The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Canadian Dominion, by Oscar D. Skelton
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Canadian Dominion
A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor
Author: Oscar D. Skelton
Release Date: December 11, 2008 [EBook #2835]
Last Updated: February 6, 2013
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CANADIAN DOMINION ***
Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
University; Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, Joe Buersmeyer, and David Widger
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO.
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1919
Copyright, 1919, by Yale University Press
* The Royal Proclamation of 1763 set the bounds of the new
colony. They were surprisingly narrow, a mere strip along
both sides of the St. Lawrence from a short distance beyond
the Ottawa on the west, to the end of the Gasps peninsula on
the east. The land to the northeast was put under the
jurisdiction of the Governor of Newfoundland, and the Great
Lakes region was included in the territory reserved for the
Indians.
It is questionable whether this policy could ever have achieved success
even if it had been followed for generations without rest or turning. But
it was not destined to be given a long trial. From the very beginning the
men on the spot, the soldier Governors of Canada, urged an entirely
contrary policy on the Home Government, and the pressure of events soon
brought His Majesty's Ministers to concur.
As the first civil Governor of Canada, the British authorities chose
General Murray, one of Wolfe's ablest lieutenants, who since 1760 had
served as military Governor of the Quebec district. He was to be aided in
his task by a council composed of the Lieutenant Governors of Montreal and
Three Rivers, the Chief Justice, the head of the customs, and eight
citizens to be named by the Governor from﹃the most considerable of the
persons of property﹄in the province.
The new Governor was a blunt, soldierly man, upright and just according to
his lights, but deeply influenced by his military and aristocratic
leanings. Statesmen thousands of miles away might plan to encourage
English settlers and English political ways and to put down all that was
French. To the man on the spot English settlers meant﹃the four hundred
and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders﹄who had come in the wake of
the army from New England and New York, with no proper respect for their
betters, and vulgarly and annoyingly insistent upon what they claimed to
be their rights. The French might be alien in speech and creed, but at
least the seigneurs and the higher clergy were gentlemen, with a due
respect for authority, the King's and their own, and the habitants were
docile, the best of soldier stuff. "Little, very little," Murray wrote in
1764 to the Lords of Trade, "will content the New Subjects, but nothing
will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here, but the expulsion of
the Canadians, who are perhaps the bravest and best race upon the Globe, a
Race, who cou'd they be indulged with a few priviledges wch the Laws of
England deny to Roman Catholicks at home, wou'd soon get the better of
every National Antipathy to their Conquerors and become the most faithful
and most useful set of Men in this American Empire."*
* This quotation and those following in this chapter are
from official documents most conveniently assembled in Shorn
and Doughty, "Documents relating to the Constitutional
History of Canada, 1759-1791", and Doughty and McArthur,
"Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada,
1791-1818".
Certainly there was much in the immediate situation to justify Murray's
attitude. It was preposterous to set up a legislature in which only the
four hundred Protestants might sit and from which the seventy thousand
Catholics would be barred. It would have been difficult in any case to
change suddenly the system of laws governing the most intimate
transactions of everyday life. But when, as happened, the Administration
was entrusted in large part to newly created justices of the peace, men
with "little French and less honour,"﹃to whom it is only possible to
speak with guineas in one's hand,﹄the change became flatly impossible.
Such an alteration, if still insisted upon, must come more slowly than the
impatient traders in Montreal and Quebec desired.
The British Government, however, was not yet ready to abandon its policy.
The Quebec traders petitioned for Murray's recall, alleging that the
measures required to encourage settlement had not been adopted, that the
Governor was encouraging factions by his partiality to the French, that he
treated the traders with "a Rage and Rudeness of Language and Demeanor"
and—a fair thrust in return for his reference to them as "the most
immoral collection of men I ever knew"—as﹃discountenancing the
Protestant Religion by almost a Total Neglect of Attendance upon the
Service of the Church.﹄When the London business correspondents of the
traders backed up this petition, the Government gave heed. In 1766 Murray
was recalled to England and, though he was acquitted of the charges
against him, he did not return to his post in Canada.
The triumph of the English merchants was short. They had jumped from the
frying pan into the fire. General Guy Carleton, Murray's successor and
brother officer under Wolfe, was an even abler man, and he was still less
in sympathy with democracy of the New England pattern. Moreover, a new
factor had come in to reenforce the soldier's instinctive preference for
gentlemen over shopkeepers. The first rumblings of the American Revolution
had reached Quebec. It was no time, in Carleton's view, to set up another
sucking republic. Rather, he believed, the utmost should be made of the
opportunity Canada afforded as a barrier against the advance of democracy,
a curb upon colonial insolence. The need of cultivating the new subjects
was the greater, Carleton contended, because the plan of settlement by
Englishmen gave no sign of succeeding: "barring a Catastrophe shocking to
think of, this Country must, to the end of Time, be peopled by the
Canadian race."
To bind the Canadians firmly to England, Carleton proposed to work chiefly
through their old leaders, the seigneurs and the clergy. He would restore
to the people their old system of laws, both civil and criminal. He would
confirm the seigneurs in their feudal dues and fines, which the habitants
were growing slack in paying now that the old penalties were not enforced,
and he would give them honors and emoluments such as they had before
enjoyed as officers in regular or militia regiments. The Roman Catholic
clergy were already, in fact, confirmed in their right to tithe and toll;
and, without objection from the Governor, Bishop Briand, elected by the
chapter in Quebec and consecrated in Paris, once more assumed control over
the flock.
Carleton's proposals did not pass unquestioned. His own chief legal
adviser, Francis Maseres, was a sturdy adherent of the older policy,
though he agreed that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an Assembly
and suggested some well-considered compromise between the old laws and the
new. The Advocate General of England, James Marriott, urged the same
course. The policy of 1768, he contended eleven years later, had already
succeeded in great measure. The assimilation of government had been
effected; an assimilation of manners would follow. The excessive military
spirit of the inhabitants had begun to dwindle, as England's interest
required. The back settlements of New York and Canada were fast being
joined. Two or three thousand men of British stock, many of them men of
substance, had gone to the new colony; warehouses and foundries were being
built; and many of the principal seigneuries had passed into English
hands. All that was needed, he concluded, was persistence along the old
path. The same view was of course strenuously urged by the English
merchants in the colony, who continued to demand, down to the very eve of
the Revolution, an elective Assembly and other rights of freeborn Britons.
Carleton carried the day. His advice, tendered at close range during four
years' absentee residence in London, from 1770 to 1774, fell in with the
mood of Lord North's Government. The measure in which the new policy was
embodied, the famous Quebec Act of 1774, was essentially a part of the
ministerial programme for strengthening British power to cope with the
resistance then rising to rebellious heights in the old colonies. Though
not, as was long believed, designed in retaliation for the Boston
disturbances, it is clear that its framers had Massachusetts in mind when
deciding on their policy for Quebec. The main purpose of the Act, the
motive which turned the scale against the old Anglicizing policy, was to
attach the leaders of French-Canadian opinion firmly to the British Crown,
and thus not only to prevent Canada itself from becoming infected with
democratic contagion or turning in a crisis toward France, but to ensure,
if the worst came to the worst, a military base in that northland whose
terrors had in old days kept the seaboard colonies circumspectly loyal.
Ministers in London had been driven by events to accept Carleton's
paradox, that to make Quebec British, it must be prevented from becoming
English. If in later years the solidarity and aloofness of the
French-Canadian people were sometimes to prove inconvenient to British
interests, it was always to be remembered that this situation was due in
great part to the deliberate action of Great Britain in strengthening
French-Canadian institutions as a means of advancing what she considered
her own interests in America.﹃The views of the British Government in
respect to the political uses to which it means to make Canada
subservient,﹄Marriott had truly declared, "must direct the spirit of any
code of laws."
