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Date: 1865-02-10
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “Confederation”, The Montreal Herald (10 February, 1865)
Other formats: TBA

CONFEDERATION.

—If we are to believe the rhetorical statements of the speakers at Quebec, we need wait very little longer for the Millennium. The union of the Provinces is about to achieve at one, within a very little of all that is expected from that blissful period. Personally Mr. Cartier ceases to be a corruptionist and Mr. Brown a Protestant bigot and fanatical hater of the French Canadian nationality. The last named of the two gentlemen finds that nothing has hitherto divided them, except some strenuous business endeavours on the part of each to achieve for his own part of Canada the full measure of pecuniary advantage to which it was entitled from the Treasury of the Province. Neither of them has done wrong; neither of them has reproached the other with the wrong. They have lived in different sections of the Province; they have each been peculiarly anxious for the welfare of his own section; but though Upper and Lower Canada are hereafter to have separate legislatures,—which they have not now—this honest rivalry of interests is hereafter to cease in virtue of the principle of Federation. Mr. Brown is henceforth to be the chief advocate of every thing required by Lower Canada; and Mr. Cartier of all that Upper Canadian “Grits” may think essential to the moral and physical good of their part of the country. In the same way the intercolonial trade in flour—though it is at present free from duty and capable of being conducted, for the best part of the year, directly by shipping which can sail from any Maritime port to any Lake port—is by some operation inscrutable to us, we confess, to be vastly increased by the fact that a certain number of gentlemen from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are to meet annually for legislative purposes at Ottawa. We say that the operation by which this is to be brought about is inscrutable to us, because Mr. Brown is we know, anxious for the continuance of the reciprocity treaty, and believes that it will be continued, so that he contemplates and hopes for, as to this breadstuffs trade, no change in the present commercial relations of any of the countries taking part in it, except by the intercolonial railway, which will not do much. Yet he expects the union to effect a great increase in this branch of our exports. In like manner, we are to be stronger, because we shall say that we live in Cabotia, or whatever it may be, with 4,000,000 of men, instead of saying we live in British North America with the same number, though the average of defenders either to the square mile, or the lineal mile of frontier, will remain the same, and although we have now just the same Imperial or central military authority which we shall have then. Again, this aggregation of people, under the same government, is somehow to make us the most popular country for immigration, it being imagined that the men who adventure themselves into the forests and make the great basis of all immigrant populations, are likely to be especially charmed by political considerations to prize physical advantages, which at present they treat with neglect. Well if all this peace, good-will, greatness and prosperity is really to come out of the passage of two or three acts of Parliament, it will certainly be a pity that we should miss them, considering how much legislation we do, which has no result whatever. With a certainty, or the next thing to a certainty, that the Confederation will be almost immediately an accomplished fact, it would be very bad manners to say one word that would cast a shadow over the pleasing prospect thus spread before us. Negatively, we have more classically, of playing Cassandra in a Troy which is past saving. Positively, we hope that the sudden change which has occurred in some minds as to the value and results of the new scheme, may be justified by the event, and that we may, as Cowper says in John Gilpin, all be there to see the glorious realization of present expectations.