STATES AND MINORITIES 427
for each new House of Commons; and it has long been a custom that when one political party continues in power for two or three parliaments, if the speaker in one parliament is of British extraction the next one shall be a French-Canadian.
“It is a rule also that the offices of speaker and of deputy speaker can at no time be held by men of the same race. If the speaker is a FrenchCanadian, the deputy speaker, who is also Chairman of committees, must be an English-speaking Canadian ; for the rule of the House is that the member elected to serve as deputy speaker shall be required to possess the full and practical knowledge of the language which is not that of the speaker for the time being.
The clerkship and the assistant clerkship of the House, and the offices of sergeant-at-arms and deputy sergeant-at-arms—all appointive as distinct from elective offices—are, by usage, also similarly divided between the two races.
Nearly all the offices, important and unimportant, connected with parliament, with the Senate as well as with the House, are distributed in accordance with these rules or usages. A roll call of the staffs of the two Houses, including even the boys in knicker-bockers who act as pages, would contain the names of almost as many French-Canadians as Canadians of British ancestry.
The rules and usages by virtue of which this distribution of offices is made are older than Confederation. They date back to the early years of the United Provinces, when Quebec and Ontario elected exactly the same number of members to the Legislature, and when these were the only provinces in the union.
Quebec today elects only 65 of the 234 members of the House of Commons. Its population is not one-fourth of the population of the Dominion. Its contribution to Dominion revenues does not exceed one-sixth. But an equal division of the offices of the House of Commons is regarded by Quebec as necessary to the preservation of its rights and privileges ; and so long as each political party, when it is in power, is dependent on support from FrenchCanada, it will be nearly as difficult to ignore the claim of Quebec to these parliamentary honours and offices as it would be to repeal the clause in the British North America Act that safeguards the separate schools system.”.
Unfortunately for the minorities in India, Indian Nationalism has developed a new doctrine which may be called the Divine Right of the Majority to rule the minorities according to the wishes of the majority. Any claim for the sharing of power by the minority is called communalism while the monopolizing of the whole power by the majority is called Nationalism. Guided by such a political philosophy the majority is not prepared to