The Quebec Act multiplied the area of the colony sevenfold by the
restoration of all Labrador on the east and the region west as far as the
Ohio and the Mississippi and north to the Hudson's Bay Company's
territory. It restored the old French civil law but continued the milder
English criminal law already in operation. It gave to the Roman Catholic
inhabitants the free exercise of their religion, subject to a modified
oath of allegiance, and confirmed the clergy in their right﹃to hold,
receive and enjoy their accustomed dues and rights, with respect to such
persons only as shall confess the said religion.﹄The promised elective
Assembly was not granted, but a Council appointed by the Crown received a
measure of legislative power.
On his return to Canada in September, 1774, Carleton reported that the
Canadians had﹃testified the strongest marks of Joy and Gratitude and
Fidelity to their King and to His Government for the late Arrangements
made at Home in their Favor.﹄The "most respectable part of the English,"
he continued, urged peaceful acceptance of the new order. Evidently,
however, the respectable members of society were few, as the great body of
the English settlers joined in a petition for the repeal of the Act on the
ground that it deprived them of the incalculable benefits of habeas corpus
and trial by jury. The Montreal merchants, whether, as Carleton commented,
they﹃were of a more turbulent Turn, or that they caught the Fire from
some Colonists settled among them,﹄were particularly outspoken in the
town meetings they held. In the older colonies the opposition was still
more emphatic. An Act which hemmed them in to the seacoast, established on
the American continent a Church they feared and hated, and continued an
autocratic political system, appeared to many to be the undoing of the
work of Pitt and Wolfe and the revival on the banks of the St. Lawrence
and the Mississippi of a serious menace to their liberty and progress.
Then came the clash at Lexington, and the War of American Independence had
begun. The causes, the course, and the ending of that great civil war have
been treated elsewhere in this series.* Here it is necessary only to note
its bearings on the fate of Canada.
* See "The Eve of the Revolution" and『Washington and His
Comrades in Arms』(in "The Chronicles of America").
Early in 1775 the Continental Congress undertook the conquest of Canada,
or, as it was more diplomatically phrased, the relief of its inhabitants
from British tyranny. Richard Montgomery led an expedition over the old
route by Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, along which French and Indian
raiding parties used to pass years before, and Benedict Arnold made a
daring and difficult march up the Kennebec and down the Chaudiere to
Quebec. Montreal fell to Montgomery; and Carleton himself escaped capture
only by the audacity of some French-Canadian voyageurs, who, under cover
of darkness, rowed his whaleboat or paddled it with their hands silently
past the American sentinels on the shore. Once down the river and in
Quebec, Carleton threw himself with vigor and skill into the defense of
his capital. His generalship and the natural strength of the position
proved more than a match for Montgomery and Arnold. Montgomery was killed
and Arnold wounded in a vain attempt to carry the city by storm on the
last night of 1775. At Montreal a delegation from Congress, composed of
Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton,
accompanied by Carroll's brother, a Jesuit priest and a future archbishop,
failed to achieve-more by diplomacy than their generals had done by the
sword. The Canadians seemed, content enough to wear the British yoke. In
the spring, when a British fleet arrived with reenforcements, the American
troops retired in haste and, before the Declaration of Independence had
been proclaimed, Canada was free from the last of its ten thousand
invaders.
The expedition had put Carleton's policy to the test. On the whole it
stood the strain. The seigneurs had rallied to the Government which had
restored their rights, and the clergy had called on the people to stand
fast by the King. So far all went as Carleton had hoped:﹃The Noblesse,
Clergy, and greater part of the Bourgeoisie,﹄he wrote,﹃have given
Government every Assistance in their Power.﹄But the habitants refused to
follow their appointed leaders with the old docility, and some even mobbed
the seigneurs who tried to enroll them. Ten years of freedom had worked a
democratic change in them, and they were much less enthusiastic than their
betters about the restoration of seigneurial privileges. Carleton, like
many another, had held as public opinion what were merely the opinions of
those whom he met at dinner.﹃These people had been governed with too
loose a rein for many years,﹄he now wrote to Burgoyne,﹃and had imbibed
too much of the American Spirit of Licentiousness and Independence
administered by a numerous and turbulent Faction here, to be suddenly
restored to a proper and desirable Subordination.﹄A few of the habitants
joined his forces; fewer joined the invaders or sold them supplies—till
they grew suspicious of paper "Continentals." But the majority held
passively aloof. Even when France joined the warring colonies and Admiral
d'Estaing appealed to the Canadians to rise, they did not heed; though it
is difficult to say what the result would have been if Washington had
agreed to Lafayette's plan of a joint French and American invasion in
1778.
Nova Scotia also held aloof, in spite of the fact that many of the men who
had come from New England and from Ulster were eager to join the colonies
to the south. In Nova Scotia democracy was a less hardy plant than in
Massachusetts. The town and township institutions, which had been the
nurseries of resistance in New England, had not been allowed to take root
there. The circumstances of the founding of Halifax had given ripe to a
greater tendency, which lasted long, to lean upon the mother country. The
Maine wilderness made intercourse between Nova Scotia and New England
difficult by land, and the British fleet was in control of the sea until
near the close of the war. Nova Scotia stood by Great Britain, and was
reserved to become part of a northern nation still in the making.
That nation was to owe its separate existence to the success of the
American Revolution. But for that event, coming when it did, the
struggling colonies of Quebec and Nova Scotia would in time have become
merged with the colonies to the youth and would have followed them,
whether they remained within the British Empire or not. Thus it was due to
the quarrel between the thirteen colonies and the motherland that Canada
did not become merely a fourteenth colony or state. Nor was this the only
bearing of the Revolution on Canada's destiny. Thanks to the coming of the
Loyalists, those exiles of the Revolution who settled in Canada in large
numbers, Canada was after all to be dominantly a land of English speech
and of English sympathies. By one of the many paradoxes which mark the
history of Canada, the very success of the plan which aimed to save
British power by confirming French-Canadian nationality and the loyalty of
the French led in the end to making a large part of Canada English. The
Revolution meant also that for many a year those in authority in England
and in Canada itself were to stand in fear of the principles and
institutions which had led the old colonies to rebellion and separation,
and were to try to build up in Canada buttresses against the advance of
democracy.
The British statesmen who helped to frame the Peace of 1783 were men with
broad and generous views as to the future of the seceding colonies and
their relations with the mother country. It was perhaps inevitable that
they should have given less thought to the future of the colonies in
America which remained under the British flag. Few men could realize at
the moment that out of these scattered fragments a new nation and a second
empire would arise. Not only were the seceding colonies given a share in
the fishing grounds of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, which was
unfortunately to prove a constant source of friction, but the boundary
line was drawn with no thought of the need of broad and easy communication
between Nova Scotia and Canada, much less between Canada and the far West.
Vague definitions of the boundaries, naturally incident to the prevailing
lack of geographical knowledge of the vast continent, held further seeds
of trouble. These contentions, however, were far in the future. At the
moment another defect of the treaty proved to be Canada's gain. The
failure of Lord Shelburne's Ministry to insist upon effective safeguards
for the fair treatment of those who had taken the King's side in the old
colonies, condemned as it was not only by North and the Tories but by Fox
and Sheridan and Burke, led to that Loyalist migration which changed the
racial complexion of Canada.
