Evidently the venerable Bishop of Valleyfield is far from believing, like the publicist whose errors we must all deplore, that in organizing a powerful army "to go overseas to fight and die for the noble and urgent cause so proved to them," the Canadian Parliament "were forging for us a militarism without parallel in any other civilized country, a depraved and undisciplined soldiery, an armed scoundrelism, without faith nor law."
The blessings of the Head of the Canadian Church and those of the whole Episcopate have consolated our brave volunteers for the outrages thrust at them, and have inspired them with the great Christian courage to forgive their author. The only revenge they have taken against their accuser has been to defend himself and his own against the barbarous Germans.
CHAPTER XXX.
Rash Denunciation of Public Men.
A long experience of public life, whether by daily observation, begun in my early youth, when the Union of the Provinces was finally discussed, carried and established, or, subsequently, during many years of active political life as a journalist and member of the Quebec and Ottawa representative Houses, has taught me to judge the actions of responsible men, whether ministerialists or oppositionists, with great fairness and respectful regard. At all times the government of a large progressive country peopled by several races, of different religious creeds, is a difficult problem. It should not be necessary to say that in days of warlike crisis, of previously unknown proportions, like the present one, the task becomes almost superhuman. Anyone taking into serious consideration the very trying ordeal through which, for instance, the rulers of Great Britain and France have been, and are still passing, since early in 1914, cannot help being indulgent for those who have the weighty and often crushing burden of the cares of State. Let so much be said without in the least contesting the right of free men to their own opinion about what is best to be done. But it was never more opportune to remember that the honourable privilege of constitutional criticism must have for its only superior object the good of the country by improved methods.
We have reason to congratulate ourselves that this sound view has widely prevailed rallying almost as units great nations,—our own one of them—previously much divided in political thoughts and aspirations, for the noble and patriotic purpose of winning a disastrous war they were forced to wage, in spite of their most determined efforts to prevent it.
Public men, nations rulers, like all others are human and liable to fail or to be found wanting. Unconscious inefficiency, however desirable to remove, cannot be fairly classed on the same footing as guilty failures. The first may, more or less, injure the bright prospects of a country; the second stains her honour which an exemplary punishment can alone redeem.
But it is said with much truth that there are always exceptions to a general rule. That of the human heart to be fallible in public life, as well as in other callings, has met with only one solitary exception in Canada: the saintly Nationalist leader who will never have his equal, "nature having destroyed the mould when she cast him."