Is there a reader nowadays that sees anything very startling in the enunciation of the following principles?--"The control of the whole revenue to be in the people's representatives; the Legislative Council to be elective; the representation in the House of Assembly to be as equally proportioned to the population as possible; the Executive Government to incur a real responsibility; the law of primogeniture to be abolished; impartiality in the selection of juries to be secured; the Judiciary to be independent; the military to be in strict subordination to the civil authorities; equal rights to the several members of the community; every vestige of Church-and-State union to be done away; the lands and all the revenues of the country to be under the control of the country; and education to be widely, carefully and impartially diffused; to these may be added the choice of our own Governor." These were the political principles sought to be established in the Governments of Canada by the party referred to, as set forth in the terms just given (almost _verbatim_) in Patrick Swift's Almanac, a well known popular, annual _brochure_ of Mr. McKenzie's. It seems singular now, in the retrospect, that doctrines such as these should have created a ferment. But there is this to be said: it does not appear that there were, at the time, in the ranks of the party in power, any persons of very superior intellectual gifts or of a wide range of culture or historical knowledge: so that it was not likely that, on that side, there would be a ready relinquishment of political traditions, of inherited ideas, which their possessors had never dreamt of rationally analyzing, and which they deemed it all but treason to call in question. And moreover it is to be remembered that the chief propagandist of the doctrines of reform, although very intelligent and ready of speech, did not himself possess the dignity and repose of character which give weight to the utterances of public men. Hence, with the persons who really stood in need of instruction and enlightenment, his words had an irritating, rather than a conciliatory and convincing effect. This was a fault which it was not in his power to remedy. For his microscopic vision and restless temperament, while they fitted him to be a very clever local reformer, a very clever local editor, unfitted him for the grand _role_ of a national statesman, or heroic conductor of a revolution. Accordingly, although the principles advocated by him finally obtained the ascendancy, posterity only regards him as the Wilkes, the Cobbett, or the Hunt of his day, in the annals of his adopted country. In the interval between the outbreak or feint at outbreak in 1838, and 1850, the whole Canadian community made a great advance in general intelligence, and statesmen of a genuine quality began to appear in our Parliaments.