TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Arranged under the Names of the Works from which they are taken.

MUSEUM

OF

Foreign Literature, Science and Art.

MAY, 1838.

From the Quarterly Review (Tory).

CANADA.

1. Remarks on the Proceedings as to Canada in the present Session of Parliament. By one of the Commissioners. 10th April, 1837.

2. Plain Statement of the Quarrel with Canada, in
which is considered who first infringed the Constitu-
tion of the Colony. London, 1838.

3. Hints on the Case of Canada, for the Consideration of
Members of Parliament. London, 1838.
4. The Canadian Controversy; its Origin, Nature, and
Merits. London, 1838.

"Tis the sport to have the Engineer Hoist in his own petar

and if the gravest interests of the country were not perilled by their monstrous imbecility, it would really have been sport to see the at once contemptible and ridiculous figures made by Lord John Russell and his colleagues in the late short session of their new parlia

ment.

In the extreme verbal detail in which the debates are

sion! Lord John-the chief performer-was like a schoolboy getting through Collins's Ode on the Passions, but reversing the order; for he began with Cheerfulness and Hope; then ran back the gamut to Anger and Despair; and at last, like the personification of Fear

reported, much of the spirit evaporates-and all the pantomime is lost. The last session-three weeks by the calendar-three hours by the measure of business -three ages by the feelings of the ministers-could The whigs have opened their new parliament in the only have been adequately reported not by the pen but same spirit, but under still darker auspices than they the pencil-not by shorthand but by sketches. The had closed the old. There is the same system of low smirking conservatism of the Treasury Bench on the and tricky expedients-the same shabby abandonment first night-the wry faces of its palinodes on the next of all public principle-the same pusillanimous dere--the hoity-toity triumph in the dawn of the debate on liction of all public duty, and the same disgraceful ob- the Spottiswoode fund; the sneaking confusion during livion of everything but the three great watchwords of its progress, and the woe-begone despair at its concluthe Whigs-place, power, and party. To keep placeto retain power-to favour party-are the main objects of every wily cabinet of the morning, and every manoeuvring debate of the evening. Greece and Spain, Russia and Turkey, Ireland and Canada-Trade, Agriculture, and Manufactures-the rights of the rich-the welfare of the poor-public Justice--the Prerogatives of the Crown-the existence of a national Church, and an Established Religion-nay, the very integrity of the British Empire itself-are all pondered and debated in this wretched make-shift Cabinet by no other Yesterday a petition was presented to the House of practical weights and measures than how to stay the Commons- but it missed fire and the villains made off :' stomach of Mr. O'Connell-how to parry the thrusts some of them (the ministers, we mean) escaped by one of Mr. Harvey-how to stifle the growls of Mr. Hume of the doors, but Lord John Russell was a moment too -and how to retain within the narrow pale of their late at the other, and with a couple of downcast colmajority the splendid names and talents of Mr. Pease leagues was sent back to the House to vote, and to and Mr. Potter, Mr. Pryme and Mr. Poulter; for at vote, infandum, against the motion to which he had the mercy of some half-dozen such people this mighty originally given his countenance-to which his folReform Ministry pants at this moment in an atmos- lowers had pledged their support, and on which the phere of its own composition, for its asthmatic existence. best hopes of the ministerial majority rested. VOL. XXXIII.—MAY, 1838.

2

'He started back, he knew not whyEven at the sound himself had made!' and absolutely ran out of the House, followed by the whole Treasury Bench. The scene reminded us of Papirius Cursor's droll cross-reading of the newspaper

Then came the Civil List, the ostensible motive of moving the committee, the Ministers gave to this unthe session. The Civil List had been settled, after a precedented inquiry the sanction of the Crown and of full consideration, by these very men, on the accession the Government; the principle on which the Pension of King William. The only point of the Civil List on List had been placed by the constitution was virtually which any real difference of opinion had existed in abandoned-abandoned by the very parties who were 1830 was the Pension List, and that had been settled so much on the side of public economy-by diminishing the future amount by nearly one half-from 120, 000l. to 75,000l.-and by the passing so recently as 1834 certain resolutions of the House of Commons controlling and limiting the power of the Crown in granting pensions-that no expectation could be entertained that an arrangement so economical, not to say parsimonious, and so recently and so solemnly settled, was now likely to be disturbed. Accordingly, Lord John Russell, on the first night of the session, expressed the determination of the government to abide by that settlement, and to resist any attempt at a revision of the list.

