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Date: 1867-05-29
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “Mr. Galt on Annexation”, The Montreal Herald (29 May, 1867)
Other formats: TBA

MR. GALT ON ANNEXATION.

—In remarking the other day upon the extra-Parliamentary utterances at the Galt dinner at Lennoxville, we said that, besides the points on which we touched, there were other noticeable things in the proceedings, to which we should thereafter have occasion to revert. Among these was certainly the observations which the late Finance Minister thought it his duty to make with respect to the United States. We have always considered that the constant allusion to the position of a neighbouring government, as a motive for our own policy, was as mischievous as it seemed to us to be in bad taste. In fact a nation ceases to be truly independent from the moment that it bases the acts of its internal government upon either the fear of its neighbour or the desire to conciliate its neighbour. We never could comprehend the reasoning, if reasoning was so much as attempted, by which it was sought to prove, and we always doubted the assertion as the statement of a fact that we must become annexed to the United States in case we did not adopt the nostrum of Confederation. However, we have adopted it, and, therefore, one would think that there should be an end of any speculation on the other of the two propounded alternatives. But Mr. Galt, not once but twice, has deliberately intimated to us that after all this wonderful panacea is by no means a certain prophylactic for the annexation disorder. To continue the medical simile, we may say that instead of its operating like vaccination, to save us from disease, it is to be looked on rather in the light of inoculation, which brings on the malady in a favourable way. The little dose of federalism, as applied to four Provinces, may thus, on Mr. Galt’s theory, be esteemed as the small quantity of virus by which the entire body politic will become impregnated with Federal Republicanism. This is certainly a remarkable style of observation for one who is still virtually a Minister of the Crown, and in the mouth of a man like Mr. Galt it can scarcely be thought to be without some settled intention. However, as a correspondent has treated the subject elsewhere, we need say nothing farther upon it in this place.