Louis-Joseph Papineau

“ There is not a single English woman who does not say: "May my husband be for me what he has been for her!" No Englishman who does not repeat daily: "May my wife be for me as the queen has been to her majestic husband! ”

“ Thus, the most perfect government in the world according to Montesquieu, Blackstone and Delolme, had remained twelve whole years in the ignorance of its ignorance, its usurpation, its incapacity and its negligence to govern by law rather than by arbitrary rule, always armed with the sword of injustice, never with the balances and blindfold of justice. ”

“ There are men of genius and knowledge in great number in a body as numerous as that of the United Kingdom, men whose special education is the science of government. May they give a proof that they are better qualified to govern than those who gave admirably good constitutions to the general government of the Union and those of the thirty-six States of the American confederation! It is not the precipitated adoption of the botched Quebec Act of confederation that can prove the wisdom of the statesmen of England. ”

“ When the confederal Parliament assembled, the fact had become obvious that our brothers of Acadia were unanimous to reject the confederation. One rightfully left to illiberal officials the role to scorn their wishes and their rights. It is a repetition of their role of all times. They were saying to them as to us: "you believe yourselves to be oppressed, be it. You are mistaken, we decide for you and against you, like England decided. Good day or bad day, you are chained to us, we love you and we do not want to divorce. We are strong, you are weak, be submissive!" ”

“ They pulverize his bronze batteries by those of the free press, by those of free discussion. They will more and more give consolation and hope to the oppressed; they move forward the hour of retribution, the hour of noble revenge, when good will be done even to those who practised evil.
The privileged ones always imagine that the prayers and the complaints against the abuses which benefit them are an invitation to repress them by violence. ”

“ Here is what could be seen before, here is what has since become so rare, now that fortunes acquired at the expense of the public and personal honour, have become so numerous! How badly does the reproach of propensity to violence come from those very ones who constantly have recourse to violence to prevent the free discussion of political or social questions, physical violence by means of the law, moral violence by the anathema! ”

“ Valiant words, which for his own people and on the day of his martyrdom exonerated great wrongs.
But truthful history is inexorable. It does not have the right to hide the crimes and the shames of heroes.
History will prove over and over again that Wolfe has outraged the laws of Humanity and violated the laws of nature and nations, since long ago regulated and established between all policed nations. There is only the crime of the deportation of the Acadians that, in darkness, surpasses his own crime, and it is the English aristocracy who wanted them both. ”

“ Aristotle, the most vigorous mind of his time, and maybe of all times; the deepest, the most creative, the most encyclopedic; Aristotle explained what we do and did yesterday, since the declarations of the Congress and the Assemblée nationale, since 1776 and 1789, all that pertains to the science of government. He had a deep knowledge of it. He studied and made us know of more varieties of government than we have today in all of America and Europe. ”

“ The most enlightened men of England and America called noble and just the efforts that my English friends and my Canadien friends, me and my colleagues in the House, and our colleagues by identity of principle and community of devotion in the Parliament of Upper Canada, have done to deliver our countries from outrage and oppression. ”

“ Aristotle prepared his pupil at the foundation of Alexandria, a great moment in the history of the development of the human mind, a city which carried on the exchange of ideas and goods; he united the Eastern and Western worlds, developed a free commerce that went on to share its benefits on all lands, with all the elements of a more enlightened and fertile civilization. The excellence of Aristotle's lessons could not stop Alexander from being sometimes extravagant and ferocious. ”

“ It is to my fellow-citizens of all origins that I call on today as I always did; to them I say that we must not only be anxious to preserve the rights which are acquired, but that, by free discussion, we must unceasingly endeavour to acquire new ones. The best means of obtaining this happy result is to call the young and vigorous minds of the elite, of all the various nationalities, to socialize, to meet frequently in this enclosure, this library, and in the other enclosures and libraries of comparable nature. They will seem themselves as friends, equal, compatriots. ”

“ To recognize that, in the political and temporal order, the only legitimate authority is that to which the majority of the nation has given its consent; that are wise and beneficial constitutions only those for which the governed have been consulted, and to which the majorities have given their free approbation; that all which is a human institution is destined to successive changes ”

“ There is only among the English and Protestant population that magistrates and juries are taken. This population accounts for 450 men, the majority despicable by their ignorance. They are drunk on the unforeseen importance that has fallen upon them, and hasten the exercise of their new powers with ostentation and rigour. They hate the Canadien nobility, because it is respectable, and the rest of the population and me, because I prevent a little of the wrongs they would like to accomplish. ”

“ The aristocracy weighed even more heavily on the people, and in the most discourteous ways, buying and auctioning it like a merchandise. It remained in control by the venality of elections, tolerating only its juniors and its clerks on the benches of the Commons. Montesquieu hence employed an artifice, like we still use today, to put in better contrast the despotism which then ruled in France. He showed in this more skill than standing. So do his imitators today.
Nobody in France dares to attack the emperor personally. He has too formidable means of repression. ”

“ In the current state of our society, with the ease of learning the two languages as of childhood, it would be to condemn ourselves to a marked inferiority to neglect to learn them both correctly, to not be able to taste the exquisite fruits that their literature produced, more abundant and tastier than those of the other peoples. ”

“ There is nothing better in antiquity than The Ethics of Aristotle. It is a book to read and read again. What was worthy in Alexander's conduct must be credited to his tutor. What was bad, and that is what prevailed, must be blamed on the vices of his impetuous temperament and on the adulation that power invariably creates around itself. Neither ethics, nor Callisthenes, parent and friend of Aristotle, whom the latter sent to protect him from his vicious inclinations, could prevent Alexander from abandoning himself to vice with fury. ”

