Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 516
The sum and substance of the wishes of the petitioners appears in the sixth of their recommendations, in which they pray “that a legislative Act be made in the provincial parliament to facilitate the mode in which the present constitutional responsibility of the advisers of the local government may be carried practically into effect; not only by the removal of these advisers from office when they lose the confidence of the people, but also by impeachment for the heavier offenses chargeable against them.” The petition was forwarded for presentation to Viscount Goderich and the Hon. E. G. Stanley, from each of whom Dr. Baldwin duly received replies. A quotation from the latter sent by Stanley, who became shortly afterwards colonial secretary, may serve to show to how great an extent the British statesmen of the period failed to grasp the position of affairs in Upper Canada. “On the last and one of the most important topics,” wrote Stanley, “namely, the appointment of a local ministry subject to removal or impeachment when they lose the confidence of the people, I conceive there would be great difficulty in arranging such a plan, . . . for in point of fact the remedy is not one of enactment but of practice — and a constitutional mode is open to the people, of addressing for a removal BALDWIN OF THE ASSEMBLY of advisers of the Crown and refusing supplies, if necessary to enforce their wishes.” The dispatch was a polite refusal of ministerial responsibility, hidden behind suggestions which experience had proved to be entirely inadequate.
In this same year (1829) Robert Baldwin first entered the legislature of the province. John Beverley Robinson, the member for York and attorney-general, had been promoted to the office of chief-justice of the court of king’s bench, his seat in the assembly being thereby vacated. Baldwin contested the seat and was successful in his canvas, being strongly aided by the influence of William Lyon Mackenzie. A petition against his election, on the ground of an irregularity in the writ, caused him to be temporarily unseated, but in the second election Baldwin was again successful and entered the legislature on January 8th, 1830. In the ensuing session he appears to have played no very conspicuous part, his membership being brought to a premature termination by the death of George IV. The demise of the Crown necessitating a dissolution of the House. Baldwin again Presented himself to the electors of York, but was defeated in the ensuing election through which the Reformers lost control of the Assembly. During the year that ensued he had no active share in the government of the country but continued to be prominent among the ranks of the moderate Reformers of York with whom his influence was constantly on the increase. To his professional career also he devoted an assiduous attention. He had, in 1827, married Augusta Elizabeth Sullivan, whose mother was a sister of Dr. William Baldwin. He now (1829) entered into partnership with his wife’s brother, Robert Baldwin Sullivan, who had been his fellow-student in his father’s law office, a young man whose showy intellectual brilliance and lack of conviction contrasted with the conscientious application of his painstaking cousin. Of Baldwin’s public life there is, however, during this period, nothing to record until the advent of Sir Francis Bond Head brought him for the first time into public office.
Among the intimate associates of the Baldwins in the year preceding the rebellion, there was no one who sympathized more entirely with their political views than Francis Hincks. Hincks came to Canada in the year 1830. He was born at Cork on December 14th, 1807, and descended from an old Cheshire family which for two generations had been resident in Ireland, in which country he spent his youth. He received at the Royal Belfast Institution a sound classical training. He had early conceived a wish to embark in commercial life, which his father, the Rev. T. D. Hincks, a minister of the Irish Presbyterian Church, did not see fit to combat. He entered as an articled clerk in the business house of John Martin & Co., Belfast, FRANCIS HINCKS where he spent five years. On the termination of his period of apprenticeship Hincks resolved to see something of the world and sailed for the West Indies (1830), visiting Barbadoes, Demerara and Trinidad. At Barbadoes, he accidentally fell in with a Mr. George Ross of Quebec, by whom he was persuaded to sail for Canada. After spending some time in Montreal he determined to visit Upper Canada and set out for the town of York, travelling after the arduous fashion of those days “by stage and schooner,” a journey which occupied ten days. Hincks spent the winter of 1830-1 at York, conceived a most favourable idea of the commercial possibilities of the little capital, and interested himself at once in the threatening political crisis. He was a frequent visitor at the Parliament House where he listened to the exciting debates of the session, in which Mackenzie was denounced as a “reptile” and a “spaniel dog,” and expelled by the indignant majority of the Tory faction. Early in 1831 he left Canada for Belfast to “fulfil a matrimonial engagement” which he had already contracted. The matrimonial engagement being duly fulfilled (July, 1832), Hincks returned to Canada to settle in York. Here he became one of the promoters and a director of the Farmers’ Joint Stock Banking Company from which, however, he soon retired on account of its connection with the Family Compact. In company with two or three other seceding directors he joined the Bank of the People, which was established in the interests of the Reform party. Of this bank Hincks was manager during the troubled period of the rebellion. With Robert Baldwin and his father the young banker had already formed an intimate connection. Hincks’s house at No. 21 Yonge Street was next door to the house occupied at this time by the Baldwins, to whom both houses belonged. The acquaintance thus formed between the families ripened into a close friendship from the time of his arrival at York. Hincks’s practical good sense had led him to sympathize with the moderate party of Reform, and he now found in Robert Baldwin an associate whose political views harmonized entirely with his own. In addition to his management of the Bank of the People, Hincks was active in other commercial enterprises. He became the secretary of the Mutual Assurance Company, founded at Toronto shortly after his coming, and appears also to have carried on a wholesale warehouse business at his premises on Yonge Street. That his eminent financial abilities met with ready recognition, is seen from the fact that he was appointed, in 1833, one of the examiners to inspect the accounts of SIR FRANCIS BOND HEAD the Welland Canal, at that time the subject of a parliamentary investigation. The practical experience and insight into the commercial life of the colony which Hincks thus early acquired, enabled him presently to bring to the financial affairs of Canada the trained capacity of an expert.