The Treaty of 1783 provided that Congress would "earnestly recommend" to
the various States that the Loyalists be granted amnesty and restitution.
This pious resolution proved not worth the paper on which it was written.
In State after State the property of the Loyalists was withheld or
confiscated anew. Yet this ungenerous treatment of the defeated by the
victors is not hard to understand. The struggle had been waged with all
the bitterness of civil war. The smallness of the field of combat had
intensified personal ill-will. Both sides had practiced cruelties in
guerrilla warfare; but the Patriots forgot Marion's raids, Simsbury mines,
and the drumhead hangings, and remembered only Hessian brutalities, Indian
scalpings, Tarleton's harryings, and the infamous prison ships of New
York. The war had been a long one. The tide of battle had ebbed and
flowed. A district that was Patriot one year was frequently Loyalist the
next. These circumstances engendered fear and suspicion and led to nervous
reprisals.
At least a third, if not a half, of the people of the old colonies had
been opposed to revolution. New York was strongly Loyalist, with
Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the Carolinas closely following. In the end
some fifty or sixty thousand Loyalists abandoned their homes or suffered
expulsion rather than submit to the new order. They counted in their ranks
many of the men who had held first place in their old communities, men of
wealth, of education, and of standing, as well as thousands who had
nothing to give but their fidelity to the old order. Many, especially of
the well-to-do, went to England; a few found refuge in the West Indies;
but the great majority, over fifty thousand in all, sought new homes in
the northern wilderness. Over thirty thousand, including many of the most
influential of the whole number (with about three thousand negro slaves,
afterwards freed and deported to Sierra Leone) were carried by ship to
Nova Scotia. They found homes chiefly in that part of the province which
in 1784 became New Brunswick. Others, trekking overland or sailing around
by the Gulf and up the River, settled in the upper valley of the St.
Lawrence—on Lake St. Francis, on the Cataraqui and the Bay of
Quinte, and in the Niagara District.
Though these pioneers were generously aided by the British Government with
grants of land and supplies, their hardships and disappointments during
the first years in the wilderness were such as would have daunted any but
brave and desperate men and women whom fate had winnowed. Yet all but a
few, who drifted back to their old homes, held out; and the foundations of
two more provinces of the future Dominion—New Brunswick and Upper
Canada—were thus broadly and soundly laid by the men whom future
generations honored as "United Empire Loyalists." Through all the later
years, their sacrifices and sufferings, their ideals and prejudices, were
to make a deep impress on the development of the nation which they helped
to found and were to influence its relations with the country which they
had left and with the mother country which had held their allegiance.
Once the first tasks of hewing and hauling and planting were done, the new
settlers called for the organization of local governments. They were quite
as determined as their late foes to have a voice in their own governing,
even though they yielded ultimate obedience to rulers overseas.
In the provinces by the sea a measure of self-government was at once
established. New Brunswick received, without question, a constitution on
the Nova Scotia model, with a Lieutenant Governor, an Executive Council
appointed to advise him, which served also as the upper house of the
legislature, and an elective Assembly. Of the twenty-six members of the
first Assembly, twenty-three were Loyalists. With a population so much at
one, and with the tasks of road making and school building and tax
collecting insistent and absorbing, no party strife divided the province
for many years. In Nova Scotia, too, the Loyalists were in the majority.
There, however, the earlier settlers soon joined with some of the
newcomers to form an opposition. The island of St. John, renamed Prince
Edward Island in 1798, had been made a separate Government and had
received an Assembly in 1773. Its one absorbing question was the tenure of
land. On a single day in 1767 the British authorities had granted the
whole island by lottery to army and navy officers and country gentlemen,
on condition of the payment of small quitrents. The quitrents were rarely
paid, and the tenants of the absentee landlords kept up an agitation for
reform which was unceasing but which was not to be successful for a
hundred years. In all three Maritime Provinces political and party
controversy was little known for a generation after the Revolution.
It was more difficult to decide what form of government should be set up
in Canada, now that tens of thousands of English-speaking settlers dwelt
beside the old Canadians. Carleton, now Lord Dorchester, had returned as
Governor in 1786, after eight years' absence. He was still averse to
granting an Assembly so long as the French subjects were in the majority:
they did not want it, he insisted, and could not use it. But the Loyalist
settlers, not to be put off, joined with the English merchants of Montreal
and Quebec in demanding an Assembly and relief from the old French laws.
Carleton himself was compelled to admit the force of the conclusion of
William Grenville, Secretary of State for the Home Department, then in
control of the remnants of the colonial empire, and son of that George
Grenville who, as Prime Minister, had introduced the American Stamp Act of
1765:﹃I am persuaded that it is a point of true Policy to make these
Concessions at a time when they may be received as a matter of favour, and
when it is in Our own power to regulate and direct the manner of applying
them, rather than to wait till they shall be extorted from us by a
necessity which shall neither leave us any discretion in the form nor any
merit in the substance of what We give.﹄Accordingly, in 1791, the British
Parliament passed the Constitutional Act dividing Canada into two
provinces separated by the Ottawa River, Lower or French-speaking Canada
and Upper or English-speaking Canada, and granting each an elective
Assembly.
Thus far the tide of democracy had risen, but thus far only. Few in high
places had learned the full lesson of the American Revolution. The
majority believed that the old colonies had been lost because they had not
been kept under a sufficiently tight rein; that democracy had been allowed
too great headway; that the remaining colonies, therefore, should be
brought under stricter administrative control; and that care should be
taken to build up forces to counteract the democracy which grew so rank
and swift in frontier soil. This conservative tendency was strengthened by
the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.* The rulers of England had
witnessed two revolutions, and the lesson they drew from both was that it
was best to smother democracy in the cradle.
* It will be remembered that in the debate on the
Constitutional Act the conflicting views of Burke and Fox on
the French Revolution led to the dramatic break in their
lifelong friendship.
For this reason the measure of representative government that had been
granted each of the remaining British colonies in North America was
carefully hedged about. The whole executive power remained in the hands of
the Governor or his nominees. No one yet conceived it possible that the
Assembly should control the Executive Council. The elective Assembly was
compelled to share even the lawmaking power with an upper house, the
Legislative Council. Not only were the members of this upper house
appointed by the Crown for life, but the King was empowered to bestow
hereditary titles upon them with a view to making the Council in the
fullness of time a copy of the House of Lords. A blow was struck even at
that traditional prerogative of the popular house, the control of the
purse. Carleton had urged that in every township a sixth of the land
should be reserved to enable His Majesty﹃to reward such of His provincial
Servants as may merit the Royal favour﹄and﹃to create and strengthen an
Aristocracy, of which the best use may be made on this Continent, where
all Governments are feeble and the general condition of things tends to a
wild Democracy.﹄Grenville saw further possibilities in this suggestion.
It would give the Crown a revenue which would make it independent of the
Assembly,﹃a measure, which, if it had been adopted when the Old Colonies
were first settled, would have retained them to this hour in obedience and
Loyalty.﹄Nor was this all. From the same source an endowment might be
obtained for a state church which would be a bulwark of order and
conservatism. The Constitutional Act accordingly provided for setting
aside lands equal in value to one-seventh of all lands granted from time
to time, for the support of a Protestant clergy. The Executive Council
received power to set up rectories in every parish, to endow them
liberally, and to name as rectors ministers of the Church of England.
Further, the Executive Council was instructed to retain an equal amount of
land as crown reserves, distributed judiciously in blocks between the
grants made to settlers. Were any radical tendencies to survive these
attentions, the veto power of the British Government could be counted on
in the last resort.
