Address of the Hon. L.J. Papineau to the electors of the West Ward of Montreal
GENTLEMEN,
Be pleased to accept my most sincere thanks for the confidence with which you have continued to honor me by re-electing me for the eighth time to represent you in Parliament. This solemn approbation of my past Parliamentary conduct is a solemn condemnation which you, in common with nineteen-twentieths of the people through the whole extent of the Province, have pronounced against an administration corrupt in its head and in all its members.
The man who was commissioned by his Sovereign to be the father of all the people has preferred to be the chief of a party — the soul of that fraction, of that faction which has elected that rickety minority, ridiculously styled "His Majesty's opposition in Parliament." The consequence has been that his ample authority and pompous titles, remain well written upon parchment. But they are null in the hearts of all honest men. He and his creatures have been scouted from every hustings by that party which, in the perspicacity of his powerful genius, AYLMER, the clear sighted, saw, "sunk to that level of insignificance from which a combination of fortuitous circumstances raised them for a time, and to which they are rapidly descending."
Does my Lord now comprehend that Governors pass away, and that rapidly, in Canada,the moment they attract to themselves the contempt of the People ?
The Election which you have made, considered in connexion with those simultaneously made in both the Canadas, is a solemn condemnation pronounced by a million of men upon political Institutions which oppress them — upon guilty men whom those Institutions have for too long a time clothed with irresponsible power, which they have so scandalously abused in every department of the state. Those Elections prove that the people are as much disgusted today with the present Constitution, as they were in 1774, with that of 1763, and in 1792 with that of 1774. It has, therefore, ceased to exist de jure. It cannot, therefore, be any longer preserved de facto, except by force and violence employed in oppressing the many for the benefit a few hirelings, who administer it for their own profit, and who, for the good of the Metropolitan State and of the Colony, cannot be to soon driven from public life, inasmuch as they are too corrupt to be reformed, and too rotten and too gangrenous to be healed. Their touch is contagious — no honest man ought to act with them, or associate with them, and thereby grant to their calamitous administration a few days' longer existence.
These Elections made under the circumstances which preceded them, impose upon the Representatives elect[ed], the obligation of working with redoubled zeal in prosecuting to punishment the guilty who were accused in the last Session of Parliament — in reforming abuses — in effecting an alteration of a vicious Constitution — and in extending the Elective principle, the only refuge from the murderous lead of their assassins, and from the more revolting partialities of the Courts of Justice, which remains for a persecuted people who have been put beyond the protection of the Law ever since that mournful day — the bloody 21st May 1832. This mission I accept with all my heart. To the accomplishment of this trust I devote all the moments of my life.
Next to the satisfaction of having united the suffrages of so great a number of my fellow Citizens, whose zeal in the midst of the most violent outrages was supported only by their conscientious conviction that the Candidates whom they supported were devoted to the interests of Canada, the most lively satisfaction that I could have experienced was to be the object of an opposition so immoral and extravagant as that which was excited against me. The minority of a part of Montreal esteeming itself of superior importance in the country, imagined that a victory which would have given it two Representatives in a House so independent as that of the 15th Provincial Parliament, would have drawn it from that perfect impotence in which it is placed by its foolish opposition to the rest of the population of the Province. It thereby exposed the silly pride, the sanguinary antipathies, the empty pretensions of the 'Tory' — 'Conservative' — 'status quo' — 'Scotch' — 'Bank' — 'Bankrupt' — and 'Government;' party, in so strong a light, that I could not help enjoying every day with delight the tortures and agonies which, in its powerless rage, I saw it felt as it daily received the news of the re-election of my honorable colleagues of the majority, and the rejection of the members of the poor, refuse, emaciated minority, so reduced and battered as not to leave to His Majesty — to George Auldjo — to John Molson, Jun. — and the other precious relics of the British party, but a very insignificant, and pitiable opposition.
The censure of bad men is praise to the good. I cannot but be flattered with a fruitless opposition, which has cost its principal instigators enormous sums, and numberless crimes, which stain and disgrace them. Some of the valiant bankrupt merchants who instigated that opposition, staled with the strongest argumentation of which they were capable, that they were ready to spill the last drop of their blood to achieve the Quixotic adventure of putting down the Reform party, that is, the nineteen-twentieths of the population of Lower Canada, and the nine-tenths of that of Upper Canada. Could they more eloquently announce that they were a fortiori very well disposed to steal their creditors' last shilling for the consummation of so good a work as the achievement of their chivalric adventure? The Scotch party raised in 1834, as in 1832, a large subscription for the purpose of gaining by corruption an Election, wherein, if the electors were left to their free and independent choice, it would not have dared to enter into the struggle. From the outset, that party manifested its contempt for the law, and for the partizans which it wished to find in the market to be bought and sold like kegs of herrings, or of whiskey, which it imported to distribute among them, Corruption was to have been so very extensive that funds which were destined for that purpose not being easily levied upon the considerable portion of British mercantile capital, consuming and dissipated among the party, they had the impudence to present their subscription list to virtuous Canadian citizens. They did not succeed in making the latter as bad subjects as themselves, shameless conspirators as they were, against the existence of the most precise laws, and against the first principles of public morals. Their conspiracy was directed not against laws of which they demanded the correction, but against those which they admit to be salutary. They love the enjoyment of vice, they give themselves up to it with eagerness, but they do not like to be called vicious. They will tell you that corruption and violence ought to be banished from Elections, in presenting you with Subscription Lists to defray the expenses attendant on violence and corruption at an Election.
