. Davies Hanson, a.s.sistant Commissioner of Crown Lands and Emigration, forming the commencement of Appendix A. to Lord Durham's _Report on the Affairs of British North America_.

[42] I use this word for want of a better, though it is not strictly accurate as applied to Upper Canada, where there were no clearly prescribed standards of religious faith from which non-supporters of Episcopacy could be said to dissent. The word "Nonconformist" is objectionable for a similar reason.

[43] See _Seventh Grievance Committee's Report_, p. 164.

[44] _Ante_, p. 51.

CHAPTER III.

THE FAMILY COMPACT.

What was the nature and origin of this powerful organization--this informally-const.i.tuted league, the name whereof has been familiar to the ears of Upper Canadians during the whole, or nearly the whole, of the present century; which is referred to in nearly all books dealing with the political and social life of this Province before the Union of 1841; which for forty years regulated the public policy of the colony, and ruled with an iron hand over the liberties of the inhabitants?

Immediately after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, in 1763, whereby Canada was ceded by France to Great Britain, it became necessary for the British Government to appoint a considerable number of officials to fill the public offices in the country so ceded. It did not suit the policy of the conquerors to leave much power in the hands of the conquered. The introduction of the English language and laws was moreover a practical disqualification for most of the native inhabitants of the colony, and the new officials were nearly all sent over from England. Some of the princ.i.p.al personages among them were men of probity and brains. Others, though possessed of a full share of brains, had but a younger brother's portion of the other commodity. The underlings, generally speaking, had but a slender allowance of either. They were for the most part appointed on the recommendation of various supporters of the Government of the day, who were thus able to provide for a number of their needy relatives and dependants--a matter of vastly greater importance in their eyes than the proper administration of the affairs of a distant and newly-acquired colony. The Conquest thus proved a boon to many servile hangers-on of public men in Great Britain, and scores of the waifs and strays of British aristocracy began to turn their eyes towards Canada as a possible resource in the last emergency. It was said to be a cold and comfortless land, but it was surely preferable to the Fleet Prison or the Marshalsea, with the alternative of starvation or enlistment in the army. Many of these pimps and panders to the whims or the pa.s.sions of those in high station found their way to Quebec and Montreal, and were provided for at the public expense by being installed in places of greater or less emolument.[45]

When Upper Canada was set apart as a separate Province, in 1791, the field of operations was considerably extended. Indeed, the Upper Province soon came to be regarded with special favour by intending aspirants to office, as it was in all respects an English colony; whereas Lower Canada, in spite of all attempts to Anglicize it, remained much more French than English. Lower Canada, indeed, remained in some respects more French than any other part of the world, not even excepting France itself, for in that country the Great Revolution had swept away many effete inst.i.tutions which were still retained in all their decrepitude among the Frenchmen of the New World. Now, the French Canadians, though most of the avenues to power and office were closed to them, composed a vast majority of the population. They did not take kindly to the British colonists, and declined to fraternize with them.

The latter could bear this isolation, as they were comforted by the spoils of office, but their lives were rendered much less agreeable than they would have been in a colony where no such disturbing elements were known. Upper Canada was precisely such a colony. No part of Britain was more British in sentiment. In no part of the world would an expatriated Englishman find himself more entirely in harmony with his environment, from a purely patriotic point of view. What wonder, then, that Upper Canada was regarded by place-hunting emigrants from England with wistful eyes? What wonder that an appointment to a public office in Upper Canada should have been regarded by such persons as a thing greatly to be coveted? Such aspirants were regarded with but little favour by Governor Simcoe. His great object was to launch the Province successfully on its career, and to lay the foundations of good government. He brought with him his own staff, selected by himself with a single eye to their fitness for the positions which they were respectively intended to fill. During his day there was little or no favouritism in public appointments, and but little, if anything, to find fault with in the conduct of the administration. His demission of office was almost immediately followed by a relaxation of discipline, and by a looseness in the management of the public business. As the years pa.s.sed by, the Province became the resort of numerous office-seekers from beyond sea--half-pay officers and scions of good English, Scotch and Irish families, who sought to better their fortunes by expatriation. As they were, generally speaking, men of some education, and of manners more polished than were ordinarily found among the colonists, they naturally a.s.similated, and were drawn towards each other. They likewise coalesced, to some extent, with a few United Empire Loyalist families of exclusive pretensions, in whose veins the blood was supposed to possess an exceptionally cerulean tint. Several persons who had rapidly gained wealth by trade and speculation, and who had thereby acquired influence in the community, were also admitted. In an inconceivably short s.p.a.ce of time this union of several influential cliques was followed by important results. They acquired a strength and influence which, in the then primitive state of the colony, carried all before them. They wormed themselves into all the more important offices, directed the Councils of the Sovereign's representative, and, in a word, became the power behind the Throne. In the early years of their domination they organized their forces with much tact and judgment, and did not develop their plans until they had been carefully matured. They may be said to have practically absorbed the Executive and Legislative Councils, as those bodies were entirely made up of persons either selected from among them or entirely subservient to their influence. No man, whatever his abilities, could hope to succeed in any profession or calling in Upper Canada if he dared to declare himself in opposition to them. A few made the attempt, and failed most signally.

