entitled to take the oath of allegiance at any time within three years. It was also provided that no person of the age of sixteen, on the 26th of May, 1826, should be debarred from inheriting property on account of its descent from an alien, and any person claiming to hold property on account of those nearer akin, being aliens, must have had actual possession and made improvements on the property before that date; a contract for the sale of property so held to be valid, if there had been no adverse possession.

The bill passed the Assembly with only such feeble opposition as the official party and their friends ventured to offer in the way of amendments. Their chagrin appears to have been shared by the Lieutenant Governor, who, in his reply to the Assembly's address informing him that they had passed the bill, petulantly threatened to tell the Colonial Secretary that it was precisely such a measure as the House had rejected in the second session of that Parliament. The House, without any such direct reference to the Lieutenant Governor as would have been unparliamentary, flatly denied this statement in the first of a series of resolutions, in which reasons for rejecting the Alien Bill in the second session were given. These resolutions, eight in number, were severally carried against the government by about two to one; and it became the duty of the Lieutenant Governor to transmit them to England. It was, no doubt, true that the bill passed was some modification of the simple declaratory measure with which the opposition had proposed to cover the whole case in the preceding session. The compromise, for such it must be called, was probably the best that

could have been devised. It shared the fate of all compromises, in meeting the opposition of a few extreme persons. The Legislative Councils altered the preamble, and amended the bill so as to prevent it repealing any statute then in force. The Legislative Assembly, after a little grumbling on the part of two or three members, accepted the amendments unanimously.

The appeal so successfully made to the Imperial Government, was suggested by Mr. Mackenzie; and it was he who got up the Committee, which decided to send an agent. He drew up Randal's instructions, and caused him to be selected in preference to another.

It often happens that some particular event produces upon the minds of even clever men impressions which, though not altogether well grounded, they never get rid of as long as they live. The success of Randal's mission to England had this effect upon Mr. Mackenzie; for, ever after, except a few years about the period of the rebellion, he believed in the specific of an appeal to the Imperial Government. His own subsequent visit to the Colonial office, and the success he met, confirmed an opinion which he cherished to the day of his death. Appeal from the oligarchy to the justice of the Imperial Government seemed at one time the only hope of the colonists, until the local Excutive could be made responsible to the popular branch of the Legislature; but after the change wrought by the introduction of responsible government, Mr. Mackenzie failed to make sufficient allow. ance for the new state of things.

CHAPTER IX.

Mr. Mackenzie conceives the idea of Publishing a Daily Paper in Montreal -"Printer to the Hon. House of Assembly"-Not a Sure Partisan-His Estimate of the Intelligence of the Assembly in 1827-Irresponsible Government-Union of Legislative and Judicial Functions-Colonial Representation in the Imperial Parliament.

IN May, 1827, Mr. Mackenzie visited Montreal, with a view of ascertaining, from the information he could collect on the spot, whether it would be advisable to commence the publication of a daily paper there. An examination of the ground convinced him that the speculation would not answer commercially; and he returned to York, resolving not to enter on the doubtful experiment.* From the 25th of January, 1827, to the 10th of January, 1828, the imprint of The Colonial

* A few months afterwards-November, 1827-he gave an account of the Periodical Press of Montreal. The Herald printing office was then the most considerable in the British Colonies. There were, besides, the Montreal Gazette and Herald, the Courant, the Canadian Spectator, La Minerve, with very limited circulations—many farmers both in Upper and Lower Canada then receiving their intelligence of current events from oral information-the Christian Sentinel, a church of England journal, circulating six hundred copies a week. The Quarterly Review had recently died for want of support; and a new Colonial Magazine had obtained twenty-one subscribers. The Quebec Gazette was

the only paper in Lower Canada distinguished for the attention it paid to commercial affairs. Mr. Mackenzie described it as occupying, in Canada, the position that the Times occupied in England, as the organ of the most respectable class of the population. A wonderful revolution in jurnalism has taken place since then.

Advocate described the paper as being "Printed and Published by W. L. Mackenzie, Printer to the Hon., the House of Assembly of Upper Canada." The contract was for the whole of the printing required by the House; and so low was the price that it does not appear to have been profitable. He preferred a claim for £25 extra, on account of the unusual expedition. required by the House; and although the extra sum he had paid to printers was larger than this, the claim was refused.

At no time does Mr. Mackenzie appear to have been a very strong partisan. Not that his views and position were not decided. He was strongly opposed

* In a letter to Mr. H. C. Thompson, of the Printing Committee, dated January 15, 1828, Mr. Mackenzie said:

‘Last session, Mr. Carey received for work done to the Legislative Council nearly at the rate of 38. 3d., and for work done for the Assembly 38.; Mr. Stanton received 3s. for some, and 48. from the government for the rest, and offered to do more for 28. I had some at 3s., some at 1s. 8d., and some at 13. per one thousand ems. Such a system is surely absurd and unjust. It is not my intention to ask for one farthing more than my one shilling contract; if the House are anxious to get their work done at an **fair price, and to give nobody but your brother-in-law (Mr. Stanton, the King's Printer) even journeyman's wages, I will not selfishly complain-but I wish very much their "saving fit" would become more general in its operation. There is a law maxim which runs thus: 'Lex neminem cogit ad impossibilia'-the law compels no man to perform impossibilities;—and upon this principle I claimed the other £25 only, not of additional price, but for double aliowance made and promised my people to get forward expeditiously with the accumulated printing of the House, at hours when they should have been in bed. This claim was supported by three affidavits, setting forth the fact that such extra work had been done, and that without working almost continually, all the hands in the office (ten or eleven) could not have done the printing in time-for we were often obliged to leave off one job and begin a second, or even a third, in order to meet the new orders of the clerk.' The letter concluded with an offer to do the sessional work of the House for 1828, at twenty cents per one thousand ems composition. He also suggested a division of the work at fair prices; and this suggestion was acted upon, three printers being included.

to the ruling minority; but he was very far from having unbounded confidence in the majority of the Assembly. Of the leaders of the opposition, Messrs. Rolph and Bidwell, he sometimes spoke in sharp terms of condemnation; showing that he was under no sort of party control or leadership. When reminded by one of his own political friends in the House that certain petitions laid before the Legislature were not privileged communications; that an action for libel would lie, if they contained what the law regarded as libellous matter, and were reprinted in a newspaper; his reply was, that he intended to publish both the petitions in question in the next number of his paper, a promise which was faithfully kept.

Before the commencement of 1828, Mr. Mackenzie was a declared candidate for a seat in the next House of Assembly; and it is not impossible that he already aimed at attaining to the leadership himself. Speaking of this House as a body, in a letter to Earl Dalhousie, he said: "Many of these Legislators are qualified to sign their names; but as to framing and carrying through a bill on any subject whatever, the half of them wisely never attempted such a herculean task." And in the same letter, he expressed undisguised contempt for the whole sham of Colonial Legislatures then in vogue. "I have long been satisfied," he said, "that if the North American Colonies were rid of these inferior and subordinate Legislatures, which are and must ever be insufficient for the purposes for which they were intended; and allowed, instead, a due weight in both branches of the British Parliament, it would prove the foundation of their