Mackenzie: Upper Canada's Thomas Jefferson

To expect the ordinary man to be capable of making an intelligent choice of several dozen different officials, from a list as tall as himself, and to expect him to keep a close critical eye on the activities of his representatives in the legislature, was to expect a good deal. But Mackenzie always did, just as he expected the farmers of Upper Canada to follow the debates in fine print and the foreign newspaper articles that he published in the Advocate. That expectation was based on two assumptions of America's great spokesman of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson: that man was by nature rational, and that this natural virtue only showed to best advantage in a society of simple, self-governing independent people living on the land.

--William Kilbourn, The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada, Voyageur Classics (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008), 137-138.