of the filial piety--rather a curious term--of these provinces, and
their great anxiety to make everything suit the ideas of this country;
and this was said particularly with reference to the proposition for a
Senate selected, not elected, for life, by the Governor-General of
Canada. He said they were extremely anxious to follow as far as possible
the institutions of the mother country. I have not the smallest
objection to any people on the face of the earth following our
institutions if they like them. Institutions which suit one country, as
we all know, are not very likely to suit every other country. With
regard to this particular case, the right hon. Gentleman said it is to
be observed that Canada has had a nominated council, and has changed it
for an elected one, and that surely they had a right if they pleased to
go back from an elected council to a nominated council. Well, nobody
denies that, but nobody pretends that the people of Canada prefer a
nominated council to an elected council. And all the wisdom of the wise
men to whom the right hon. gentleman the member for Oxford has referred
in such glowing terms, unless the experience of present and past times
goes for nothing, is but folly if they have come to the conclusion that
a nominated council on that continent must be better than an elected
council. Still, if they wish it, I should not interfere and try to
prevent it. But I venture to say that the clause enabling the Governor-
General and his Cabinet to put seventy men in that council for life
inserts into the whole scheme the germ of a malady which will spread,
and which before very long will require an alteration of this Act and of
the constitution of this new Confederation.
But the right hon. Gentleman went on to say that with regard to the
representative assembly--which, I suppose, is to be called according to
his phrase the House of Commons--they have adopted a very different
plan. There they have not followed the course of this country. They have
established their House of Representatives directly upon the basis of
population. They have adopted the system which prevails in the United
States, which upon every ten years' summing up of the census in that
country the number of members may be changed, and is by law changed in
the different States and districts as the rate of population may have
changed. Therefore, in that respect his friends in Canada have not
adopted the principle which prevails in this country, but that which
prevails in the United States. I believe they have done that which is
right, and which they have a right to do, and which is inevitable there.
I regret very much that they have not adopted another system with regard
to their council or senate, because I am satisfied--I have not a
particle of doubt with regard to it that we run a great danger of making
this Act work ill almost from the beginning.
They have the example of thirty-six States in the United States, in
which the Senate is elected, and no man, however sanguine, can hope that
seventy-two stereotyped provincial peers in Canada will work
harmoniously with a body elected upon a system so wide and so general as
that which prevails in the States of the American Union. There is one
point about which the right hon. Gentleman said nothing, and which I
think is so very important that the Member for Oxford, his predecessor
in office, might have told us something about it. We know that Canada is
a great country, and we know that the population is, or very soon will
be, something like 4,000,000, and we may hope that, united under one
government, the province may be more capable of defence. But what is
intended with regard to the question of defence? Is everything to be
done for the province? Is it intended to garrison its fortresses by
English troops? At the present moment there are, I believe, in the
province 12,000 or 15,000 men.
There are persons in this country, and there are some also in the North
American provinces, who are ill-natured enough to say that not a little
of the loyalty that is said to prevail in Canada has its price. I think
it is natural and reasonable to hope that there is in that country a
very strong attachment to this country. But if they are to be constantly
applying to us for guarantees for railways, and for grants for
fortresses, and for works of defence, then I think it would be far
better for them and for us--cheaper for us and less demoralising for
them--that they should become an independent State, and maintain their
own fortresses, fight their own cause, and build up their own future
without relying upon us. And when we know, as everybody knows, that the
population of Canada is in a much better position as regards the
comforts of home, than is the great bulk of the population of this
country, I say the time has come when it ought to be clearly understood
that the taxes of England are no longer to go across the ocean to defray
expenses of any kind within the Confederation which is about to be
formed.
The right hon. Gentleman has never been an advocate for great
expenditure in the colonies by the mother country. On the contrary, he
has been one of the members of this House who have distinguished
themselves by what I will call an honest system for the mother country,
and what I believe is a wise system for the colonies. But I think that
when a measure of this kind is being passed, having such stupendous
results upon the condition and the future population of these great
colonies, we have a right to ask that there should be some consideration
for the revenue and for the taxpayers of this country. In discussing
this Bill with the delegates from the provinces, I think it was the duty
of the Colonial Secretary to have gone fairly into this question, and,
if possible, to have arranged it to the advantage of the colony and the
mother country.
