Locke and Bentham Influenced Mackenzie's Political Thought

The other British influence, the Westminster and Edinburgh Reviews, were the chief exponents of the liberal tradition, derived from Locke and Bentham, of cheap rational government, free enterprise, and the prior rights of the individual, which became the prevailing wind in the climate of opinion of later nineteenth-century England and twentieth-century Canada.... It is true that Mackenzie accepted many liberal ideas somewhat uncritically himself.... He needed, too, more opponents capable of countering his dogmatic liberalism with argument rather than abuse.

--William Kilbourn, The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada, Voyageur Classics (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008), 135-136.