Justice & Law Quote by Charles Tupper

“It is admitted by everybody” is the kind of courtroom flourish that pretends to be humble while loading the dice. Tupper isn’t opening a conversation; he’s trying to foreclose one. By invoking an imagined unanimity, he turns a contested constitutional and cultural crisis into a settled fact, then dares opponents to look unreasonable for disputing it.

The context is the Manitoba Schools Question, after Manitoba’s 1890 laws dismantled publicly funded Catholic schools and curtailed French Catholic educational rights that had been protected at Confederation. Tupper, a Conservative statesman and former prime minister, is speaking from the high-stakes terrain where minority protections collide with majoritarian politics and provincial autonomy. His sentence is engineered to frame the conflict as a clear act of dispossession: rights existed, then they were “taken away,” full stop. No hedging about modernization, efficiency, or a new provincial consensus. The verb choice makes the state the actor and the minority the victim.

The subtext is tactical. Once you accept the premise that recognized “rights and privileges” were removed, you’ve already conceded the moral and constitutional leverage Tupper needs to justify federal remedial action. He’s not just defending Catholics; he’s defending the Confederation bargain itself, warning that a province can’t rewrite foundational guarantees without consequences.

It’s also a reminder that Canadian liberalism has often advanced through paperwork and procedure: the violence here is administrative, accomplished “by legislation,” and made to sound almost bloodless. That’s exactly why the line hits: it makes the bureaucratic feel like a breach of honor.