This unjust sentence created wide-spread indignation among all right-thinking people, especially as it followed a message of the lieutenant-governor to the legislature, that he did not feel justified in extending the grants of land, made to actors in the war of 1812-15, to “any of the inhabitants who composed the late convention of delegates, the proceedings of which were very properly subjected to your very severe animadversion” This undoubtedly illegal action of the lieutenant-governor only escaped the censure of the assembly by the casting vote of the speaker, but was naturally justified in the legislative council where Chief Justice Powell presided.  Gourlay became a martyr in the opinion of a large body of people, and a Reform party began to grow up in the country.  The man himself disappeared for years from Canadian history, and did not return to the province until 1856, after a chequered and unhappy career in Great Britain and the United States.  The assembly of the United Canadas in 1842 declared his arrest to be “unjust and illegal,” and his sentence “null and void,” and he was offered a pension as some compensation for the injuries he had received; but he refused it unless it was accompanied by an official declaration of the illegality of the conviction and its elision from the records of the courts.  The Canadian government thought he should be satisfied with the action of the assembly and the offer of the pension.  Gourlay died abroad, and his daughters on his death received the money which he rejected with the obstinacy so characteristic of his life.

During these days of struggle we find most prominent among the official class Attorney-General Robinson, afterwards chief justice of Upper Canada for many years.  He was the son of a Virginian Loyalist, and a Tory of extreme views, calm, polished, and judicial in his demeanour.  But whatever his opinions on the questions of the day he was too discreet a politician and too honest a judge ever to have descended to such a travesty of justice as had been shown by his predecessor in the case of Gourlay.  His influence, however was never in the direction of liberal measures.  He opposed responsible government and the union of the two provinces, both when proposed unsuccessfully in 1822, and when carried in Upper Canada eighteen years later.

The elections of 1825 had a very important influence on the political conditions of the upper province, since they brought into the assembly Peter Perry, Dr. Rolph, and Marshall Spring Bidwell, who became leading actors in the Reform movement which culminated in the concession of responsible government.  But the most conspicuous man from 1826 until 1837 was William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scotchman of fair education, who came to Canada in 1820, and eventually embraced journalism as the profession most suited to his controversial temperament.  Deeply imbued with a spirit of liberalism in politics, courageous and even defiant in the expression