Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the last Fifty Years: An AutobiographyThompson, Samuel
History
Reminiscences of a Canadian Pioneer for the last Fifty Years: An Autobiography
Thompson, Samuel
Frontier and pioneer life -- Ontario; Thompson, Samuel, 1810-1886; Toronto (Ont.) -- Biography; Toronto (Ont.) -- History
"As a boy, I had a sincere admiration for his [Sir Francis's]
devoted loyalty, and genuine English character; and I have since
learnt to respect and appreciate with greater discrimination his
great services to the Crown and Empire. He was a little Quixotic
perhaps. He had a marked individuality of his own. But he was as
true as steel, and most staunch to British law and British
principle in the trying days of his administration in Canada.
His loyalty was chivalrous and magnetic; by his enlightened
enthusiasm in a good cause he evoked a true spirit of loyalty in
Upper Canada, that had well-nigh become extinct, being overlaid
with the spirit of ultra-radicalism that had for years
previously got uppermost among our people. But Upper Canada
loyalty had a deep and solid foundation in the patriotism of the
U. E. Loyalists, a noble race who had proved by deeds, not
words, their attachment to the Crown and government of the
mother land. These U. E. Loyalists were the true founders of
Upper Canada; and they were forefathers of whom we may be justly
proud--themselves 'honouring the father and the mother'--their
sovereign and the institutions under which they were born--they
did literally obtain the promised reward of that 'first
commandment with promise,' viz.: length of days and honour."
* * * * *
William Lyon Mackenzie was principally remarkable for his indomitable
perseverance and unhesitating self-reliance. Of toleration for other
men's opinions, he seems to have had none. He did, or strove to do,
whatsoever he himself thought right, and those who differed with him he
denounced in the most unmeasured terms. For example, writing of the
Imperial Government in 1837, he says:
"Small cause have Highlanders and the descendants of Highlanders
to feel a friendship for the Guelphic family. If the Stuarts had
their faults, they never enforced loyalty in the glens and
valleys of the north by banishing and extirpating the people; it
was reserved for the Brunswickers to give, as a sequel to the
massacre of Glencoe, the cruel order for depopulation. I am
proud of my descent from a rebel race; who held borrowed
chieftains, a scrip nobility, rag money and national debt in
abomination. . . . Words cannot express my contempt at
witnessing the servile, crouching attitude of the country of my
choice. If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or
Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-born
Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth, who would dare
to insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler,
of such an equivocal character as this Mr. what do they call
him--Francis Bond Head."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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