This, Dr. Ryerson soon discovered on his first visit to England, in
1833, and in his personal intercourse with the Colonial Secretaries and
other public men in London. The manly generosity of his nature recoiled
from being a party to the misrepresentation and injustice which was
current in Canada, when he had satisfied himself of the true state of
the case. He, therefore, on his return to the Province, gave the public
the benefit of his observation and experience in England.

In the light of to-day what he wrote appears fair and reasonable. It was
the natural expression of pleased surprise that men and things in
England were not so bad as had been represented; and that there was no
just cause for either alarm or ill feeling. His comparisons of parties
in England and in Canada were by extreme political leaders in Canada
considered odious. Hence the storm of invective which his observations
raised.

He showed incidentally that the real enemies to Canada were not those
who ruled at Downing Street, but those who set themselves up--within the
walls of Parliament in England and their prompters in Canada--as the
exponents of the views and feelings of the Canadian people.

The result of such a proceeding on Dr. Ryerson's part can easily be
imagined. Mr. Hume in England, and Mr. W. L. Mackenzie in Canada, took
the alarm. They very properly reasoned that if Dr. Ryerson's views
prevailed, their occupation as agitators and fomenters of discontent
would be gone. Hence the extraordinary vehemence which characterized
their denunciations of the writer who had so clearly exposed (as he did
more fully at a later period of the controversy), the disloyalty of
their aims, and the revolutionary character of their schemes.

This assault on Dr. Ryerson was entirely disproportionate to the cause
of offence. Were it not that the moral effect of what he wrote--more
than what he actually said--was feared, because addressed to a people
who had always listened to his words with deep attention and great
respect, it is likely that his words would have passed unchallenged and
unheeded.

* * * * *

I have given more than usual prominence to this period of Dr. Ryerson's
history--although he has left no record of it in the "Story" which he
had written. But I have done so in justice to himself, and from the fact
that it marked an important epoch in his life and in the history of the
Province. It was an event in which