Certain influential citizens, alarmed and perceiving in these preparations of the party who were the authors of the events of the 21st May, the danger that they would make the 21st of November, more after their own hearts, that is to say, that they should cause a greater number of Canadians to be destroyed — thought they spoke to men whilst they spoke to tigers. From an excessive love of peace, they proposed, by way of compromise, to leave to them the choice of a representative, a step which would render the murderous means they had prepared useless. The one party wished for peace. The mean of the 21st of May desired blood — still more blood — and the applause of my Lord Aylmer. The proposition was rejected, and the subscription continued, and was filled up to a much larger amount than on any former occasion.
Amongst the subscribers to the fund employed in supporting Mr. Bagg, there have been in two years and an half bankruptcies to the amount of £200,000.1 In two years and a half from this time, who can say to how much larger an amount the subscribers to the Donnellan and Walker funds will have robbed the widow and orphan by similar bankruptcies?2 The advances of the Banks and the aid of the British capital afforded almost exclusively to the anti-Liberal party, give them on all occasions superior facilities for repeating these immoral subscriptions, followed by more immoral bankruptcies, and these tricks and violences at Elections, which are neither within the means nor in conformity with the manners of the Canadians.
It was under these auspices that the West Ward Election opened. a rabid determination to oppose by unlawful means a man whom they knew they were unable to exclude from the representation, inasmuch as he might have been readily elected in almost every county where he might have been presented — the extent of the sacrifices which they have uselessly made for an useless object, since whether this man were or were not in the representation, the course to be pursued in the approaching Assembly was so certainly marked out by the course pursued in the last Assembly, and approved of by the formal demands of the people — are things which can be little understood by those who are ignorant of the secret motives which force men who are sunken deep into the mire of iniquity and crime, to plunge more and more therein until they are engulphed altogether and disappear for ever.
The several causes which put so many blind puppets in motion at the will of a dozen scoundrels in place, aspirants to and members of the Legislative Council, and of the government, such as they have been, are purely as follow :— Official and lying communications to the Colonial Office on the one hand, and other other an active, hateful and mendacious correspondence between a few intriguers in Canada with other of the same character in London, such as Hay, of the Colonial Office, Gould, Gillespie, Logan, and the hon. member of the Imperial Parliament, Robinson, the paid director of the Land Company, a vile sharper (escroe) which has abused a charge so honorable as that of member of the House of Commons to permit himself, aided by his worthy compeer, Stanley, to commit an act so dishonorable as that of smuggling through the House, unknown to our agents and to Mr. Roebuck, the Bill which put a few founds into his pocket, and which dishonored the British Government, by disregarding the engagement which it made in 1778, relative to the Revenues to be raised in the Colonies. These intriguers have written that the election of Dr. Tracey had been carried by acts of violence so that the correspondents and their friends dared not approach the poll ; that the correspondents were the masters of the election of the West Ward ; that the House of Assembly knew it well, and that it as in consequence of this certain knowledge of an incontestable fact that the Assembly had suspended the issuing of the Writ of Montreal, under the pretext that no election could be carried on in safety in the then agitated and riotous state of the Ward. Mr. Stanley, instructed and inspired by these honest and disinterested correspondents, repeated that Montreal represents a considerable portion of the British commercial capital, and that he did not doubt that such was the reason why the Writ was not issued in a year and a half. He had learned from the same source, and knew with the same exactness, that the population of Montreal was only 20,000, amongst whom 7,000 male adults had signed an address expressing their gratitude for the murders of that mournful day — the 21st May, 1832.
In Canada we know well that only 300 fanatics had participated in this murder, by their approving address. Is the forgery of adding thereto 6,700 supposed signatures the crime of the correspondents in Canada, or of those in London, or of the Castle of St. Lewis in Quebec, or of Downing-street? Time will reveal this iniquitous mystery. But the authorities who were sufficiently depraved to have prepared, or simple enough to allow themselves to be duped, will no longer govern the Canadas. — They have given the Canadas the extension of the elective system. They have rendered it of indispensable necessity by this striking proof either of their stupidity or of their villany.
