or was
assisted, mostly ruled, by an Executive Council, consisting for the most
part of salaried officers, judges, and members of the Legislative
Council, who were not responsible either to the Governor or to the
Legislative Council, or to the House of Assembly--an independent,
irresponsible body--an oligarchy which exercised great power, was very
intolerant, and became very odious.

The first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada was General John Graves
Simcoe, who had commanded the Queen's Rangers in the revolutionary war;
he was a landed gentleman, elected to the British House of Commons, in
which he supported the Constitutional Act of 1791, and afterwards
accepted the office of Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada created by
that Act, and did all in his power to give beneficial effect to it. He
arrived in Upper Canada the 8th of July, 1792, when the members of the
Executive and Legislative Councils were sworn in at Kingston, and writs
were issued for the election of members of the Legislative Assembly.

After much hesitation and perplexity, the seat of government was first
established at a village then called Newark, now Niagara, at the mouth
of the Niagara River, where the Governor built a small frame house which
had to serve as a Parliament House, as well as residence for the
Lieutenant-Governor. The Governor, with the usual state and ceremony,
opened the first session of the first Parliament of Upper Canada the
17th of September, 1792. There were present three members of the
Legislative Council and five members of the House of Assembly. The
members of the Assembly have been represented as "plain, home-spun clad
farmers and merchants, from the plough and the store." The members of
the Legislature have always, for the most part, been such from that day
to this, but many of the members of the first Parliament of Upper Canada
had possessed respectable, and some of them luxurious homes, from which
they had been exiled by narrow-minded and bitter enemies; they had
fought on battle fields for the country whose forests they now burned
and felled; their home-spun garments were some of the fruits of their
own industry, and that of their wives and daughters. Eight years had
elapsed since 10,000 of these United Empire Loyalists, driven from their
homes in the States, came into the dense wilderness of Upper Canada, to
hew out homes for themselves and their families in the vast solitude,
the silence of which was only broken by t