e than is the man who,
through long and weary years, struggles to win success for a depressed
and righteous cause. That he was not devoid of a spirit of sincere
patriotism is evident, alike from his words and his deeds. He had
amassed a few hundreds of pounds, and was in no dread of poverty, being
sanguine and self-confident to an uncommon degree. He ardently longed to
see this fair colony rescued from the thraldom under which it groaned.
In a letter[65] written many years afterwards, when he was an outlaw and
an exile, he gives his own version of the motives which impelled him to
embark upon what he calls "the stormy sea of politics." "I had long," he
writes, "seen the country in the hands of a few shrewd, crafty, covetous
men, under whose management one of the most lovely and desirable
sections of America remained a comparative desert. The most obvious
public improvements were stayed; dissension was created among classes;
citizens were banished and imprisoned in defiance of all law; the people
had been long forbidden, under severe pains and penalties, from meeting
anywhere to petition for justice; large estates were wrested from their
owners in utter contempt of even the forms of the courts; the Church of
England, the adherents of which were few, monopolized as much of the
lands of the colony as all the religious houses and dignitaries of the
Roman Catholic Church had had the control of in Scotland at the era of
the Reformation; other sects were treated with contempt and scarcely
tolerated; a sordid band of land-jobbers grasped the soil as their
patrimony, and with a few leading officials, who divided the public
revenue among themselves, formed the Family Compact, and were the avowed
enemies of common schools, of civil and religious liberty, of all
legislative or other checks to their own will. Other men had opposed,
and been converted by them. At nine-and-twenty I might have united with
them, but chose rather to join the oppressed, nor have I ever regretted
that choice, or wavered from the object of my early pursuit."

A man entertaining such views as these, more especially a man of energy
and intelligence, with a newspaper at his back, could not fail to be
acceptable to the little knot of politicians who formed the nucleus of
the Reform Party of Upper Canada. Mr. Mackenzie was cordially welcomed
into the ranks, and was soon recognized as a most useful and valuable
acquisition thereto. He could make no pretence to the