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Date: 1866-11-20
By: Montreal Herald
Citation: “Correspondence” Montreal Herald (20 November 1866).
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CORRESPONDENCE.

To the Editor of the MONTREAL HERALD.

SIR,—With all the admiration I feel for the gallant warfare you are waging, almost single handed, among the journals of the country against false principles and corrupt practices in the administration of our public affairs, I cannot conceal my regret that you do not more frequently refer to the debasing and deadening influence on the Press exerted by the Government that owes its origin to the most unprincipled intrigue that disfigures even Canadian political history. You are probably restrained by considerations of professional delicacy, and I can appreciate and applaud such motives, which are at once natural and creditable; but I venture to suggest that there can be no more appropriate function of high toned, independent journalism than to signalize the effect of any given policy or series of events on an instrument of so much importance as the machinery of our modern civilization, as the newspaper press has become. Outside your own and one or two other journals of less note, who now looks for anything like independent criticism on passing events, or for utterances of any kind, even the announcement of facts, that might perchance affect unfavourably the supposed interests of the knot of politicians whose unscrupulous use of the public patronage enable them practically to control the columns of the great majority of the newspapers published in the province? This control is even more apparent in the suppression of all discussion, than in the slavish subserviency that characterizes such comments as are occasionally suffered to see the light on common place or indifferent topics. When mum is the word, it passes along the whole line from Quebec to Sarnia, and it is obeyed with unquestioning alacrity, that would provoke merriment if it were not a sickening sign of the degradation of a noble institution which we have been taught to regard as the palladium of our liberties. It is only the other day that the leading Ministerial Journal in this city, deliberately declared its determination not to discuss a question of the gravest importance to a large class in our community, of whom it has claimed and still claims to be the special champion, intimating at the same time that information on the subject in the possession of its conductors was withheld from its readers until it suited the purposes of the Government to make it public. I doubt whether there was ever before witnessed, in any country possessing a free press, so complete an abnegation of its functions on the part of a Journal with any pretensions to independence. And then, what has been the course recently of the same Journal on a subject that has for some days past formed the chief topic of conversation in the commercial and financial circles of this great city? I mean the extraordinary proceedings and particularly the extraordinary statement made on behalf of the Government at the late meeting of the shareholders of the Bank of Upper Canada. Here surely was a subject on which, if on any, the voice of an independent press should be heard, but we listen in vain for the utterances of the Montreal Gazette. Indeed, throughout the length and breadth of the Province, no thoroughly Ministerial journal has, I believe, ventured any comments whatever on this subject. The Government cannot be praised, cannot even be defended, for its past word!” How different are the relations of the Press to the Government and to the public in England. There an independent press, the honest exponent of enlightened public opinion, literally controls the Government. Of this we have had two notable examples within the past few weeks. We all remember the vigorous comments of the London journals on the Lamirande case, and how promptly the Government followed these expressions of public opinion by ordering an investigation. And more striking still was the case of poor Mr. Snider, the inventor, whose wrongs and untimely fate have roused the sympathy of the world. Unfortunately, Red Tape and the Circumlocution office had nearly finished their work, before the great heart of England was touched by a knowledge of his sufferings and wrongs; but the moment the facts became known, the cry for justice was echoed through the land by a faithful press, and Red Tape and Circumlocution were instantly put to rout—too late, alas! to save their victim. But the example of the direct and controlling influence of public opinion, as developed by the Press, on the administration of public affairs in England, is none the less apposite.

The Press in this country will rise to the grandeur of its mission whenever the people insist that the unholy alliance between the public treasury, represented by tricky politicians, and the public press, represented by a class of men who have no proper conception of the dignity of their vocation, shall cease — and not till then.