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THE LOYALIST MYTH
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The popular Canadian impression is that Loyalist was synonymous with all that is good and noble and upright, patriotic, and self- sacrificing, and that to be descended from a Loyalist is to be possessed of the inheritance of all these virtues. Regarding the Loyalists no questions are asked; and to ask them seems to savour almost of sacrilege and impiety.
Behind the advent of the Loyalists no one seeks to penetrate. All the United Empire Loyalists now stand on a footing of equality. They may, in 1784, have been of high or of humble birth, and many of them were servants and camp-followers. Their descendants, however, all point with pride to their Loyalist origin.... [T]he cult of the Loyalists is sometimes carried so far that it is impossible to treat it with patience. For when all is said and done, the Loyalists were no more than a set of worthy gentlemen, officeholders, lawyers, doctors, and clergymen, and their dependents, who took the losing side in a great quarrel, and took it so vigorously that when the end came there was no room for them in the land of their birth....
.The men of the rank and file, who of course formed the great majority were not much better and certainly no worse than their fellows anywhere. They were, as colonists, perhaps more intelligent than the soldiers.. .but little inclined to utilise their knowledge, and generally fared badly as settlers.They were in no
sense nation-makers; and the nation whose character and tradition such men had to form would have been in the blessed position of having no history at all. Our interest lies entirely in their leaders, the officers of the provincial regiments and the body of professional men, officials and landed gentry, who are generally in people’s minds when the term Loyalist is used..., the men who were to rule the colony for nearly a century.. . . These were the men who formed the Loyalist tradition for good and evil,
men who had been men of mark and note, of property and of office, in the old American colonies, men who had deliberately sided with the Crown in a quarrel which was none of theirs... ITihey did not forget their birth and breeding in the new country in which they found refuge....
But they had the defects of their qualities.
[Tjhe ideal they pursued was to obtain some position of emolument and honour. They did not believe much in education.... The Sons, without real education and brought up to regard office and influence as the objects of life, hardly ever rose above mediocrity. Their energies were diverted to the barren pursuit of political jobbery at home and in the colony, whereby a man who had never studied law might become a judge, or a clergyman the secretary of a province. Influence and not fitness or possible efficiency came to be the decisive test. These practices, combined with their loyalty, made them the apologists and supporters of privilege.... Any attempt to encroach on their privileges or to criticise their conduct in office was an act of iflsul)ordinatiOfl...
Most emphatically they were not men designed by nature to be pioneers and builders of a new country. They lacked the energy and the persistence, and they had not the necessary limitation to the material side of existence which is to some extent necessary in a pioThey regarded their land as a residential
estate which, with the assistance of a good official salary, they might manage to keep up in a manner befitting their position and dignity.... Occasionally in a gentlemanly way they made experiments in industry, establishing saw-mills and even stores; hut they hardly ever took a direct part in the management....
.The result was industrially a lack of initiative, a tendency to take things easy, a desire to wait upon the action of the government, which
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