Such was the Family Compact. "For a long time," says Lord Durham,[46]

writing in 1838, "this body of men, receiving at times accessions to its members, possessed almost all the highest public offices, by means of which, and of its influence in the Executive Council, it wielded all the powers of Government; it maintained influence in the Legislature by means of its predominance in the Legislative Council; and it disposed of the large number of petty posts which are in the patronage of the Government all over the Province. Successive Governors, as they came in their turn, are said to have either submitted quietly to its influence, or, after a short and unavailing struggle, to have yielded to this well-organized party the conduct of affairs. The bench, the magistracy, the high offices of the Episcopal Church, and a great part of the legal profession, are filled by the adherents of this party: by grant or purchase they have acquired nearly the whole of the waste lands of the Province; they are all-powerful in the chartered banks, and, till lately, shared among themselves almost exclusively all offices of trust and profit."

The influences which produced the Family Compact were not confined to Upper Canada. In the Lower Province, as well as in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, similar causes led to similar results, and the term "Family Compact" has at one time or another been a familiar one in all the British North American colonies. But in none of them did the organization attain to such a plenitude of power as in this Province, and in none of them did it wield the sceptre of authority with so thorough an indifference to the principles of right and wrong. Its name is a rather indefinite, but not inapt characterization. Lord Durham refers to the term "Family Compact," as being not much more appropriate than party designations usually are; "inasmuch as," he writes, "there is, in truth, very little of family connexion among the persons thus united.[47]" "Much" is a saving clause, but if his Lords.h.i.+p had thought it worth his while to enquire minutely into the relations subsisting between the members of this body, he would have found that there had been a good many intermarriages between them, and that the pecuniary interests which bound them together had been welded by the most powerful of social bonds.[48] The designation "Family Compact," however, did not owe its origin to any combination of North American colonists, but was borrowed from the diplomatic history of Europe. By the treaty signed at Paris on the 15th of August, 1761, by representatives on behalf of France and Spain, the contracting parties agreed to guarantee each other's territories, to provide mutual succours by sea and land, and to consider the enemy of either as the enemy of both. This treaty, being contracted between the two branches of the House of Bourbon, is known to history as the Family Compact Treaty, and the name was adopted in the Canadas, as well as in the Maritime Provinces, to designate the combination which enjoyed a monopoly of power and place in the community, and among the members whereof there seemed to be a perfect, if unexpressed, understanding, that they were to make common cause against any and all persons who might attempt to diminish or destroy their influence.

