Canada: More Liberal Than Tory?

I. Early on a Thursday morning, in the fine, cool spring air, a prosperous blacksmith and a gentleman farmer fell to their deaths from a scaffold in a public execution in front of the Toronto Gaol. Their crime was insurrection. Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews were convicted and hanged by the colonial oligarchs of Upper Canada for their role in the Rebellion of 1837. Given that the men were charged with treason, a contemporary reader might assume that, just or not, the trial of Lount and Matthews was concerned with protecting the Tory values governing Upper Canada from the more pronounced liberal ones of the United States. It was not.

In his judicial address, which was published at length in the local papers, Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson employed a clearly Lockean justification for condemning the prisoners to death. Upper Canada was a peaceful, verdant land in which hard-working inhabitants could secure a comfortable degree of material security; the...