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
In diplomacy I deny also the palm. For although India is a case in
point, like as Texas, yet even there we have never first planted a
population with the express purpose of ejecting the lawful government,
but have conquered where conquest was not only hailed by the enslaved
people but was a positive benefit, by the introduction of mild and
equitable laws instead of brutal and bloody despotisms. We have not
snatched from a weak republic, whose principles had been expressly
formed on our own model, that which poverty alone obliged it to
relinquish. If the writer, who appears to be an excellent man and a good
christian, had lived for several years on the borders of the eagerly
desired Canada, I very much doubt whether he would have seen such a
_couleur de rose_ in the transactions of the mighty commonwealth, where
the rulers are the ruled, and where education, intellect, integrity,
innocence, and wealth must all alike bow before the Juggernaut of an
unattainable perfection of equality.
If Bill Johnson, the mail robber and smuggler, is as good as William
Pitt or any other William of superior mind, why then the sooner the
millennium of democracy arrives the better. It is unfortunate for the
present generation--what it will be for the next no man can pretend to
say--that this debasing principle is gaining ground not only in Canada
but in England. A reflecting mind has no objection to the creed that all
men were created equal; but history, sacred and profane, plainly shows
that mind as well as matter is afterwards, for the wisest of purposes,
very differently developed.
Does the meanest white American, the sweeper of Broadway, if there be
such a citizen, believe in this perfection of equality amongst men as a
fundamental axiom of the rights of man? Place a black sweeper of
crossings in juxtaposition, and the question will very soon solve
itself. Why, the free and enlightened citizens will not even permit
their black or coloured brethren to worship their common Creator in the
same pew with themselves--it is horror, it is degradation! And yet
there is a universal outcry about sacred liberty and equality all over
the Union. The angels weep to witness the tricks of men placed in a
little brief authority. Can such a state of things last as that, where
the Irish labourer is treated as an inferior being in the scale of
creation, and the Negro, or the offspring of the Negro and the white, is
branded with the stigma of servile? It cannot--it will not. Either let
democracy assume its true and legitimate features, or let it cease--for
the re-action will be a fearful one, as dread and as horribly diabolical
as that which the folly of the aristocracy of old France brought on that
devoted land.
I have said, and I repeat it, that a residence on the borders of Canada
and the United States for some time will cure a reflecting mind of many
long cherished notions concerning the relative merits of a limited
monarchy and of a crude democracy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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