The Political Ideas of William Lyon Mackenzie

Abstract

Few public men in Canadian history have so represented the spirit of their age as did William Lyon Mackenzie, and particularly during the pre-Rebellion stage of his career. This was the age of Catholic Emancipation and the Great Reform Bill, the age of Bentham and Byron, of Cobbett and Edinburgh Reviewers, of O'Connell and Huskisson; the age when the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe triumphed over the last of the Bourbons at Paris, and when “King” Andrew Jackson succeeded the Adams dynasty at Washington. On both sides of the Atlantic the new wine of liberty and democracy was bursting the old bottles of restriction and privilege. Across the Atlantic the new stocks were of the vintage of the French Revolution or from the vineyards of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham; on this side it was largely “home brew” of the frontier. But there was still on hand much of the vintages of 1688 and 1776, neither of which had lost its power to stimulate men. In the 1820's and 1830's William Lyon Mackenzie was the principal purveyor of these various wines of liberty to the backwoods colony of Upper Canada.