t of the Habeas Corpus Act; denied his
enlargement upon bail or main-prize; branded as a malefactor of the most
dangerous kind; badgered and tortured to the ruin of his health and his
reason? Merely this: he had imbibed, in advance, the spirit of Mr.
Arthur Clennam, and had "wanted to know."[2] He had displayed a
persistent determination to let in the light of day upon the iniquities
and rascalities of public officials. He had denounced the system of
patronage and favouritism in the disposal of the Crown Lands. He had
inveighed against some of the human bloodsuckers of that day, in
language which certainly was not gracious or parliamentary, but which as
certainly was both forcible and true. He had even ventured to speak in
contumelious terms of the reverend Rector of York himself, whom he had
stigmatized as "a lying little fool of a renegade Presbyterian." Nay, he
had advised the sending of commissioners to England to entreat Imperial
attention to colonial grievances. He had been the one man in Upper
Canada possessed of sufficient courage to do and to dare: to lift the
thin and flimsy veil which only half concealed the corruption whereby a
score of greedy vampires were rapidly enriching themselves at the public
cost. He had dared to hold up to general inspection the baneful effects
of an irresponsible Executive, and of a dominating clique whose one hope
lay in preserving the existing order of things undisturbed. It was for
this that the Inquisition had wreaked its vengeance upon him; for this
that the vials of Executive wrath had been poured upon his head; for
this that his body had been subjugated and his nerves lacerated by more
than seven months' close imprisonment; for this that he had been "ruined
in his fortune and overwhelmed in his mind." And all these things took
place in "this Canada of ours," in the year of grace eighteen hundred
and nineteen--barely sixty-six years ago--while the Duke of Richmond was
Governor-General, and his handsome scapegrace of a son-in-law nominally
administered the government of the Upper Province.

With a view to a clearer understanding of the circumstances which led to
this most villainous of Canadian State prosecutions, it will be well to
glance at some details of the prisoner's past life.[3]

Robert Gourlay was the son of a gentleman of considerable fortune--a
retired Writer to the Signet--and was born in the parish of Ceres,
Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1778. He received an education s