The members of the Family Compact, with very few exceptions, were members of the Church of England, which, owing to the before-mentioned provisions in the Const.i.tutional Act, they regarded as the State Church of Upper Canada, established by law, and ent.i.tled to the special veneration of the inhabitants. They accounted all persons as members of the Church of England who were not actual members of some other religious body, and in enumerating the people for statistical purposes they sometimes even went so far as to include the infant children of Dissenters as Episcopalians. They sought to defend the alleged establishment of a State Church in Canada by arguments which it is astonis.h.i.+ng to think that men of education and intelligence should ever have stooped to employ. "There should be in every Christian country an established religion," said Dr. Strachan, in his evidence before the Select Committee on Grievances, in 1835, "otherwise it is not a Christian but an infidel country."[49] According to their theory, one of the princ.i.p.al ends of the Government of Upper Canada was the propagation of religious truth as set forth in the doctrines of the Church of England. True, the arguments on the subject were not so well understood then as now. Mr. Gladstone's little volume on "The State in its Relations with the Church," and Macaulay's answer thereto in the _Edinburgh Review_, had not then been published. But some of the most conclusive arguments adduced by Macaulay were as old as the world itself; and even Mr. Gladstone, in all his youthful exuberance, did not venture to take so preposterous a stand as was a.s.sumed by the upholders of a State Church in this Province. Their bigotry and intolerance were utterly out of keeping with the times in which they lived, and were better suited to the days of Archbishop Laud or Sir Robert Filmer. Of that heaven-born charity which suffereth long, and is kind; which vaunteth not itself, and is not puffed up; which seeketh not her own, and is not easily provoked; which thinketh no evil; which rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; which beareth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things--of the spirit which impels to such a state of mind as this, we find few traces in the lives and writings of the upholders of State-Churchism in Upper Canada in those days. We find, on the contrary, much unkindness, much vaunting of themselves, much selfish conceit, much seeking, not only of their own, but of that which of right belonged to their neighbours. The champions of ecclesiastical monopoly were easily provoked to anger, and to thinking and speaking all manner of evil of those who differed from them as to the distribution of the Clergy Reserves. Roman Catholicism they contemplated with a certain amount of toleration, as the Roman Catholic hierarchy yielded the Government an unwavering support in return for the freedom and privileges which they enjoyed. But their toleration was not broad enough to cover any other form of religious belief. Dissent, in all its multiform phases, they looked upon with mingled abhorrence and contempt--as a thing to be shunned and tabooed by all right-minded persons. Dissenting ministers of religion were regarded as "low fellows," whom it was no sin to persecute, and, if possible, drive out of the country. Comparatively few of the latter were permitted to solemnize matrimony during the first forty years of the Province's history. By the statute 38 George III., chapter 4, pa.s.sed in 1798, the privilege of doing so was accorded to ministers of "The Church of Scotland, or Lutherans or Calvinists;" but it was hedged about with c.u.mbrous restrictions which must have been felt as humiliating and unnecessary. No person was to be regarded as a minister under the Act until he had appeared before the Justices of the Peace in Quarter Sessions, and had produced satisfactory credentials of his ordination.

He was also compelled to take the oath of allegiance. Even after complying with all formalities, his functions were restricted to cases where one or both of the parties to be joined together belonged to his own religious society. Ministers of other denominations, including those of the Methodist body, which was the most numerous religious community in the Province, were not allowed the privilege of solemnizing marriage rites till the year 1831. The ignominous disqualification was removed by the statute 11 George IV., chapter 36, which was pa.s.sed in 1830, but which did not receive the royal a.s.sent until the following year. A similar measure had repeatedly been pa.s.sed by the a.s.sembly in former sessions, but had as often been rejected by the Upper House. Before the law was finally and equitably settled as above mentioned, several ministers of religion had been tried and banished from the Province for having ventured to solemnize matrimony without legal authority. It is said that in one case where a minister was tried on a charge of this kind, the accused protested against his sentence, alleging that the Chief Justice, who presided at the trial, had himself sanctioned the performance of the ceremony. The Chief Justice, being called upon to descend from the judgment seat and give evidence as to this fact, declined to do so; but he afterwards procured a pardon for the prisoner.[50]

The Compact always contained within its ranks a few persons of more than average ability. Some of them doubtless believed that the course pursued by their organization was for the advantage of the colony, though, reasoning by the light of present knowledge, it is difficult to comprehend how men of even moderate perspicacity and judgment could have brought themselves to such a conclusion. It was, however, inevitable that persons of such narrow and contracted views--persons to whom self and pelf were the mainsprings of life--should degenerate, mentally as well as morally. The persons composing the second generation were, with very few exceptions, striking ill.u.s.trations of the doctrine of the descent of man. Their sires had been men of energy and force of character. They themselves were--to borrow a phrase from the acting drama--the mere walking gentlemen of the colony. The sires had originated a bold and determined policy, and had from first to last pursued it with consistent vigour. The sons had neither brains to conceive nor discretion to carry out the conceptions of others. The sires had been persons whom it had been possible for the commonalty to respect. The sons were persons whom it was impossible not to despise.

Surely a more superlatively commonplace and contemptible race of human beings has seldom been seen on the earth than four-fifths of the second generation of this b.a.s.t.a.r.d aristocracy of Upper Canada. It bore no resemblance to any other aristocracy whereof history has preserved any record. The old Roman commonalty, while they groaned beneath the iron heel of tyranny, were one and all conscious of a secret pride in their imperial oppressors. For the Roman aristocracy was an aristocracy of nature. The Roman patricians made foreign rulers to crouch and tremble at the name of Rome. Their triumphs were the triumphs of the nation.

