Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1Bonnycastle, Richard Henry, Sir
History
Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1
Bonnycastle, Richard Henry, Sir
Canada -- Description and travel; Ontario -- Description and travel
The republican notions which the greater portion of the lower classes
emigrating from the old country have been drilled into, lead them to
believe that in the United States all men are equal, and that thus they
have a splendid vault to make from poverty to wealth, an easy spring
from a state of dependency to one of vast importance and consideration.
The simple axiom of republicanism, that a ploughman is as good as a
president, or a quarryman as an emperor, is taken firm hold of in any
other sense than the right one. What sensible man ever doubted that we
were all created in the same mould, and after the same image; but is
there a well educated sane mind in America, believing that a perfect
equality in all things, in goods and chattels, in agrarian rights and in
education, is, or ever will be, practicable in this naughty world?
Has nature formed all men with the same capacities, and can they be so
exactly educated that all shall be equally fit to govern?
The converse is true. Nature makes genius, and not genius nature. How
rarely she yields a Shakespeare!--There has been but one Homer, one
Virgil, since the creation. There was never a second Moses, nor have
Solomon's wisdom and glory ever again been attainable.
Look at the rulers of the earth, from the patriarchs to the present day,
how few have been pre-eminent! Even in the earliest periods, when the
age of man reached to ten times its present span, the wonderful sacred
writ records Tubal-Cain, the first artificer, and Jubal, the lyrist, as
most extraordinary men; and with what care are Aholiab and Bezabel,
cunning in all sorts of craft, and Hiram, the artificer of Tyre,
recorded! Hiram, the king, great as he undoubtedly was, was secondary in
Solomon's eyes to the widow's son.
These men, says the holy record, were gifted expressly for their
peculiar mission; and so are all men, to whom the Inscrutable has been
pleased to assign extraordinary talent.
Caesar, the conqueror, Napoleon, his imitator, and Nelson, and
Wellington, are they on a par with the rabble of New York? Procul, O,
procul este profani!
Pure democracy is an utter and unattainable impossibility; nature has
effectually barred against it. The only thing in the course of a life of
more than half a century that has ever puzzled me about it is, that the
Catholic clergy should, in so many parts of the world, have lent it a
helping hand. The ministers of a creed essentially aristocratic,
essentially the pillars of the divine right of kings, have they ever
been in earnest about the matter? Perhaps not!
If that giant of modern Ireland, the pacificator citizen king, succeeded
in separating the island from Great Britain, would he, on attaining the
throne, or the dictatorship, or the presidency, or whatever it might be,
for the nonce, desire pure democracy? _Je crois que non_, because, if he
did, he would reign about one clear week afterwards.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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