“ These last sources will let the state of our society be better know than it is today.
There had been no legitimate government in the country. The aristocracy was informed of it and recognized it. The reign of evil without a cause was thus to end; Would the reign of good begin? All the wisdom and all the authority of the State assembled in Parliament gave us the third kind of administration, the first parliamentary charter.
It became urgent not to uprise the whole of America. The thirteen former colonies were agitated and did not want to let themselves be taxed by the metropolis. ”

“ Such is the American system, by far the most perfect that ingenuity and human reason have imagined to rapidly promote the greatness and prosperity of the States that will have the chance of receiving it. ”

“ Today, there is pleasure in recognizing that our majestic sovereign has all the virtues most suited to inspire the veneration for her person; that she understood and practised, better than any other king of her dynasty, as far as it is possible to understand them and to fulfil them, all the duties of her high dignity; that she does happily all that the law allows her to do ”

“ They were as rough in Upper Canada, where there was only one nationality, as they were here, where there were two. The majorities of both of them were uninterested friends of the rights, freedoms, and privileges due to all English subjects. They were voluntarily exposing themselves to the lieful slander, dangerous anger, sanguinary revenge sometimes, of egoistic minorities, by themselves weak, but supported by the strength of the bayonnettes paid with the gold of the people, but everywhere directed against the people. ”

“ In the middle of the difficulties of a situation so voluntarily and purposely made bad and arbitrary, it is not a small merit for our house of assembly to have been the first one to establish, in all the extent of the Empire, the principle of absolute religious tolerance, to have destroyed the disqualifications resulting from an out of date legislation against the Israelites, and, to a lesser degree, against all the dissenting churches, by allowing their ministers and the synagogues to hold civil registers for the members of their congregations. ”

“ Those of genius, knowledge, public virtues, those which prove their true nobility in contests open to a free competition between all the classes of citizens of the same country; in the equitable elective system, where the lowest in fortune can attain the highest position in the social hierarchy, if he is richer in merit, and under the happy command of whom we can ensure the successions of Presidents, who all will be men of transcendent superiority and such that heredity cannot provide. ”

“ All the colonies which had representatives had control over their full revenues, by the vote of their elective houses. This right was refused to the Canadas alone.
The insurrectionist movement, legitimate in theory, imprudent in practise, since it has succumbed, was not proposed by the most influential men in Parliament: on the contrary. But those who wanted to destroy the politicians of Lower Canada; who wanted the union of the two provinces; who wished to see the executive branch be in control and regulate the income and the legislation, pushed for it. ”

“ These free peoples must also have a judicial power, authorized to decide, when a question is submitted to it, if a law is in conformity with or against the constitution, to declare it executory if it is in conformity with it, or null and of no effect if it is against it. The convention, during the periods and circumstances for which it is established, becomes the most important authority of a country, without possessing the power to pass any law. It has no other role than that of examining if the body politic has remained healthy, or if it has become sick ”

“ The transfer of a new country, with a majority whose religious beliefs and political education differed deeply from those of the minority, could have let us fear that the latter be exposed to denials of justice. Full religious tolerance, the most important of the rights which belong to men in society, had not been understood nor allowed at the time. ”

“ All free men who deserve their freedom, owe themselves a mutual support. Therefore, we cannot remain indifferent to the oppression of our brothers of the maritime colonies, and all the truly liberal and independent men of Canada owe them support and sympathy.
This new governmental plan reveals, more than the others, the violent animosity that the aristocracy feels toward elective institutions. ”

“ Among the most important and useful truths, those that pertain the the better political organization of society are at the forefront. They are among those it is shameful not to have carefully studied, and cowardly to dare not proclaim, when we believe that those we possess are true and therefore useful. ”

“ The English and Irish people, by those who were their true and worthy representatives approved us; the American governors and citizens approved us; the enlightened men of the European continent approved us; but especially our compatriots, for whom we suffered and who suffered with us, approved us; better than that even, our conscience approved us.
Those who today exile in such great a number, because the disgust for the present men and their measures push them to go breathe a purer air, tell once abroad what are the stigmata which the colonist bare on his forehead ”

“ They fought among themselves with eagerness to obtain nobility titles from overseas. On the one hand, they defrauded their country and on the other they were even defrauding among themselves for the superiority of the rank; and they found ways to associate many accomplices to their shame, as if it was less dark because it was shared! They promised counsellors elected for a term to make them counsellors for life. They created a fake aristocracy, that became such by their participation in an obvious violation of the law. ”

“ When the right to freethinking, whether religious, political or scientific, is as generally proclaimed as it is it by the laws, the values and the practise of our days, it cannot be lost. Judicious people will not need to demand it later.
Other parliamentary acts against Canada were acts of rigour, following disorders which would have been prevented by a tiny portion of the concessions that were granted much too late. The merit of these concessions is small and has little value, because they were made only after executions which were murders. ”

“ They threw into the sea the tea taxed by the high wisdom, the full justice, and the absolute power of the Parliament. They competed to be right against England with irrefutable protests and writings. Lastly, reason not being able to do anything against an unjust and presumptuous obstinacy, it became necessary for them to think of confederating, of organizing themselves in power under the direction of a Congress.
Powers can continue playing their game in order to steal money from the aristocracy: the money spent, they become aggressive. ”