Caius of Corioli, Furius Camillus, t.i.tus Capitolinus, were names the mere utterance of which stirred the Roman blood like the blast of a trumpet. For many a long year after one haughty dictator had slept his last sleep beneath the walls of Praeneste, and after another had taken his final plunge beneath the yellow Tiber or from the Tarpeian rock, their exploits furnished themes for tale and song around the Roman camp-fires. These puissant representatives of the dominant cla.s.s had shown little sympathy for the plebeians, upon whom they had looked down from a lofty height, and towards whom they had ever borne themselves with haughtiness and disdain. But their pride was a something to be tolerated by Romans of every degree, for they had achieved much glory for the Roman name. In the words of one who has interpreted the sentiment of those times with rare felicity, Rome could bear the pride of him of whom herself was proud. The old French n.o.blesse, again, were not devoid of redeeming qualities. Their galling yoke would not have been borne from reign to reign, and through century after century, even by such seeming reconcilables as const.i.tuted the bulk of the French populace during the ante-Revolutionary period, if they had all been like the wicked St. Evremonde of Mr. d.i.c.kens's tragic story. As a cla.s.s, they had a subtle French grace about them which rendered their most grievous exactions less hard to bear than were the exactions of their eastern neighbours. They were an unmistakable _haute n.o.blesse_, ever polished and dignified. Some of them, like Philippe Egalite, had the cunning, when the time of trial arrived, to bend to the popular storm, and even to affect a zeal for citizens.h.i.+p. Comparatively few of them were at once _blase_ and brainless. It may be doubted if a single one of them combined--as did many of the rank and file of the second generation of the Family Compact of Upper Canada--the pretensions of an aristocrat with the sentiments of a boor and the intellectual development of a child. Yet further. The feeling of veneration with which the English commonalty have for centuries regarded the House of Lords is easy enough to understand. That feeling seems to be rapidly pa.s.sing away, if, indeed, it has not already departed. But it would not have endured from the time of the Plantagenets to the time of Queen Victoria if it had not had some substantial foundation to rest upon. The House of Lords has always contained a number of men of high integrity and ability. Take it for all and all, it is probably the most just-minded and intellectual aristocratic a.s.sembly the world has ever seen. This may not be very high praise, but it may at least be taken for what it is worth. Its individual members are seldom brought sufficiently near to the lower order of the commonalty to enable the latter to detect their weaknesses.

Their wealth, prestige and social position give them a vast influence, while at the same time their legislative powers are held in check by the direct representatives of the people. Most of these conditions were directly reversed in Upper Canada, where the members of the dominant faction were brought into the closest relations with the people generally, insomuch that their many deficiencies could not be concealed.

Such wealth as they had they were too often known to have obtained at the expense of the rest of the community. The Lower House formed no efficacious check upon them, for they either managed to return a sufficient number of their tools to control the vote in that body, or else they rendered the a.s.sembly's operations of no avail by means of their influence in the Legislative Council. They had none of the graceful suavity of the Lower Canadian seigneurs. Nor could they boast of the superiority derived from a liberal education. Many of them--even including some of those who held high public offices--were so illiterate that they were unable to write a simple business letter without committing errors of orthography of which any one but Artemus Ward or Jeames de la Pluche might well feel ashamed.

Nearly all the leading spirits of this strangely-a.s.sorted oligarchy were either wealthy or on the direct road to wealth. Being comfortably provided for at the public cost, in the form of fat offices or wild lands, or both, they a.s.sumed a swelling port, and aped, as best they knew how, the manners and customs of the upper cla.s.ses in Great Britain.

They built their dwellings in imitation of old-fas.h.i.+oned English manor-houses, with a variety of wings and gables, and with broad entrance halls which in an emergency might have served the purpose of presence-chambers. They dined long and late, and with much old-world pomp and ceremonial. They drove out in coaches emblazoned with heraldic bearings, and attended by broad-calved flunkeys in family livery.

Certain social observances of the early Georgian era, long since effete and worn out in England, flourished in the social life of Little York down to a period within the memory of many persons who are still living.

