ion of 1837-8:--

I had long seen the country in the hands of a few shrewd, crafty,
covetous men, under whose management one of the most lovely,
desirable sections of America remained a comparative desert. The
most obvious public improvements were stayed; dissension was
created among classes; citizens were banished and imprisoned
[Gourley, Beardsley, etc.] in defiance of all law; the people had
been forbidden, under severe pains and penalties, from meeting
anywhere to petition for justice; large estates were wrested from
their owners in utter contempt of even the forms of the courts; the
Church of England, the adherents of which were few, monopolized as
much of the lands of the Colony as all the religious houses and
dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church had had the control of in
Scotland at the era of the Reformation. Other sects were treated
with contempt, and scarcely tolerated; a sordid band of
land-jobbers grasped the soil as their patrimony, and with a few
leading officials, who divided the public revenue among themselves,
formed "the family compact," and were the avowed enemies of common
schools, of civil and religious liberty, of all legislative or
other checks to their own will. Other men had opposed and been
converted by them. At nine-and-twenty I might have united with
them, but chose rather to join the oppressed; nor have I ever
regretted that choice, or wavered from the object of my early
pursuit. So far as I, or any other professed reformer, was
concerned in inviting citizens of [the United States] to interfere
in Canadian affairs, there was culpable error. So far as any of us,
at any time, may have supposed that the cause of freedom would be
advanced by adding the Canadas to [that] confederation, we were
under the merest delusion. Mr. Lindsey adds:--In some respects the
condition of the Province was worse than Mr. Mackenzie described
it. He dealt only with its political condition.

With a Scotchman's idea of justice and freedom, he felt a longing desire
to right the wrongs which he saw everywhere around him. This, therefore,
constituted, as he believed, his mission as a public man in Canada, and
it furnishes the key to his life and character.

Mr. Mackenzie was a political pessimist. He looked upon every abuse
which he attacked, with a somewhat severe, i