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Date: 1866-11-03
By: Montreal Herald
Citation: “Reasons for Confederation” Montreal Herald (3 November 1866).
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REASONS FOR CONFEDERATION.—We yesterday endeavoured to show the futility of some of the after dinner arguments for Confederation, which have been recently delivered in this city and at Hamilton. We had not, however, space to notice, among the other assertions made and not proved, that this wonderful scheme would strengthen the tie which binds us to the Mother Country. We can reply that this is exactly the reverse of the reason which prevails among a considerable number of persons in England, who profess to give in their adhesion to the new project. A Canadian having occasion to see the editor of a London journal on the subject of a paper which the former desired to publish, was told that it had been considered inadmissible, because opposed to Confederation, though there were other points in it, for the discussion of which the columns of the journal were open. You are of course right to manage your journal in your own way, was the reply, and to have your own opinions on the subject of Confederation; but I think there is a duty which we owe to one another in this matter. In Canada we are always told that this plan is to straiten the tie between us and the Mother Country. Here I find a great many people in favour of the project; but they tell me it is because it is a step towards making us independent, and so getting rid of their responsibilities towards us. Which is your reason? The editor avowed that his reason for desiring the change was the latter one. He was one of these anti-Colonial men who are the subject of so much fearful denunciation at Confederate dinners in Canada, and yet a friend of Confederation from his own point of view. In the London Review a writer openly declares that the escape of England from present responsibilities, is the one ground on which he supports Confederation. “We may seem unfeeling in these matters—we are sorry to produce such an impression. But we know that the question of the North American Colonies is a serious embarrassment to the English Government, and we do not think it would be wise in us by exaggerating local claims and giving ear to local jealousies, to postpone indefinitely a settlement which will greatly relieve us.” Relieve us from what? Manifestly from the embarrassment of the responsibility of present relations. Other journals are not quite so outspoken, though one can easily trace the same line of thought in them; but the London Spectator is almost or quite as frank as the Review. Now we take it that no one in Canada can desire or believe that what the Reviewer calls “embarrassments” will be relieved by Confederation. We all know here that, be our power of raising troops something greater or something less after Confederation than before—and we all recognize our duty to do our share in that direction—it can never be great enough to enable us to dispense with any considerable portion of the aid which we should require from Great Britain to confront a nation which is not only ten times greater than ourselves to-day, but which daily receives ten additions to its population for every one that comes to us. Now we think it very important that this delusion should not be encouraged on the other side of the Atlantic—created, as it is, partly by the imaginations of the people there, but more by vague statements from hence, which, if reduced to figures, would be too absurd for even credulity to believe. It is also wrong that the people of this country should be played upon through their affections by representations equally delusive of an opposite character, and certainly, if Mr. Jno. A. MacDonald’s speech be correctly reported, his remarks were so allocated as to suggest a tendency the very opposite of that which he was seeking to affix to the plan he was advocating. “But as England was unable to hold the thirteen Colonies—so if she wished to maintain her present position on this Continent it would not do to divide the present Colonies.” From a statesman referring to the history of the past as the guarantee of his predictions for the future, we have rarely met a more extraordinary statement. Mr. McDonald was endeavouring to show that union was strength; yet England, he says, could not hold the old Colonies, because they were divided; from whence we must gather, that if they had been united, they would have been so weak as to be easily put down. As a matter of fact, however, even before the revolution, a union had been projected, for the purpose of bringing together the forces of some of the Provinces which were not necessarily contiguous to external enemies, and which would have been thus safe and probably inert while other colonies were suffering ravages. If we were in the same position, New Brunswick lying behind Canada, as Massachusetts does behind Vermont, and Nova Scotia behind New Brunswick, as Connecticut does behind Massachusetts, the sham union now proposed would be a real one, like that of the celebrated bundle of sticks, and it would strengthen us in a military point of view. But the effect which the leagues of the old Colonies had upon them, as their historians describe it to us, was to make them feel a nationality separate from that of the Metropolis; invest the officers of their armies with a pride of country which led to constant bickerings between them and the officers of the regular army; and finally inspire them with the idea of throwing off the allegiance to a distant government, and setting up one of their own. The present union is the creature of the revolution, and in its original shape was the instrument by which the authority of the Mother Country was cast off. That is what some, at least, of the English advocates of Confederation look forward to and desire in our case. We do not say that it must happen; for times and ideas and manners have greatly changed within a hundred years. But we do say that when Mr. Jno. MacDonald refers us to the old Colonies, to show us that Great Britain cannot keep us unless we adopt a system of Confederation, he talks something a great deal too much like nonsense for the discourse of one of the keenest intellects in the country. This nonsense, however, is certainly not in excess of that which consists in the assertion that high moral character among statesmen is necessarily associated with extent of territory, when every school boy knows that Alexander the Great sighed for more worlds to conquer, and yet died at last of delirium tremens.