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Date: 1865-05-05
By: True Witness
Citation: “Rouge Tartufferie”, True Witness (5 May, 1865)
Other formats: TBA

ROUGE TARTUFFERIE.

— That the political party in Lower Canada known as the Rouges, and of which the Pays is the organ in chief, were insincere, dishonest, and hypocritical in their opposition to the Brown-Cartier scheme of Union for the B. N. A. Provinces, we have always believed. We have never been disposed to attribute that opposition on their part, to anything but the basest and most mercenary of motives; to party spite, to disappointed ambition, and to a hankering after a share in the spoils of office. Their professions of patriotism we have always looked upon as buncombe : and remembering their antecedents, their readiness some few years ago to coalesce with Mr. George Brown, and to sacrifice to the insolent demands of Upper Canada Clear-Gritism, the autonomy of Lower Canada, we have always held in contempt their newly discovered and noisily proclaimed attachment “to our laws, our language, and our religion.” The Rouges were themselves the authors and most active promoters of that very policy which they now condemn.

Nothing could more perfectly justify us in our suspicion of Rouge honesty, of Rouge patriotism, and Rouge attachment to the principle of Lower Canadian autonomy, then the tone which their journals have ever adopted towards the Northern and Southern States, respectively, during the contest that has been raging for the last four years. The principle at issue in that contest was, as every one knows, that of “State Rights” and “State autonomy.” Accidentally—but accidentally only, and in no wise affecting its intrinsic merits, the question of negro slavery became complicated therewith: but the essence of the contest was “State Rights” on the one hand, “Centralisation” on the other. Now these also are the very questions involved in the “sectional difficulties” betwixt British and Protestant U. Canada on the one hand, and French and Catholic Lower Canada on the other hand.

To compare great things to small, the contest or cause that since the cession of Canada by France, the French race in this part of the world have had to maintain, is identical with that for which the Southerners took up arms, and over which Northern democracy has for the time triumphed. Therefore it is natural, indeed inevitable, that every one who forms his political opinions from logical premises, and who bases his political actions upon principle, not upon sordid motives of personal interest,, must sympathise with either North or South, with Upper Canada or with Lower Canada, according as he is in favor of or opposed to, the principles of democratic centralisation. Carrying out his principles logically, the Clear Grit, whose object it is to “swamp the French,” and to consolidate the Two Provinces into one Province, must, and for the same reason, sympathise with the North, and rejoice over the defeat of the principle of State Rights. So also he who upon principle defends the autonomy of Lower Canada, and resists its absorption by the other and adjacent British Provinces, must if logical and honest, sympathise with the Southerners, and espouse, heart and soul, the cause of the Confederates as against the centralising North. There is no shadow of difference of principle in the two cases. What the South is to the North in the neighboring republic, that is the Lower Province to Upper Canada, in this part of the American Continent. The cause of the former was—is rather we should say, for the cause is not yet lost, is the cause of Lower Canada ver. Upper Canada—and its defeat in one quarter must be a severe blow, a source of mourning to its friends in every other quarter. If the Northerners have right on their side as against the South, so also must right be on the side of Upper Canada as against Lower Canada. If the latter does well in resisting a Union which menaces, or even appears to menace its autonomy, and which tends to centralisation, and therefore to a despotism the vilest, the most odious, and the most degrading of all despotisms because a democratic despotism—so also the Southerners did well, and deserved to succeed, in their resistance to the North, and in their assertion of the indefeasible sovereignty and independence of their several States.

Now the Rouge press of Lower Canada, like the Montreal Witness, the Toronto Globe and the entire Clear Grit press of the Province is, and always has been enthusiastic on the side of the North as against the South. To justify its inconsistency in the eyes of its readers, it has published a series of filthy and mendacious libels scraped up out of the dirty Protestant gutter against the slave-owners of the Southern States, who are therein presented as cruel libidinous tyrants: though the fact stands out in the face of the world that, though for the last four years the slaves of the Southern States have been constantly excited to rise against the whites ; and though their masters, away with the army, had left their homes, their wives and daughters at the mercy of their slaves, not a single case of servile insurrection is on record. This simple fact is of itself a conclusive refutation of the mendacious libels circulated by evangelical ministers in the United States, and by a class of writers who pander to the beastly appetites of the public by publishing, sometimes obscene stories against Nuns and Catholic religious, at other times stories equally obscene and equally mendacious against the planters and gentlemen of the South. With this kind of stuff which no honest man would publish, which nothing but a morbid appetite for impurity would ever prompt any one to peruse, so dreary are its platitudes, has the Rouge press endeavored to blind its readers as to the real question at issue, that of State autonomy, in the great American war; and to their own inconsistency and dishonesty in advocating the cause of the North, whilst hypocritically pretending to base their opposition to the lately propounded scheme of Union of all the British North American Provinces, upon patriotic motives, and loyal attachment to the autonomy of Lower Canada.

That autonomy is and must be dear to the Conservative and to the Catholic, because therein is to be found the best defence against democratic aggression upon our civil institutions, against Protestant and infidel aggression upon our religious and educational institutions. But what care the Rouges, properly so called, for these? Their avowed political and religious principles are those of ’89, of which the first fruits were the abolition of all the Parliaments or local legislatures of France, the spoliation of the Church, and the “Civil Constitution” of the Clergy.—How then can we expect that the inheritors of these principles in America should be honest in their professions of patriotic attachment to the liberties and autonomy of Lower Canada; or anything but hypocrites when they raise the cry of “our laws, our language, and our religion?” Bah!