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: