804, authorising the arrest of any person who had resided in the
province for six months without taking the oath of allegiance, and was
suspected to be a seditious character. Such a person could be ordered by
the authorities to leave the province, or give security for good
behaviour. This act had been originally passed to prevent the
immigration of aliens unfavourable to England, especially of Irishmen
who had taken part in the rebellion of 1798 and found refuge in the
United States. Gourlay had been a resident of Upper Canada for nearly
two years, and in no single instance had the law been construed to apply
to an immigrant from the British Isles. Gourlay was imprisoned in the
Niagara gaol, and when his friends attempted to bring him out on a writ
of _habeas corpus_ they failed simply because Chief Justice Powell, an
able lawyer of a Loyalist family and head of the official party, refused
to grant the writ on a mere technical plea, afterwards declared by the
highest legal authorities in England to be entirely contrary to sound
law. Gourlay consequently remained in prison for nearly eight months,
and when he was brought again before the chief justice, his mental
faculties were obviously impaired for the moment, but despite his
wretched condition, which prevented him from conducting his defence, he
was summarily convicted and ordered to leave the province within
twenty-four hours, under penalty of death should he not obey the order
or return to the country.

This unjust sentence created wide-spread indignation among all
right-thinking people, especially as it followed a message of the
lieutenant-governor to the legislature, that he did not feel justified
in extending the grants of land, made to actors in the war of 1812-15,
to "any of the inhabitants who composed the late convention of
delegates, the proceedings of which were very properly subjected to your
very severe animadversion" This undoubtedly illegal action of the
lieutenant-governor only escaped the censure of the assembly by the
casting vote of the speaker, but was naturally justified in the
legislative council where Chief Justice Powell presided. Gourlay became
a martyr in the opinion of a large body of people, and a Reform party
began to grow up in the country. The man himself disappeared for years
from Canadian history, and did not return to the province until 1856,
after a chequered and unhappy career in Great Britain and the United
States. The assembly of