The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion | Page 5

smallest relief. Exasperation of mind, now joined to the heat of the
weather, which was excessive, rapidly wasted my health and impaired
my faculties. I felt my memory sensibly affected, and could not connect
my ideas through any length of reasoning, but by writing, which many
days I was wholly unfitted for by the violence of continual headache."
There is a pathos about this plain, unvarnished story that appeals to
every heart. That a man, no matter what his crimes, should have his
nervous system thus cruelly undermined; that his physical and mental
faculties should be slowly but surely filched from him in this deliberate
fashion, is an idea not to be borne with composure by anyone whose
breast is susceptible to human impulses. But Robert Gourlay was no
great criminal. He had engaged in no plot to blow up King, Lords and
Commons. He had been guilty of no treason or felony. He had
threatened no man's life, and taken no man's purse upon the highway.
He was by no means the stuff of which great criminals are made. He
was not even a vicious or immoral man. He was an affectionate
husband, a fond and indulgent father. His story, from beginning to end,
even when subjected to the fiercest light that can be thrown upon it,
discloses nothing cruel or revengeful, nothing vile or outrageously
wicked, nothing grovelling or base, nothing sordid or mean. On the
other hand, it discloses a man of many noble and generous impulses; a
man with a great heart in his bosom which could warmly sympathize
with the wrongs of his fellow-creatures; a man in whom was no
selfishness or greed; a man of decided principles and stainless morals;
who was incapable of dishonesty or cruelty; who had a high sense of
human responsibility; who feared his God and honoured his King.

When we compare his virtuous and honourable, albeit turbulent and
much misguided life, with that of any one of his immediate persecutors,
the contrast is mournfully suggestive of Mr. Lowell's antithesis about
"Truth forever on the scaffold; wrong forever on the throne."
To what, then, was his long and bitter persecution to be attributed?
Why had he been deprived of his liberty; thrust into a dark and
unwholesome dungeon; refused the benefit of the Habeas Corpus Act;
denied his enlargement upon bail or main-prize; branded as a
malefactor of the most dangerous kind; badgered and tortured to the
ruin of his health and his reason? Merely this: he had imbibed, in
advance, the spirit of Mr. Arthur Clennam, and had "wanted to
know."[2] He had displayed a persistent determination to let in the light
of day upon the iniquities and rascalities of public officials. He had
denounced the system of patronage and favouritism in the disposal of
the Crown Lands. He had inveighed against some of the human
bloodsuckers of that day, in language which certainly was not gracious
or parliamentary, but which as certainly was both forcible and true. He
had even ventured to speak in contumelious terms of the reverend
Rector of York himself, whom he had stigmatized as "a lying little fool
of a renegade Presbyterian." Nay, he had advised the sending of
commissioners to England to entreat Imperial attention to colonial
grievances. He had been the one man in Upper Canada possessed of
sufficient courage to do and to dare: to lift the thin and flimsy veil
which only half concealed the corruption whereby a score of greedy
vampires were rapidly enriching themselves at the public cost. He had
dared to hold up to general inspection the baneful effects of an
irresponsible Executive, and of a dominating clique whose one hope
lay in preserving the existing order of things undisturbed. It was for this
that the Inquisition had wreaked its vengeance upon him; for this that
the vials of Executive wrath had been poured upon his head; for this
that his body had been subjugated and his nerves lacerated by more
than seven months' close imprisonment; for this that he had been
"ruined in his fortune and overwhelmed in his mind." And all these
things took place in "this Canada of ours," in the year of grace eighteen
hundred and nineteen--barely sixty-six years ago--while the Duke of

Richmond was Governor-General, and his handsome scapegrace of a
son-in-law nominally administered the government of the Upper
Province.
With a view to a clearer understanding of the circumstances which led
to this most villainous of Canadian State prosecutions, it will be well to
glance at some details of the prisoner's past life.[3]
Robert Gourlay was the son of a gentleman of considerable fortune--a
retired Writer to the Signet--and was born in the parish of Ceres,
Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1778. He received an education suitable to his
social position, and while at the