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Date: 1867-01-29
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “Denying His Identity”, The Montreal Herald (29 January, 1867)
Other formats: TBA

DENYING HIS IDENTITY.

The following is from the Kingston Daily News, a Ministerial paper:—

The Montreal Gazette has made a most extraordinary denial relative to Mr. Galt and the educational question. It says:— “We notice that two of our contemporaries are fighting with men of straw about Mr. Galt having some special mission from the Protestants of Lower Canada. Nobody ever said that he had that we know of, except a Rouge paper in this city, which is as good an authority on that as many other things on which it ventures to speak with positiveness.”

It will be distinctly recalled that the Montreal “Gazette” itself was the first to light the embers of the educational agitation, by printing editorially, in October last, a statement which we copied at the time, in which it was asserted that Mr. Galt had become a delegate to London, in order to watch over the interests of the Protestants of the Eastern Townships. That paragraph, it is now notorious in Upper Canada, was written or procured by Mr. Galt himself, just as the authorship of the paragraph appearing in the same newspaper the succeeding day is attributed to the Hon. T. D. McGee. It is proper to state this, although it may appear at variance with journalistic propriety, since it was not a belief in the vague statements of journals that gave energy to the vigilance of Upper Canadian Protestants, but solely the impression thus conveyed that the two delegates were each determined to play an opposing game, with the sure effect of neutralizing each other and destroying the hopes each was separately trying to raise. It was such a belief that led the people of Upper Canada to place more confidence in the justice of the Imperial government than our own; and to expect more from the honesty of the British Parliament than from Canadian delegates, setting out with avowedly antagonistic purposes. If the people have been deceived on this head, the origin of the deception deserves to be traced, and we trace it accordingly to the two prominent paragraphs appearing in the Gazette in October last, presumably written, the one by Mr. Galt, the other by Mr. McGee, and to which presumption, believed to be well-founded, they owed all their force. How the Gazette can now turn round and deny its own original story is, we confess, most extraordinary. One may well wish for authoritative information from England, when it is seen how doubtful and conflicting the statements retailed in Canada appear.