For a time the installment of self-government thus granted satisfied the
people. The pioneer years left little leisure for political discussion,
nor were there at first any general issues about which men might differ.
The Government was carrying on acceptably the essential tasks of
surveying, land granting, and road building; and each member of the
Assembly played his own hand and was chiefly concerned in obtaining for
his constituents the roads and bridges, they needed so badly. The
English-speaking settlers of Upper Canada were too widely scattered, and
the French-speaking citizens of Lower Canada were too ignorant of
representative institutions, to act in groups or parties.
Much turned in these early years upon the personality of the Governor. In
several instances, the choice of rulers for the new provinces proved
fortunate. This was particularly so in the case of John Graves Simcoe,
Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada from 1792 to 1799. He was a good
soldier and a just and vigorous administrator, particularly wise in
setting his regulars to work building roads such as Yonge Street and
Dundas Street, which to this day are great provincial arteries of travel.
Yet there were many sources of weakness in the scheme of government—divided
authority, absenteeism, personal unfitness. When Dorchester was
reappointed in 1786, he had been made Governor in Chief of all British
North America. From the beginning, however, the Lieutenant Governors of
the various provinces asserted independent authority, and in a few years
the Governor General became in fact merely the Governor of the most
populous province, Lower Canada, in which he resided.
In Upper Canada, as in New Brunswick, the population was at first much at
one. In time, however, discordant elements appeared. Religious, or at
least denominational, differences began to cause friction. The great
majority of the early settlers in Upper Canada belonged to the Church of
England, whose adherents in the older colonies had nearly all taken the
Loyalist side. Of the Ulster Presbyterians and New England
Congregationalists who formed the backbone of the Revolution, few came to
Canada. The growth of the Methodists and Baptists in the United States
after the Revolution, however, made its mark on the neighboring country.
The first Methodist class meetings in Upper Canada, held in the United
Empire Loyalist settlement on the Bay of Quinte in 1791, were organized by
itinerant preachers from the United States; and in the western part of the
province pioneer Baptist evangelists from the same country reached the
scattered settlers neglected by the older churches.
Nor was it in religion alone that diversity grew. Simcoe had set up a
generous land policy which brought in many "late Loyalists," American
settlers whose devotion to monarchical principles would not always bear
close inquiry. The fantastic experiment of planting in the heart of the
woods of Upper Canada a group of French nobles driven out by the
Revolution left no trace; but Mennonites, Quakers, and Scottish
Highlanders contributed diverse and permanent factors to the life of the
province. Colonel Thomas Talbot of Malahide,﹃a fierce little Irishman who
hated Scotchmen and women, turned teetotallers out of his house, and built
the only good road in the province,﹄made the beginnings of settlement
midway on Lake Erie. A shrewd Massachusetts merchant, Philemon Wright,
with his comrades, their families, servants, horses, oxen, and 10,000
pounds, sledded from Boston to Montreal in the winter of 1800, and thence
a hundred miles beyond, to found the town of Hull and establish a great
lumbering industry in the Ottawa Valley.
These differences of origin and ways of thought had not yet been reflected
in political life. Party strife in Upper Canada began with a factional
fight which took place in 1805-07 between a group of Irish officeholders
and a Scotch clique who held the reins of government. Weekes, an
Irish-American barrister, Thorpe, a puisne judge, Wyatt, the surveyor
general, and Willcocks, a United Irishman who had become sheriff of one of
the four Upper Canada districts, began to question the right to rule of
"the Scotch pedlars" or "the Shopkeeper Aristocracy," as Thorpe called
those merchants who, for the lack of other leaders, had developed an
influence with the governors or ruled in their frequent absence. But the
insurgents were backed by only a small minority in the Assembly, and when
the four leaders disappeared from the stage,* this curtain raiser to the
serious political drama which was to follow came quickly to its end.
* Weekes was slain in a duel. Wyatt and Thorpe were
suspended by the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Gore, only
to win redress later in England. Willcocks was dismissed
from office and fell fighting on the American side in the
War of 1812.
In Lower Canada the clash was more serious. The French Canadians, who had
not asked for representative government, eventually grasped its
possibilities and found leaders other than those ordained for them. In the
first Assembly there were many seigneurs and aristocrats who bore names
notable for six generations back Taschereau, Duchesnay, Lothiniere,
Rouville, Salaberry. But they soon found their surroundings uncongenial or
failed to be reelected. Writing in 1810 to Lord Liverpool, Secretary of
State for War and the Colonies, the Governor, Sir James Craig, with a fine
patrician scorn thus pictures the Assembly of his day.
"It really, my Lord, appears to me an absurdity, that the Interests of
certainly not an unimportant Colony, involving in them those also of no
inconsiderable portion of the Commercial concerns of the British Empire,
should be in the hands of six petty shopkeepers, a Blacksmith, a Miller,
and 15 ignorant peasants who form part of our present House; a Doctor or
Apothecary, twelve Canadian Avocats and Notaries, and four so far
respectable people that at least they do not keep shops, together with ten
English members compleat the List: there is not one person coming under
the description of a Canadian Gentleman among them."
And again:
"A Governor cannot obtain among them even that sort of influence that
might arise from personal intercourse. I can have none with Blacksmiths,
Millers, and Shopkeepers; even the Avocats and Notaries who compose so
considerable a portion of the House, are, generally speaking, such as I
can nowhere meet, except during the actual sitting of Parliament, when I
have a day of the week expressly appropriated to the receiving a large
portion of them at dinner."
Leadership under these conditions fell to the "unprincipled Demagogues,"
half-educated lawyers, men "with nothing to lose."
But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and shopkeepers,
nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but as an Englishman on guard against
Frenchmen that Craig found himself at odds with his Assembly. For nearly
twenty years in this period England was at death grips with France, end to
hate and despise all Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and congenial
duty of all true Britons. Craig and those who counseled him were firmly
convinced that the new subjects were French at heart. Of the 250,000
inhabitants of Lower Canada, he declared,﹃about 20,000 or 25,000 may be
English or Americans, the rest are French. I use the term designedly, my
Lord, because I mean to say that they are in Language, in religion, in
manner and in attachment completely French.﹄That there was still some
affection for old France, stirred by war and French victories, there is no
question, but that the Canadians wished to return to French allegiance was
untrue, even though Craig reported that such was﹃the general opinion of
all ranks with whom it is possible to converse on the subject.﹄The French
Revolution had created a great gulf between Old France and New France. The
clergy did their utmost to bar all intercourse with the land where deism
and revolution held sway, and when the Roman Catholic Church and the
British Government combined for years on a single object, it was little
wonder they succeeded. Nelson's victory at Trafalgar was celebrated by a
Te Deum in the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Quebec. In fact, as Craig
elsewhere noted, the habitants were becoming rather a new and distinct
nationality, a nation canadienne. They ceased to be French; they declined
to become English; and sheltered under their "Sacred Charter"* they became
Canadians first and last.
*『It cannot be sufficiently inculcated ON THE PART OF
GOVERNMENT that the Quebec Act is a Sacred Charter, granted
by the King in Parliament to the Canadians as a Security for
their Religion, Laws, and Property.』Governor Sir Frederick
Haldimand to Lord George Germaine, Oct. 25, 1780.
The governors were not alone in this hostility to the mass of the people.
There had grown up in the colony a little clique of officeholders, of whom
Jonathan Sewell, the Loyalist Attorney General, and later Chief Justice,
was the chief, full of racial and class prejudice, and in some cases
greedy for personal gain. Sewell declared it﹃indispensably necessary to
overwhelm and sink the Canadian population by English Protestants,﹄and
was even ready to run the risk of bringing in Americans to effect this
end. Of the non-official English, some were strongly opposed to the
pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; but others, and especially the
merchants, with their organ the Quebec "Mercury", were loud in their
denunciations of the French who were unprogressive and who as landowners
were incidentally trying to throw the burden of taxation chiefly on the
traders.
