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Date: 1865-03-09
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “Making a Constitution”, The Montreal Herald (9 March, 1865)
Other formats: TBA

MAKING A CONSTITUTION.

—If we were to say that the people in general were surprized or, shocked, or angry at what they saw going on just now in Quebec on the part of the Government, we should say something very far from the truth. None of these or any other active sentiment is that which prevails. Everywhere we witness, on the contrary, an utter apathy and callousness to all events or changes, which is born to a great extent of an absolute want of faith in the honesty of purpose or sincerity of profession of any of the politicians. People have seen, one after another, so many of our pretended statesmen set up a certain set of opinions and views for years, only to sell it on the first opportunity when anything was to be made by it; they have seen them so often hold up others as fraudulent knaves, only to humbly accept office with the men they characterized as rascals only an hour before; they have seen them, to complete the farce, so frequently put on the airs of virtuous reprobation towards those with whom they had, up to a very recent period, been acting for years, but whom they had suddenly deserted, that they conclude all are alike, and have no hope of effecting any worthy object by such instrumentality. They perfectly understand, moreover, that by the union of two great Parliamentary parties, under resolute leaders, with all the available talent for speech-making at their disposal, with the press which is pecuniarily independent, chiefly following the political leads, and the press, which is pecuniary dependent, managed by the famous circular about the advertisements, the country is as effectually, though more gently garrotted, than France was by the coup d’etat. You meet hardly any one who expresses satisfaction at the course of events. There is an almost universal apprehension of financial evil, with no expectation of any well defined improvement, but, on the contrary, a thorough conviction that there must be an increase of burdens. Most regard our new nostrums either as actually mischievous, or at best as inadequate remedies. Yet they look on with a dull apathy while the play is being played out. This state of insensibility in the body politic, however, is not a more healthy condition than in the body natural. When a great revolution is being effected in the country, it would be well that people should feel a strong interest in what is going on, and if they did, there would be that division of judgment and that wholesome warmth and activity on both sides, which would prevent the too hasty construction of an edifice intended to be lasting. We have the histories of many constitutions; but no one ever wrote that of one which was constructed with the indecent secrecy and hurry which has characterized the framing and passing of the one with which we are about to be endowed if the other Provinces will be as compliant as this. We are quite [s]ure, moreover, that no Legislature in the World, consisting of men of British race was ever before dragooned in the manner to which that at Quebec is by a large majority quietly submitting. Count Bismarck himself could not perpetrate a worse insult on a Prussian Parliament, than by submitting to them a piece of legislation, consisting not of one, but of a long string of propositions, concocted by a clandestine, self-appointed Committee, not known to the Constitution, and informing them that they were not to be permitted to modify that scheme in any particular; nay, that they should be prevented from putting upon record any attempt at modification by carrying of the previous question, and thus destroying the faculty even of moving amendments. A Constitution thus made may be the very best possible one, as good as the choicest of those which the Abbe Sieyes used to manufacture; but it can have none of that guarantee for stability which results from a frame of government being the slow and deliberate expression of a peoples wants. In order that institutions intended for this purpose should be lasting, they should be assented to, and that freely and intelligently, which last condition involves times for reflection. Of what avail is it to snap a favorable judgment for such a plan, even if that be done in the utmost good faith, if inconveniences and dead locks shall arise from the moment that the institutions which are created shall be put into operation? What solid ground for believing that this will not happen can there be in the case of a constitution framed in two or three weeks time by the incongruous elements brought together at the Quebec Conference, and explained in half a dozen different ways to suit the taste of half a dozen different peoples, neither of whom would have it, if they understood it in the same sense, which is elsewhere declared to be the true one? Let us on this head take one item. In Canada the Ministry were reproached for irrevocably binding the country, with no option of Parliament, to the Intercolonial Railroad, by putting the obligation to build it into the constitution. Mr. John A. Macdonald ridiculed the idea of such a thing being in the constitution, by which, if he meant anything serious, he meant that the matter was not to be settled by the fundamental law, and was, of course, open to be adopted or rejected thereafter by the Confederate Parliament. This was very good in Canada, where the doctrine even of Mr. Macdonald’s colleagues is that the railway is only desirable for the sake of the Confederacy, but it did not suit Mr. Tilley’s book in New Brunswick, where they do not want the railway for the sake of the Confederacy; but the Confederacy, if at all, for the sake of the railway. So as soon as Mr. Tilley got the news of Mr. John A. Macdonald’s speech, he wrote to cross question that gentleman, and received for answer a telegraph, saying that Mr. Macdonald had indeed stated that the undertaking to build the railway would not be in the Constitution, but that it would be in the Imperial Act which will most assuredly be the only constitution that we shall have. What are we to expect hereafter, when people coming together under one Government find themselves deceived as to the rights and duties for which they have stipulated, except that which happens when husband and wife only learn after marriage that each has been deceiving the other. Our constitution, if carried in the mode now proposed, will be very far from one of those which, like that of the Mother Country, “slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.” It will be very far, also, from being one of those which, to use another time-honored statement, are not made, but grow. At any rate, we never heard of more than one vegetable of a like portentous size which had so rapid a growth; and, we need hardly add, that that was the gourd of Jonah, which did not prove very comfortable to live under.