office
in 1826 by a number of young men, relatives of the principal
officials--one of them actually the private secretary of the
lieutenant-governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland. Mr. Mackenzie obtained
large damages in the courts, and was consequently able to continue the
publication of his paper at a time when he was financially embarrassed.
The sympathy felt for Mr. Mackenzie brought him into the assembly as
member for York during the session of 1829. So obnoxious did he become
to the governing class that he was expelled four times from the assembly
between 1831 and 1834, and prevented from taking his seat by the orders
of the speaker in 1835--practically the fifth expulsion. In 1832 he went
to England and presented largely signed petitions asking for a redress
of grievances. He appears to have made some impression on English
statesmen, and the colonial minister recommended a few reforms to the
lieutenant-governor, but they were entirely ignored by the official
party. Lord Glenelg also disapproved of the part taken by
Attorney-General Boulton--Mr. Robinson being then chief justice--and
Solicitor-General Hagerman in the expulsion of Mr. Mackenzie; but they
treated the rebuke with contempt and were removed from office for again
assisting in the expulsion of Mr. Mackenzie.

In 1834 he was elected first mayor of Toronto, then incorporated under
its present name, as a consequence of the public sympathy aroused in his
favour by his several expulsions. Previous to the election of 1835, in
which he was returned to the assembly, he made one of the most serious
blunders of his life, in the publication of a letter from Mr. Joseph
Hume, the famous Radical, whose acquaintance he had made while in
England. Mr. Hume emphatically stated his opinion that "a crisis was
fast approaching in the affairs of Canada which would terminate in
independence and freedom from the baneful domination of the mother
country, and the tyrannical conduct of a small and despicable faction in
the colony." The official class availed themselves of this egregious
blunder to excite the indignation of the Loyalist population against Mr.
Mackenzie and other Reformers, many of whom, like the Baldwins and
Perrys, disavowed all sympathy with such language. Mr. Mackenzie's
motive was really to insult Mr. Ryerson, with whom he had quarrelled.
Mr. Ryerson in the _Christian Guardian_, organ of the Methodists, had
attacked Mr. Hume as a person unfit to present petitions from