The first open sign of the racial division which was to bedevil the life
of the province came in 1806 when, in order to meet the attacks of the
Anglicizing party, the newspaper "Le Canadien" was established at Quebec.
Its motto was significant: "Notre langue, nos institutions, et nos lois."
Craig and his counselors took up the challenge. In 1808 he dismissed five
militia officers, because of their connection with the irritating journal,
and in 1810 he went so far as to suppress it and to throw into prison four
of those responsible for its management. The Assembly, which was proving
hard to control, was twice dissolved in three years. Naturally the
Governor's arbitrary course only stiffened resistance; and passions were
rising fast and high when illness led to his recall and the shadow of a
common danger from the south, the imminence of war with the United States,
for a time drew all men together.
While the foundations of the eastern provinces of Canada were being laid,
the wildernesses which one day were to become the western provinces were
just rising above the horizon of discovery. In the plains and prairies
between the Great Lakes and the Rockies, fur traders warred for the
privilege of exchanging with the Indians bad whiskey for good furs.
Scottish traders from Montreal, following in the footsteps of La Verendrye
and Niverville, pushed far into the northern wilds.* In 1788 the leading
traders joined forces in organizing the North-West Company. Their great
canoes, manned by French-Canadian voyageurs, penetrated the network of
waters from the Ottawa to the Saskatchewan, and poured wealth into the
pockets of the lordly partners in Montreal. Their rivalry wakened the
sleepy Hudson's Bay Company, which was now forced to leave the shores of
the inland sea and build posts in the interior.
* It is interesting to note the dominant share taken in the
trade and exploration of the North and West by men of
Highland Scotch and French extraction. For an account of La
Verendrye see "The Conquest of New France" and for the
Scotch fur traders of Montreal see "Adventurers of Oregon"
(in "The Chronicles of America").
On the Pacific coast rivalry was still keener. The sea otter and the seal
were a lure to the men of many nations. Canada took its part in this
rivalry. In 1792, when the Russians were pressing down from their Alaskan
posts, when the Spaniards, claiming the Pacific for their own, were
exploring the mouth of the Fraser, when Captain Robert Gray of Boston was
sailing up the mighty Columbia, and Captain Vancouver was charting the
northern coasts for the British Government, a young North-West Company
factor, Alexander Mackenzie, in his lonely post on Lake Athabaska, was
planning to cross the wilderness of mountains to the coast. With a fellow
trader, Mackay, and six Canadian voyageurs, he pushed up the Peace and the
Parsnip, passed by way of the Fraser and the Blackwater to the Bella
Coola, and thence to the Pacific, the first white man to cross the
northern continent. Paddling for life through swirling rapids on rivers
which rushed madly through sheer rock-bound canyons, swimming for shore
when rock or sand bar had wrecked the precious bark canoe, struggling over
heartbreaking portages, clinging to the sides of precipices, contending
against hostile Indians and fear-stricken followers, and at last winning
through, Mackenzie summed up what will ever remain one of the great
achievements of exploration in the simple record, painted in vermilion on
a rock in Burke Channel: Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the
twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. The
first bond had been woven in the union of East and West. Between the
eastern provinces a stronger link was soon to be forged. The War of 1812
gave the scattered British colonies in America for the first time a living
sense of unity that transcended all differences, a memory of perils and of
victories which nourished a common patriotism.
The War of 1812 was no quarrel of Canada's. It was merely an incident in
the struggle between England and Napoleon. At desperate grips, both
contestants used whatever weapons lay ready to their hands. Sea power was
England's weapon, and in her claim to forbid all neutral traffic with her
enemies and to exercise the galling right of search, she pressed it far.
France trampled still more ruthlessly on American and neutral rights; but,
with memories of 1776 still fresh, the dominant party in the United States
was disposed to forgive France and to hold England to strict account.
England had struck at France, regardless of how the blow might injure
neutrals. Now the United States sought to strike at England through the
colonies, regardless of their lack of any responsibility for English
policy. The "war hawks" of the South and West called loudly for the speedy
invasion and capture of Canada as a means of punishing England. In so far
as the British North American colonies were but possessions of Great
Britain, overseas plantations, the course of the United States could be
justified. But potentially these colonies were more than mere possessions.
They were a nation in the making, with a right to their own development;
they were not simply a pawn in the game of Britain and the United States.
Quite aside from the original rights or wrongs of the war, the invasion of
Canada was from this standpoint an act of aggression.﹃Agrarian cupidity,
not maritime right, wages this war,﹄insisted John Randolph of Roanoke,
the chief opponent of the "war hawks" in Congress. "Ever since the report
of the Committee on Foreign Relations came into the House, we have heard
but one word—like the whippoorwill, but one eternal monotonous tone—Canada,
Canada, Canada!"
At the outset there appeared no question that the conquest of Canada could
be, as Jefferson forecast, other than "a mere matter of marching." Eustis,
the Secretary of War, prophesied that﹃we can take Canada without
soldiers.﹄Clay insisted that the Canadas were﹃as much under our command
as the Ocean is under Great Britain's.﹄The provinces had barely half a
million people, two-thirds of them allied by ties of blood to Britain's
chief enemy, to set against the eight millions of the Republic. There were
fewer than ten thousand regular troops in all the colonies, half of them
down by the sea, far away from the danger zone, and less than fifteen
hundred west of Montreal. Little help could come from England, herself at
war with Napoleon, the master of half of Europe.
But there was another side. The United States was not a unit in the war;
New England was apathetic or hostile to the war throughout, and as late as
1814 two-thirds of the army of Canada were eating beef supplied by Vermont
and New York contractors. Weak as was the militia of the Canadas, it was
stiffened by English and Canadian regulars, hardened by frontier
experience, and led for the most part by trained and able men, whereas an
inefficient system and political interference greatly weakened the
military force of the fighting States. Above all, the Canadians were
fighting for their homes. To them the war was a matter of life and death;
to the United States it was at best a struggle to assert commercial rights
or national prestige.
The course and fortunes of the war call for only the briefest notice. In
the first year the American plans for invading Upper Canada came to grief
through the surrender of Hull at Detroit to Isaac Brock and the defeat at
Queenston Heights of the American army under Van Rensselaer. The campaign
ended with not a foot of Canadian soil in the invaders' hands, and with
Michigan lost, but Brock, Canada's brilliant leader, had fallen at
Queenston, and at sea the British had tasted unwonted defeat. In single
actions one American frigate after another proved too much for its British
opponent. It was a rude shock to the Mistress of the Seas.
The second year's campaign was more checkered. In the West the Americans
gained the command of the Great Lakes by rapid building and good sailing,
and with it followed the command of all the western peninsula of Upper
Canada. The British General Procter was disastrously defeated at
Moraviantown, and his ally, the Shawanoe chief Tecumseh, one of the half
dozen great men of his race, was killed. York, later known as Toronto, the
capital of the province, was captured, and its public buildings were
burned and looted. But in the East fortune was kinder to the Canadians.
The American plan of invasion called for an attack on Montreal from two
directions; General Wilkinson was to sail and march down the St. Lawrence
from Sackett's Harbor with some eight thousand men, while General Hampton,
with four thousand, was to take the historic route by Lake Champlain.
