Page:Address of the Hon. L.J. Papineau to the electors of the West Ward of Montreal.djvu/14

 and British, Bank directors, members of the Board of Trade and of Walker's committee hurraed in the midst of those cannibals. And as the people of this country have witnessed sights of a similar description repeated a thousand times, it was possible for them to consider as national the gross and brutal manners of upstarts, who begin by scrubbing shoes and sweeping shops in order, some time later, to sit in the Legislative Council. It is an injustice, but the acts of an Administration which has so often chosen such Representatives of British nationality, have rendered it inevitable.

The gentry (gentilhommerie) who directed this movement, seeing the honest electors, who reproached them with their infamy, determined to regain their lost ground on Monday, and warned that they were determined to take it, not from the paid, but from the paying, assassins, found it painful to expose its aristocratic skin—so tender and so soft—to the contact of the hard & tough plebeian skin of the citizens and artisans. They entered into a threatening negociation with the Returning Officer—into a fraudulent negociation with Canadian gentlemen—and into a negociation of alliance offensive and defensive with the Magistrates of Montreal. They wrote to the Returning Officer under the authority of a name as imposing as that of Walking, that he was almost guilty of something very like high treason. Walker, both Judge and jury in his own case, giving his electors an example of the facility with which oaths ought unscrupulously to be taken in a good cause. transmitted to the Justices of the Peace his affidavit of the alleged criminality of the Returning Officer, and of the precision of his notions of Criminal Law, which led him to make a discovery so gratifying to the loyalty of the Justices of the Peace, contributors to the common fund, raised to promote the election of the loyal.

The whole was founded on what the Returning Officer, it is said, had muttered "very low, between his teeth" on the previous Friday, "that he was in danger—that he did not know whether he should not be under the necessity, in order to preserve his life, of placing himself on the following Monday under the protection of a Company of Militia." Certainly to put in a position to protect himself from the assassins (sicaires) of Mr. Walker, was, according to Mr. Walker, to declare war against the Sovereign whose Crown would be endangered if Mr. Walker were not elected. Henceforward many persons sincerely believed that Mr. Walker was really and truly mad. They attributed this derangement to the sudden invasion of too great a quantity of love of the public good into the narrow and oppressed regions of his brain, which until that time had been void of that humour, and the neighbouring parts, until that moment swollen and filled with self-love, personal interest, and flatulency, becoming compressed with a crackling noise (craquements) and terrible suffering caused those external convulsions which every one remarked.

After having thus alarmed the Magistrates for the safety of the State, and the Returning Officer for the safety of his head—disposing, after the manner of the Crown Officers in 1832, of the conscience of the Sovereign, and as if he was already elected, and thenceforth Attorney-General, or Chief Justice, or one and the other both together, and had become similar to those whom he had so justly denominated rogues, he resolved to stay the course of justice, and not to cause the Returning Officer to be executed if the latter would only submit to his conditions.

A few days' respite would be granted him to prepare for his latter end, before attacking him anew on the Cattle Market more treacherously than ever, provided it did not occur again that he had to receive seven votes for the Democratic Candidates against one for the embryo of a great man (le grand homme en herbe.) He transmitted in writing the same nonsensical propositions to the opposite Candidates, adding that his Electors preferred not to vote for him at all than to be obliged to mix in the crowd. The adverse Candidates ought to have laughed and said nothing, in accordance with wise old saying—Answer not foolish questions. Nevertheless this Returning Officer, who had been before and after this day so undeservedly ill-treated by this insolent man and his insolent friends, whom, on more than one occasion, he ought to have immediately sent to jail, through an exceeding love for that peace which, when the law was insufficient to preserve it, he had no right to expect either from the honour nor from the good faith of those by whom it was disturbed, condescended to acquiesce to the proposal to take a vote, alternately at one window for one party, and a vote at another window for the other party. When he announced this his determination, on Monday, at the opening of the Poll, the popular Candidates said that they would not consent to it. It was illegal and unequal. It was as injurious to the popular party, which was that of the majority, as it was advantageous to the Tory party, which was that of the minority which had began the riots, and was organised to continue them—which had the most ample means at its disposal—corruption and no scruples—and which would thus appear for several days, as an encouragement to the Tories at a distance, to be on an equal footing in point of numbers with the Liberal party. Several Electors who perceived this injustice retired discontented, and some did not return. Trick and violence were the means resorted to by the Aristocracy. Confidence and patience, even unto dupery, were the popular weapons.

Immediately after the frightful tumult of Friday, the Father of Lies, assuming the features and figure of Doctor, ran from door to door saying that Montferand had arrived with a Calash filled with axe handles which the Canadians immediately laid hold of in order to knock down the English, but which a few of the latter had wrenched out of their hands, and put them to fight. He was not then ignorant of what all the world knew, that a great number of Walker's partizans had sallied out of English's house, armed with axe handles, and clubs—that the premises of of the Widow McGrath had been forcibly broken open by those of Walker's partizans who had come from English's without sticks—that they had stolen wheel-spokes, which a man named Monarque had stored there, with pitch-forks, rakes and broom-handles, for the purpose of retailing, as a means of gaining a livelihood—and Walker's Committee has some short time after paid for those same wheel-spokes.