Why subject the Colony to the dissensions of party?  Why foster a spirit of undying enmity among a people disposed to dwell together in harmony?  The signatories argue from the history of Ireland and Scotland, “which never had responsible government, yet government became impracticable the moment it approached to equal rights.”  Hence a Union, because “government must be conducted with a view to some supreme ruling power, which is not practicable with several independent Legislatures.”  Finally, Loyalists and Imperialists as they are, they are not going to stand an attempt to “force independence” on them.  They will take the matter into their own hands, and, if necessary, call in the United States to “replace the British influence needlessly overthrown.”

I do not quote this sort of thing in order to add any tinge of bitterness to present controversies.  The signatories lived to see their errors and to be ashamed of what they wrote.  They, like the Irish Unionist leaders of to-day, were able and sincere men, unconscious, we may assume, that their pessimism about the tendencies of their fellow-citizens was really due to the defective institutions which they themselves were upholding, and to the forcible suppression of the finer attributes of human nature; unconscious, we may also assume, of identifying loyalty with privilege, and “the supreme ruling power” with their own ruling power; unconscious that what they called “Imperial Unity” was in reality on the verge of producing Imperial disruption; and wholly unconscious, certainly, of the ghastly irony of their analogy drawn from the brutally misgoverned, job-ridden, tithe-ridden, rack-rented Ireland of their day, living, for no fault of its own, under a condition of intermittent martial law, and hurrying at that moment towards the agony of the famine years.  Less severe in degree, analogous abuses perpetuated in their own interest existed in their own Colony, and were only abolished under the new regime which they attacked with such vehemence before it came, and which, because it transformed and elevated their own character and that of their fellow-citizens, while drawing them closer to the old country, they afterwards learned to regard with pride and thankfulness.

As an effective contrast to the mistaken views of the Upper Canadian statesmen, the reader cannot do better than study the letters of Joseph Howe, the brilliant Nova Scotia “agitator,” to Lord John Russell, in answer to that statesman’s speech of June 3, 1839, when he argued against responsible government, and quoted the Upper Canadian manifesto as his text.  These letters make a wonderful piece of sustained and humorous satire, of which every word was true and every word applicable to Ireland.  Howe’s portrait, for example, of the average Colonial Governor applies line for line to the average Chief Secretary, coming at an hour’s notice to a country he has never seen, and knows nothing of, vested with absolute powers of patronage, and often pledged to carry out a policy in direct conflict with the wishes of the vast majority of the people whose interests he is supposed to guard.