Quebec to Amherstburg. For Lord Glenelg, with the best intentions in the world, had a positive genius for doing the wrong thing.
But even such evidences of ignorance as did arrive by despatches and otherwise did not warrant, in the minds of many Liberals, the overthrow of a monarchy. They made allowance for good disposition in the abstract, and spoke of “want of knowledge and characteristic apathy.” The influence of these men cannot now be overestimated. They were then looked upon with suspicion by either side, for they recognized that gigantic obstacles and class exclusions were to be met; a recognition which lessened the credit of their heartfelt “Je suis loyal.” On the other hand, a good many French Canadians were made to join the rebel side by intimidation.
If the assurance of “Je suis loyal” did not come quickly enough some inoffensive Frenchman would find himself popped into the guardhouse, and the results of jealousy and over-zeal have left us many absurd stories. A county M.P., at the Château one sultry evening, seeing the rest all busy at ice-cream, asked for some. The Canadian Solon took a huge spoonful, his first taste of such a delicacy. With a feeling of rage at what he thought an insult, or at least neglect, he cried out what is translated into, “You abominable rascal, had this been for an Englishman you would have taken the chill off.”
No more condemnatory record exists of the British Clique than that left of it in its earliest days by Governor Murray, a man not likely, to judge by the personal anecdotes we have of his reign, to be accused of French proclivities. For a time everything was given a French turn, and “Don’t moushify me,” in the words of an eminent literary man, showed the essence of British feeling of the day.
Although Murray said the ignorance of the French-Canadian and his devotion to his priest ran together, and that the veneration was in proportion to the ignorance, he has to say also that, with the exception of nineteen Protestant families and a few half-pay officers, most of the British population were traders, followers of the army, men of mean education. All had their fortunes to make: “I fear few are solicitous about the means when the end can be obtained. … The most immoral collection of men I ever knew, of course little calculated to make the new subjects enamoured with our laws, religion and customs, and far less adapted to enforce these laws which are to govern.”
Canadians were then a frugal, industrious, moral set of men, noblesse and peasantry alike, knit to each other by ties made in the time of common danger; the former as much contemned by Murray’s compatriots for their superior birth and behaviour as the latter were by him for their ignorance. In his despatch to the king’s advisers he is particularly hard on the judge and attorney-general, neither of whom knew the French language—nor, indeed, did any of the men to whom offices of greatest trust were bestowed by the sub-letting of posts whose property they became through favour. In a word, a more worthless set of officials could not be gathered together than that which carried out the beginning of British rule in Lower Canada. Haphazard circumstance placed them where they were, and they scrupled not to make themselves paramount.
This oligarchy, made up “of the driftwood of the army and manned by buccaneers of the law, knew how to seize occasion and circumstance;” and the governors, “fascinated by these official anacondas, fell into their folds and became their prey, were their puppets and servants, and made ministers of them instead of ministering to them.”
Papineau contended that when all the people in any country unanimously repudiate a bad law it is thereby abrogated. To which sentiment Mr. Stuart responded, “This is rebellion.” Unfortunately, with many high in office, some governors included, any measure of opposition meant rebellion, and, like Mr. Stuart, they did not hesitate to say so.
Papineau, and those whom he represented, looked upon the British Government as a mélange of old usages, old charters, old fictions, and prejudices old and new, new and old corruptions, the right of the privileged few to govern the mass. The boasted “image and transcript” in Canada was called by them a veritable Jack-’o-lantern, a chameleon that assumed colour as required.
In Papineau’s interview with Lord Bathurst some years before rebellion, that nobleman, after allowing that difficulties existed, blaming remoteness from England and nearness to the United States as aggravating circumstances, asked for only twenty-five years of patriotic resignation to what he considered a hard but, under the circumstances, natural state of things. But Papineau’s Utopia differed from Lord Bathurst’s; and he told him so.
It was now that it came to be acknowledged there was something more powerful than Parliament, governor, or priest. That was opinion after it had spoken in print. On being asked how much treason a man might write and not be in danger of criminal prosecution, Horne Tooke replied: “I don’t know, but I am trying to find out.” Where anything belonging to Majesty, even so remotely as an article in the military stores, was irreverently treated, the article in question became of importance through the importance of its royal owner, and treason could lurk in a misused garment.
“For grosser wickedness and sin,
As robbery, murder, drinking gin,”
the penalties were then heavy indeed; but the nature of treason, according to the Common Law of England, is vague, and judges were sometimes put to rare shifts to find it. Evidently it did not always dwell in the heart alone, but on occasion could be found by a diligent judge considerably below that organ. A tailor, tried for the murder of a soldier, had the following peroration tacked on to his death sentence by a judge who was loyal enough to have been a Canadian:
“And not only did you murder him, but you did thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propel the lethal weapon through the belly-band of his breeches, which were His Majesty’s!”
“To slay a judge under specified circumstances” was also a count in treason, and this knight of the bodkin doubtless longed to thrust his tool into his wordy antagonist. But as a phrenologist has told us, the judge could best illustrate his bump of veneration by the feeling with which Tories of the old school regarded their sovereign. In Canada a man had not to show sedition in order to be suspended; for there was a law to banish him if he were “about to endeavour to alienate the minds of His Majesty’s subjects … from his person or Government.” She foreshadowed the methods of the Mikado; when it was desired to punish a man “a crime was invented to suit his case”—an inversion of the punishment fitting the crime. Sir James Mackintosh succeeded in passing two bills lessening the list of crimes punished by hanging; but Lord Eldon demurred at the noose being done away with in case of five shillings worth of shoplifting, as the small tradesmen would be ruined. Then, why not quartering and other horrors for treason?
They certainly left no stone unturned in Canada to find out details in matters of treason or libel. The John Bull and other English papers handled some cases without gloves; but it was reserved for Canada to show what could be done with printers’ ink. The type fairly flew into place under the willing fingers of compositors who were also politicians. Minerva in the printing office is oftentimes undignified. She seems to have been particularly so in the case of Le Canadien, a paper founded in 1806. Its wood-cut frontispiece had the arms and emblems of Canada, with two beavers hard at work biting the slender tie which attached the scroll to the insignia of Great Britain, and, of course, a suitable motto. Two reporters of that stormy time added to the excitement of the Assembly by throwing assafœtida on the stoves. The odour was insupportable, and the too enthusiastic scribes were taken in charge by the sergeant-at-arms. Like many others whose freedom that functionary sought to curtail, they could not be found when wanted. When the type, paper and presses of Le Canadien office, under a warrant from Judge Sewell, were seized in 1810, the magistrate, attended by a file of soldiers, removed all to the vaults of the Courthouse. This act, with the long imprisonment without trial which followed, was considered one of the most arbitrary committed since Hanoverian rule began. The printers were arrested, as were also the leading members of the Assembly, Messrs. Pierre Bedard, Tachereau and Blanchet. When some of these members had been admitted to the bar, M. Perrault, one of those discreet men who were the saving of their country, patriotic but prudent, made the caustic remark: “So many men forced to steal in order to make a living! I shall certainly yet see some of you hanged.” It was quite easy to hang a man in days when the death penalty covered an incredible number of offences,