But extraordinary acts and extraordinary words were not confined to Canada. It was reserved for a member of Parliament, a British statesman, to pen words the repetition of which alone was sufficient to overturn the feelings of the majority of the thinking and well-intentioned portion of the colony. Never did Tory press or Tory lips tire of abusing saddle-bag doctors and saddle-bag ministers as the purveyors of treason, the latter, in guise of Methodist preacher, supposed to scatter seeds of faith and sedition with the same hand. Strangely enough, Dr. Ryerson, the most prominent Methodist in the country, was Tory enough to provoke the wrath of the radical Mr. Hume. In a letter to Mackenzie, so abusive that all must wonder a gentleman could write it, Hume made the clergyman an object of abuse in words which stamped the receiver as well as the writer everything their most ardent enemies desired and believed them to be. That letter did more for Loyalism in Upper Canada than the concentrated action of Governor, oligarchy, and Tory press could ever do to hurt it. Mackenzie, to work off a private spleen of his own against Dr. Ryerson, published the obnoxious document without comment. Vain was it for its author to hasten to say “that the misrule of the Government of Canada, and the monopolizing, selfish domination of such men as had lately (though but a small faction of the people) resisted all improvement and reform, would lose the countenance of the authorities in Downing Street, and leave the people in freedom to manage their own affairs.” The mischief was done. On the one hand, many of the most reputable of that body through which amelioration of condition might be hoped to come were forever divorced from a party that could voice such sentiments; and on the other, it placed a weapon ready to the hand of those men who, the incarnation of Toryism, honestly believed themselves to be the only conservers of loyalty left. By noon of that day, in May, ’34, when the “copious extracts” were published by Mackenzie, he and the writer of them were execrated by many who, an hour before that electrical sheet was issued, had been friends or silent sympathisers. The whole country was under baneful domination; but not of the mother-land. Great provocations had brought just condemnations, and the match was about to be put to the torch. The rights of the people and the prerogative of the Crown bade fair to become parallel lines that could not meet. Some still believed in a brighter future; but the few streaks of light which they declared they could discern in that darkest hour before dawn were blood-red. Day was to be ushered in with much woe, although more than one writer has been found to call Rebellion “a magniloquent word” as applied to all the unsettled humours of the land in that episode of Canadian history.