System of Government for Canada: Difference between revisions

Here, ''Messieurs'', success will depend much on the formalities: I am on the spot; suffer that I communicate you the experience of my eyes. You have dispatched three deputies, who are advisable as much as you want by uprightness, patriotism, good spirit and personal merit; but they were ordinary citizens: they failed completely; on the least of knowledge of the higher society you must have expected it. The individual merit, the isolated virtue, shining solely by its internal and modest gloss, are not enough to succeed with a government; one needs glare, grandeur, pump, in the courts, to be noticed and listened; and it is only by the importance of the ambassador that the importance of the embassy is judged. After all, a province as respectable as the province of Quebec has some rights to be represented grandiosely. It is from this point of view that I would advise you to form your delegation, whose members should be taken among the elite of each class of citizens; two from the clergy, two from the nobility, four from the body of traders, and four from that of the farmers: each class would defray their own deputies; it would be for each individual but a pure misery, from which you would be abundantly paid back with the success that would then surely be your. If however such a great number of deputies alarms your economy, reduce it by half, or even to a single representative for each class.

[[Image:Rouville.jpg|thumb|left|René-Ovide Hertel de Rouville, judge of the Court of Common Pleas of the District of Montreal]][[Image:Mabane.jpg|thumb|Adam Mabane, judge of the Court of Common Pleas of the District of Quebec]]But here, a malignant influence, came out of the impure vapours of passions of some false friends, can only corrupt, and kill among you, to the very germ of hope of public happiness. At the first step which the publication of these reflexions could cause, the noisy and wrathful faction of the [[Wikipedia:Adam Mabane|Mabane]], the [[Wikipedia:John Fraser|Fraser]], the [[Wikipedia:René-Ovide Hertel de Rouville|Rouville]], and some flattering mercenaries in place, will at once sound the alarm in all Canada; I can see them in advance flying from street to street, walking their sorrows and their frights, which they will try to universalize and pour in all the hearts, in favour of tumult and din; I am following them with my eyes, knocking from door to door, an address in hand, fabricated in the forging mills of imposture and lie, allied together to support the triumph of the tyranny of despotism, and, through manipulation, threats and artifices, make the frightened and surprised citizens sign a document saying that the administration of General Haldimand has been the administration of justice, humanity, benevolence, and that the current government is the sole government wisely designed for your freedom, your happiness and your glory.

Because such are the inaccurate and poisoned channels, which of source even more perfidious and diseased, led up until now State communications, on the current situation of our province, on the desks of public agencies: and it is by these lying repertories, that our ministries are flattered to learn it: eh, but! would they be so little initiated to the knowledge of men, to imagine that a governor, whose heart is villain enough to play tyrants, could have enough virtue to entrust in the middle of ministers, i.e. of his judges, the evidence of his tyrannies? No; it would be to fall by his own hands, and to overthrown himself from the throne; he is wary to be his own enemy; so did he ever represent, and will he ever represent, to the public leaders, the province of Quebec, as an enchanting stay enchanter, where justice, happiness, the purest serenity reign, without the sign of any sigh, except perhaps that of punished crime; that is to say, ''Messieurs'', that you are and will always be presented as happy in London, at least in the court of state administrators, even if in your fatherland you were swimming in blood and tears: and here is the lamentable illusion and the imposition which I bitterly deplored as of last December and November in my(6) letters to [[Wikipedia:Frederick North, Lord North|Milord North]]. My sighs and yours were then lost; are they condemned to be so forever?

