ey were only eight in
number, but they were such men as Wolfred Nelson and Robert Bouchette,
whose treason was open and notorious. They knew, and Durham knew, that
they could not obtain a fair trial. Therefore the High Commissioner
overleapt the law, and by an ordinance banished these ringleaders to
Bermuda during Her Majesty's pleasure. Durham was much pleased at this
happy solution of a difficult and delicate problem. He congratulated
himself, as well he might, on having terminated a rebellion without
shedding a drop of blood. 'The {16} guilty have received justice, the
misguided, mercy,' he wrote to the Queen, 'but at the same time,
security is afforded to the loyal and peaceable subjects of this
hitherto distracted Province.' Furthermore, his proceedings had been
'approved by all parties--Sir J. Colborne and all the British party,
the Canadians and all the French party.' Durham fancied that this
question was now settled, and that he could proceed unhampered with his
main task of reconstruction. But his justifiable satisfaction was not
to last long.

While the High Commissioner was labouring in Canada, as few officials
have ever laboured, for the good of the Empire, his enemies and his
lukewarm friends in England were between them preparing his downfall.
Of his foes, the most bitter and unscrupulous was Brougham, a political
Ishmael, a curious compound of malignity and versatile intellectual
power. He had criticized Durham's delay in starting for Canada; and he
was only too glad of the handle which the autocratic, czar-like
ordinance of banishment to Bermuda offered him against his enemy. It
is nearly always in the power of a party politician to distort and
misrepresent the act {17} of an opponent, however just or blameless
that act may be. Brougham made a great pother about the rights of
freemen, usurpation, dictatorship. As a lawyer he raised the legal
point, that Durham could not banish offenders from Canada to a colony
over which he had no jurisdiction. He enlisted other lawyers on his
side to attack the composition of Durham's council. The storm Brougham
raised might have done no harm, if Durham's political allies had stood
by him like men. But the prime minister Melbourne, always a timorous
friend, bent before the blast, and Durham's ordinance was disallowed.
The High Commissioner, who had been granted such great powers, was held
to have exceeded those powers. Durham belonged to the caste which