Document Information

Date: 1866-10-26
By: Montreal Herald
Citation: “The Delegations to England” Montreal Herald (26 October 1866).
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THE DELEGATIONS TO ENGLAND.—It seems that there is not to be only one protect of special interests with the delegates from these Provinces who are about to proceed to England to urge the Imperial Government to destroy the British Constitution in British North America, and give us instead one that is based like the American Constitution, on a written and inflexible fundamental law, which can be reformed only by civil war. According to that one of our contemporaries who gives us all the news of the movements of the great people, Mr McGee is also to have an express mission, and that is to protect the interests of the Upper Canadian Catholics. This story, unless it be like so many others, a mere sham, conflicts with the account which we have heard, and which we are bound to say we have reason for believing, that Messrs. Macdougall and Howland positively refused to consent to any farther change in the school laws of Upper Canada. These pretended appointments, however, of protectors for separate interests illustrate well the character of the whole Confederation movement. We are told that all parties are longing most affectionately for a closer union, and yet we have these practical avowals that no part of the population can with any confidence trust any other part; and that each one is afraid of the position which all are told they are longing to assume. It is an excellent farce—Confederation made to put an end to Lower Canadian ascendency, and Mr. McGee a representative of Lower Canada going home to cause to be incorporated in the fundamental and irrecoverable constitution a law by which Upper Canada is to be ruled, which of all others appears most unpalateable to Upper Canada and its self-dubbed champion.