It is from those premises that the intriguers of London have written to those of Montreal, "if you do not render yourselves masters of the West Ward of Montreal, we can no more present ourselves at Downing-street as your mouth-piece ; we shall be driven thence with contempt as having too long been the bearers of your boastings and your lies." We must not therefore be surprised at the crimes which they have committed. It must be evident that noting but the mildness of the habits of the Canadians, joined with the conviction that they were masters of the Election, have enabled them to bear, without crushing their oppressors, the outrages which have been daily heaped upon them.
From the very dawn of the Election, a great number of "open houses" have been established for the use of the partisans of Walker and Donnellan, and a great number of men, who were not Electors, attracted thither from the distant parts of this Province, and even from Upper Canada, by the offer of money, have been permanently stationed at those houses, intoxicated by drink, and maddened by the speeches of Walker and those of our sublime counter-aristocracy, wallowing night and day in the midst of those Bachanalian orgies. The Candidate Walker frequently brought from the scenes to the Poll, a state of excitement, which rendered him an object of pity to his adversaries.
Who is there, in fact, who has not seen him — frequently seen him abandoned to transports of rage — who, that has so seen him that has not feared that he would suddenly stifle and perish! In these attacks, the agitation of his body, the convulsive dislocation of his jaws — the sudden distortion of his features — his livid pallor — the fixity of his besotted stare, the sudden flight or reason, rendering him a prey to delirium, and attaching to a man who, it is true, never possessed any breeding, but which pretended to have received some education, language such as a drunken fish-fag would scarcely have resorted to — these things, I say, frequently created a belief that he was about to fall into an epileptic fit. This forced and unnatural situation generated the remark that if it was a love of the public good that could thus agitate him, and not the regret of a disappointed ambition, he must, indeed, love the public good most furiously.
One circumstance which may tend to raise doubts concerning the pure and disinterested love of the public good, which manifested itself by such violent symptoms is, that ambition was not a stranger to the breast of the distinguished colleague whom Mr. Walker recommended to public favor. A short time before there was any question of Election, this unpolished, unintellectual mass, whose self-love is simple enough to cause him to believe and say also, that the electors have done him and themselves great injustice, in depriving themselves of the eminent service which his capacity for the part of the Legislator rendered him so fit to perform, disclosed that important negociations had been commenced between him, John Donnellan, and the Provincial administration, to detach him from the popular cause. That if he had chosen to betray his conscience and convictions, he might have obtained a great quantity of lands. Now, however improbable these disclosures are, I would not take upon myself to say that they are false. It is very probable that to the littleness of our administration, John Donnellan may be very great ; in its distress he may appear a notable personage, with whom at last the bargain which he had so long repulsed was concluded. The aristocracy of the Banks, of the Government and of the Counter, must undoubtedly have been initiated in the secret, ere it came and democratized so strongly as it did by rendering homage to the marked superiority, enlightenment and influence which it attributed to John Donnellan, the new idol which it placed on the pedestal. As to the public, it could see nothing in these prostrations of the British nobility at the feet of the illiterate gardener, but the the saturnalia of Demogogueism. As for myself the abjectness alone of their conduct convinced me that it was truly aristocratic, monarchical, loyal and British, and that it flowed from the maxim which our colonial government has ever placed above all laws, human and divine ; Divide to reign. At the thought of the vast territorial possessions which his newly borrowed loyalty was about to procure for his fortunate colleague, what golden visions must have smiled upon the imagination of Mr. Walker if he became the chief of his Majesty's opposition in Parliament!! It was not then surprising that each time he seemed to feel the three-cornered hat tottering on his head in consequence of the rejection of a bad vote, or the retreat of an Elector too scrupulous to take the oath which Mr. Walker with clasped hands entreated him to take, his love of the public good threw him into convulsions. He had not to regret the bills of his creation which would have been rejected by a majority of twelve to one, which majority cherish the interests of Canada as much as they despise the venality of its administration and the meanness of his Majesty's opposition in Parliament.
Prepared by the amount of their subscriptions, by their extensive enlistments of drunken ruffians, strangers to the town, where they might commit the greatest crimes without any risk of being recognized in a place in which they appeared for the first time ; prepared by engaging a number of taverns and cellars from which hordes of hired murderers, placed under the command of the gentlemen, ordered, advanced or retreated by the sound of a bugle, with countersigns and watchwords, rushed suddenly forward upon inoffensive Citizens who were totally ignorant of their infamous manoeuvres — better prepared than on any preceding occasion for the greatest violence that the honour of their correspondents and the good of the Government could require, every species of excess they could commit against their adversaries was considered by the loyalists, in their ardent loyalty, as most meritorious.