content, though Upper
Canada was no worse off in that respect than the mother-country prior to
the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832. For years before the Rebellion,
the little district towns of Niagara, Brockville and Cornwall each
enjoyed the privilege of sending a representative to the Assembly. All
three of them were notoriously rotten boroughs--as rotten as Gatton,
Grampound or Old Sarum--and always returned Tory members prepared to do
the bidding of the Executive. By such means was the Assembly corrupted,
and the elective franchise turned into an instrument of oppression. Some
of the salaries of public officials were altogether out of proportion
to the state of the revenue, and to the nature and extent of the duties
performed. Certain highly-paid offices were the merest sinecures, and
had been created for no other purpose than to provide for serviceable
tools of the Administration. The practice of permitting judges to sit
and vote in the Legislature needs no comment. Whatever justification
there might have been for such a union of functions in the first infancy
of the Province, when educated men were few in the land, there was
certainly none in the days when Chief Justice Robinson was Speaker of
the Legislative Council. The effect of making the tenure of office of
judges and other dignitaries dependent on the will of the Executive was
such as has attended upon such a system in all countries where it has
been in vogue. The officials were selected almost entirely from one
political party, and had always an eye upon the nod of their
taskmasters, who had the power to make or unmake them. Whenever it was
desirable, in the supposed interests of the Executive, that the
authority of the courts should be strained to the perversion of
judgment, the dispensing of even-handed justice was altogether a
secondary consideration. Mr. Gourlay's case, to say nothing of that of
Bartemus Ferguson, affords a sufficient illustration of the extent to
which the traditions of the Star Chamber were revived in Upper Canadian
practice, when it was thought desirable to crush a champion of popular
liberty and equal rights.

Such were a few of the burdens which the people of Upper Canada were
compelled to bear in the by-gone epoch when tyranny reigned supreme
throughout the Province: when

"the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,"

were the all too frequ