tra-Radicals, and had to be handled with extreme delicacy.
Others were chary of any concerted action with the Lower Canadians on
account of the latter's religious faith. In several instances, moreover,
the meetings were actually broken up by the Tories, in whose ears the
language used by Mackenzie and his coadjutors was neither more nor less
than treason. In other instances, though the opposition was not
effective enough to actually break up the meetings, it was found
impossible to carry any resolutions founded upon the Declaration. In
two cases the meetings were broken up in confusion by local bodies of
Orangemen, and a number of persons sustained more or less physical
violence. Such incidents as these, however, were the exception, and not
the rule. Out of all the meetings--considerably more than a hundred in
number[283]--held between the adoption of the Declaration and the actual
outbreak of rebellion, seventy-five per cent seem to have passed off
without serious disturbance or interference. Most of those who
disapproved of the meetings staid away from them, and regarded those who
promoted them with settled hostility, frequently accompanied by
contempt. Of those who attended and supported the resolutions, a very
small number had any suspicion that matters were shaping themselves, or
were being shaped by Mackenzie, towards rebellion.

As for Mackenzie himself, he seems to have been intent on mischief
during the whole summer of this eventful year. He however recognized the
necessity of moving slowly, for no one knew better than he that a very
small percentage of the Reformers of the Province could be brought to
sanction such a project as rebellion under his auspices. What they might
have been disposed to do if rebellion had been mooted by Robert Baldwin,
Bidwell, Rolph, and other eminent Reformers, it would now be idle to
inquire. It would be as profitless as to discuss what would have been
the fate of the Revolution of 1688 if James the Second had died while he
was Duke of York. The mental constitution of Baldwin and Bidwell were
such that it would have been an impossibility for them to take part in a
rebellion, and the general belief with respect to Rolph was that his
doing so was equally out of the question. All this was well known to
Mackenzie. He also well knew that the Reform press would have promptly
denounced him had his designs been known. If he had encountered such
denunciation his bubble would have burst there