Document Information
Date: 1867-03-08
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “Confederation and What It Means”, The Montreal Herald (8 March, 1867)
Other formats: TBA
CONFEDERATION AND WHAT IT MEANS.
(From the True Witness)
“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 “Seance 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 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, that 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 those 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, when then there were changes of Ministry two or three times a year; and when consequently, no man knew what principles he could prudently profess, how he should vote, or what party it was the most 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 prophecies 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 the 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 whatever name our country may be called, our social conditions, are, and will remain as 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.
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 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 elementary truths—we should not hear so much talk about establishing a Canadian, or rather Borealian Kingdom.
GOVERNMENT BY PARTY.—There is one peculiarity of our new Constitution which we fear will not be advantageous, though hitherto it has been strangely overlooked—we mean the appointment of Lieutenant Governors to the several Provinces. These are to be named by the Governor General, who as a British nobleman himself, unconnected with provincial politics, will never be looked upon as head or chief of a party. But the Lieutenant Governors by him appointed will probably be Provincials: that is to say persons already well known in the Provinces by their political antecedents, or in other word, strong “party men,” for nowhere does “party spirit” run stronger than here. Now if the Lieutenant Governorships are to be mere honorary posts, or sinecures, this will be of little consequence; but if they are really to be of some weight in the State, then shall we have reproduced in Canada one of the worst features of American democracy—that, to wit, which renders it inevitable that the chief Executive shall always be a strong “party man,” and therefore the head rather of a political party, than of the State. It is the great advantage of hereditary monarchy that the Executive is of no party; it will be one inevitable disadvantage of the new form of Government in Canada, that the provincial Executive will always be a “party man”—unless indeed the Governor General select to fill the seats of the Lieutenant Governors, obscure men, who have taken no prominent or decided part in provincial politics. But this is unlikely.
Only fancy Mr. George Brown Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Ontario! What respect for such a man or his government could the Catholics of that Province entertain? What confidence could they have in him, or in his administration? He would represent to them, not the Queen holding the scales of justice impartially, but the bitter, unprincipled, unscrupulous partisan. We do not pretend that such an outrage as making Mr. George Brown Lieutenant Governor will actually be perpetrated; but the thing is not impossible, and the appointment, if made, would be strictly legal. Yet would the moral effects be most disastrous; more even than the appointment of Orange Magistrates would it bring the administration of justice into suspicion and contempt in Upper Canada, for the fountain would be poisoned at its source.
Better no Provincial Lieutenant Governors, than to have party men, who have taken an active part in provincial politics, raised to the post; better by far that all Executive functions should be left in the hands of the Governor General. If we must have Lieutenant Governors, however, they should be named directly by the Queen, and selected, either from strangers to the Province—as is actually the case with all Colonial Governors, or it should be a strict proviso that if a Provincial be appointed, he be one who has never had a seat in the Provincial Legislature, or taken any part whatever in our provincial politics. “Party men” in a Legislature are in their place; but in the Executive or Judicial branches of Government they are a curse to the community.