Justice & Law Quote by Charles Tupper

Tupper is doing something slyly practical here: collapsing a legal hair-splitting into a moral and constitutional argument. In a political culture that loved tidy categories, “right” versus “privilege” was the classic escape hatch. Call something a privilege and you can revoke it without admitting you’ve violated anyone’s rights. Tupper refuses the dodge. He doesn’t grandly declare every benefit a natural right; he says, pointedly, that under the country’s constitution the line isn’t “broad.” That phrasing matters. It’s lawyerly enough to sound restrained, but it’s also a warning that governments can’t launder coercion through semantics.

The subtext is about power and precedent. If what people “enjoyed” can be “taken away” simply by downgrading it to a privilege, then constitutional protections become optional, and citizenship becomes conditional. Tupper’s sentence turns on verbs: enjoyed versus taken away. It frames the issue as dispossession, not policy adjustment. That choice loads the argument with consequence while still keeping it within the respectable grammar of parliamentary debate.

Contextually, Tupper operated in the late 19th-century Canadian project of nation-building, when new institutions were being cemented and minority rights, voting rules, and provincial-federal boundaries were live ammunition. His intent is to pin the state to its own foundational claims: if a constitution is meant to restrain power, it can’t tolerate a loophole where “privileges” are treated as second-class entitlements. The rhetoric is less inspirational than strategic, but that’s the point: it’s a statesman’s move to make rights harder to shrink by definition.