Half-way down the St. Lawrence Wilkinson came to grief. Eighteen hundred
men whom he landed to drive off a force of a thousand hampering his rear
were decisively defeated at Chrystler's Farm. Wilkinson pushed on for a
few days, but when word came that Hampton had also met disaster he
withdrew into winter quarters. Hampton had found Colonel de Salaberry,
with less than sixteen hundred troops, nearly all French Canadians, making
a stand on the banks of the Chateauguay, thirty-five miles south of
Montreal. He divided his force in order to take the Canadians in front and
rear, only to be outmaneuvered and outfought in one of the most brilliant
actions of the war and forced to retire. In the closing months of the year
the Americans, compelled to withdraw from Fort George on the Niagara,
burned the adjoining town of Newark and turned its women and children into
the December snow. Drummond, who had succeeded Brock, gained control of
both sides of the Niagara and retaliated in kind by laying waste the
frontier villages from Lewiston to Buffalo. The year closed with
Amherstburg on the Detroit the only Canadian post in American hands. On
the sea the capture of the Chesapeake by the Shannon salved the pride of
England.
The last year of the war was also a year of varying fortunes. In the far
West a small body of Canadians and Indians captured Prairie du Chien, on
the Mississippi, while Michilimackinac, which a force chiefly composed of
French-Canadian voyageurs and Indians had captured in the first months of
war, defied a strong assault. In Upper Canada the Americans raided the
western peninsula from Detroit but made their chief attack on the Niagara
frontier. Though they scored no permanent success, they fought well and
with a fair measure of fortune. The generals with whom they had been
encumbered at the outset of the war, Revolutionary relics or political
favorites, had now nearly all been replaced by abler men—Scott,
Brown, Exert—and their troops were better trained and better
equipped. In July the British forces on the Niagara were decisively beaten
at Chippawa. Three weeks later was fought the bloodiest battle on Canadian
soil, at Lundy's Lane, either side's victory at the moment but soon
followed by the retirement of the invading force. The British had now
outbuilt their opponents on Lake Ontario; and, though American ships
controlled Lake Erie to the end, the Ontario flotilla aided Drummond,
Brock's able successor, in forcing the withdrawal of Exert forces from the
whole peninsula in November. Farther east a third attempt to capture
Montreal had been defeated in the spring, after Wilkinson with four
thousand men had failed to drive five hundred regulars and militia from
the stone walls of Lacolle's Mill.
Until this closing year Britain had been unable, in face of the more vital
danger from Napoleon, to send any but trifling reenforcements to what she
considered a minor theater of the war. Now, with Napoleon in Elba, she was
free to take more vigorous action. Her navy had already swept the daring
little fleet of American frigates and American merchant marine from the
seas. Now it maintained a close blockade of all the coast and, with troops
from Halifax, captured and held the Maine coast north of the Penobscot.
Large forces of Wellington's hardy veterans crossed the ocean, sixteen
thousand to Canada, four thousand to aid in harrying the Atlantic coast,
and later nine thousand to seize the mouth of the Mississippi. Yet,
strangely, these hosts fared worse, because of hard fortune and poor
leadership, than the handful of militia and regulars who had borne the
brunt of the war in the first two years. Under Ross they captured
Washington and burned the official buildings; but under Prevost they
failed at Plattsburg; and under Pakenham, in January, 1815, they failed
against Andrew Jackson's sharpshooters at New Orleans.
Before the last-named fight occurred, peace had been made. Both sides were
weary of the war, which had now, by the seeming end of the struggle
between England and Napoleon in which it was an incident, lost whatever it
formerly had of reason. Though Napoleon was still in Elba, Europe was far
from being at rest, and the British Ministers, backed by Wellington's
advice, were keen to end the war. They showed their contempt for the
issues at stake by sending to the peace conference at Ghent three
commissioners as incompetent as ever represented a great power, Gambier,
Goulburn, and Adams. To face these the United States had sent John Quincy
Adams, Albert Gallatin, Henry Clay, James Bayard, and Jonathan Russell, as
able and astute a group of players for great stakes as ever gathered round
a table. In these circumstances the British representatives were lucky to
secure peace on the basis of the status quo ante. Canada had hoped that
sufficient of the unsettled Maine wilderness would be retained to link up
New Brunswick with the inland colony of Quebec, but this proposal was soon
abandoned. In the treaty not one of the ostensible causes of the war was
even mentioned.
The war had the effect of unifying Canadian feeling. Once more it had been
determined that Canada was not to lose her identity in the nation to the
south. In Upper Canada, especially in the west, there were many recent
American settlers who sympathized openly with their kinsmen, but of these
some departed, some were jailed, and others had a change of heart. Lower
Canada was a unit against the invader, and French-Canadian troops on every
occasion covered themselves with glory. To the Canadians, as the smaller
people, and as the people whose country had been the chief battle ground,
the war in later years naturally bulked larger than to their neighbors. It
left behind it unfortunate legacies of hostility to the United States and,
among the governing classes, of deep-rooted opposition to its democratic
institutions. But it left also memories precious for a young people—the
memory of Brock and Macdonell and De Salaberry, of Laura Secord and her
daring tramp through the woods to warn of American attacks, of Stony Creek
and Lundy's Lane, Chrystler's Farm and Chateauguay, the memory of
sacrifice, of endurance, and of courage that did not count the odds.
Nor were the evil legacies to last for all time. Three years after peace
had been made the statesmen of the United States and of Great Britain had
the uncommon sense to take a great step toward banishing war between the
neighbor peoples. The Rush-Bagot Convention, limiting the naval armament
on the Great Lakes to three vessels not exceeding one hundred tons each,
and armed only with one eighteen-pounder, though not always observed in
the letter, proved the beginning of a sane relationship which has lasted
for a century. Had not this agreement nipped naval rivalry in the bud,
fleets and forts might have lined the shores and increased the strain of
policy and the likelihood of conflict. The New World was already preparing
to sound its message to the Old.
* The natural increase of the French-Canadian race under
British rule is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in
social history. The following figures illustrate the rate of
that increase: the number was 16,417 in 1706; 69,810 in
1765; 479,288 in 1825; 697,084 in 1844. The population of
Canada East or Lower Canada in 1844 was made up as follows:
French Canadians, 524,244; English Canadians. 85,660;
English, 11,895; Irish, 43,982; Scotch, 13,393; Americans,
11,946; born in other countries, 1329; place of birth not
specified, 4635.
In the reform movement in Upper Canada there were a multiplicity of
leaders and a constant shifting of groups. In Lower Canada, after the
defection of James Stuart in 1817, there was only one leader, Louis Joseph
Papineau. For twenty years Papineau was the uncrowned king of the
province. His commanding figure, his powers of oratory, outstanding in a
race of orators, his fascinating manners, gave him an easy mastery over
his people. Prudence did not hamper his flights; compromise was a word not
found in his vocabulary. Few men have been better equipped for the
agitator's task.
His father, Joseph Papineau, though of humble birth, had risen high in the
life of the province. He had won distinction in his profession as a
notary, as a speaker in the Assembly, and as a soldier in the defense of
Quebec against the American invaders of 1775. In 1804 he had purchased the
seigneury of La Petite Nation, far up the Ottawa. Louis Joseph Papineau
followed in his father's footsteps. Born in 1786, he served loyally and
bravely in the War of 1812. In the same year he entered the Assembly and
made his place at a single stroke. Barely three years after his election,
he was chosen Speaker, and with a brief break he held that post for over
twenty years.
Papineau did not soon or lightly begin his crusade against the Government.
For the first five years of his Speakership, he confined himself to the
routine duties of his office. As late as 1820 he pronounced a glowing
eulogy on the Constitution which Great Britain had granted the province.