But Mr. Daniel Whittle Harvey gave notice of a motion for a committee to inquire into the individual grounds of each of these pensions, and the weathercock ministry suddenly shifted right round. As long as they are fixed on the pivot of place, they care not which way they point, nor with what breeze they veer about. They now resolved to take the matter out of Mr. Harvey's hands, by proposing the committee themselves. This ridiculous change of purpose was as mischievous as ridiculous. An inquiry into the grounds and motives of the pensions, and of the individual services of particular pensioners, was a complete solecism. The pension fund was granted to the monarch for the exercise of royal grace and favour. Public services were always considered as belonging to another class, and were rewarded from time to time by public grants; but the Civil List pension fund was professedly placed at the disposal of the Crown, not merely for the reward of public claims, but also for its own irresponsible charity and bounty: to inquire, by a committee of the House of Commons, into the disposal of such a fund, with any view to the public merits of the recipients, is a positive contravention of the compact on which the fund was granted by Parliament to the monarch on the surrender of the hereditary revenue, and is, in fact, neither more nor less than an absolute and direct surrender of the principle of the grant.

Much better would it be, as we have seen remarked in an able journal, to have no pension list at all, than to have one which should bring the Crown into direct debate and constant collision with the House of Commons on every item of an expenditure nominally intrusted to the sole discretion of the sovereign. The monarchy could not survive a series of such litigation. It might be very well for a member professing radical opinions to moot such a question: but by taking the matter out of Mr. Harvey's hands, and themselves

most bound to defend it; and the royal authority was, in this additional instance, employed against the royal prerogative. We have heard it rumoured that all this arose from some juggle behind the scenes between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Mr. Harvey. We know not how that may be, but this we know, that with our best attention, we could not discover any difference, either theoretical or practical, between the speeches in which Mr. Harvey supported his motion and that in which Mr. Rice opposed it. Mr. Rice was, we have no doubt, anxious to do his duty to the Crown, and he professed his strong opinion to be against the revision of the list. Why, then, did he not adhere to the first resolution of the Cabinet, which, besides its intrinsic propriety, rested on the recent settlement of the question by the first reform ministry, and by the resolutions of the House of Commons in 1834? No two opinions could, we suppose, be more opposite to each other than those of Mr. Rice and Mr. Harvey, but judging by their speeches, they seemed to us to travel by the same road and to have arrived at the same end.

This would seem to exhaust inconsistency:-not so; contrary to all precedent, the member who proposed the Committee was, on some pretence, excluded from it, and by this ill-judged and invidious distinction the ministers have contrived to lose even the small advantage they might have promised themselves from the Committee; because, assuredly, Mr. Harvey will not be propitiated by such an inquiry, and those-few in number, but loud in clamour-who participate in Mr. Harvey's opinions on the subject, will be additionally vociferous when they see, or fancy they see, that the government was too timid to refuse an inquiry, and too conscious to grant a bonâ fide one. We hesitate not to say that in the whole of this miserable juggle the Ministers have betrayed their duty to the constitutional rights of the sovereign; and when we recollect the extreme youth and inexperience of the Queen, and the extent of restriction and sacrifice to which this legerdemain seems likely to expose the probably long life of her Majesty, we feel something higher than mere political indignation at such, as it seems to us, tergiversation and treachery.

But a more urgent and important instance of their incapacity and cowardice has burst upon the astonished public in the case of Canada. We shall not attempt to go through the long series of facts and reasonings on this subject which are to be found in the various works, the titles of which we have placed at the head of this article. We are not now about to discuss the details of the Canadian question as between this country and the

given additional umbrage to the French population, and the intrigues of factious demagogues in London, who trade in disorganization, have afforded them encouragement and supplied them with excuses. These are the causes which have led to the extension of the republican principle in Lower Canada, and that principle has led to five or six years of paper war, and now to a revolt in the field.

colony, but as between this country and the ministry, amongst them, and particularly in Upper Canada, has which, by its characteristic and systematic alternation of advance and retreat, of bluster and sneaking, has been the main cause, beyond all other causes, of this deplorable rebellion. Lord John Russell made, on the 16th of January, a long speech (six columns of the "Times') on the subject of Canada-one of the most unstatesmanlike, narrow-minded, and inconsistent expositions and exposures we have ever read from a British minister; a speech which, affecting a certain historical tone, details every possible cause of the difference between the parties-except the real one; and elaborately examines every point of the case-except that on which the whole turns. That real cause is neither more nor less than the determination of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada to throw off the British authority, and to erect the province into an independent RepUBLIC, after the manner and model of the UNITED STATES.