I believe there is no delusion greater than this--that there is any
party in the United States that wishes to commit any aggression upon
Canada, or to annex Canada by force to the United States. There is not a
part of the world, in my opinion, that runs less risk of aggression than
Canada, except with regard to that foolish and impotent attempt of
certain discontented not-long-ago subjects of the Queen, who have left
this country. America has no idea of anything of the kind. No American
statesman, no American political party, dreams for a moment of an
aggression upon Canada, or of annexing Canada by force. And therefore,
every farthing that you spend on your fortresses, and all that you do
with the idea of shutting out American aggression, is money squandered
through an hallucination which we ought to get rid of. I have not risen
for the purpose of objecting to the second reading of this Bill. Under
the circumstances, I presume it is well that we should do no other than
read it a second time. But I think the Government ought to have given a
little more time. I think they have not treated the province of Nova
Scotia with that tenderness, that generosity, and that consideration
which is desirable when you are about to make so great a change in its
affairs and in its future. For my share, I want the population of these
provinces to do that which they believe to be best for their own
interests--to remain with this country if they like it, in the most
friendly manner, or to become independent States if they wish it. If
they should prefer to unite themselves with the United States, I should
not complain even of that. But whatever be their course, there is no man
in this House or in those provinces who has a more sincere wish for
their greatness and their welfare than I have who have taken the liberty
thus to criticise this Bill.
* * * * *
AMERICA.
I.
THE 'TRENT' AFFAIR.
ROCHDALE, DECEMBER 4, 1861.
[During the excitement caused by the seizure of Messrs. Mason and
Slidell, the envoys of the Slaveholders' Confederation, on board the
_Trent_ steamer, Mr. Bright's townsmen invited him to a Public
Banquet, that they might have the opportunity of hearing his opinions on
the American Civil War, and on the duty of England in regard to it. This
speech was delivered on the occasion of that Banquet.]
When the Gentlemen who invited me to this dinner called upon me, I felt
their kindness very sensibly, and now I am deeply grateful to my friends
around me, and to you all, for the abundant manifestations of kindness
with which I have been received to-night. I am, as you all know,
surrounded at this moment by my neighbours and friends, and I may say
with the utmost truth, that I value the good opinions of those who now
hear my voice far beyond the opinions of any equal number of the
inhabitants of this country selected from any other portion of it. You
have, by this act of kindness that you have shown me, given proof that,
in the main, you do not disapprove of my course and labours, that at
least you are willing to express an opinion that the motives by which I
have been actuated have been honest and honourable to myself, and that
that course has not been entirely without service to my country. Coming
to this meeting, or to any similar meeting, I always find that the
subjects for discussion appear too many, and far more than it is
possible to treat at length. In these times in which we live, by the
influence of the telegraph, and the steamboat, and the railroad, and the
multiplication of newspapers, we seem continually to stand as on the top
of an exceeding high mountain, from which we behold all the kingdoms of
the earth and all the glory of them,--unhappily, also, not only their
glory, but their follies, and their crimes, and their calamities.
Seven years ago, our eyes were turned with anxious expectation to a
remote corner of Europe, where five nations were contending in bloody
strife for an object which possibly hardly one of them comprehended,
and, if they did comprehend it, which all sensible men amongst them must
have known to be absolutely impracticable. Four years ago, we were
looking still further to the East, where there was a gigantic revolt in
a great dependency of the British Crown, arising mainly from gross
neglect, and from the incapacity of England, up to that moment, to
govern the country which it had known how to conquer. Two years ago, we
looked South, to the plains of Lombardy, and saw a great strife there,
in which every man in England took a strong interest; and we have
welcomed, as the result of that strife, the addition of a great kingdom
to the list of European States. Now, our eyes are turned in a contrary
direction, and we look to the West. There we see a struggle in progress
of the very highest interest to England and to humanity at large. We see
there a nation which I shall call the Transatlantic English nation--the
inheritor and partaker of all the historic glories of this country. We
see it torn with intestine broils, and suffering from calamities from
which for more than a century past--in fact, for more than two centuries
past--this country has been exempt. That struggle is of especial
interest to us. We remember the description which one of our great poets
gives of Rome,--
'Lone mother of dead empires.'
But England is the living mother of great nations on the American and on
the Australian continents, which promise to endow the world with all her
knowledge and all her civilization, and with even something more than
the freedom she herself enjoys.
