been made to the Lieutenant Governor, in person; but as he paid no attention to them, this appeal was made from the Governor to the Minister. But it was

in vain.

The one was found to be as deaf and as obstinate as the other.

On the 31st October, Sir Francis Bond Head had refused the offer of a volunteer company to guard the Government House; preferring to wait, as he expressed it, till the lives or property of Her Majesty's subjects should require defence. To the very last, the Lieutenant Governor refused to resort to any measure of precaution against the threatened insurrection. On the 2nd December, a free-mason, who resided in Markham, informed Capt. Fitzgibbon that bags full of pike heads and pike handles had been collected; and that he had observed all the signs of a rapidly ripening revolt. Capt. Fitzgibbon sought out Judge Jones, to whom he repeated what he had heard. They went before the Executive Council together, where the statement was once more repeated. Mr. Justice Jones exclaimed: "You do not mean to say that these people are going to rebel!" Capt. Fitzgibbon replied that undoubtedly they were; when Mr. Jones, turning to the Lieutenant Governor, contemptuously exclaimed, "Pugh! pugh!" The length to which the Judge carried his obdurate scepticism may best be illustrated by the reception he gave Capt. Fitzgibbon on the night of the outbreak. "The over-zeal of that man,’ he complained, "is giving me a great deal of trouble" The insurgents were already at Montgomery's.

Nor is this all. Sir Francis Bond Head made it a matter of boasting that, "in spite of the remonstrances

which, from almost every district in the Province," he received, he allowed Mr. Mackenzie "to make deliberate preparation for revolt;"* that he allowed him "to write what he chose, to say what he chose, to do what he chose;" that he offered no opposition to armed assemblages for the purpose of drill. Nor did he rest satisfied with doing nothing to check preparations, the nature of which he understood so well; he encouraged the outbreak. For this purpose he sent all the troops from the Province; ‡ and boasted that he had laid a trap to entice Mackenzie and others into revolt. Nothing could have been more culpable thaħ this conduct of the Lieutenant Governor. To encourage men to the commission of an act, and then to punish its performance with death, as in the case of

* Vice Regal speech on the opening of the third session of the thirteenth Parliament of Upper Canada, December 28, 1837.

"I considered that if an attack by the rebels was inevitable, the more I encouraged them to consider me defenceless the better.”—Narrative, p. 329.

In his Narrative, Sir Francis Bond Head boastingly reports, "I purposely dismissed from the Province the whole of our troops," p. 337. But when this extraordinary conduct on the part of the Lieutenant Governor had been severely censured both in Parliament and by the Press, he denied that he had sent away the troops. "Many people," he says in The Emigrant, "have blamed, and I believe still blame, me for having, as they say, sent the troops out of the Province. I, however, did no such thing." He then proceeds to throw on Sir John Colborne the blame of an act, of which, before he had discovered that it was improper, he had eagerly claimed all the credit. "It was the duty of the Government," said Sir Robert Peel, in a speech in the House of Commons, January 16, 1838, "to have prepared such a military force in the colony as to have discouraged the exciters of the insurrection from pursuing the course they did." How great then must be the condemnation of the Lieutenant Governor!

? The Earl of Durham, in his Report on British North America, January 81, 1839, says: "It certainly appeared too much as if the rebellion had been purposely invited by the Government, and the unfortunate men who took part in it deliberately drawn into a trap by those who subsequently inflicted so severe a punishment on them for their error."-pp. 59, 60

Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews, is more like murder with malice aforethought than any thing else to which it could possibly be compared.*

* Sir Francis Bond Head, however, was not responsible for the executions. He had left the Province before they took place; and many who were never admirers of his policy believe that he had too much magnanimity of character to have pursued a vindictive course in needlessly causing an effusion of blood. He released several prisoners, with arms in their hands, as soon as they were captured, though some of them, contrary to good faith, were arrested again.