In that year he tested the extent of the privileges so granted by joining
in the attempt of the Assembly to assert its full control of the purse;
but it was not until the project of uniting the two Canadas had made clear
beyond dispute the hostility of the governing powers that he began his
unrelenting warfare against them.
There was much to be said for a reunion of the two Canadas. The St.
Lawrence bound them together, though Acts of Parliament had severed them.
Upper Canada, as an inland province, restricted in its trade with its
neighbor to the south, was dependent upon Lower Canada for access to the
outer world. Its share of the duties collected at the Lower Canada ports
until 1817 had been only one-eighth, afterwards increased to one-fifth.
This inequality proved a constant source of friction. The crying necessity
of cooperation for the improvement of the St. Lawrence waterway gave
further ground for the contention that only by a reunion of the two
provinces could efficiency be secured. In Upper Canada the Reformers were
in favor of this plan, but the Compact, fearful of any disturbance of
their vested interests, tended to oppose it. In Lower Canada the chief
support came from the English element. The governing clique, as the older
established body, had no doubt that they could bring the western section
under their sway in case of union. But the main reason for their advocacy
was the desire to swamp the French Canadians by an English majority.
Sewell, the chief supporter of the project, frankly took this ground. The
Governor, Lord Dalhousie, and the Colonial Office adopted his view; and in
1822 an attempt was made to rush a Union Bill through the British
Parliament without any notice to those most concerned. It was blocked for
the moment by the opposition of a Whig group led by Burdett and
Mackintosh; and then Papineau and Neilson sailed to London and succeeded
in inducing the Ministry to stay its hand. The danger was averted; but
Papineau had become convinced that if his people were to retain the rights
given them by their "Sacred Charter" they would have to fight for them. If
they were to save their power, they must increase it.
How could this be done? Baldwin's bold and revolutionary policy of making
the Executive responsible to the Assembly did not seem within the range of
practical politics. It meant in practice the abandonment of British
control, and this the Colonial Office was not willing to grant. Antoine
Panet and other Assembly leaders had suggested in 1815 that it would be
well,﹃if it were possible, to grant a number of places as Councillors or
other posts of honour and of profit to those who have most influence over
the majority in the Assembly, to hold so long as they maintained this
influence,﹄and James Stuart urged the same tentative suggestion a year
later. But even before this the Colonial Office had made clear its
position. "His Majesty's Government," declared the Colonial Secretary,
Lord Bathurst, in 1814, "never can admit so novel & inconvenient a
Principle as that of allowing the Governor of a Colony to be divested of
his responsibility [to the Colonial Office] for the acts done during his
administration or permit him to shield himself under the advice of any
Persons, however respectable, either from their character or their
Office."
Two other courses had the sanction of precedent, one of English, the other
of American example. The English House of Commons had secured its dominant
place in the government of the country by its control of the purse. Why
should not the Assembly do likewise? One obvious difficulty lay in the
fact that the Assembly was not the sole authority in raising revenue. The
British Parliament had retained the power to levy certain duties as part
of its system of commercial control, and other casual and territorial dues
lay in the right of the Crown. From 1820, therefore, the Assembly's main
aim was twofold—to obtain control of these remaining sources of
revenue, and by means of this power to bludgeon the Legislative Council
and the Governor into compliance with its wishes. The Colonial Office made
concessions, offering to resign all its taxing powers in return for a
permanent civil list, that is, an assurance that the salaries of the chief
officials would not be questioned annually. The offer was reasonable in
itself but, as it would have hampered the full use of the revenue
bludgeon, it was scornfully declined.
The other aim of the Patriotes, as the Opposition styled themselves, was
to conquer the Legislative Council by making it elective. Papineau, in
spite of his early prejudices, was drawn more and more into sympathy with
the form of democracy worked out in the United States. In fact, he not
only looked to it as a model but, as the thirties wore on, he came to hope
that moral, if not physical, support might be found there for his campaign
against the English Government. After 1830 the demand for an elective
Legislative Council became more and more insistent.
The struggle soon reached a deadlock. Governor followed Governor: Lord
Dalhousie, Sir James Kempt, Lord Aylmer, all in turn failed to allay the
storm. The Assembly raised its claims each session and fulminated against
all the opposing powers in windy resolutions. Papineau, embittered by
continued opposition, carried away by his own eloquence, and steadied by
no responsibility of office, became more implacable in his demands. Many
of his moderate supporters—Neilson, Andrew Stuart, Quesnel,
Cuvillier—fell away, only to be overwhelmed in the first election at
a wave of the great tribune's hand. Business was blocked, supplies were
not voted, and civil servants made shift without salary as best they
could.
The British Government awoke, or half awoke, to the seriousness of the
situation. In 1835 a Royal Commission of three, with the new Governor
General, Lord Gosford, as chairman, was appointed to make inquiries and to
recommend a policy. Gosford, a genial Irishman, showed himself most
conciliatory in both private intercourse and public discourse.
Unfortunately the rash act of the new Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada,
Sir Francis Bond Head, in publishing the instructions of the Colonial
Office, showed that the policy of Downing Street was the futile one of
conciliation without concession. The Assembly once more refused to grant
supplies without redress of grievances. The Commissioners made their
report opposing any substantial change. In March, 1837, Lord John Russell,
Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Melbourne Ministry, opposed only by a
handful of Radical and Irish members, carried through the British
Parliament a series of resolutions authorizing the Governor to take from
the Treasury without the consent of the Assembly the funds needed for
civil administration, offering control of all revenues in return for a
permanent civil list, and rejecting absolutely the demands alike for a
responsible Executive and for an elective Council.
British statesmanship was bankrupt. Its final answer to the demands for
redress was to stand pat. Papineau, without seeing what the end would be,
held to his course. Younger men, carried away by the passions he had
aroused, pushed on still more recklessly. If reform could not be obtained
within the British Empire, it must be sought by setting up an independent
republic on the St. Lawrence or by annexation to the United States.
In Upper Canada, at the same time, matters had come to the verge of
rebellion. Sir John Colborne had, just before retiring as Lieutenant
Governor in 1836, added fuel to the flames by creating and endowing some
forty-four rectories, thus strengthening the grip of the Anglican Church
on the province. His successor, Sir Francis Bond Head, was a man of such
rash and unbalanced judgment as to lend support to the tradition that he
was appointed by mistake for his cousin, Edmund Head, who was made
Governor of United Canada twenty years later. He appointed to his
Executive Council three Reformers, Baldwin, Rolph, and Dunn, only to make
clear by his refusal to consult them his inability to understand their
demand for responsible government. All the members of the Executive
Council thereupon resigned, and the Assembly refused supplies. Head
dissolved the House and appealed to the people.
The weight of executive patronage, the insistence of the Governor that
British connection was at stake, the alarms caused by some injudicious
statements of Mackenzie and his Radical ally in England, Joseph Hume, and
the defection of the Methodists, whose leader, Egerton Ryerson, had
quarreled with Mackenzie, resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the
Reformers. The sting of defeat, the failure of the Family Compact to carry
out their eleventh hour promises of reform, and the passing of Lord John
Russell's reactionary resolutions convinced a section of the Reform party,
in Upper Canada as well as in Lower Canada, that an appeal to force was
the only way out.
