y but has told me that the greatest boon
which could be conferred on the country would be that they should be
swept into the Atlantic, and that nobody should get them. My Bill[54]
has gone through the Assembly by a considerable majority, thirty to
twenty, and I feel confident that I can get it through the {54} Council
without the change of a word. If it is really carried, it is the
greatest work that ever has been done in this country, and will be of
more solid advantage to it than all the loans and all the troops you
can make or send. It is worth ten unions, and was ten times more
difficult."[55]

It is a melancholy comment on the ecclesiastical interpretation of
religion that, ten years later, when the firmly expressed desires of
all moderate men had given the Bishop of Toronto a good excuse for
acquiescence in Sydenham's _status quo_, that pugnacious ecclesiastic
still fought to save as much of the monopoly as could be secured.[56]

With the Clergy Reserve dispute, the region of politics has been
reached; and, after all, politics furnished the most powerful influence
in the young Canadian community. But politics must be taken less in
the constitutional sense, as has been the custom with Canadian writers,
and more in the social and human sense. It is important also to note
the broad stretches of Canadian existence {55} into which they hardly
intruded. Political questions found few exponents among the pioneers
as they cleared the forests, or gathered lumber for the British market,
or pushed far to the west and north in pursuit of furs. Even the
Rebellion, when news of it reached Strickland and his fellow-settlers
in the Peterborough country, came to them less as part of a prolonged
struggle in which they all were taking part, than as an abnormal
incident, to be ended outright by loyal strength. They hardly seem to
have thought that any liberties of theirs were really endangered. When
Mackenzie himself complained that instead of entering Toronto with four
or five thousand men, he found himself at the head of a poor two
hundred, he does not seem to have realized that, even had his
fellow-conspirators not mismanaged things, it would still have been
difficult to keep hard-working settlers keyed up to the pitch of
revolutionary and abstract doctrines.[57] There must have been many
settlers of the temper of the humble Scottish janitor in Queen's
College, Kingston, who wrote, in the midst of the struggle of parties