All He Had To Do Was,
When One Of The Five Successive Governments Which Arose In Four Years
Was In Danger, To Rise In His Place, Say 'Yea!' And Presto The
Country Was Saved.
This House was fast losing, under such a state of
things, its hold on the country; the administrative departments were
becoming disorganized under such frequent changes of chiefs and
policies; we were nearly as bad as the army of the Potomac before its
'permanent remedy' was found in General Grant.
Well, we have had our
three warnings: one warning from within and two from without. Some
honorable gentlemen, while admitting that we have entered, within the
present decade, on a period of political transition, have contended
that we might have bridged the abyss with that Prussian pontoon called
a Zollverein. But if any one for a moment will remember that the trade
of the whole front of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia gravitates at
present along-shore to Portland and Boston, while the trade of Upper
Canada, west of Kingston, has long gravitated across the lakes to New
York, he will see, I think, that a mere Zollverein treaty without a
strong political end to serve, and some political power at its back,
would be, in our new circumstances, merely waste paper. The charge that
we have not gone far enough - that we have not struck out boldly for a
Consolidated Union, instead of a union with reserved local
jurisdictions - is another charge which deserves some notice. To this I
answer that if we had had, as was proposed, an Intercolonial Railway
twenty years ago, we might by this time have been perhaps, and only
perhaps, in a condition to unite into one consolidated government; but
certain politicians and capitalists having defeated that project twenty
years ago, special interests took the place great general interest
might by this time have occupied; vested rights and local ambitions
arose and were recognized; and all these had to be admitted as existing
in a pretty advanced stage of development when the late conferences
were called together. The lesson to be learned from this squandering of
quarter centuries by British Americans is this, that if we lose the
present propitious opportunity, we may find it as hard a few years
hence to get an audience, even for any kind of union (except democratic
union), as we should have found it to get a hearing last year for a
legislative union, from the long period of estrangement and non-
intercourse which had existed between these Provinces, and the special
interests which had grown up in the meantime in each of them. Another
motive to union, or rather a phase of the last motive spoken of, is
this, that the policy of our neighbours to the south of us has always
been aggressive. There has always been a desire amongst them for the
acquisition of new territory, and the inexorable law of democratic
existence seems to be its absorption. They coveted Florida, and seized
it; they coveted Louisiana, and purchased it; they coveted Texas, and
stole it; and then they picked a quarrel with Mexico, which ended by
their getting California. They sometimes pretend to despise these our
colonies as prizes beneath their ambition; but had we not had the
strong arm of England over us we should not now have had a separate
existence. The acquisition of Canada was the first ambition of the
American Confederacy, and never ceased to be so, when her troops were a
handful and her navy scarce a squadron. Is it likely to be stopped now,
when she counts her guns afloat by thousands and her troops by hundreds
of thousands? On this motive a very powerful expression of opinion has
lately appeared in a published letter of the Archbishop of Halifax, Dr.
Connolly. Who is the Archbishop of Halifax? In either of the coast
colonies, where he has laboured in his high vocation for nearly a third
of a century, it would be absurd to ask the question; but in Canada he
may not be equally well known. Some of my honorable friends in this and
the other House, who were his guests last year, must have felt the
impress of his character as well as the warmth of his hospitality.
Well, he is known as one of the first men in sagacity, as he is in
position, in any of these colonies; that he was for many years the
intimate associate of his late distinguished confrere,
Archbishop Hughes of New York; that he knows the United States as
thoroughly as he does the Provinces, - and these are his views on this
particular point; the extract is somewhat long, but so excellently put
that I am sure the House will be obliged to me for the whole of it: -
"Instead of cursing, like the boy in the upturned boat, and holding on
until we are fairly on the brink of the cataract, we must at once begin
to pray and strike out for the shore by all means, before we get too
far down on the current. We must at this most critical moment invoke
the Arbiter of nations for wisdom, and abandoning in time our perilous
position, we must strike out boldly, and at some risks, for some rock
on the nearest shore - some resting-place of greater security. A cavalry
raid, or a visit from our Fenian friends on horseback, through the
plains of Canada and the fertile valleys of New Brunswick and Nova
Scotia, may cost more in a single week than Confederation for the next
fifty years; and if we are to believe you, where is the security even
at the present moment against such a disaster? Without the whole power
of the Mother Country by land and sea, and the concentration in a
single hand of all the strength of British America, our condition is
seen at a glance. Whenever the present difficulties will terminate - and
who can tell the moment?
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