Politics & Power Quote by John Strachan

Strachan’s sentence is a lesson in how power talks when it wants to sound like common sense. He frames a fight over public money and religious privilege as a matter of unfortunate practicality: Catholics “could hardly be expected” to fund a Protestant church, and Upper Canada is too broke for alternatives. That measured, bureaucratic cadence is the point. It recasts a political demand as an inevitability, a weather report on sectarian reality rather than a bid to entrench Anglican authority.

The subtext is sharper than the polite wording. By describing Catholic legislators as people “taught to consider” Protestantism “heretical,” Strachan reduces their opposition to inherited prejudice, not reasoned disagreement. It’s a subtle delegitimization: their convictions aren’t political principles; they’re catechism. Meanwhile, “scanty means” in Upper Canada functions as a pressure tactic, implying that if the state can’t support multiple institutions, it must back the one Strachan represents. Scarcity becomes a moral argument.

Context matters. In the early 19th century, Upper and Lower Canada were arenas where church-state alignment, land endowments (like the clergy reserves), and the boundaries of British identity were being negotiated. Strachan, an Anglican clergyman deeply invested in an establishment model, writes as if pluralism is a logistical problem rather than a democratic aspiration. The rhetorical move is strategic: concede that Catholics won’t play along, then use that fact to justify a settlement that still centers the Anglican Church as the default civic partner.