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Date: 1864-07-30
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “Prospect of the Coalition Scheme”, The Montreal Herald (30 July, 1864)
Other formats: TBA

PROSPECTS OF THE COALITION SCHEME.

—There cannot be a doubt that the defeat of Mr. McDougal must be felt as a great discouragement by Mr. Brown, and by all who are sincerely desirous of seeing the project of which he is a leading contriver carried out. We have already indicated what seems to us to be the moral or conclusion deducible from it. It is true that Mr. Cameron, in a certain way, has given in his adhesion to the Ministerial programme; but to kill the artificers is a poor way to aid in the construction of an edifice, and we cannot but see that any person who really placed the public question before personal considerations would not have put himself forward to defeat one who was a representative of the movement, especially considering how much less than their fair share in the personnel of the Government had been accepted by the particular school of politicians to which Mr. McDougal belongs. Admitting that Mr. Cameron had personal griefs which made him not amenable to party discipline or party persuasion, an angry man cannot carry a County in virtue of his anger; nor is his personal anger likely to influence hundreds of voters with their minds filled with desire for a great and important political change. We know how often personal considerations unworthily affect public decisions; but we know also that these considerations are powerful only when major issues are not involved in the contest, or, what is the same thing, do not excite the minds of the voters. The defeat in North Ontario is, however, of less consequence than the tone of the press which represents Mr. Brown’s Lower Canadian allies. We have reproduced some extracts from these journals when we have been able to seize upon any definite utterance; but to say the truth, that has not generally been a matter of easy accomplishment. On the eve of the most important change which the country has ever seen, these journals whose friends have the initiative of the movement so much in their own hands, have taken small pains to enlighten their readers on the future; but have been dwelling largely and vehemently upon the past. The object of this is to show that the rouges are very bad people for having been willing to do that which, if words have any meaning, the present Ministry has pledged itself to accomplish. Of course, these gentlemen are not inventors of the tu quoque argument, and it would be a very legitimate mode of polemics to use that method, so far as facts will warrant, in reply to those who are now complaining that French Canadian nationality is being sacrificed. But that mode of reasoning implies an admission that what the rouges are said to have been willing to do, the so-called bleus have undertaken, and it is just this admission which we fail to see made in any frank manner in the papers in question. To abuse others for having been willing to adopt a given scheme, is certainly not a good means for conciliating opinion in favour of that scheme, when assumed by themselves, and this seems to us to be the spirit, if not precisely the letter of the arguments which appear in the French Canadian Ministerial press. No doubt, passages may be picked out here and there of a contrary tendency. We have even seen articles in favour of a Confederacy with representation based on population one day, in papers that the next abjured any sort of arrangement which would lessen in any degree the exorbitant influence which accrues to the French Canadian part of the population by the existing repartition of the representation. But, we repeat, the spirit of that part of the press to which we allude is very far from being frankly favourable to that which, if the movement have any life or substance in it, forms the life and substance—we mean the increase of Upper Canadian influence in the Legislature, in something like the proportion of the excess of population in the Western section, subject to the protection of French Canadian interests on subjects peculiarly belonging to them. What we should expect to see in this quarter, and what we have, so far, failed to see, is a straightforward, consistant, and persistent exposition, first of all, of the justice of the Upper Canadian demand, taken per se, and, next, a demonstration of the efficacy of the means proposed for preventing this measure of justice to Upper Canada from being converted into an instrument of local oppression. On the contrary, the gist of all we read is a demonstration, or series of demonstrations, of the want of reality of the whole plan, as announced to the world and understood by people who do not cast about for a non-natural sense in which to read plain verbal documents. This spirit extends not less to the statements of facts than to those of arguments. Thus in one of these journals we have seen a scheme for the repartition of the representation, based on population, in a Federal Legislature of all the B. N. A. Colonies, and the number of members to be sent by Upper Canada, reckoning one member for 40,000 of the population is set down at only two more than those to be sent by Lower Canada, whereas in fact the number, according to the last census, at one member for 40,000, would be nine or ten. Of course, however, there is larger room for doubtful statement in dealing with existing facts than in speculating on facts to be hereafter accomplished. It is, therefore, chiefly in the latter that we find ground for our statements, and notwithstanding the contradictions or quasi contradictions which we have noticed, the key note of all these utterances seems to be that nothing is to be done; that Mr. Brown, by being permitted to take office with his old opponents, has been made virtually to retract all that he has hitherto said against them, and that having thus been shorn of his strength, his colleagues will cooperate with him in proposing some scheme in a perfunctory manner, with the clear understanding among their friends that it is to be defeated, or that if carried, it will amount to nothing. The Canadien indeed, while supporting a Ministry pledged in the most solemn way to federation and representation based upon population, has had the courage to say that it will have neither, and that the Ministry—at least the part with which it is especially en rapport—has as little love for either as itself. We believe that this state of things in Lower Canada is much more seriously ominous as to the success of the coalition policy than is the defeat of Mr. MacDougal. It may be that some menagements of this kind are a necessary preliminary to the conversion of a whole population to a doctrine which they have for years been taught to regard as necessarily destructive to everything they ought to hold dear. We, of course, deal only with the present, and not with what may be said or done in the future; and judging from that present, Mr. Brown will require all the support of those who wish well to his cause in order to enable him to achieve it.