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ought then to have waited quietly the result; to have left the government to make the best of the impracticability of the state of things thus thrown on their hands; and the greatest of follies was to relieve them from their embarrassment of what next to do, by a renewal of hostilities which a little time and patience would probably render entirely unnecessary.

A great city should be set upon a hill, that its greatness should be the more conspicuous; but the little hamlet that would aspire to the same elevation makes its insignificance the more manifest to all the world. We have long been inclined to look upon Lord Durham as a political charlatan; his Canadian dictatorship has only proved him a very poor one. We could never have the slightest confidence or respect for a man who, while professing to head such a party as the Radical party of England, was well known, by a thousand current anecdotes, to be in his personal habits the most absurdly aristocratic, haughty and tyrannical man to his domestics and dependents, within the United Kingdom. Such a man could not be other than a charlatan, with nothing in him but a little cleverness, an excessive vanity, and a ridiculous pomposity. There could not be any thing sound, genuine and healthy in such a man. We confidently predicted his failure when he disembarked from on board the Hastings, in all the imposing magnificence of his ostentation of wealth and power. He had come to a great and a grave task, and all this silly gilding and tinsel, while they proved the vanity and pride of the man, proved also his total misconception of its nature, and incompetency to its performance. And this soon became apparent. The first act of the "Pacificator" was to banish all the principal leaders of the popular party, who were guilty of the crimes of being dear to nine-tenths of the nation, and of having been driven to resistance by the arbitrary and illegal attack of the violent minority in the possession of the government-→ thus exasperating the people themselves who were to be tranquillized, and driving these men into that hostile attitude, on the frontier of a neighbouring country, which must frustrate all efforts at "pacification." While on the other hand the "Liberal" was soon found in more intimate relations with the ultra Tory faction of Canada, out of whose long career of arbitrary violence the agitations of the country had confessedly proceeded, than any former governor. The individual perhaps the most odious to the popular party was made Chief Justice of Quebec; and where the partisan corruption of justice had long been one of the loudest complaints of the popular party, one of the most violent and obnoxious of partisans was placed at the head of its entire administration in the Province; in a capacity which gives him, as the head of the government party, principal dispenser of its patronage, and member of the Executive Council, the

admirable plurality of offices, of selecting the objects of prosecutions, instructing the prosecuting officers, packing the juries through subservient sheriffs, who hold their offices at will, and trying the prisoners-with a direct political interest, in each case, in the issue. The appointment of James Stewart as Chief Justice of Quebec, Mr. O'Sullivan, Chief Justice of Montreal, Andrew Stewart Solicitor General, with Mr. Ogden for Attorney General, could not fail to irritate the popular party in the highest degree; and was certainly aggravating the difficulties of a task which already needed no such increase, that of assuaging the excited and bitter discontents of that portion of the people whose immense preponderance of majority was indisputably attested by the results of the two last. general elections.

In the second place, his course in relation to Wolfred Nelson and the other exiles to Bermuda, proved him utterly incompetent to the high duties of such a position. Even on his own garbled and perverted showing, he stood convicted of a high-handed stretch of power, beyond the limits equally of the law, the constitution and his commission; for which he was most justly held up to the rebuke of the Parliament and people of England, by the indignant eloquence of a Brougham,-of whose career this was one of the finest acts; and which, at all the hazards of the consequences to ensue, Lord Durham's best friends were forced to disavow. The act itself showed the weakness and ignorance, as its attendant circumstances showed the meanness and duplicity, of the man. The letter of Nelson and Bouchette, referred to above, convicts His Excellency of one of the most miserable and mean of falsehoods, which, we doubt not, Lord Brougham will not forget, when the former comes to render his account of his stewardship. General opinion has excused what has been regarded as an inconsiderate extension, beyond the strict line of formal and legal right, of a power supposed to be unlimited,—on the presumption that it was really, as it professed to be, an act of generous clemency, adopted with the best of motives and in the fairest spirit. But how does the truth turn out? Instead of a voluntary confession of guilt on the part of these gentlemen, with an appeal to his mercy-it proves that they were repeatedly and urgently appealed to themselves, by an agent of the government, to do an act of magnanimous self-devotion for the sake of their country and their fellow-prisoners, to allow Lord Durham to release the latter from their protracted incarceration, and to commence the work of reform, for which the finest promises were made -that they were assured that no harm was intended themselves, an assurance of which they knew the subtle treachery only on receiving the order for their banishment, on which their indignation burst strongly forth-that it was only by garbling the paper they were thus prevailed upon to sign, that he was able to make any show of

pretext for his assumption of their acknowledged guilt of high-treason—and that, instead of his reluctance to bring them to trial proceeding either from clemency to them, or from fear of the political prejudices of jurors, the Attorney General had not, within the seven months of their incarceration, been able to procure evidence even to convince himself of their guilt! We leave Lord Durham to extricate himself as he best may from the predicament in which he has thus gratuitously involved himself.

A great many Americans appear to have been marvellously fascinated with the condescension and civilities of "His Excellency the Governor General." We confess that if he does not seem to have managed any of the other functions of his ambitious and noble mission with remarkable skill, he does appear to have very shrewdly apprehended one common foible of a large portion of our republican travelling "good society," the adoration of rank and grandeur, and to have played upon that string (it being so essential a point to generate a favorable public opinion in the Union) very freely, if not over delicately. But for our own part, not having formed one of the thousands who have flocked to Canada this year and having no violent passion for military reviews, and magnificent services of plate, nor for being hunted up by aides-de-camp in hotels to be invited to the honor of a tea-drinking with the Lady of one of the haughtiest scorners of democratic canaille in Christendomwe have not been drawn within the enchanted circle of this peculiar fascination. And we must therefore claim the liberty of looking, undazzled, from a distance upon all this fine show-this aristocratic ostentation-these body-guards, and this vice-regal style and statethese self-contradicting excesses of a condescension which is certainly any thing but hospitality-and of pronouncing the whole spectacle, in connexion with the political pretensions of the Radical Lord Durham, one of the most ridiculous of follies and most impudent of quackeries.

