ands, and sailed from New York on the 1st of May.
In due course he reached his destination, and put himself into
communication with Hume, Roebuck, Cobbett, O'Connell, and other eminent
persons of Liberal proclivities, including Lord Goderich, the Colonial
Secretary.

The reader hardly needs to be informed that this was a momentous period
in the history of England. It was the epoch of Reform, and the nation
was in a state of ferment. During the brief space while Mackenzie had
been crossing the Atlantic great events had taken place. Earl Grey's
ministry had resigned; Sir Robert Peel had refused to join the Duke of
Wellington in an attempt to form a Government; and Earl Grey had resumed
office, armed with the King's written authority to Lord Brougham and
himself to create as many peers as might be necessary to ensure the
passing of the Reform Bill. This authority it did not become necessary
to exercise. The titled aristocracy bowed to the unconquerable will of a
great and thoroughly-aroused people, and Mackenzie reached London in
time to hear the third reading of the Great Bill in the House of Lords.
He was soon afterwards received at the Colonial Office, not as the
representative of any particular class of Canadian politicians, but as a
person interested in Canadian affairs, and able to afford much valuable
information concerning them.[153] He then found that the efforts of the
official party in Upper Canada to render his mission inoperative had not
been barren of results. Petitions had been received at the Colonial
Office in which entire satisfaction was expressed with the existing laws
and institutions of the Province; and the signatures thereto slightly
exceeded in number those appended to the petitions of which he himself
had been the bearer. He however devoted himself with characteristic
energy to the presentation of his case, and prepared a memoir wherein
all the most serious grievances of the Upper Canadian people were set
forth in detail. In this document the writer adopted a discursive and
rhetorical style which, as the Colonial Secretary justly remarked, were
"singularly ill adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and
importance to a definite issue." The facts were nevertheless pretty
comprehensively embodied, and were generally speaking of such a
character as to tell their own story. The perusal of the memoir seems to
have produced an impression upon the Colonial Secretary's mind. He wrote
a long and el