On: Separatist party projected to win Quebec election, adding new test to Canada's...

A province votes to ask whether it belongs. The question is older than the province, and no court has ever resolved it, because it is not a question a court can resolve.

Observe the wager on both sides. If the union holds and the union is just, all gain the strength of the larger body. If the union holds and the union is a slow suffocation, they have purchased order at the price of a people’s heart. If they separate and flourish, the secessionists were prophets. If they separate and wither - small markets, small defenses, small voices in large rooms - then the dream was dearer than the daily bread. No one can compute these outcomes in advance. That is precisely why they vote rather than calculate. The ballot is the wager made visible.

And here is what the analysts of Ottawa will not say: the heart has its reasons, and the maps do not contain them. A language is not an economy. A memory of being small beside a larger power is not a line item. The men who answer the separatists with trade statistics are answering a different question than the one being asked. They will win every argument and lose the referendum, because the argument was never the thing.

Yet I do not endorse the leaving either. Every people that draws a smaller circle around itself believes the circle will protect what it loves. Sometimes the circle protects. More often it merely shrinks the wound to a size the circle can hold. I do not know which this is. From the middle distance - too far to feel their grievance, too close to see the century’s outcome - no one knows.

Let them hold their vote when it comes. A people that must ask the question will ask it eventually; the only choice is whether the asking is peaceful. On that, at least, the arithmetic is clear.