Among its most
prominent members were John Beverly Robinson, for some years
attorney-general, and eventually an able chief-justice, and the recipient
of a baronetage; William Dummer Powell, a chief-justice; John Henry
Boulton, once attorney-general; John Strachan, the first bishop of the
Episcopal Church in Upper Canada; Jonas Jones, the Sherwoods, and other
well-known names of residents of York, Niagara, Kingston, and Brockville.

It was not until 1820 that a strong opposition was organised in the
assembly against the ruling bureaucracy. The cruel treatment of Robert
Gourlay, an erratic Scotch land-agent, by the ruling class who feared his
exposure of public abuses, had much to do with creating a reform party in
the legislature. Gourlay was a mere adventurer, who found plenty of
material in the political condition of the province {345} for obtaining
the notoriety that he coveted. In the course of some inquiries he made
in connexion with a statistical work he published in later years, he
touched on some points which exposed the land monopoly and other abuses.
He was immediately declared by the "compact" to be a dangerous person,
who must be curbed by some means or other. He was tried on two occasions
for libelling the government, but acquitted. Then his enemies conspired
to accuse him most unjustly of being a seditious and dangerous person,
who came under the terms of an alien act passed in 1804. He was arrested
and kept in prison for seven months. When he was at last tried at
Niagara, the home of Toryism, he was a broken-down man, hardly in full
possession of his senses. A severe judge and prejudiced jury had no
pity, and he was forced to leave the province, to which he did not return
until happier times. The injustice which was meted out to a man who had
thrown some light on public corruption, stimulated the opponents of the
"family compact" to united action against methods so dangerous to
individual liberty and so antagonistic to the redress of public
grievances.

The disputes between the reformers and the "family compact" were
aggravated by the "clergy reserves" question, which was largely one
between the Episcopalians and the dissenting bodies. This question grew
out of the grant to the Protestant Church in Canada of large tracts of
land by the imperial act of 1791, and created much bitterness of feeling
for a quarter of a century and more. The {346} reformers found in this
question abundant material