nce of the judges, an elective Legislative
Council, and a curtailment of the arbitrary powers and privileges of the
Executive, which led to gross jobbery, favouritism, and extravagance. As
in Upper Canada, the greatest practical grievance, though it assumed a
somewhat different form, was the disposal of the public lands. Here,
too, there were extensive and undeveloped Clergy Reserves for the
Episcopalian Church, as well as free grants on a large scale to
speculators. The estates of the Jesuit Order had been confiscated, so
that disputes about their disposal were tinged with religious
bitterness. But most of the friction over the land question came from
the operations of a chartered land company, which, under the protection
of the Government, and with financial and political support from
England, dealt with the unsettled land in a manner very unfair and often
corrupt, and promoted here, as in Upper Canada and Ireland, absentee
ownership.
The popular agitation ran the same course as in Upper Canada, reached
its crisis at the same moment, threw into prominence the same types of
men, moderate and extreme, and produced the same waste of good human
material and distortion of human character, both in the ascendant and
the subject classes. As Sir John Cockburn tells us in his "Political
Annals of Canada" (p. 177), some of the most incendiary speakers and
writers (in 1836) were "most able and worthy men, who in the subsequent
days of tranquillity occupied most prominent and distinguished positions
in the public service, revered as loyal, true, and able statesmen by all
classes." The popular movement was by no means wholly French. A Scot,
John Neilson; an Englishman, Wilfred Nelson; and an Irish journalist,
Dr. O'Callaghan, were prominent members of a kind of Radical party; but
the ablest and most influential among the agitators, and in every
respect more admirable than Mackenzie, was the Frenchman, Louis
Papineau, who first became Speaker of the Assembly in 1817, and retained
that high position until the verge of the rebellion of 1837. By no means
devoid of superficial faults, but eloquent, honest, accomplished and
adored by his compatriots, here was a man who, if he had been given
reasonable scope for his talents, and steadied by official
responsibility, would have been a tower of strength to the Colony and
the British connection. He corresponds in position and aims, and to a
certain extent in character and gifts, to his great
|