Louis-Joseph Papineau

“ Messieurs of the institute, you have accepted the apostate to proclaim, to have others love, and to defend the right to free examination and free discussion, as the best and most legitimate means of attaining knowledge of the truth, the love of all that is good and useful to humanity in general, to the homeland in particular. It is only with free examination that we can acquire convictions so firm that they become, during important matters, a true and burning faith, of which we want the propagation and triumph despite whatever risk and personal nuisance it may expose us to. ”

“ A Bill allowing the benefit of cession of property would have secured a debtor in his person, when free from fraud, without extinction of his debt, after he had made over whatever he owns; would redeem him from the cruel vengeance of an unmerciful creditor, from perpetual imprisonment even until death to which, without that benefit, he might be subject. Ought the law to allow such immense power, such abusive trust to one man over another? The House has offered a remedy - you have it not. ”

“ Diffused throughout the American continent, it proves that the intrepid democratic spirit that once shook the yoke of infamous barons and set limits to the despotic prerogatives of sovereigns, still animates a part of the citizens of your country.
Your nation has always prided herself of the democracy which allowed her, in the course of long and hard battles, to preserve a freedom and a political power higher than those of her neighbours of Europe. We thus accept with gratitude the sympathy of a democracy animated by feelings so high and so just on the nature of government. ”

“ The affections of the British for Ireland and the Colonies has never been any thing else than the love of the pillage of Ireland and the Colonies, abandoned to the cutting and carving of the British Aristocracy and its creatures. The people of Great Britain have, by the Reform Bill, destroyed the usurpation of their nobles, repossessed themselves of their rights, and authorize us by their example and their principles, to expect that they cannot avoid restoring to us our rights. ”

“ If the great Jefferson in the sincere respect of a philosophic lawgiver for the rights of posterity, and with the sacred deference to the progress of opinion, questioned the power and doubted the propriety of a legislature's enacting laws binding more than one generation, what shall we think in our land and in an age subsequent to Jefferson, of the horrid criminality of these bloody executions in Canada, under a law some hundreds of years old and for an offence and American and a Republican cannot commit. No, the spirit of murder is essentially combined with the spirit of British Monarchy. ”

“ I feel well among the most patriotic elite of Montreal, among the beautiful, lovable, virtuous wives of the members of the institute, their husbands, devoted to the service of the natal or adopted country, devoted in life and in death, were it required to the safety of the homeland. Young ladies, beautiful, good and patriotic like your mothers, you are here in a worthy sanctuary where the cult of the homeland is celebrated with dignity, because it is free from any covetousness, gains and personal interests. ”

“ The wise and immortal framers of the AMERICAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, embodied in that document the principles on which alone are based the RIGHTS OF MAN; and successfully vindicated and established the only institutions and form of government which can permanently secure the prosperity and social happiness of the inhabitants of this Continent, whose education and habits, derived from the circumstances of their colonization, demand a system of government entirely dependent upon, and directly responsible to, the People. ”

“ Do not believe that, being very few, we fear the consequences of our determination. Nature gave fortified places to our country and valiant hearts to our people. For the hour, the arguments of justice and reason are our weapons. They can easily be replaced by more destructive weapons if the usurpers of our rights continue to have eyes too weak to see and ears too deaf to hear. We do not believe that bands of soldiers from Europe would wage a war of extermination against the democracy of America. ”

“ The citizens of Montreal like those of Canada in general, are diverse in origins — Celts, Franks, Anglo-Saxons; some born here, many come from afar to make it their adoptive country; all sincerely desiring its prosperity; all having here their hearts, their families, and their interests. All other them, a little earlier or a little later, came from France or from the British Isles, to seek in America, for them and for their children, life, liberty and happiness. No one commits the absurdity of quitting Europe to seek here distinctions, institutions of privileges of aristocracies. ”

“ To the infamy of having committed crime, they super-add the infamy of imputing their crime, to those who have been their victims. It is not for Canada that they fabricate this tissue of absurd lies. It is for Downing Street where three hundred signatures breed six thousand seven hundred—where the intelligence of a Colonial Secretary has reckoned in the minority of a population of 20,000 souls who lose an Election, the seven thousand men who blame the seven thousand and one of the majority. All this is labour lost. ”