We have gone a little out of our way to speak thus freely of the late Governor General, in order that at least one just and honest opinion in relation to him and his conduct, may issue to England from the American press, which seems to us to have most egregiously misappreciated and overrated the man whom they havein return for a few candied flatteries to the particular vanity of a few individuals, and to our general vanity as a nation-loaded with a gratuitous prodigality of adulation equally ridiculous and mortifying in our eyes. It is scarcely necessary to say, that it expresses only our individual views, without reference to the sentiments of any that may surround us.

There remain but one or two points more to which we propose to allude in this Article, which has already extended to too great a length.

How

With respect to the prisoners taken in the late ill-advised attempts at invasion, we trust that the British Government wi!l deal with them with that generosity and clemency befitting its own character and the spirit of the age. Rash, guilty, as those deluded men may have been, yet we do not conceive that they can rightfully be treated as pirates, or on any other terms than as prisoners of war. ever criminal in relation to the laws of their own country their conduct must be regarded--however it may have severed all bonds connecting them with their own government, and entitling them to its protection--and however the latter may have felt itself constrained to repress their lawless proceedings, by disavowing them, and cautioning them against relying on a delusive hope of its protection or interference in their behalf-yet we caution the British authorities (whose determination at the date of this Article remains in suspense) against yielding to the clamor for the blood of those men raised by the rabid fury of some of the Tory organs. They can never cement the union of their colonies with the mother-conntry by blood. They can have no more right to treat them otherwise than as prisoners of war, than Don Carlos had in relation to the English prisoners taken in arms against him on the Spanish soil. The cases are precisely analogous, so far as it respects the rights of the prisoners. Their enterprise being tolerated or discountenanced by their own government, does not affect their rights in relation to the government whose prisoners they may have become. And if Great Britain interfered in the case of the prisoners of Don Carlos, to insist on the treatment of fair prisoners of war being extended to them, it, at least, has no right to apply any other principle to these unfortunate men. Rebellion is not piracy, though it may be hightreason; nor can the volunteer assistance of foreigners to a rebel cause-misguided and thrust forward into the post of danger by artful men who shrank from leading them there, and excited by false representations, and appeals to natural sympathies neither ungenerous nor unworthy-rightfully, in this age at least, subject them to the treatment of murderers and pirates. At any rate if they are treated with the severity now threatened, we have no doubt that it will, instead of striking a panic, immediately kindle an excitement which no efforts of our Government can repress, and which will entirely neutralize the beneficial influence of its recent course, and of the recent examples of the disastrous failure to be expected in all similar enterprises, so inauspiciously undertaken and so miserably executed. There remains but one more of the topics to which we have proposed to allude at present-the arguments by which some of the friends of the Patriots attempt to appeal to motives of interest on our part, to aid their efforts to establish their independence. They speak of the danger to the tranquillity of the Union, of the vicinity

of the English power; and say that our own Revolution will never be complete, nor the full benefit derived of that important feature of our national system, our geographical separation from all the great European powers-so long as England stretches her arms along our whole line of northern frontier. That her principal object in striving to maintain her colonial dominion on the North American continent is to have that strong hold upon us, to enable her to take advantage of those agitations, and probable dissolution of the Union, which she expects to grow (especially under her fostering stimulus) out of the question of slavery. That the Canadas now afford an asylum for vast numbers of fugitive slaves; the transmission of which to the frontier is carried on, as a regular system, to an extent greater than is known or imagined by us-under the encouragement of the British Government, which is very glad to incorporate them into its black regiments, as the only soldiers on whom, from the necessity of their position, it can implicitly rely, whether as against us or against its own discontented subjects. That by the independence of the Canadas, and their incorporation with our Union, an end would be put to this state of things; the expensive system of fortifications and custom-houses along our northern frontier would become unnecessary; we should be secure of the free navigation of the St. Lawrence, with a vastly increased trade with the people of those Provinces, to the developement of whose resources the acquisition of their independence would afford a strong stimulus,--with other arguments of a similar character.

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Such are the appeals employed, to seduce us from the plain path of duty dictated to us by the highest considerations of national honor and good faith-not destitute of plausibility, though entirely unsound. We have no such apprehensions of the views of Great Britain in relation to our Union. We have before sufficiently shown the entire coincidence of interest, on the part of the people of England, with our own policy of peace and commerce; should we consider the perfect safety from any possible danger of another war with England which is now secured to us by the best of all guarantees, her own interest, to be at all increased by the withdrawal of the geographical facilities for attack which her possession of the Canadas may afford. The security being perfect and satisfactory in its present form, to seek to increase it would be but a work of supererogation. And as for the idea of a prospective annexation of the Canadas, as free republics, to our Union, we see but little to recommend it to favor, and many cogent reasons against agitating or entertaining such an idea. It is from other motives than a spirit of hostile intrigue against the Union that this abduction of slaves is carried on. When the course of events shall bring about, by proper means, and the consent of the mother country, what all parties concede to be after all but a question of time, the

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