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Date: 1867-03-08
By: True Witness
Citation: “As You Were”, True Witness (8 March, 1867)
Other formats: TBA

“AS YOU WERE.”

“You are to-day, what you were yesterday.” With these memorable words did Sieyes reassure the members of the National Assembly on the day of the famous sitting of the 23rd June, when somewhat disturbed by the attitude of the Court, they seemed almost inclined to forget the famous oath of the “Séance du Jeu de Paume.” You are to-day, what you were yesterday, neither more nor less.

These words might well be addressed to some of our Canadian journalists, who seem to be perfectly deranged in their intellects by the passage of the so-called “Confederation scheme.” You are, gentlemen, to-day, just what you were yesterday, neither more nor less; neither richer nor poorer; neither stronger nor weaker; neither better nor worse; neither more nor less free and independent; neither more nor less republican; neither more nor less democratic; neither more nor less aristocratic; neither more nor less monarchical. You are “as you were.” Your climate, your soil, your climatic conditions, upon which, after all, depend your material well-being, and your material greatness as a nation, remain unchanged: your population is not increased in proportion to the frontiers which you have to defend; and in a word your winters are as long and rigorous, as they were of yore. Your social condition, too, remains the same. If democratic in its tendencies heretofore, it is equally democratic still: if aristocratic, or tending towards feudalism, it was just as much so before, as it will be after, the passing of this great measure; and for yourselves, you are neither more nor less the subjects of Queen Victoria in 1867, than you were in 1866 and the preceding years. What then in the name of all that is farcical, is all this rumpus about?

In plain English, a great deal more is made of this same “Confederation” than it deserves.—It is not quite so good as its friends pretend; and it is far from being so bad, as its enemies insist that it is. If it endure, which of course is very doubtful, it will make but little sensible change in any of us. Men will go on eating and drinking, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, as they did in the days before the Union. There will be a greater number of Government situations to fill, and there will therefore be a proportionate increase in the number of place-beggars; there will be two or three elected legislatures where before there was but one, and there will be a proportionate increase in the number of political adventurers; but except for place-beggars, political adventurers, and in a word all these who look for a living from the public purse, there is little in the measure itself for which any one has cause to crow or to cry, to laugh or to weep. It will probably, for a season at least, settle the “sectional” differences betwixt Upper and Lower Canada, and give us consequently a more stable government than that which we have had hitherto, where there were changes of Ministry two or three times a year; and when consequently, no man knew what principles be could prudently profess, now he should vote, or what party it was the more desirable for him—with an eye to Ministerial patronage of course—to support. Here is one palpable benefit to accrue from Confederation.

On the other hand, the measure brings with it its burdens. It imposes on us, so says one of our morning contemporaries, the cost of maintaining an army, and a navy; a Vice-Regal Court with all the ensigns and trappings of royalty, and, he adds, “an aristocracy will spontaneously arise.” Thus prophesies the Montreal Daily News of Friday last; and, with one exception, we admit his claims as a seer. We believe not in the growth of an aristocracy, for we have neither the soil, nor the climate that such a growth requires. A Bureaucracy—a very different thing from an Aristocracy—we may have; but our social conditions present an insuperable obstacle to the growth of an aristocracy, or anything resembling one. This, to grow, must have its roots in the soil, and to thrive it requires something very different from the trappings of a Vice-Regal Court. It requires the hereditary transmission of landed property; for on this, and this alone, is all aristocracy, in the feudal sense of the word, based; and a non-feudal aristocracy is but a bureaucracy such as exists in China. By whatsoever name our country may be called, our social conditions are, and will remain as are those of our Yankee neighbors. The hereditary principle will never flourish here; and though without it we may be an agricultural people, a commercial people, and a manufacturing people, we never can be an aristocratic people; we can never reproduce the faintest copy even of the political conditions of England.

And this for the simple reason that our social conditions are essentially different. No political institutions can be permanent unless they have their roots in, unless they are the natural and spontaneous outgrowth of, unless they are in harmony with, the social system of the people. The social system of Great Britain naturally leads to a Government by King, Lords, and Commons, because in the social system of Great Britain there is a social hierarchy with corresponding distinctions and degrees of rank; because there exists there an indigenous aristocracy, the product of the soil, and the growth of ages: because there exists there an hereditary landed gentry, based upon the custom of primogeniture. The political order of Great Britain corresponds with, or is the transcript of, its social order—and therefore it exists.

In Canada, we have no social hierarchy, no distinctions of rank, no historic aristocracy, no hereditary landed gentry, no rule or custom of primogeniture. We cannot therefore, even if we would, create a political order analogous to that of Great Britain. We have but one class here, the bourgeoisie, for as yet we have properly speaking, no prolétaire class. These are our social materials, the stuff with which we have to work; and as you cannot “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” so neither out of such social materials can you make a Government by Kings, Lords, and Commons—that is to say, a Government of Estates. But the peculiarity of the British Government consists in this:—Not that it is a limited or an hereditary monarchy, for there are other countries in the world that are the same; neither does it consist in that it has a representative or elected legislature, for this also many other countries have; but its peculiarity, its excellence according to its friends, its inherent defect according to its enemies, consists in this:—That it is a Government by Orders, by classes if you will, mutually limiting and balancing one another. Take away, or destroy any one of these Orders, and the British Constitution would be destroyed. For the same reason, there, where through a defect in the social system, any one of these Orders does not exist, it is morally impossible to establish a political order analogous to that which we call the British Constitution.—If men would but bear in mind these elementary truths—we should not hear so much talk about establishing a Canadian, or rather a Borealian Kingdom.