That such would probably have been the result of a successful rebellion, whatever were its cause, any one might guess; but in the present case 'the wish was father to the thought,' and the real grievance of the Canadians, and the real source of their dissatisfaction, may be told in one word—the monarchial sovereignity of England. To throw off this-the lightest yoke and the easiest burden that ever colony bore-is the sole principle of the Canadian revolt, and they are egregiously mistaken who attribute it to any minor causes.

It may be asked, what can have altered, within so comparatively short a period, the loyalty of one of the happiest and, we believe, best governed (as far as England is concerned) provinces in the world? The Canadian advocates have a theory that every colony must, as soon as it thinks itself strong enough to walk alone, throw off the trammels of the mother country: they allege that Canada has reached that point;-nor do we doubt that the great and growing prosperity of the colony, and the neighbouring example of the United States, afforded the revolutionists plausible topics of seduction; but every thinking man in Canada was aware that the country was not ripe for nationality, and that its prosperity was essentially dependent on its connexion with England. In point of political feeling also, there had been really the reverse of any fondness for American institutions; and, in short, the real and immediate cause of the revulsion of public opinion in Canada was, the recent triumphs of the revolutionary principle in Europe, the success of the July barricades in France, and above all, the subversive doctrines and practices of the English Whig Ministry. These have concurred to remind the French Roman Catholic Canadians of their foreign origin and difference of religion, and given them at once the desire and the hope of making themselves an independent people; while the growth of the British interest |

Of this, the clear, certain, and almost avowed motive of the insurrection, Lord John Russell does not, according to the long report which we have read of his speech, take any notice. Instead of seizing the leading thread of the maze, he bewilders himself and his hearers (or at least his readers) with a detail of alleged grievances on minor subjects, and of a series of what he seems to consider as individual acts of perverseness and obstinacy on the part of the Canadians: which is just as rational and as fair as if some historian of Lord John's last advent to office should, on the occasion of the opening of the new parliament in 1835, enter into a disquisition as to whether Mr. Abercrombie or Mr. Manners Sutton had the stronger claims to the chair of the House of Commons-or whether it was or was not wise to grant a charter to the London University-or whether it would have been a good bargain for the Protestant parsons of Ireland to receive 701. per cent. on their income; and should detail and comment upon the right and the wrong of all these topics, without saying a syllable of Sir Robert Peel's administration, or of the real and single design of all the aforesaid propositions, namely, the overthrow of that ministry.

Without having any great respect for the scope of
Lord John Russell's mind, we are convinced that he
could not but have seen the imperfection, nay, the ab-
surdity, of this mode of treating the subject; but his eva-
sion of the real question was another instance of the mi-
nisterial system of shift and subterfuge which charac-
terizes all their policy and constitutes their only talent:
by the elaborate enumeration of the successive and dis-
tinct features of the discussions, the ministers hoped
to account for their own vacillation and negligence.
'How,' Lord John Russell's speech seems to suggest,
could we foresee a civil war arising out of a judge's
salary-or an assertion of national independence on a
mere question of the law of tenures?' But a wise
minister in considering, and an able statesman in ex-
plaining these matters, should and would have seen
that those were not insulated and accidental questions
but parts of one continuous system of encroachment and
aggression on British authority.

"These things, indeed they have articulated,
Proclaimed at market-crosses, read in churches,
To face the garment of rebellion
With some fine colour.'

But the dullest eye might have detected the ‘rogue's

yarn' throughout the whole patchwork of pretended therefore his Lordship's duty, in common fairness, to grievances.

Thus it was that, when all real grievances were re-hitherto defrayed out of the surrendered revenues;—but dressed and extinguished, the House of Assembly began a new course of agitation on the theory of national independence.