At the time when Baldwin, Hincks, and their friends among the constitutional Reformers of Upper Canada were viewing with alarm the increasing bitterness which separated the rival parties, a new lieutenant-governor arrived in the province whose coming was destined to bring matters rapidly to a crisis. Francis Bond Head was one of those men whose misfortune it was to have greatness thrust upon them unsought. He was awakened one night at his country home in Kent by a king’s messenger, who brought a letter from the colonial-secretary offering to him the lieutenant-governorship of Upper Canada. Head was a military man, a retired half-pay major who received his sudden elevation to the governorship with what he himself has described as “utter astonishment.” On the field of Waterloo and during his experience as manager of a British mining corporation in South America, he had given proof that he was not wanting in personal courage. Of civil government, beyond the fact that he had been an assistant poor law commissioner, he had no experience. Of politics in general he knew practically nothing; of Canada even less. At first he had enough common sense to refuse the appointment, but pressure from the Colonial office and the promise of a baronetcy overcame his scruples. The unsought honours added to his natural conceit and he betook himself to Canada puffed up with the pride of a professional pacificator. How Lord Glenelg, the colonial secretary, could have been induced to make such an appointment, remains one of the mysteries of Canadian history. Rumour indeed has not scrupled to say that the whole affair was an error, that the name of Francis Head had been confused with that of Sir Edmund Head, also a poor law commissioner and a young man of rising promise and attainments. Hincks in his Reminiscences asserts that he was informed of this fact in later years by Mr. Roebuck and that a “distinguished imperial statesman had also spoken of it.”
In so far as he had had any political affiliations in England, Head had been a Whig. The news of this simple fact had gone before him, and the Reform party were prepared to find in him a champion of their interests. Sir Francis in consequence found the rôle of saviour of the country already prepared for his acceptance. “It was with no little surprise,” he writes in his Narrative, in speaking of his first entry into Toronto (January, THE TRIED REFORMER 1836), “I observed the walls placarded with large letters which designated me as Sir Francis Head, a tried Reformer.” The administration on which the new governor now entered was from first to last a series of blunders. It had been impressed upon him by the British cabinet that he must seek to conciliate the Reform party and to compose the factious differences by which the province was torn. The Seventh Report on Grievances had become, since his appointment, the object of his constant perusal, and the Reformers of the province crowded about him in the fond hope of political redress. It was impossible, therefore, that Sir Francis should fail to make some advances to the Reform party. This indeed he was most anxious to do, although he at once took a violent dislike to Bidwell and Mackenzie, the latter of whom he described as a tiny creature raving about grievances, voluble and eccentric, with the appearance of a madman. As a pledge, however, of his good intentions, he determined to add three members to his executive council and to fill their places from among the Reform party. The men upon whom his choice fell were Robert Baldwin, Dr. John Rolph, a leader of the Mackenzie faction, and John Henry Dunn, who had filled the office of receiver-general but had not been identified with either of the rival parties. In a despatch addressed to the colonial secretary, the lieutenant-governor speaks thus of Baldwin:— “After making every inquiry in my power, I became of opinion that Mr. Robert Baldwin, advocate, a gentleman already recommended to your Lordship by Sir John Colborne for a seat in the legislative council, was the first individual I should select, being highly respected for his moral character, being moderate in his politics and possessing the esteem and confidence of all parties.”
