by
painful lessons.... Under these circumstances I beg you will make my
apology," etc. The letter appears in the _Advocate_ of March 13th, 1834,
following one to a similar purport from Dr. Rolph.

[190] It was continued for some time after by another hand, under the
name of _The Correspondent and Advocate_.

CHAPTER XIV.

SEE, THE CONQUERING HERO COMES!

[Sidenote: 1835.]

Parliament met on the 15th of January, 1835, when the Reform majority in
the Assembly were able to once more elect Mr. Bidwell to the
Speakership. The vote stood thirty-one to twenty-seven. Among the
minority were five or six Conservative members who repudiated the name
of Tory, and were opposed to the policy of the official party, to whom,
as has been seen,[191] they merely yielded a qualified support as the
less of two evils. Such being the state of affairs in the Assembly, the
Compact party were of course precluded from making any further serious
attempts to keep Mackenzie out of the House. The proceedings of previous
sessions relative to the several expulsions were upon motion of
Mackenzie himself expunged from the journals of the House. The baneful
domination letter was made the subject of a long discussion, in the
course of which Mackenzie received some exceedingly hard hits from
Solicitor-General Hagerman; but as he had been manifestly in the wrong
in giving publicity to that letter, and as he had been disciplined by
members of his party to keep silence in the event of an attack on that
score, he sat quietly through the Solicitor-General's onslaught.

The most important proceedings of the session, and the only ones of
which it is necessary to take cognizance in these pages, were those
relating to the Seventh Report of the Grievance Committee, to which
frequent reference has already been made. On Friday, the 23rd of
January, Mackenzie moved for and obtained the appointment of a Special
Committee on Grievances, with power to send for persons, papers and
records, and with authority to report to the House from time to time by
bill, address or otherwise. Mackenzie himself acted as Chairman of the
Committee, the other members of which, as finally struck, were Dr.
Morrison, David Gibson and Charles Waters, one of the members for
Prescott. The famous Seventh Report, which did more to arouse the Home
Government on the subject of Upper Canadian affairs than all previous
efforts in that direction, was completed and presented to the Assembl