Sometimes, when he sensed the meeting was ready, Mackenzie went beyond anything he said at Toronto. In the township of Caledon, he gave his audience a lesson in Locke and the legal right of rebellion:
When a government is engaged in systematically oppressing a people it commits the same species of wrong to them that warrants an appeal to force against a foreign enemy.... The glorious revolutions of 1688 on one continent, and of 1776 on another, may serve to remind those rulers that they are placing themselves in a state of hostility against the governed.... A magistrate who shuts the gates of justice on the public restores them to their original right of defending themselves.
--William Kilbourn,
The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada, Voyageur Classics (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008), 183-184.
No comments:
Post a Comment