while proposals for taxation and the state of the marriage law gave a field for difference of opinion and debate. When the session was over, Simcoe reported that he found the members of the Assembly ‘active and zealous for particular measures, which were soon shown to be improper or futile’, and the Council ‘cautious and moderate, a valuable check upon precipitate measures’.[205] [Sidenote: Simcoe.] John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, was the son of a naval officer who died when serving under Admiral Saunders in the fleet which helped to take Quebec. The son, who derived his second name from another sailor, his godfather Admiral Graves, was born in 1752. He was born in Northumberland, but after his father’s death, his mother made her home in Devonshire. He was educated at Exeter Grammar School, at Eton, and at Merton College, Oxford, and he joined the army in 1771, when he was nineteen years old. He served with much distinction in the War of Independence, in which he commanded a Loyalist Corps, known as the Queen’s Rangers. When the war ended, he held the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After his return to England in bad health he spent some years at his family home in Devonshire, he married, and in 1790 became a member of Parliament, sitting for the borough of St. Mawes in Cornwall. His Parliamentary career was very short, for in 1791, before he was yet forty years of age, Pitt appointed him to be Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. He left Canada in 1796, and soon after he reached England he was sent out as Governor to St. Domingo. After a few months in the island, the state of his health compelled him to come home. He became a lieutenant-general, and was appointed to be Commander-in-Chief in India in succession to Lord Lake, but he never took up the appointment. Prior to going out he was sent to Lisbon in 1806 on a special mission, was taken ill, and brought home to die. He died at Exeter in October, 1806. There is a monument to him by Flaxman in Exeter Cathedral[206], and in Canada his name is borne by Lake Simcoe. He was not only a good soldier, but a capable, vigorous, public-spirited man, well suited in many ways to be the pioneer governor of a new province. He was strong on questions of military defence and a great road maker. He made Yonge Street, the road from Toronto north to Lake Simcoe, called after Sir George Yonge then Secretary of State for War and afterwards for a short time Governor of the Cape; and he made Dundas Street, christened after the Secretary of State for the Colonies, which then started from the point on Lake Ontario where the city of Hamilton now stands and, running west, connected with the river Thames. [Sidenote: York or Toronto.] [Sidenote: Simcoe’s views as to the seat of government for Upper Canada.]