At the opening of each successive session of the United States Congress, the President sends to both the House of Representatives and the Senate, what is known as his Message to Congress. In this he passes in review the foreign and domestic policy of the nation, its relation with foreign powers and recommends such legislation as he deems advisable. More particularly, however, he deals with the state of the country and what is going on there at the time. These messages are of course regarded as highly important historical documents, and a history of the United States since the Revolution could be written from them alone, as the custom is as old as the Constitution itself.

Following such an illustrious example, it will be well before proceeding with this narrative to take a look around us and observe what was going on, not only in Canada, but in the world at large, in and immediately preceding the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, when what we now call Grey County was settled. Coming events are said to cast their shadows before. Contemporary events, however, act and react upon one another and their influence in affecting decisions in the affairs of men is often not clearly recognized at the time they happen. As an instance, some of the events happening at this time were instrumental in bringing many immigrants from the Old Land to Canada.

To begin with, then, in 1840 was solemnized the marriage of Queen Victoria, of gracious memory, to Albert, Prince of Saxe, Coburg-Gotha. England engaged in the Opium War,—a moral mistake, as every one now admits. This year also saw the adoption of penny postage in England, one of the victories of peace. The following year was notable for the revolt in Afghanistan and the destruction of the British forces during the retreat. In 1842, China was thrown open to foreign trade with the world. The Boer Republic of Natal was seized by the British and Sinde was annexed to India. Quite a year of expansion for those times. In 1845, Sir John Franklin sailed on his last search of the Northwest Passage, the fate of his voyage remaining for years in doubt. England and France made war on the Argentine in this year. Next year the Oregon boundry dispute with the United States was happily settled by treaty and another war thereby avoided. This year will always be remembered by reason of the potato rot and its concommitants, famine arid disease, which devastated Ireland and the flood of Irish emigration to the United States, altho Canada got its share. It was marked, too, by intense agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and on May 15th of that year, the bill providing for their gradual abolition, sponsored by Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, passed the House of Commons by a majority of ninety-eight. It was the beginning of the down-fall of protection in England, and the adoption of that policy of free trade, which has been so consistently followed since and which was so strikingly vindicated last year. With the possible exception of the Reform Bill, it was by far the most important event in England’s domestic policy in last century, its effects being unforseen even by the most astute economists of the time. In 1847 the Irish emigration to Canada reached its height. It was left to the individual greed of ship-owners; the United States maintained sanitary regulations, which were to a certain extent effectual, but in Canada there was no such safe-guards. Some of the ships, says an eye-witness, looked like the Black Hole of Calcutta and the poor emigrants carrying with them from Ireland the seeds of disease, died like flies. They continued to die and to scatter an infection which meant almost sure death, after they had landed in the country. At Montreal eight hundred emigrants died in nine weeks and nine hundred died of (diseases caught from emigrants. There are few blacker chapters in Britain’s history than that of the famine in Ireland, and those who prattle the pleasing platitude, that you cannot change human nature, should ask themselves if we would tolerate such a chapter being written again in this day and age. No preparation was made for the reception or employment of the emigrants, as they landed here. In six months the deaths of the new arrivals was in excess of three thousand. Yet even while they were leaving Ireland, grain was being exported from that country. The London Times pronounced the neglect of Government to be an eternal stigma on the British name. The Chief Secretary for Ireland was able to inform the House of Commons, that of a hundred thousand Irishmen that fled to Canada in a year, six thousand, one hundred died on the voyage, four thousand, one hundred on arrival, five thousand, two hundred in hospitals and one thousand nine hundred in towns to which they had gone. In a previous chapter, we have deplored the waste of trees in our land when it was new, but here was a waste of human life ten thousand times more deplorable. Some of these emigrants came to the Irish Block of Sydenham, and a finer class of settlers in a new land never left their native shores. Thus was life wasted, not in a day of war, but of profound peace. The Emigrant Society of Montreal, paints the result as follows:

“From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of our great river, up the shores of Lake Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of emigration has extended, are to be found one unbroken chain of graves where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers in a commingled heap—no stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand and upward have gone down to their fate.”

Is it possible to imagine a harder fate than that of these poor emigrants, dying in poverty, far from their native land and among strangers, and hastily buried in an unknown grave?

In 1848 the English crowded back the Boers in South Africa, who emigrated and formed the Transvaal Republic. And in 1849 the wonderful story of Livingstone’s discoveries in Africa became known.

Turning to France we find in 1841, Louis Napoleon attempting another revolution in his own favor. The remains of Bonaparte, the Man of Destiny, left the lonely rock of St. Helena, were borne to France and laid to rest in Paris, amid scenes as solemn as they were impressive. Guizot, whose historical works are his best monument, was Minister of Foreign Affairs. This decade was, everything considered, rather an uneventful one in France. In 1843, as noted, she joined England in war on the Argintine and in 1847 finally subjugated Morocco. In February of 1848 began the workingmen’s revolution and a workingmen’s convention gathered in Paris. It was followed by a bloody communist outbreak, and still later in the year Louis Napoleon was elected President of France.

