driven into permanent and active
opposition.

The leaders of the movement of resistance which now began to gather
force included all sorts and conditions of men. The fiercest and
most aggressive were two Scotchmen, Robert Gourlay and William Lyon
Mackenzie. Gourlay, one of those restless and indispensable cranks
who make the world turn round, active, obstinate, imprudent,
uncompromisingly devoted to the common good as he saw it, came to Canada
in 1817 on settlement and colonization bent. Innocent inquiries which he
sent broadcast as to the condition of the province gave the settlers an
opportunity for voicing their pent-up discontent, and soon Gourlay was
launched upon the sea of politics. Mackenzie, who came to Canada three
years later, was a born agitator, fearless, untiring, a good hater,
master of avitriolic vocabulary, and absolutely unpurchasable. He found
his vein in weekly journalism, and for nearly forty years was the stormy
petrel of Canadian politics. From England there came, among others, Dr.
John Rolph, shrewd and politic, and Captain John Matthews, a half-pay
artillery officer. Peter Perry, downright and rugged and of a homely
eloquence, represented the Loyalists of the Bay of Quinte, which was
the center of Canadian Methodism. Among the newer comers from the
United States, the foremost were Barnabas Bidwell, who had been Attorney
General of Massachusetts but had fled to Canada in 1810 when accused of
misappropriating public money, and his son, Marshall Spring Bidwell,
one of the ablest and most single-minded men who ever entered Canadian
public life. From Ireland came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son
Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger
Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or
self-seeking.

How were these men to bring about the reform which they desired? Their
first aim was obviously to secure a majority in the Assembly, and by the
election of 1828 they attained this first object. But the limits of the
power of the Assembly they soon discovered. Without definite leadership,
with no control over the Administration, and with even legislative power
divided, it could effect little. It was in part disappointment at the
failure of the Assembly that accounted for the defeat of the Reformers
in 1830, though four years later this verdict was again reversed.
Clearly the form of government itself should be changed. But in what
way? Here a divergen