used as a political dodge.

The persecution of Robert Gourlay was yet more outrageous.

He had come to Canada soon after the War of 1812, and in the course of
collecting statistics for a book on the colony was quick to realize how
Canada's progress was being literally gagged by the policy of the
ruling clique. Gourlay attacked the local magistrates in the press.
He pointed out that the land grants were notorious. He advocated
bombarding the evils from two sides at once, by appealing to the home
government and by {416} holding local conventions of protest. The pass
to which things had come may be realized by the attitude of the
council. It held that the colony must hold no communications with the
imperial government except through the Governor General; in other
words, individual appeals not passing through the hands of the
legislative council were to be regarded as illegal. It is sad to have
to acknowledge that such a palpably dishonest measure was ever
countenanced by people in their right minds. But "_the family
compact_" went a step farther. It passed an order forbidding meetings
to discuss public grievances. This part of Canada's story reads more
like Russia than America, and shows to what length men will go when
special privileges rather than equal rights prevail in a country.
Gourlay met these infamous measures by penning some witty doggerel,
headed "Gagged, gagged, by Jingo!" The editor in whose paper Gourlay's
writings had appeared, was arrested, and the offending sheet was
compelled to suspend. Gourlay himself is arrested for sedition and
libel at least four times, but each time the jury acquits him. At any
cost the governing clique must get rid of this scribbling fellow, whose
pen voices the rising discontent. An alien act, passed before the War
of 1812, compelling the deportation of seditious persons, is revived.
Under the terms of the act Gourlay is arrested, tried, and sentenced to
be exiled, but Gourlay declares he is not an alien. He is a British
subject, and he refuses to leave the country. He is thrown in jail at
Niagara, and for a year and a half left in a moldy, close cell. One
dislikes to write that this outrage on British justice was perpetrated
under Chief Justice Powell, whose failure to obtain decisions from the
jury in the Red River trials brought down such harsh criticism on the
bench. At the end of twenty months Gourlay is again hauled before the
jury and sentenced to deportati