Eighty-five years ago, at the time when some of our oldest townsmen were
very little children, there were, on the North American continent,
Colonies, mainly of Englishmen, containing about three millions of
souls. These Colonies we have seen a year ago constituting the United
States of North America, and comprising a population of no less than
thirty millions of souls. We know that in agriculture and manufactures,
with the exception of this kingdom, there is no country in the world
which in these arts may be placed in advance of the United States. With
regard to inventions, I believe, within the last thirty years, we have
received more useful inventions from the United States than from all the
other countries of the earth. In that country there are probably ten
times as many miles of telegraph as there are in this country, and there
are at least five or six times as many miles of railway. The tonnage of
its shipping is at least equal to ours, if it does not exceed ours. The
prisons of that country--for, even in countries the most favoured,
prisons are needful--have been models for other nations of the earth;
and many European Governments have sent missions at different times to
inquire into the admirable system of education so universally adopted in
their free schools throughout the Northern States.
If I were to speak of that country in a religious aspect, I should say
that, considering the short space of time to which their history goes
back, there is nothing on the face of the earth besides, and never has
been, to equal the magnificent arrangement of churches and ministers,
and of all the appliances which are thought necessary for a nation to
teach Christianity and morality to its people. Besides all this, when I
state that for many years past the annual public expenditure of the
Government of that country has been somewhere between 10,000,000_l_. and
15,000,000_l_., I need not perhaps say further, that there has always
existed amongst all the population an amount of comfort and prosperity
and abounding plenty such as I believe no other country in the world, in
any age, has enjoyed.
This is a very fine, but a very true picture; yet it has another side to
which I must advert. There has been one great feature in that country,
one great contrast, which has been pointed to by all who have commented
upon the United States as a feature of danger, as a contrast calculated
to give pain. There has been in that country the utmost liberty to the
white man, and bondage and degradation to the black man. Now rely upon
it, that wherever Christianity lives and flourishes, there must grow up
from it, necessarily, a conscience hostile to any oppression and to any
wrong; and therefore, from the hour when the United States Constitution
was formed, so long as it left there this great evil--then comparatively
small, but now so great--it left there seeds of that which an American
statesman has so happily described, of that 'irrepressible conflict' of
which now the whole world is the witness. It has been a common thing for
men disposed to carp at the United States to point to this blot upon
their fair fame, and to compare it with the boasted declaration of
freedom in their Deed and Declaration of Independence. But we must
recollect who sowed this seed of trouble, and how and by whom it has
been cherished.
Without dwelling upon this stain any longer, I should like to read to
you a paragraph from the instructions understood to have been given to
the Virginian delegates to Congress, in the month of August, 1774., by
Mr. Jefferson, who was perhaps the ablest man the United States had
produced up to that time, and who was then actively engaged in its
affairs, and who afterwards for two periods filled the office of
President. He represented one of these very Slave States--the State of
Virginia--and he says:--
'For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable
reason at all, his Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary
tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object
of desire in those Colonies where it was unhappily introduced in
their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the
slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further
importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect
this by prohibition, and by imposing duties which might amount to
prohibition, have hitherto been defeated by his Majesty's
negative,--thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few
British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States,
and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this
infamous practice.'
I read this merely to show that, two years before the Declaration of
Independence was signed, Mr. Jefferson, acting on behalf of those he
represented in Virginia, wrote that protest against the course of the
English Government which prevented the Colonists from abolishing the
slave trade, preparatory to the abolition of slavery itself.
Well, the United States Constitution left the slave question for every
State to manage for itself. It was a question too difficult to settle
then, and apparently every man had the hope and belief that in a few
years slavery itself would become extinct. Then there happened a great
event in the annals of manufactures and commerce. It was discovered that
in those States that article which we in this country now so much depend
on, could be produced of the best quality necessary for manufacture, and
at a moderate price. From that day to this the growth of cotton has
increased there, and its consumption has increased here, and a value
which no man dreamed of when Jefferson wrote that paper has been given
to the slave and to slave industry. Thus it has grown up to that
gigantic institution which now threatens either its own overthrow or the
overthrow of that which is a million times more valuable--the United
States of America.
The crisis at which we have arrived--I say 'we,' for, after all, we are
nearly as much interested as if I was making this speech in the city of
Boston or the city of New York--the crisis, I say, which has now
arrived, was inevitable. I say that the conscience of the North, never
satisfied with the institution of slavery, was constantly urging some
men forward to take a more extreme view of the question; and there grew
up naturally a section--it may not have been a very numerous one--in
favour of the abolition of slavery. A great and powerful party resolved
at least upon a restraint and a control of slavery, so that it should
not extend beyond the States and the area which it now occupies. But, if
we look at the Government of the United States almost ever since the
formation of the Union, we shall find the Southern power has been mostly
dominant there. If we take thirty-six years after the formation of the
present Constitution--I think about 1787--we shall find that for thirty-
two of those years every President was a Southern man; and if we take
the period from 1828 until 1860, we shall find that, on every election
for President, the South voted in the majority.
