and then. But the Reform
press knew nothing of his designs. He was believed to be agitating for
constitutional Reform. It was of course known that he was carrying his
agitation to an unprecedented length, but it was supposed that he was
doing so for the purpose of intimidating the Government, and thereby
coercing them into concessions; and the Reform press throughout the land
was fully prepared to support him in such a course. He accordingly acted
with much greater caution than he had been wont to display in the
management of either public or private affairs. He perceived that the
machinery of vigilance committees, branch societies, public meetings and
what not, which had been so successfully set in motion under the
auspices of the Reformers, might be turned to account for
insurrectionary purposes. To a few of his friends in the country, over
whom he possessed almost unbounded influence, and who, as he knew, felt
almost as bitterly towards the Government as he himself did, he imparted
a project involving a resort to arms. Among them were Samuel Lount,
Jesse Lloyd, Silas Fletcher, Nelson Gorham and Peter Matthews. The
communication was doubtless made to the several persons at different
times, but all of those mentioned seem to have been made acquainted with
the project before the beginning of autumn. They all yielded a ready
enough acquiescence, but no thought of bloodshed was in their minds. It
was intended to get together a great body of Reformers from all over the
country, and then to advance upon the capital in the form of a monster
demonstration. This idea seems to have originated with Lount. It was at
first objected to by Mackenzie as unlikely to prove efficacious. He
urged that demonstrations had been made in his favour several years
before, and that none of them had had any effect in moderating the
policy of the Government, or in inducing the Assembly to permit him to
sit therein. He especially instanced the occasion upon which a great
crowd of the York electors had accompanied him to the House of Assembly,
and had filled the galleries and lobbies while Parliament was
sitting.[284] All this, he pointed out, had been labour in vain, and if
such a scene were to be re-enacted it must, in order to produce any
satisfactory effect, be on a very large scale indeed. His argument was
unanswerable. It was clear that any appeal to the Government's sense of
right would be made in vain, and that they could only be influenced