“ I will place the one Governor in contra-distinction to the other in order to calm a little and quiet the small band of men who have places, who desire to have places, who do not think by themselves nor for themselves; who expect before they form their opinion about public men and public measures, the watch-word and the direction of those who give places. You will see that their apparent anger is under orders, is a play of chance; that it must not trouble freemen, and that, probably, under another administration they will profess other sentiments. ”

“ When I had the honour to see you, only a few months ago in Montreal, I was far from foreseeing that in such a near future my fellow-citizens in great number and myself would be the objects, almost the victims of as violent and unjust a persecution, from the immoral English government, as that which we now experience. Appearances are against us. They expose us to public censure. We seem to be a troop of gloomy and imprudent conspirators, of fugitives already dispersed and punished, who have plotted against a government too powerful to ever have anything to fear from our efforts. ”

“ I am thrown in the political life against my inclination. After I frankly explained my dissatisfaction and my scorn for the political order forcibly imposed to my country, with the same hostile aim, by the same perverse means which chains yours, by a fatal and degrading Union for Ireland, as ours is hostile to us and more degrading even for Lower Canada, colony twice subjugated to two metropolises, that of England which oppresses by antipathy, that of Upper Canada which exploits us by cupidity, the county of Saint-Maurice chose me to represent it. ”

“ Legislation will never be able to do as much good for society, as corruption did against it.
You can remain a strong government on the seats of Parliaments, but outside its enclosure, you are without any moral authority on the masses.
The population is so divided and subdivided, that it feels irritated, that it remains deaf to advices, indifferent to the fate of the public men who floated between so many various opinions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tell the government its crimes: far from leaving it, it plunges in it, and only swims back up to pass from its torpor to the fury of intoxication, which redoubles its blows against the country, where it hates everywhere and everywhere is hated. Tell the government the names of the men faithful to the cult of the fatherland: you are a denouncer who populates dungeons, a ferocious spectator keeping his fist closed to have the Christians thrown to the beasts. ”

“ But the mind, as the body, has its necessities. The duties of humanity are badly fulfilled, if the wants of the body only are supplied, without any aid being given to those of the mind. Oh! may those who make the mistake, of being indifferent to general instruction, give themselves the pleasure of a journey to the United States to see how much more at their ease the farmers are over there than over here - on how many bad lands they reap more than we do on our good ones - why their poor lands sell for then times as much as our rich ones. ”

“ If the colonies become the instrument of the corrupted favouritism which is used to shelter and maintain the poorest portion your aristocracy, an excuse to maintain professional armies, to deprive the people of their subsistence in order to pile up stones and mortar and to make fortifications out of it, or a pretext to restrict the free movement of your trade, then the separation of those which can be self-sufficient can only give stability to your freedoms and support the prosperity of your nation. ”

“ Nothing would be more compromising for an honest man than to be praised, often and highly, by rascals. Nothing would tend to more quickly ruin a reputation of political integrity, of devotion to the cause of justice, freedom and the rights of the people, than to deserve a word of praise, to get a second compliment from The Transcript, or any other section of the Tory press of Lower Canada, such as it has been on the whole, since the first page of The Mercury to the last lucubration of The Courier. ”

“ The Representative system is become the desire of all civilized nations, because it promises to nations a powerful lever to extirpate abuses; because it affords a popular efficacious action which penetrates into all the parts of administration, and influences, in a salutary manner, all its agents, from the Sovereign to the lowest officer, recalling them continually to their destination, which is the peace and the welfare of nations. ”

“ It is the municipality which makes the power and glory of the democracy in England and the United States, and despotism never triumphed on the European Continent till it had destroyed the municipality. The municipality is the political school of the people, it is the temple of their liberty, it is the citadel of their rights. Without the municipality, democracy can never be long maintained. ”

“ I was neither more nor less at fault, neither more nor less deserving than a great number of my colleagues, but their kind indulgence having for a long time and often carried me to the most honorable position in the country, the chair by means of election on the country's elite, I was more than the others in display before the eyes of political friends and enemies. Individual enemies I have not had many, I believe, since voluntarily, I never harmed nor gave offense to any individual as such. ”

“ The time is come when every Canadian must desert the odious cause of the Council, or frankly admit that he requires the intervention of an armed force, to stifle, in the blood of his compatriots, the opposition which they all feel in their heart and soul against the preservation of the Council. That is understood; and there is in the two Canadas an indissoluble union of the majority of the People for the purpose of destroying this nuisance. ”