Document Information

Date: 1866-11-29
By: The Montreal Herald
Citation: “Small Reasons for Great Changes”, The Montreal Herald (29 November, 1866)
Other formats: TBA

SMALL REASONS FOR GREAT CHANGES.

—The Globe is becoming less hopeful as to the advantages of Confederation. In an article in answer to the second article in the Daily News, it says:

We do not know that any rational Unionist has ever contended that Confederation would make these Provinces a great military power. The people of the Provinces to be united are all British subjects now, and bound to do their utmost in their own defence whenever called upon; and that is all they can do when united. But what we do contend is, that Union will enable us to make the most of the strength we have. It will put under one authority and one system a population now under five or six local authorities and five or six different systems. It will tend to give us confidence in ourselves and in each other. It will draw closer together the people of the various Provinces. It will make us feel that we are really doing something to consolidate our power, and as far as possible to increase it. Granting that our position under Union will not be all we could wish, it is clear that it will be better than now, and infinitely better than the logical consequences of the arguments of the Daily News. The Intercolonial Railway may not commercially be the most promising enterprise in the world. It may be that military men have over-estimated its importance as a means of defence. Still it will surely be worth something. It may not yield large pecuniary dividends, but it will bind more closely together the different parts of our union of the Provinces—and on that ground we are willing to pay for it.

Now, if this is all that can be said for it, is it worth while going through so much to learn so little? Is it worth while to break up a compact Government on the British model for two and a half millions of people, in order to subject these people to the operations of three different governments, and all for the sake of a federal union, on a plan wholly un-English with four scattered colonies, two of them islands—one a very distant island, and all of them possessing in the aggregate only some 700,000 people? To call the proposed change a union is to use a word which falsifies the fact. It is a disunion of a country now organized on a British model, in order to try an experiment of putting up the pieces with some other fragments in another and looser form of union on the American model, rendered ridiculous by travesty. And after all, little as the Globe now promises us for all the accompanying expense and inconvenience, it is infinitely more than we shall receive according to its own past teachings; for the Globe has shown, “not that the Intercolonial railway may not be the most promising enterprize in the world”; but that it will not pay for the grease for its wheels—not that “military men may have over estimated its importance for defence,” but that it will be utterly useless for defence, and worse than useless because deceptive; not that it will “at all events bind together the different parts of our union,” which union will “give us confidence in ourselves and each other”; but that the said union and all its belongings will be the source of all kinds of evil, and especially of dissensions greater than have before existed among us.