Document Information

Date: 1866-05-05
By: Montreal Herald
Citation: “CONFEDERATION AND SEPARATION FROM THE MOTHER COUNTRY” Montreal Herald (5 mai, 1866)
Other formats: TBA

CONFEDERATION AND SEPARATION FROM THE MOTHER COUNTRY.

—Among the arguments which have been urged, not in favour of Confederation; but against persons who saw reasons to be opposed to it, the cry of disloyalty, and of a desire to separate from the Mother Country, has been very freely made use of by all the Tadpoles and Tapers of this Canadian Province. We on the contrary have contended—not against the persons of the friends of Confederation, but against the plan itself, as viewed from this side of the Atlantic—that if it affected at all our relations with Great Britain, it would do so in the way of hastening this so much deprecated separation. We said, moreover, that whatever may have been the wishes and intentions of the promoters on this side of the Atlantic, of an entire change of our present unwritten British constitution, for a written fundamental law, like that of the United States, creating institutions which resembled those of the United States so far as they resembled anything hitherto imagined, that there was a party at home notoriously opposed to the continuance of the Colonial relation, and that those persons were all favourers of the plan. Their object is very obvious. It is to provide us with such an appearance of independent existence, as shall enable the Mother Country, if it shall ever be brought to adopt their plans, to cut the Colonies adrift without dishonour. We do not say that there are not other men in England who favour the same project from different motives; but it must be acknowledged that these gentlemen have not generally made Colonial subjects so much of a special study as they have been made by [—?—] [there?] were persons in this Colony itself not strangers to this motive, when we remember that some of Her Majesty’s present advisers have boasted that by this measure they have brought the country to the “threshold of independence,” and that they recommended its adoption as a mode of establishing a “new nationality”—manifestly not that of England, whose distinguishing epithet is “Old.” These gentlemen, however, are accustomed to the use of words in a non-natural sense, and are entitled to the benefit of that circumstance when we consider their intentions. From thence we must no doubt conclude that bringing the country to the threshold of independence means preventing it from becoming independent, when it was rushing towards that consummation; and that “establishing a new nationality” intends a bigoted adherence to the one of which we have been proud as long as we can remember. Considering that this is their real meaning, however, it must be regarded as singular that a full blooded Ministerial paper, published at headquarters as an “organ”—the Ottawa Times—has within a few days affirmed precisely the very statement which we have often made, and have been sometimes blamed for making, with regard to the true tendency of Confederation, and of the intentions of some of its promoters. The following is a pretty argument to come from one of these loyal and conservative organs, printed under the very nose of the government, and so far as we have seen without rebuke:—

“No sound thinking man can contemplate the future of these dependencies without seeing the danger of their isolation. It is evident they cannot continue for ever their present relations to the mother country—it is no disloyalty to say that sooner or later the connexion will be severed, we sincerely hope at a distant day and in mutual good will. If we understand the policy of Great Britain in reference to her North American colonies, this is what she is desirous of preparing them for by the earnest promotion of a general union.”

We cannot see any use in preparing for a thing which we are resolutely resolved shall never come to pass; and, on the other hand, in political action you are tolerably certain to bring about the thing which you do prepare for—not mind prepare against, which is a totally different matter. When you get everything ready for the establishment of a given state of things, you make take long odds that that state of things will arise. We do not desire separation; do not think it necessary; and are disposed only to prepare for it when we find it inevitable, which is not a state of things that can come upon us before we know anything of it. Our desire as to the present connection is expressed in the words Esto perpetua, and therefore we refuse to look at the wisdom of a revolution whose great merit is that it is to prepare us for another and still more unpalateable revolution.