emissaries of Tory superiors beyond sea, whose instructions they had
generally carried out. All this had been changed; but the change, so
far as Upper Canada was concerned, had been for the worse. The Reformers
of the Province felt that the man who had been placed at the helm of
State--the man who had been sent over by an ostensibly Liberal
Government to redress the accumulated wrongs of the past--was in some
respects far more dangerous than any of his predecessors had been.
Carlyle had not then delivered his celebrated discourse on fools, but
the idea that a fool may sometimes be far more dread-inspiring than a
wise man is sufficiently obvious, and had presented itself in vivid
shape before the minds of a good many of the Reformers of Upper Canada.
They had by this time come to know something of Sir Francis Head. They
had brought themselves to regard him as not only a fool, but a fool
devoid of right feeling or principle; a fool who would stop at no
injustice or iniquity the perpetration whereof would conduce, in however
small a degree, to his own glorification. He evidently regarded his
personal interference in the elections as a thing upon which he ought to
plume himself. Such a state of things was not to be borne. It was clear
that life, for Canadian Reformers, would very soon be not worth living.
They despaired of the future, which, to their depressed vision, seemed
to be overhung by a sky of unrelieved blackness. Their despair was
accompanied by a smarting sense of defeat and injustice proportionate to
the circumstances. Such feelings were not confined to defeated
candidates and their immediate friends, but were participated in by
Reformers generally. Some of them began to weigh the advantages and
disadvantages of removal from the Province. Others, after the first
effervescence of disappointment had expended itself, determined to
endure in patience and to hope for the best. A comparatively small
number, yielding to the influence of mingled despair and exasperation,
began to contemplate armed resistance to authority as among the
possibilities of the near future. Constitutional resistance, they
thought, had had a fair trial. Might it not be worth while to try a more
drastic remedy?

Conspicuous among the personages who were strongly influenced by such
thoughts as those last indicated was William Lyon Mackenzie, who, as
previously mentioned, had lost his election in the Second Riding of
York. It might have been suppo