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Date: 1864-08-31
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “Confederation”, The Montreal Herald (31 August, 1864)
Other formats: TBA
CONFEDERATION.
—An article which we translate to-day from the Journal de Quebec touches the great difficulty, from the French Canadian point of view, which will attend the construction of the new organization, Federal or Confederal. To these gentlemen the confederacy is to be only a means of augmenting, not Canadian, but French Canadian power—to limit its sphere, perhaps; but also to intensify it and in the intensified form to hedge it about with such constitutional forms as shall secure it alike from the numerical influence, or the power of reason which may be brought to bear upon it from those who are nevertheless to be called fellow countrymen, and with whom they propose to sit and vote in a joint Federal or Confederal Legislature. In other words, they will, if possible, insist on a constitution on the principle which the Southerners assert to be that of the constitution of the United States, and a legal acknowledgment of State rights such as is now being sought for by means of arms and bloodshed, and such as we believe has a manifest tendency to lead to war and bloodshed. That might, perhaps, be avoided under such constitutional forms, if men could express their ideas in a manner admitting of only one meaning, and if they were sincere enough and disinterested enough to acknowledge the one meaning which could alone be attached to a fundamental constitutional instrument. But, with State rights and Federal rights, there is sure some time or other to come a conflict of powers The majority of States will, or will be thought to do something hostile to the minority of States, and contrary to the rights which the minority has reserved to itself. What happens then? Either that the minority submit to what they esteem an illegality, and the supposed protection of the constitution turns out to be virtually no protection at all, or they support their own view of law by secession. The truth is, that in Governments there must be a universal supremacy somewhere, with power to enforce its behests. This cannot be supposed to lie in the separate States of a Confederacy, because that might ally supreme authority with the weakness, perhaps, of a single State. That the United States were obliged to dispense with a recognized supremacy or to put up a doubtful one, was not a matter of choice, but of necessity—it was the only condition on which the different colonies, each insisting on its own autonomy, each crying out for its own institutions, could come together. The contingent evils were foreseen, but were accepted with the rest of the constitution as, at least, a nearer approach to a united government than the mere league of nations which had formerly existed. Nor is the Government of the United States the only one where the pretensions to sovereignty on the part of separate States has led to the same evils. Without speaking of ancient times, we know the rock on which the Dutch Republic split, and it is within recent memory that civil war has existed even in Switzerland. Yet this idea of separate State governments, established for the express purpose of keeping apart instead of coalescing, is the kind of union which many of our Franco-Canadian journals hold out as the only one to which they can consent.