This period has ever since been known in America as “the roaring forties”. They roared all right. Steamboat boilers were bursting on the Mississippi and land booms were bursting everywhere. It was an era of intense land speculation. The country was growing and, generally speaking, prosperous. It was also an era of execrably bad manners among the people, if we may believe Charles Dickens and his “American Notes”. It started in 1840 with the election of William Henry Harrison as President; he died a month after his inauguration and Vice-President Tyler served out his term as President. In 1842 the Seminole War ended and Fremont began his explorations of the Rocky Mountains. James K. Polk was elected President in 1844, and in 1845 came the invention of the telegraph. The Slave Power which had dominated national affairs for twenty-five years was at the apex of its authority, and this year Florida and Texas were admitted as slave states. In 1846 as a result of its sinister machinations, began the Mexican War, “the most indefensible war ever waged on a weaker nation” as it was described by General Grant, who fought through it as a second lieutenant. Elias Howe patented the sewing machine at this time. In the following year the war was brought to a “triumphal” conclusion, when the American army entered Mexico City. In 1848 a huge piece of Mexican territory was ceded to the United States as a result of it. The Mormons settled Utah, and gold was discovered in California. Hoary headed men among us remember this event and the rush to the coast that followed it, in which several Sydenham people joined. Zachary Taylor, who had served under General Scott in Mexico was inaugurated President in 1849.

In Germany the greatest event in these ten years was the Revolution of 1848. Russia had her greedy eyes fixed on India and was spreading her tentacles everywhere in that direction.

Here in the homeland we were pretty well recovered from the shock of the MacKenzie rebellion and the hard times following it. It was a wretched affair and reflected no credit on either party, but perhaps a worse share on the loyalists. Lount and Matthews, whose heroism ill deserved the fate they suffered, have since been canonized by the Reform party, but they were misguided men, caught in the nets of “circumstance, that unspiritual god” as Byron has phrased it. But the uprising had a powerful anid unfavorable effect upon the settlement of Owen Sound and Sydenham township. They would have been settled four years earlier but for its intervention. Mr. Charles Rankin, Provincial Land Surveyor, had received instructions in 1836 to run the line now known as the Garafraxa Road, but Upper Canada was thrown into such an uproar by the events of 1837, the proposed survey was abandoned until 1839. In 1838 Lord Durham, an able Liberal statesman, was commissioned to go to Canada and report upon the state of the colony ; he was also appointed to the office of Governor General, vacant at that time. On his return, the report he submitted was made the basis of the union of Upper and Lower Canada, the union being bitterly opposed by the Family Compact, to whose various iniquities, which need not be recounted here, the MacKenzie Rebellion was largely due. The Family Compact was of course hostile to the proposed union, as it foresaw the end of its reign of graft and misrule. The Hon. John Beverly Robinson went to England and published a counterblast to Lord Durham’s report ; he was the adviser, philosopher and friend of the dominant faction, but he might as well have argued against the law of gravitation, more especially when it was remembered that sixteen years earlier he had strongly advocated the very union he now so strongly opposed. In the session of 1839 a bill reuniting the Canadas was introduced in the Imperial Parliament, by Lord John Russell, which afterwards became law. Charles Poulett Thomson was sent to Canada the following year, arriving in October. He had been appointed Governor General in succession to Lord Durham and enjoyed that gentleman’s confidence thoroughly. He was a well informed man in mercantile matters, having been bred to commercial pursuits and was an ardent free trader. While neither a thorough or profound statesman, he was a clever diplomat and politician and had held the office of president of the board of trade in the Russell administration. No better man could have been entrusted with the task of steering the two provinces into the bonds of union. His middle name was afterwards bestowed upon what in time became the chief business throughfare of Owen Sound. The new task taxed all his finesse and political agility. The difficulties he encountered and surmounted need not be narrated here ; it will suffice that he landed the ship of state entrusted to his care safely in port, and for his indefatigable and arduous services was in August, 1840, raised to the peerage, with the title of Baron Sydenham, of Sydenham in Kent and Toronto in Canada. His labors had weakened his physical powers as he was not a robust man, but he was ambitious and not disposed to brood over his maladies. What was afterwards Owen Sound took its first name from him, and it was only natural that a township which was always so strongly liberal in politics as Sydenham, should adopt the name in its turn.

The MacKenzie rebellion and the union of the two Canadas were the most important events of that period, the second foreshadowing the greater event of Confederation, which was to come sixteen years later.

These are a few of the principal events in the world, that were transpiring in the fourth decade of last century and which agitated men’s minds at the time. It was a stormy time in Canada’s political history ; the first election after the union of Upper and Lower Canada was attended by scenes of violence such as have never been seen before or since on such occasions. The reins of power were slipping from the grasp of the Family Compact, the very name of which became an odious memory. About the only merit of the MacKenzie rebellion was that it drew the attention of the Imperial Parliament to the intolerable abuses that had grown up under their despotic rule. Lord Durham should be counted among the chief benefactors of our native country, which from such unpromising beginnings has grown, under wise statesmanship, to be one of the strongest props of empire.