Nature and Human Nature

by Thomas Chandler Haliburton

“My good gracious,” said he, a talking to himself, “my good gracious, is this you, John Smiler? I havn’t seen you before now going on twenty years. Oh, how shockingly you are altered, I shouldn’t a known you, I declare.”

Now, I have held the mirror to these fellows to see themselves in, and it has scared them so they have shaved slick up, and made themselves look decent. I won’t say I made all the changes myself, for Providence scourged them into activity, by sending the weavel into their wheat-fields, the rot into their potatoes, and the drought into their hay crops. It made them scratch round, I tell you, so as to earn their grub, and the exertion did them good. Well, the blisters I have put on their vanity stung ’em so, they jumped high enough to see the right road, and the way they travel ahead now is a caution to snails.

Now, if it was you who had done your country this sarvice, you would have spoke as mealy-mouthed of it as if butter wouldn’t melt in it. “I flatter myself,” you would have said, “I had some little small share in it.” “I have lent my feeble aid.” “I have contributed my poor mite,” and so on, and looked as meek and felt as proud as a Pharisee. Now, that’s not my way. I hold up the mirror, whether when folks see themselves in it they see me there or not. The value of a glass is its truth. And where colonists have suffered is from false reports, ignorance, and misrepresentation. There is not a word said of them that can be depended on. Missionary returns of all kinds are coloured and doctored to suit English subscribing palates, and it’s a pity they should stand at the head of the list. British travellers distort things the same way. They land at Halifax, where they see the first contrast between Europe and America, and that contrast ain’t favourable, for the town is dingy lookin’ and wants paint, and the land round it is poor and stony. But that is enough, so they set down and abuse the whole country, stock and fluke, and write as wise about it as if they had seen it all instead of overlooking one mile from the deck of a steamer. The military enjoy it beyond anything, and are far more comfortable than in soldiering in England; but it don’t do to say so, for it counts for foreign service, and like the witnesses at the court-marshall at Windsor, every feller sais, Non mi ricordo. Governors who now-a-days have nothing to do, have plenty of leisure to write, and their sufferings are such, their pens are inadequate to the task. They are very much to be pitied.

Well, colonists on the other hand seldom get their noses out of it. But if provincials do now and then come up on the other side of the big pond, like deep sea-fish rising to the surface, they spout and blow like porpoises, and try to look as large as whales, and people only laugh at them. Navy officers extol the harbour and the market, and the kindness and hospitality of the Haligonians, but that is all they know, and as far as that goes they speak the truth. It wants an impartial friend like me to hold up the mirror, both for their sakes and the Downing Street officials too. Is it any wonder then that the English don’t know what they are talking about? Did you ever hear of the devil’s advocate? a nickname I gave to one of the understrappers of the Colonial office, an ear mark that will stick to the feller for ever! Well, when they go to make a saint at Rome, and canonize some one who has been dead so long he is in danger of being forgot, the cardinals hold a sort of court-martial on him, and a man is appointed to rake and scrape all he can agin him, and they listen very patiently to all he has to say, so as not to do things in a hurry. He is called “the devil’s advocate,” but he never gained a cause yet. The same form used to be gone through at Downing Street, by an underling, but he always gained his point. The nickname of the “devil’s advocate” that I gave him did his business for him, he is no longer there now.

The British cabinet wants the mirror held up to them, to show them how they look to others. Now, when an order is transmitted by a minister of the crown, as was done last war, to send all Yankee prisoners to the fortress of Louisburg for safe keeping, when that fortress more than sixty years before had been effectually razed from the face of the earth by engineer officers sent from England for the purpose, why it is natural a colonist should laugh, and say Capital! only it is a little too good; and when another minister says, he can’t find good men to be governors, in order to defend appointments that his own party say are too bad, what language is strong enough to express his indignation? Had he said openly and manly, We are so situated, and so bound by parliamentary obligations, we not only have to pass over the whole body of provincials themselves, who have the most interest and are best informed in colonial matters, but we have to appoint some people like those to whom you object, who are forced upon us by hollerin’ their daylights out for us at elections, when we would gladly select others, who are wholly unexceptionable, and their name is legion; why, he would have pitied his condition, and admired his manliness. If this sweeping charge be true, what an encomium it is upon the Dalhousies, the Gosfords, the Durhams, Sydenhams, Metcalfs, and Elgins, that they were chosen because suitable men could not be found if not supported by party. All that can be said for a minister who talks such stuff, is that a man who knows so little of London as to be unable to find the shortest way home, may easily lose himself in the wilds of Canada.

Now we licked the British when we had only three millions of people including niggers, who are about as much use in a war as crows that feed on the slain, but don’t help to kill ’em. We have “run up” an empire, as we say of a “wooden house,” or as the gall who was asked where she was raised, said “She warn’t raised, she growed up.” We have shot up into manhood afore our beards grew, and have made a nation that ain’t afeard of all creation. Where will you find a nation like ours? Answer me that question, but don’t reply as an Irishman does by repeating it,—“Is it where I will find one, your Honour?”

Minister used to talk of some old chap, that killed a dragon and planted his teeth, and armed men sprung up. As soon as we whipped the British we sowed their teeth, and full-grown coons growed right out of the earth. Lord bless you, we have fellows like Crocket, that would sneeze a man-of-war right out of the water.

We have a right to brag, in fact it ain’t braggin’, its talking history, and cramming statistics down a fellow’s throat, and if he wants tables to set down to, and study them, there’s the old chairs of the governors of the thirteen united universal worlds of the old States, besides the rough ones of the new States to sit on, and canvas-back ducks, blue-point oysters, and, as Sorrow says, “hogs and dogs,” for soup and pies, for refreshment from labour, as Freemasons say. Brag is a good dog, and Holdfast is a better one, but what do you say to a cross of the two?—and that’s just what we are. An English statesman actually thinks nobody knows anything but himself. And his conduct puts folks both on the defensive and offensive. He eyes even an American all over as much as to say, Where the plague did you originate, what field of cotton or tobacco was you took from? and if a Canadian goes to Downing Street, the secretary starts as much as to say, I hope you han’t got one o’ them rotten eggs in your hand you pelted Elgin with. Upon my soul, it wern’t my fault, his indemnifyin’ rebels, we never encourage traitors except in Spain, Sicily, Hungary, and places we have nothin’ to do with. He brags of purity as much as a dirty piece of paper does, that it was originally clean.

“We appreciate your loyalty most fully, I assure you,” he says. “When the militia put down the rebellion, without efficient aid from the military, parliament would have passed a vote of thanks to you for your devotion to our cause, but really we were so busy just then we forgot it. Put that egg in your pocket, that’s a good fellow, but don’t set down on it, or it might stain the chair, and folks might think you was frightened at seeing so big a man as me;” and then he would turn round to the window and laugh.

Whoever brags over me gets the worst of it, that’s a fact. Lord, I shall never forget a rise I once took out of one of these magnetized officials, who know all about the colonies, tho’ he never saw one. I don’t want any man to call me coward, and say I won’t take it parsonal. There was a complaint made by some of our folks against the people of the Lower provinces seizing our coasters under pretence they were intrudin’ on the fisheries. Our embassador was laid up at the time with rheumatism, which he called gout, because it sounded diplomatic. So says he, “Slick, take this letter and deliver it to the minister, and give him some verbal explanations.”