For opening new settlements the habitant has many useful qualifications, being usually competent to provide, by his personal skill, all the essentials requisite for his situation, such as house, clothing, and the ordinary farming implements. But having cleared his land, erected a dwelling for himself and a church for the curé, he remains stationary, contented with his lot, and living and dying as his ancestors lived and died before him. At the present day, for instance, a traveller may pass through districts where there is an abundance of excellent milk, and be unable to procure either butter or cheese with the sour and black-looking country bread which is served up at his meals; and it is by no means an uncommon circumstance for a habitant to sell his manure to a neighbouring farmer, or throw it into the adjoining river, while every season his crops are deteriorating, in consequence of the degeneracy of the seed and the exhaustion of the soil.
By the habitant a small gain, or saving of actual coin, is deemed much more important than a large expenditure of time; and he will not easily be induced to venture on an immediate pecuniary outlay to secure a remote advantage, unless indeed the money is to be devoted to litigation, in which he loves to indulge.
There is no class resembling English "country gentlemen" among the Canadians; nor do the doctors, notaries and lawyers, who overabound in the colony, form an efficient substitute for such a class. Needy and discontented, they are more disposed to attempt an improvement in their own condition of political agitation, than to labour for the advancement of their uninstructed neighbours. The only body of men to whom the habitants can look for aid and direction are the parochial clergy, who, in the districts where their authority is unimpaired, act as a vigilant moral police, the efficiency of which is manifested in established habits of sobriety and order. Persons acquainted with the province are well aware that, in the disaffected districts, the influence of the Canadian clergy is much diminished.
It appears, then, that the mode of village settlement adopted by the Franco-Canadians is favourable to the establishment of municipal institutions, and that the obstacles to be encountered are the absence of education, popular inexperience, blind repugnance to taxation, and the absence of a wealthy and instructed class, interested in the prosperity of the many, and desirous of engaging gratuitously in the administration of local affairs.
[ 34. THE IRRESPONSIBLE OPPOSITION IN LOWER CANADA (1838).]
Source.—Lord Durham's Report. Lucas. Vol II.
It appears, therefore, that the opposition of the Assembly to the Government was the unavoidable result of a system which stinted the popular branch of the legislature of the necessary privileges of a representative body, and produced thereby a long series of attempts on the part of that body to acquire control over the administration of the Province. I say all this without reference to the ultimate aim of the Assembly, which I have before described as being the maintenance of a Canadian nationality against the progressive intrusion of the English race. Having no responsible ministers to deal with, it entered upon that system of long inquiries by means of its committees, which brought the whole action of the executive immediately under its purview, and transgressed our notions of the proper limits of Parliamentary interference. Having no influence in the choice of any public functionary, no power to procure the removal of such as were obnoxious to it merely on political grounds, and seeing almost every office of the Colony filled by persons in whom it had no confidence, it entered on that vicious course of assailing its prominent opponents individually, and disqualifying them for the public service, by making them the subjects of inquiries and consequent impeachments, not always conducted with even the appearance of a due regard to justice; and when nothing else could attain its end of altering the policy or the composition of the colonial government, it had recourse to that ultima ratio of representative power to which the more prudent forbearance of the Crown has never driven the House of Commons in England, and endeavoured to disable the whole machine of Government by a general refusal of the supplies.
It was an unhappy consequence of the system which I have been describing, that it relieved the popular leaders of all the responsibilities of opposition. A member of opposition in this country acts and speaks with the contingency of becoming a minister constantly before his eyes, and he feels, therefore, the necessity of proposing no course, and of asserting no principles, on which he would not be prepared to conduct the Government, if he were immediately offered it. But the colonial demagogue bids high for popularity without the fear of future exposure. Hopelessly excluded from power, he expresses the wildest opinion, and appeals to the most mischievous passions of the people, without any apprehension of having his sincerity or prudence hereafter tested, by being placed in a position to carry his views into effect; and thus the prominent places in the ranks of opposition are occupied for the most part by men of strong passions, and merely declamatory powers, who think but little of reforming the abuses which serve them as topics for exciting discontent.