Mackenzie Schools Upper Canadians in Locke and the Right of Rebellion

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.

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.

An Economic Tyranny Existed in Upper Canada

The Almanack, like many numbers of the Advocate, is a fair indication of the two chief British influences on Mackenzie's thought--the poetry of Robert Burns, and the British periodicals of intelligent commentary and opinion.... Just as in Scotland, an economic tyranny existed in Upper Canada: "Our farmers are indebted to our country merchants, our country merchants are deeply bound down in the same manner to the Montreal wholesale dealers." And when Mackenzie denounced the commercial tyrants he often added a verse from Burns to drive his point home.

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

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.

Mackenzie Attacks the Unconstrained Executive Power

Mackenzie deplored once again the fact that the popular House had so little control over that government. The only effective check a colonial Assembly has ever had upon the executive branch has been the right to refuse to vote supplies until grievances are remedied. But in Upper Canada this check had been effectively diminished by the passage, in the Tory Assembly of 1831, of a bill that provided for the chief officials' salaries to be paid without reference to the Assembly. This "Everlasting salary Bill," as he caustically called it, Mackenzie attacked once again.

--William Kilbourn, The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada, Voyageur Classics (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008), 155.