has come up to show them how to drill. They take possession
of a newly built convent. Then on Sunday, the 3d of December, comes
word of the defeat down on the Richelieu. The moderate men plead with
Chenier to stop now before it is too late; but Chenier will not listen.
He knows the cause is right, and with the credulity or faith of a
simple child hopes some mad miracle will win the day. Still he is much
moved; tears stream down his face. Then on December 14 the church
bells ring a crazy alarm. The troops are coming, two thousand of them
from Montreal under Sir John Colborne, the governor. The insurgent
army melts like frost before the sun. Less than one hundred men stand
by poor Chenier. At eleven-thirty the troops sweep in at both ends of
the village at once, Girod, the Swiss commander, suicides in panic
flight. Cooped up in the church steeple with the flames mounting
closer round them and the troopers whooping jubilantly outside, Chenier
and his eighty followers call out: "We are done! We are sold! Let us
jump!" Chenier jumps from the steeple, is hit by the flying bullets,
and perishes as he falls. His men cower back in the flaming steeple
till it falls with a crash into the burning ruins. Amid the ash heap
are afterwards found the corpses of seventy-two patriots. The troopers
take one hundred prisoners in the region, then set fire to all houses
where loyalist flags are not waved from the windows.

Matters have now come to such an outrageous pass that the British
government can no longer ignore the fact that the colony has been
goaded to desperation by the misgovernment of the ruling clique. Lord
Durham is appointed special commissioner with extraordinary powers to
proceed to Canada and investigate the whole subject of colonial
government. One may guess that the ruling clique were prepared to take
possession of the new commissioner and prime him with facts favorable
to their side; but Durham was not a man to be monopolized by any
faction. {432} When he arrived, in May of 1838, he quickly gave proof
that he would follow his own counsels and choose his own councilors.
His first official declaration was practically an act of amnesty to the
rebels, eight only of the leading prisoners, among them Dr. Nelson,
being punished by banishment to Bermuda, the rest being simply expelled
from Canada.

This act was tantamount to a declaration that the rebels possessed some
rights and had suffered real grievanc