You are here

قراءة كتاب Canada and the Canadians Volume I

تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"

‏اللغة: English
Canada and the Canadians
Volume I

Canada and the Canadians Volume I

تقييمك:
0
No votes yet
دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 4

accurate returns, it has been ascertained that in the United States there were last year 1,500,000, with 21 bishops, 675 churches, 592 mission stations, and 572 priests otherwise employed in teaching and travelling; 22 colleges or ecclesiastical establishments, 23 literary institutions, 53 female schools or convents for instruction, 84 charitable hospitals and institutions, and 220 young students, preparing for the ministry; whilst we learn, from the Annals of the Propaganda, that 1,130,000 francs were appropriated, in May 1845, to the missions of America, or about £47,000 annually, of which the share for the United States, including Texas, was 771,164 francs, or about £32,000 in round numbers.

Then again, the greater portion of the Indian tribes in the north-west and west, excepting near the Rocky Mountains or beyond them, are Roman Catholics; and their numbers are very great, and all in deep hatred, dislike, and enmity, to the Big Knives.

More than half a million of the Lower Canadians are also of the same persuasion, and their church in Upper Canada is large and increasing by every shipload from Ireland. Even in Oregon, a Catholic bishop has just been appointed.

It is more than probable, that in and around the United States three millions of Roman Catholic men are ever ready to advance the standard of their faith; whilst Mexico, weak as it is, offers another Catholic barrier to exclusive tenets of liberty, both of conscience and of person.

It is surprising how very easily the emigrants are misled, and how simply they fancy that, once on the shores of the New World, Fortune must smile upon them.

There is a British society, as I have already stated, for mutual protection, established at New York; and the government have agents of the first respectability at Quebec, at Montreal, and at Kingston. But the poorer classes, as well as those whose knowledge of life has been limited, are sadly defrauded and deluded.

At a recent meeting of the Welsh Society at New York, facts were stated, showing the depravity and audacity of the crimps at Liverpool and New York. The President of the Society said that, owing to the nefarious practices against emigrants, the Germans first, then the Irish, after that the Welsh, and lastly the English residents of the city had taken the matter in hand by the formation of Protective Societies.

The president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick observed that in Liverpool the poor emigrants were fleeced without mercy; and he gave as one instance a fact that, by the representations of a packet agent, a large number of emigrants were induced to embark on board a packet without the necessary supply of provisions, being assured that for their passage-money they would be supplied by the captain—an arrangement of which the captain was wholly ignorant.

The president of the Welsh Society exhibited sixty dollars of trash in bills of the Globe Bank, that had been palmed off upon an unsuspecting Welshman by some rascal in Liverpool, in exchange for his hoarded gold, and declared that this was only one of a series of like villanies constantly occurring.

The ex-president of the St. George's Society, Mr. Fowler, mentioned a curious circumstance connected with the history of New York. He said that he remembered the city when it contained only fifty thousand inhabitants, and not one paved side walk, excepting in Dock Street. Now it had a population of nearly 400,000, and had so changed, that he could no longer identify the localities of his youthful days.

Who, he asked, had done this? The emigrant! and it was protection they needed, not charity. He should have added, that the great mass of the emigrants who have made New York the mighty city it now is, were Irish, and that the native Americans have banded themselves in another form of protection against their increasing influence.

The republican notions which the greater portion of the lower classes emigrating from the old country have been drilled into, lead them to believe that in the United States all men are equal, and that thus they have a splendid vault to make from poverty to wealth, an easy spring from a state of dependency to one of vast importance and consideration. The simple axiom of republicanism, that a ploughman is as good as a president, or a quarryman as an emperor, is taken firm hold of in any other sense than the right one. What sensible man ever doubted that we were all created in the same mould, and after the same image; but is there a well educated sane mind in America, believing that a perfect equality in all things, in goods and chattels, in agrarian rights and in education, is, or ever will be, practicable in this naughty world?

Has nature formed all men with the same capacities, and can they be so exactly educated that all shall be equally fit to govern?

The converse is true. Nature makes genius, and not genius nature. How rarely she yields a Shakespeare!—There has been but one Homer, one Virgil, since the creation. There was never a second Moses, nor have Solomon's wisdom and glory ever again been attainable.

Look at the rulers of the earth, from the patriarchs to the present day, how few have been pre-eminent! Even in the earliest periods, when the age of man reached to ten times its present span, the wonderful sacred writ records Tubal-Cain, the first artificer, and Jubal, the lyrist, as most extraordinary men; and with what care are Aholiab and Bezabel, cunning in all sorts of craft, and Hiram, the artificer of Tyre, recorded! Hiram, the king, great as he undoubtedly was, was secondary in Solomon's eyes to the widow's son.

These men, says the holy record, were gifted expressly for their peculiar mission; and so are all men, to whom the Inscrutable has been pleased to assign extraordinary talent.

Cæsar, the conqueror, Napoleon, his imitator, and Nelson, and Wellington, are they on a par with the rabble of New York? Procul, O, procul este profani!

Pure democracy is an utter and unattainable impossibility; nature has effectually barred against it. The only thing in the course of a life of more than half a century that has ever puzzled me about it is, that the Catholic clergy should, in so many parts of the world, have lent it a helping hand. The ministers of a creed essentially aristocratic, essentially the pillars of the divine right of kings, have they ever been in earnest about the matter? Perhaps not!

If that giant of modern Ireland, the pacificator citizen king, succeeded in separating the island from Great Britain, would he, on attaining the throne, or the dictatorship, or the presidency, or whatever it might be, for the nonce, desire pure democracy? Je crois que non, because, if he did, he would reign about one clear week afterwards.

Look at the United States, see how each successive president is bowed down before the Moloch altar; he must worship the democratic Baal, if he desires to be elected, or re-elected. It is not the intellect, or the wealth of the Union that rules. Already they seriously canvass in the Empire State perfect equality in worldly substance, and the division of the lands into small portions, sufficient to afford the means of respectable existence to every citizen. It is, perhaps, fortunate that very few of the office-holders have much substance to spare under these circumstances; but, if the President, Vice-President, and the Secretaries of State, are to live upon an acre or two of land for the rest of their lives, Spartan broth will be indeed a rich diet to theirs.

When the sympathizers invaded Canada, in 1838-1839, the lands of the Canadians were thus parcelled out amongst them, as the reward of their extremely patriotic services, but in slices of one hundred, instead of one or two, acres.

But, notwithstanding all this ultra-democracy, there is at present a sufficient counterbalance in the sense of the people, to prevent any very serious consequences; and the Irish, from having had their religion trampled upon, and themselves despised, would be very likely to run

Pages