of the ruling faction. But there were a
good many of them who not only were not wealthy, but who were in
positively indigent circumstances. 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 class 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 opp