We know what an election is in the United States for President of the
Republic. There is a most extensive suffrage, and there is the ballot-
box. The members of the House of Representatives are elected by the same
suffrage, and generally they are elected at the same time. It is thus
therefore almost inevitable that the House of Representatives is in
accord in public policy with the President for the time being. Every
four years there springs from the vote created by the whole people a
President over that great nation. I think the world offers no finer
spectacle than this; it offers no higher dignity; and there is no
greater object of ambition on the political stage on which men are
permitted to move. You may point, if you will, to hereditary rulers, to
crowns coming down through successive generations of the same family, to
thrones based on prescription or on conquest, to sceptres wielded over
veteran legions and subject realms,--but to my mind there is nothing so
worthy of reverence and obedience, and nothing more sacred, than the
authority of the freely chosen by the majority of a great and free
people; and if there be on earth and amongst men any right divine to
govern, surely it rests with a ruler so chosen and so appointed.
Last year the ceremony of this great election was gone through, and the
South, which had been so long successful, found itself defeated. That
defeat was followed instantly by secession, and insurrection, and war.
In the multitude of articles which have been before us in the newspapers
within the last few months, I have no doubt you have seen it stated, as
I have seen it, that this question was very much like that upon which
the Colonies originally revolted against the Crown of England. It is
amazing how little some newspaper writers know, or how little they think
you know. When the War of Independence was begun in America, ninety
years ago, there were no representatives there at all. The question then
was, whether a Ministry in Downing-street, and a corrupt and borough-
mongering Parliament, should continue to impose taxes upon three
millions of English subjects, who had left their native shores and
established themselves in North America. But now the question is not the
want of representation, because, as is perfectly notorious, the South is
not only represented, but is represented in excess; for, in distributing
the number of representatives, which is done every ten years, three out
of every five slaves are counted as freemen, and the number of
representatives from the Slave States is consequently so much greater
than if the freemen, the white men only, were counted. From this cause
the Southern States have twenty members more in the House of
Representatives than they would have if the members were apportioned on
the same principle as in the Northern Free States. Therefore you will
see at once that there is no comparison between the state of things when
the Colonies revolted, and the state of things now, when this wicked
insurrection has broken out.
There is another cause which is sometimes in England assigned for this
great misfortune, which is, the protective theories in operation in the
Union, and the maintenance of a high tariff. It happens with regard to
that, unfortunately, that no American, certainly no one I ever met with,
attributed the disasters of the Union to that cause. It is an argument
made use of by ignorant Englishmen, but never by informed Americans. I
have already shown you that the South, during almost the whole existence
of the Union, has been dominant at Washington; and during that period
the tariff has existed, and there has been no general dissatisfaction
with it. Occasionally, there can be no doubt, their tariff was higher
than was thought just, or reasonable, or necessary by some of the States
of the South. But the first Act of the United States which levied duties
upon imports, passed immediately after the Union was formed, recited
that 'It is necessary for the encouragement and protection of
manufactures to levy the duties which follow;' and during the war with
England from 1812 to 1815, the people of the United States had to pay
for all the articles they brought from Europe many times over the
natural cost of those articles, on account of the interruption to the
traffic by the English nation.
When the war was over, it was felt by everybody desirable that they
should encourage manufactures in their own country; and seeing that
England at that precise moment was passing a law to prevent any wheat
coming from America until wheat in England had risen to the price of
84_s_. per quarter, we may be quite satisfied that the doctrine of
protection originally entertained did not find less favour at the close
of the war in 1815.
There is one remarkable point with regard to this matter which should
not be forgotten. Twelve months ago, at the meeting of the Congress of
the United States, on the first Monday in December--when the Congress
met, you recollect that there were various propositions of compromise,
committee meetings of various kinds to try and devise some mode of
settling the question between the North and the South, so that disunion
might not go on--though I read carefully everything published in the
English papers from the United States on the subject, I do not recollect
that in a single instance the question of the tariff was referred to, or
any change proposed or suggested in the matter as likely to have any
effect whatever upon the question of Secession.