At all events, ''Messieurs'', here is path that prepares the faction whose pernicious plots I traced the portrait a few moments before. It has absorbed in itself, all the public places, all the emoluments and wages of the province; it is this way that it became strong, on the pinnacle of fortune; it can only maintain itself on this summit by the continuation of your humiliation, your oppression, and your slavery: it will move heaven and earth to choke, in their birth, the noble efforts by which you will try to raise up; and to consume your destruction, by consuming the triumph of the system of government which elevated it on your ruins. It is up to you to decide if your provincial existence must be sacrificed to the exaltation and the fortune of some false and perfidious citizens, and if it is appropriate for your glory, to be the idle and insensitive spectators... what do I say? ... the craftsmen and promoters of your own loss, by actively contributing to the success of the measures of these factious. I do not even hesitate to communicate you the confession of it, (because it is important to your glory, which is a part of my own) I will confess you, says I, that you were represented here as a submissive, timid and flexible people, so familiarized with obedience, and made for it, that the voice of liberty, and the sublimes passions of man, would not be able to awake you, and to set yourselves in motion in order to lift even the weight of your irons, and much less to break them. All of England, well aware of your oppression, is today waiting to judge you by your courage and your firmness.

In the middle of this waiting, which your glory commands you end soon, here is the only wish that my sincere patriotism expects in your favour: may your children, and the children of your children, return by their abundant blessings, the zeal and the love of freedom which you will deploy in the critical circumstances, where you suffer, and never have to pour tears of blood on the destiny which threatens them! because it is no longer the time to let yourselves be blinded, ''Messieurs''; it is of all your posterity, which it is question of defending and saving today. Today the government has the arrangement of the province of Québec(6) in its hands; it would take centuries to bring it back from an error of legislation it would not see against the economy of your interests and your rights; and how not to tremble on the future existence of such a sad event, since so many lying voices avert from all sides to mislay the government's justice, by surprising its good faith! There are only you as a body, ''Messieurs'', who, by a decided and vigorous exertion, can form a counterweight, to counterbalance the actions of these enemies, unchained against your freedom. There is only you who can plead your cause eloquently; but at least am I relying on quite authentic titles when I ensure you that, provided that you want to plead it as brave men, you will undoubtedly not lose it.

[[Image:North.jpg|thumb|left|Frederick North, Earl of Guilford]][[Image:Sydney.jpg|thumb|Thomas Townshend, Viscount Sydney]]What are your claims for the reform of the unhappy government which now oppresses you? Nothing more, but as nothing less, than the prerogatives of the citizens of England; but by the content of the social contract, nature assigns them to you, the laws of nations ensure them to you, the constitution of the State, at least in its spirit, confirms them to you; and finally the wishes of all the patriotism of England (as much as it is possible for an ordinary person to count so many votes) wish you their plenary concession and their perfect enjoyment. Our sovereign, from who you must, at the highest degree, demand justice, has been proclaimed, by the public voice, the best of princes who ever sat on the throne of England. A title, at the very least comforting to you, decorates him; he is the special protector, and by predilection of the heart, the father of Canada; this quality, well understood in the capital, shoul by itself be enough to redress and give life to your confidence. The ministry which governs us today enjoys, in the universal ideas, of the glory of popularity, that is to say of a patriotism decided to extend the national happiness in the most remote domains of the empire; the whole body of the people, by recognition and regard, found it honourable to design, by choice, a Parliament according to their model: finally, the minister of the department responsible for the province of Quebec, is [[Wikipedia:Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney|Milord Sidney]]. This lord, then known only as Mr. Townshend(7), was the senator who rose up in advance with more energy and force, against the sanction given in Parliament to the bill of Quebec, because of the despotism, that he foresaw and justly predicted, would one day result from it: Milord Sidney is by honour bound to support the advances of Mr. Townshend, and to extirpate a tyranny which he had rejected and condemned before its advent.

Lastly, this great minister is, by his mother, the descendant of [[Wikipedia:Algernon Sydney|Sidney]](8), the famous patriot whose is the patron of freedom, of which he was so passionate and fond that he wished to never suffer at home anything that was not marked of his majestic livery. A blood so free, running in his veins, will not condemn to slavery a whole people of new subjects, who would come to his official court to reclaim freedom, in the name of the illustrious nation which adopted them.