What with Crown Reserves, Clergy Reserves, grants to those who had served the state, and holdings picked up by speculators from soldiers or poorer Loyalists for a few pounds or a few gallons of whisky, millions of acres were held untenanted and unimproved, waiting for a rise in value as a consequence of the toil of settlers on neighboring farms.Not one-tenth of the lands granted were occupied by the persons to whom they had been assigned.The province had given away almost all its vast heritage, and more than nine-tenths of it was still in wilderness.These speculative holdings made immensely more difficult every common neighborhood task.At best the machinery and the money for building roads, bridges, and schools were scanty, but with these unimproved reserves thrust in between the scattered shacks, the task was disheartening."The reserve of two-sevenths of the land for the Crown and clergy," declared the township of Sandwich in 1817, "must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, a hindrance to a compact and good neighborhood."A further source of discontent developed in the disabilities affecting recent American settlers.A court decision in 1824 held that no one who had resided in the United States after 1783 could possess or transmit British citizenship, with which went the right to inherit real estate.This decision bore heavily upon thousands of "late Loyalists" and more recent incomers.Under the instructions of the Colonial Office, a remedial bill was introduced in the Legislative Council in 1827, but it was a grudging, halfway measure which the Assembly refused to accept.
After several sessions of quarreling, the Assembly had its way;but in the meantime the men affected had been driven into permanent and active opposition.
The leaders of the movement of resistance which now began to gather force included all sorts and conditions of men.The fiercest and most aggressive were two Scotchmen, Robert Gourlay and William Lyon Mackenzie.Gourlay, one of those restless and indispensable cranks who make the world turn round, active, obstinate, imprudent, uncompromisingly devoted to the common good as he saw it, came to Canada in 1817 on settlement and colonization bent.Innocent inquiries which he sent broadcast as to the condition of the province gave the settlers an opportunity for voicing their pent-up discontent, and soon Gourlay was launched upon the sea of politics.Mackenzie, who came to Canada three years later, was a born agitator, fearless, untiring, a good hater, master of avitriolic vocabulary, and absolutely unpurchasable.He found his vein in weekly journalism, and for nearly forty years was the stormy petrel of Canadian politics.
From England there came, among others, Dr.John Rolph, shrewd and politic, and Captain John Matthews, a half-pay artillery officer.
Peter Perry, downright and rugged and of a homely eloquence, represented the Loyalists of the Bay of Quinte, which was the center of Canadian Methodism.Among the newer comers from the United States, the foremost were Barnabas Bidwell, who had been Attorney General of Massachusetts but had fled to Canada in 1810when accused of misappropriating public money, and his son, Marshall Spring Bidwell, one of the ablest and most single-minded men who ever entered Canadian public life.From Ireland came Dr.
William Warren Baldwin, whose son Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or self-seeking.
How were these men to bring about the reform which they desired?
Their first aim was obviously to secure a majority in the Assembly, and by the election of 1828 they attained this first object.But the limits of the power of the Assembly they soon discovered.Without definite leadership, with no control over the Administration, and with even legislative power divided, it could effect little.It was in part disappointment at the failure of the Assembly that accounted for the defeat of the Reformers in 1830, though four years later this verdict was again reversed.
Clearly the form of government itself should be changed.But in what way? Here a divergence in the ranks of the Reformers became marked.One party, looking upon the United States as the utmost achievement in democracy, proposed to follow its example in making the upper house elective and thus to give the people control of both branches of the Legislature.Another group, of whom Robert Baldwin was the chief, saw that this change would not suffice.In the States the Executive was also elected by the people.Here, where the Governor would doubtless continue to be appointed.by the Crown, some other means must be found to give the people full control.Baldwin found it in the British Cabinet system, which gave real power to ministers having the confidence of a majority in Parliament.The Governor would remain, but he would be only a figurehead, a constitutional monarch acting, like the King, only on the advice of his constitutional advisers.
