leges enjoyed by those on the other. But the history of 1837 in Upper and in Lower Canada, the lives of Gourlay and Mackenzie and Papineau, and their contemporaries, show that whenever it was believed that rights were being withheld, there were those who were willing if necessary to seal their faith with their blood. Many a noble man bore a musket as loyalist in these troubled times, and some whose memory I reverence were on the other side. I would not, then, be considered here as passing judgment upon the merits of those I have named, or approving or disapproving of the rebellion of 1837 in Upper or in Lower Canada—that is, moreover, a controversial question into which I have no right to enter. Who was right and who was wrong—or whether both sides were right and both wrong—must be left to history to decide; but however the answer turn out, the rebel and the loyalist both showed the courage of his convictions and armed himself to fight for what he believed to be right.
It was well said by the philosopher of New England, "Only such persons interest us, Spartans, Romans, Saracens, English, Americans, who have stood in the jaws of need, and have by their own wit and might extricated themselves, and made man victorious."
Those who founded and guided our nascent country wholly fulfil Emerson's conditions.
It were to take up too much of your time if I were to speak of the early French settlers, of the life and death struggle, frequently repeated, with the ferocious and wily aborigines, of the devoted missionary
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