The leaders of the movement of resistance which now began to gather force included all sorts and conditions of men. The fiercest and most aggressive were two Scotchmen, Robert Gourlay and William Lyon Mackenzie. Gourlay, one of those restless and indispensable cranks who make the world turn round, active, obstinate, imprudent, uncompromisingly devoted to the common good as he saw it, came to Canada in 1817 on settlement and colonization bent. Innocent inquiries which he sent broadcast as to the condition of the province gave the settlers an opportunity for voicing their pent-up discontent, and soon Gourlay was launched upon the sea of politics. Mackenzie, who came to Canada three years later, was a born agitator, fearless, untiring, a good hater, master of avitriolic vocabulary, and absolutely unpurchasable. He found his vein in weekly journalism, and for nearly forty years was the stormy petrel of Canadian politics. From England there came, among others, Dr. John Rolph, shrewd and politic, and Captain John Matthews, a half-pay artillery officer. Peter Perry, downright and rugged and of a homely eloquence, represented the Loyalists of the Bay of Quinte, which was the center of Canadian Methodism. Among the newer comers from the United States, the foremost were Barnabas Bidwell, who had been Attorney General of Massachusetts but had fled to Canada in 1810 when accused of misappropriating public money, and his son, Marshall Spring Bidwell, one of the ablest and most single-minded men who ever entered Canadian public life. From Ireland came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or self-seeking.