ason, were found guilty,
and were hanged in Montreal. Some of these had been pardoned once for
their part in the rising of the previous year; some were implicated in
plain murder; all were guilty; but the chill deliberate formalities of
the gallows, the sufferings of the wretched men, their bearing on the
scaffold, the vain efforts to obtain reprieve, produced a strong
revulsion of popular feeling in their favour. By the common law of
nations they were traitors; but they are still named and accounted
'patriots.'

At Toronto, Lount and Matthews, two of the rebel leaders of Upper
Canada, were hanged in the jail-yard on April 12, 1839. A petition for
mercy was set aside; Lount's wife on her knees begged the
lieutenant-governor to spare her husband's life, but in vain. Here,
too, public feeling was chiefly pity for the unfortunate. But these
executions did not satisfy the extremists. The lieutenant-governor,
Sir George Arthur, who had long been governor of the penal settlement
in Tasmania, was avowedly in favour of further severities; and vengeful
loyalists clamoured in support. All Durham's work seemed undone. The
political outlook of {31} the Canadas in 1839 was, if anything, darker
and more hopeless than it had been two years before.

Almost as grave as the political condition of the country was the
financial situation. The rebellions of '37 coincided with a
wide-spread financial crisis in the United States, which had its
inevitable reaction upon all business in Canada, and matters had gone
from bad to worse. By the summer of 1839 Upper Canada--the present
rich and prosperous Ontario--was on the verge of bankruptcy. The
reason lay in the ambition of this province. The first roads into any
new country are the rivers. Therefore the population of Canada first
followed and settled along the ancient waterway of the St Lawrence and
the Great Lakes. But this wonderful highway was blocked here and there
by natural obstacles to navigation, long series of rapids and the giant
escarpment of Niagara. To overcome these obstacles the costly Cornwall
and Welland canals had been projected and built. The money for such
vast public works was not to be found in a new country in the pioneer
stage of development; it had to be borrowed outside; and the annual
interest on these borrowings amounted {32} to L75,000, more than half
the annual income of the province. And this huge interest charge was
met by the disastrous policy