Now came a critical moment in the history of the time. With a majority in the assembly and with a proper control over the executive offices, the Reform party would find themselves arrived at that goal of responsible government which had been the object of their every effort. They conceived, nevertheless, that the acceptance of office was of no import or significance unless it were conjoined with an actual control of the policy of the administration. Such, however, was by no means the idea of Sir Francis Head. The “smooth-faced insidious doctrine” of responsible government, as he afterwards called it, and the self-effacement of the governor which it implied, could commend itself but little to one who had confessedly come to Canada as a “political physician” proposing to rectify the troubled situation by his own administrative skill. Interviews followed between Baldwin and Sir Francis Head, at which the BALDWIN AND HEAD former refused to hold office unless the remaining Tory members of the executive, who were also legislative councillors, should be dismissed. Baldwin, indeed, suffering from the domestic affliction he had just sustained in the loss of his wife, appears to have been reluctant to assume the cares of office. On reconsideration, however, the Reformers decided to accept the positions offered and were duly appointed (February 20th, 1836). It was, nevertheless, made quite clear to the governor that Baldwin and his friends accepted office only on the understanding that they must have his entire confidence. A letter, written at this time by Baldwin to Peter Perry, his father’s friend and fellow Reformer, accurately explains the situation and elucidates also the full force of the “one idea” by which the writer was animated. “His Excellency having done me the honour to send for me . . . expressed himself most desirous that I should afford him my assistance by joining his executive council, assuring me that in the event of my acceding to his proposals I should enjoy his full and entire confidence. . . . I proceeded to state that . . . I would not be performing my duty to my sovereign or the country, if I did not, with His Excellency’ s permission, explain fully to His Excellency my views of the constitution of the Province and the change necessary in the practical administration of it, particularly as I considered the delay in adopting this change as the great and all absorbing grievance before which all others in my mind sank into insignificance, and the remedy for which would most effectually lead, and that in a constitutional way, to the redress of every other grievance . . . and that these desirable objects would be accomplished without the least entrenching upon the just and necessary prerogative of the Crown, which I consider, when administered by a lieutenant-governor through the medium of a provincial ministry responsible to the provincial parliament, to be an essential part of the constitution of the province.” Baldwin adds that the “call for an elective legislative council which had been formally made from Lower Canada, and which had been taken up and appeared likely to be responded to in this province, was as distasteful to me as it could be to any one.”
WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE
From a painting
The new ministry were no sooner appointed than they found themselves in a quite impossible position. Head had no intention of governing according to their advice. On the contrary he proceeded at once to make official appointments from among the ranks of their opponents, calling down thereby the censure of the assembly. The new council now found themselves called to account by the country for executive acts in which they had had no share. The formal remonstrances which they addressed to the lieutenant-governor drew from him a direct denial of their A BREAD AND BUTTER ELECTION cardinal principle of government. “The lieutenant-governor maintains,” they were informed, “that responsibility to the people, who are already represented in the House of Assembly, is unconstitutional; that it is the duty of the council to serve him, not them.” To say this was, of course, to throw down the gauntlet. On March 4th, 1836, the entire Council made formal complaints. On March 10th, Head replied that he recognized responsibility to the Colonial office alone and that he would consult the Council at such times as he thought necessary. The die was cast. Two days later, the whole council, old and new members alike, retired. The Assembly carried a resolution by an overwhelming majority in favour of “a responsible executive council,” and declared that they had no confidence in the council with which Head had replaced his recalcitrant advisers. Head now lost all sense of proportion. Not content with reliance on the strictest interpretation of his official duties, he proceeded to public denunciation of the Reformers as disloyal republicans who were bent on encouraging a foreign invasion. The Assembly adopted extreme measures and finally stopped supplies. At the end of May, Head dissolved the House. Henceforth there was war to the knife between the governor and the party of Reform. In the general election which followed, he exerted himself strenuously on the side of the Tories. To Lord Glenelg he denounced the “lowbred antagonist democracy” which he felt it his duty to combat. In an address issued to the electors of the Newcastle district, the voters were told, “if you choose to dispute with me and live on bad terms with the mother country, you will, to use a homely phrase, only quarrel with your bread and butter.” The Tories made desperate efforts. Large sums of money were subscribed. The Anglican interest was enlisted on behalf of the clergy reserves, a policy to which the Reformers were bitterly opposed. The Methodists, fearing to be carried to extremes, veered away from the party of Reform. The latter, meanwhile, were not idle. Baldwin himself, indeed, had no share in the campaign, having sailed for England shortly after his resignation, pursued by a letter from the irate governor to Lord Glenelg in which he was denounced as an agent of the revolutionary party.
Head’s letter had the unfortunate effect of making Glenelg refuse to see Baldwin. Had he done so things might not have ended in tragedy. Be that as it may, Baldwin wrote to the Colonial Secretary during his stay in England a letter which is one of the most important in Canadian history. He outlined, in sober loyalty to the mother country, conditions in the colony and he A TUMULTUOUS ELECTION suggested a remedy as clear-cut as it eventually proved successful. There could be no misinterpretation. Baldwin’s recommendations were those of full responsible government over all the internal affairs of the province. Durham never wrote more clearly, and it is not uninteresting in the light of his Report to note that before it was penned Baldwin sent him a copy of this famous letter to Glenelg. Had the latter been persuaded to give Baldwin a personal interview, the logic of the reasoning might have been driven home. As it was Baldwin, the most loyal and constructive of the Reformers, remained under the suspicion of being a revolutionary.