The aristocratic clique which preserved these customs was in the highest degree rigid and exclusive. No outsider was admitted into the charmed circle unless he came duly ticketed and accredited. The attempt to transplant the usages of an old and advanced state of society into the primitive streets and lanes of such places as York, Kingston, and Woodstock was for a time more successful than might be supposed. Such of the families as had been to the manner born carried off these observances with considerable grace. They had brought their traditions with them across the Atlantic, and though such traditions were not well suited to the genius of a young and spa.r.s.ely-settled colony, they were at least maintained with some regard to the sources whence they had been derived. With the pretenders who formed a portion of the clique, and who had been admitted into it for special political reasons, the attempt to copy the habits of their social superiors was, generally speaking, less satisfactory. There was, in truth, an inner social circle which these latter were never invited to join. They, however, enjoyed all the political and pecuniary advantages arising from their connection, and were not easily distinguishable by outsiders from the very head and front of the organization.

So far as to the wealthy members of the ruling faction. But there were a good many of them who not only were not wealthy, but who were in positively indigent circ.u.mstances. These, for the most part, were members of old country families who had sent them to Canada with the sole object of getting rid of them. Others were half-pay officers who had spent their whole fortunes in settling on land, after which they had found themselves unable to make a livelihood, and had then sold their property for as much--or as little--as they could manage to get. These latter, after having disposed of their lands, generally repaired to the towns, and most of them sooner or later found their way to the Provincial capital. There they became obedient slaves of those in authority, and picked up a precarious livelihood by making themselves useful in various ways. The Executive could always find a certain amount of work for such persons, though, if the truth must be told, the supply was often greater than the demand. The code of social ethics in vogue among this cla.s.s was such as might have been expected from persons who had been reared to regard themselves as the objects of a special dispensation of fortune. They looked upon manual labour as degrading.

Any person, no matter what his abilities, who earned a livelihood by the sweat of his brow, or even by honest trade, was considered as no fit company for the brood of parasites who hung on to the heels of the Compact, and who nevertheless did not hesitate to perform tasks from which the average costermonger would have shrunk in disgust. Their employers occasionally admitted them to their tables, and even to some degree of social intimacy. More frequently they presented them with their cast-off clothing, with new gowns for their wives at Christmas, or--when things were at a remarkably low ebb--with a hundredweight of flour or half a barrel of mess pork. Yet the recipients of these favours piqued themselves upon their good birth and high connexions, and would have felt themselves insulted if anyone had ventured to hint that they should visit, upon terms of equality, with the grocer or the butcher in the next street.

The reader now has before him a sufficient array of facts to enable him to form a pretty accurate conception of the state of social life in Upper Canada during ante-Rebellion times. It was a matter of course that such a monopoly of power as was possessed and exercised by the ruling faction should excite envy and opposition on the part of those who did not revel in its smiles or share in its plunder. Loud murmurings began to make themselves heard against the delay and partiality in the land-granting department, and against the corrupt manner in which the public affairs of the Province generally were carried on. Before the close of Governor Hunter's _regime_ these murmurings had become loud enough to occasion no little disquiet to some of the officials who had most reason to dread enquiry and investigation. The abuses were greater in some branches of the service than in others, but peculation prevailed to a greater or less extent almost everywhere. The Indian department was notorious for the corruption of its officials. A sum of sixty thousand pounds sterling was annually granted by the Imperial Government for distribution among the various tribes, and for the payment of agents and interpreters. The distribution among the Indians chiefly took the form of commodities which had a particular fascination for the mind of the n.o.ble savage--such commodities, for instance, as muskets, powder, bullets, knives, tomahawks, hatchets, blankets, spangles, pocket mirrors, and--last, but by no means least--fire-water. The opportunities which this grant afforded for peculation and plunder were too tempting to be resisted. The agents and their subordinates, from highest to lowest, owed their positions to their servility and usefulness to those in authority. So long as they proved serviceable and obedient to their masters, there was not much likelihood of their being called to serious account for any iniquities they might commit towards Mohawk or Seneca, Oneida or Mississauga. By way of consequence, the Indians were robbed and the Government was robbed; and the robbers, feeling secure of protection from their superiors, plied their nefarious traffic with impunity.[51]

There were equally culpable but less notorious abuses of power in other branches of the service. Probably not one in ten of these ever came to light, but from time to time there were awkward revelations which could not be suppressed. All these things combined to beget a widespread lack of confidence in the official clique. The want of confidence, not without good reason, extended even to the administrators of the law. The judges, as already mentioned, held office at the will of the Executive, and, at least in some instances, were shamelessly servile and corrupt.