1867 Read Online Free

entrust the government to the leaders of the dominant party. They would appoint friends of that party to all the jobs and posts that had previously been the governor’s patronage, and they would sign into law whatever bills the governing party could get through the elected legislature.
    “Under British responsible government as now in operation in Canada,” wrote George Brown a couple of years later, “the people of Canada have entire control over their public affairs.” 5 Within about a decade, the British government would acknowledge that the British North American colonies had the right even to decide whether they would remain part of the British Empire. In effect, the Canadian colonies had secured sovereign authority over their own affairs. Responsible government had created the conditions under which confederation would be made and ratified less than twenty years later. All the makers of confederation were children of that moment.
    Brown had been on the winning side on responsible government in the late 1840s, though he was only a fledgling journalist and held no elective office. By the 1860s, responsible government was no longer controversial. Its former opponents had adapted to the new facts of political power so successfully that they had defeated and replaced the reform ministries in several of the British North American provinces. Ironically, another of George Brown’s great principles hadhelped doom the reformers to minority status in the united Canadas – and had made him the voice of western alienation and anger.
    George Brown believed fiercely in the separation of church and state. Not because he was irreligious or anti-religious. Brown was a devout, God-fearing Scots Presbyterian, an heir to those early Protestants who had first condemned the worldly power and worldly corruption of the Church of Rome. His “voluntaryism” – the conviction that churches should be supported by their believers, not by the state – was deeply rooted in his family. An invitation to his father to edit a Toronto Presbyterian newspaper “on the voluntary principle” had helped bring the Browns to Canada. As true Scots Presbyterians, the Browns would have no bishops, no popes, and no elaborate worldly institutions standing between a man and his God.
    Today, separation of church and state seems as much a political platitude as responsible government. Even in the 1860s, church and state were separate; there were no longer any “established” churches in the colonies. But it was an age of faith, and everywhere religion impinged on politics. The split between tories and reformers over responsible government could still be found mirrored in tension between high-church Anglicans and evangelical-minded dissenters like the Presbyterians. It was Catholics, however, not Protestants, who felt most threatened by the voluntaryism that was part of George Brown’s religion and his politics. And in the union of the Canadas, what threatened Catholics threatened the union itself, for Canada East was as staunchly Catholic as Canada West was Protestant.
    As a Scotsman, a Briton, and a Protestant, Brown had been brought up to cherish deep suspicions of the Roman Catholic Church. Any Presbyterian minister could thunder for hours about the Church of Rome’s worldly pomp, its idolatry, its support for superstition and ignorance, and its malevolent efforts to inject popish power into civil society. The historical pageant of British liberty and parliamentary government, which Brown loved and sought to extend to British North America, was also a story of English resistance tothe pope, to absolutist and Catholic powers in Spain and France, and to the Catholic Stuarts, who had been deposed from the English throne in 1688. Brown could not help but look with scepticism and alarm at the Catholic Church, wherever it was found. And in British North America, Catholicism was as fundamental as the French language to the identity of the majority population