There were local councils in both Toronto
and Quebec--or Upper and Lower Canada, as they were called--and there
were local legislatures; but the governing cliques were appointed by
the Royal Governor, which meant that whatever little clique gained the
Governor's ear had its little compact or junta of friends and relatives
in power indefinitely. There were elections, but the legislature had
no control over the purse strings of the government. Such a close
corporation of special interests did the governing clique become that
the administration was known in both provinces as a "Family Compact."
Administrative abuses flourished in a rank growth. Judges owing their
appointment to the Crown exercised the most arbitrary tyranny against
patriots raising their voices against government by special interests.
Vast land grants were voted away to favorites of the Compact. Public
moneys were misused and neither account given nor restitution demanded
from the culprit. Ultra-loyalty became a fashionable pose. When
strolling actors played American airs in a Toronto theater they were
hissed; and when a Canadian stood up to those airs, he was hissed.
Special interests became intrenched behind a triple rampart of fashion
and administration and loyalty. Details of the revolt need not be
given here. A great love is always the best cure for a puny
affection--a Juliet for a Rosalind; and when a pure patriotism arose to
oust this spurious lip-loyalty, there resulted the Rebellion of 1837.

The point is--when the rebellion had passed, Canada had overthrown a
system of government by oligarchy. She had ousted special interests
forever from her legislative halls. In a blood and sweat of agony, on
the scaffold, in the chain gang, penniless, naked, hungry and in exile,
her patriots had fought the dragon of privilege, cast out the accursed
thing and founded national life on the eternal rocks of justice to all,
special privileges to none. Her patriots had themselves learned on the
scaffold that law must be as sacredly observed by the good as by the
evil, by the great as by the small. From the death scaffolds of these
patriots sprang that part of Canada's national consciousness that
reveres law next to God. Canada passed through the throes of purging
her national consciousness from 1815 to 1840, as the United States
passed through the same throes in the sixties, but the process cost her
half a century of delay in growth and development.