Toward the end of 1837 armed rebellion broke out in both the Canadas. In
both it was merely a flash in the pan. In Lower Canada there had been
latterly much use of the phrases of revolution and some drilling, but
rebellion was neither definitely planned nor carefully organized. The more
extreme leaders of the Patriotes simply drifted into it, and the actual
outbreak was a haphazard affair. Alarmed by the sudden and seemingly
concerted departure of Papineau and some of his lieutenants, Nelson,
Brown, and O'Callaghan, from Montreal, the Government gave orders for
their arrest. The petty skirmish that followed on November 16, 1837, was
the signal for the rallying of armed habitants around impromptu leaders at
various points. The rising was local and spasmodic. The vast body of the
habitants stood aloof. The Catholic Church, which earlier had sympathized
with Papineau, had parted from him when he developed radical and
republican views. Now the strong exhortations of the clergy to the
faithful counted for much in keeping peace, and in one view justified the
policy of the British Government in seeking to purchase their favor. The
Quebec and Three Rivers districts remained quiet. In the Richelieu and
Montreal districts, where disaffection was strongest, the habitants lacked
leadership, discipline, and touch with other groups, and were armed only
with old flintlocks, scythes, or clubs. Here and there a brave and
skillful leader, such as Dr. Jean Olivier Chenier, was thrown up by the
evidence opened a way out of the difficult situation. A year later Peel
and Webster, representing the two countries, exchanged formal
explanations, and the incident was closed.
In Upper Canada many a rebel sympathizer lay for months in jail, but only
two leaders, Lount and Matthews, both brave men, paid the penalty of death
for their failure. In Lower Canada the new Governor General, Lord Durham,
proved more clement, merely banishing to Bermuda eight of the captured
leaders. When, a year later, after Durham's return to England, a second
brief rising broke out under Robert Nelson, it was stamped out in a week,
twelve of the ringleaders were executed, and others were deported to
Botany Bay.
The rebellion, it seemed, had failed and failed miserably. Most of the
leaders of the extreme factions in both provinces had been discredited,
and the moderate men had been driven into the government camp. Yet in one
sense the rising proved successful. It was not the first nor the last time
that wild and misguided force brought reform where sane and moderate
tactics met only contempt. If men were willing to die to redress their
wrongs, the most easy-going official could no longer deny that there was a
case for inquiry and possibly for reform. Lord Melbourne's Government had
acted at once in sending out to Canada, as Governor General and High
Commissioner with sweeping powers, one of the ablest men in English public
life. Lord Durham was an aristocratic Radical, intensely devoted to
political equality and equally convinced of his own personal superiority.
Yet he had vision, firmness, independence, and his very rudeness kept him
free from the social influences which had ensnared many another Governor.
Attended by a gorgeous retinue and by some able working secretaries,
including Charles Buller, Carlyle's pupil, he made a rapid survey of Upper
and Lower Canada. Suddenly, after five crowded months, his mission ended.
He had left at home active enemies and lukewarm friends. Lord Brougham,
one of his foes, called in question the legality of his edict banishing
the rebel leaders to Bermuda. The Ministers did not back him, as they
should have done; and Durham indignantly resigned and hurried back to
England.
Three months later, however, his "Report" appeared and his mission stood
vindicated. There are few British state papers of more fame or more worth
than Durham's "Report". It was not, however, the beginning and the end of
wisdom in colonial policy, as has often been declared. Much that Durham
advocated was not new, and much has been condemned by time. His main
suggestions were four: to unite the Canadas, to swamp the French Canadians
by such union, to grant a measure of responsible government, and to set up
municipal government. His attitude towards the French Canadians was
prejudiced and shortsighted. He was not the first to recommend responsible
government, nor did his approval make it a reality. Yet with all
qualifications his "Report" showed a confidence in the liberating and
solving power of self-government which was the all-essential thing for the
English Government to see; and his reasoned and powerful advocacy gave an
impetus and a rallying point to the movement which were to prove of the
greatest value in the future growth not only of Canada but of the whole
British Empire.
* From 1841 to 1867 the whole province was legally known as
the "Province of Canada." Yet a measure of administrative
separation between the old sections remained, and the terms
"Canada East" and "Canada West" received official sanction.
The older terms, "Lower Canada" and "Upper Canada," lingered
on in popular usage.
In June, 1841, the first Parliament of united Canada met at Kingston,
which as the most central point had been chosen as the new capital. Under
Sydenham's shrewd and energetic leadership a business programme of
long-delayed reforms was put through. A large loan, guaranteed by the
British Government, made possible extensive provision for building roads,
bridges, and canals around the rapids in the St. Lawrence. Municipal
institutions were set up, and reforms were effected in the provincial
administration.
Lord John Russell in England and Sydenham in Canada were anxious to keep
the question of responsible government in the background. For the first
busy months they succeeded, but the new Parliament contained men quite as
strong willed as either and of quite other views. Before the first session
had begun, Baldwin and the new French-Canadian leader, La Fontaine, had
raised the issue and begun a new struggle in which their single-minded
devotion and unflinching courage were to attain a complete success.
Responsible government was in 1841 only a phrase, a watchword. Its full
implications became clear only after many years. It meant three things:
cabinet government, self-government, and party government. It meant that
the government of the country should be carried on by a Cabinet or
Executive Council, all members of Parliament, all belonging to the party
which had the majority in the Assembly, and under the leadership of a
Prime Minister, the working head of the Government. The nominal head,
Governor or King, could act only on the advice of his ministers, who alone
were held responsible to Parliament for the course of the Government. It
meant, further, national self-government. The Governor could not serve two
masters. If he must take the advice of his ministers in Canada, he could
not take the possibly conflicting advice of ministers in London. The
people of Canada would be the ultimate court of appeal. And finally,
responsible government meant party government. The cabinet system
presupposed a definite and united majority behind the Government. It was
the business of the party system to provide that majority, to insure
responsible and steady action, and at the same time responsible criticism
from Her Majesty's loyal Opposition. Baldwin saw this clearly in 1841, but
it took hard fighting throughout the forties to bring all his fellow
countrymen to see likewise and to induce the English Government to resign
itself to the prospect.
Sydenham fought against responsible government but advanced it against his
will. The only sense in which he, like Russell, was prepared to concede
such liberty was that the Governor should choose his advisers as far as
possible from men having the confidence of the Assembly. They were to be
his advisers only, in fact as well as form. The Governor was still to
govern, was to be Prime Minister and Governor in one. When Baldwin, who
had been given a seat in the Executive Council, demanded in 1841 that this
body should be reconstructed in such a way as to include some
French-Canadian members and to exclude the Family Compact men, Sydenham
flatly refused. Baldwin then resigned and went into opposition, but
Sydenham unwillingly played into his hand. By choosing his council solely
from members of the two Houses, he established a definite connection
between Executive and Assembly and thus gave an opportunity for the
discussion of the administration of policy in the House and for the
forming of government and opposition parties. Before the first session
closed, the majority which Sydenham had built up by acting as a party
leader at the very time he was deriding parties as mere factions, crumbled
away, and he was forced to accept resolutions insisting that the
Governor's advisers must be men﹃possessed of the confidence of the
representatives of the people.﹄Fate ended his work at its height. Riding
home one September evening, he was thrown from his horse and died from the
injuries before the month was out.
It fell to the Tory Government of Peel to choose Sydenham's successor.
They named Sir Charles Bagot, already distinguished for his career in
diplomacy and known for his hand in matters which were to interest the
greater Canada, the Rush-Bagot Convention with the United States and the
treaty with Russia which fixed, only too vaguely, the boundaries of
Alaska. He was under strict injunctions from the Colonial Secretary, Lord
Stanley, to continue Sydenham's policy and to make no further concession
to the demands for responsible government or party control. Yet this Tory
nominee of a Tory Cabinet, in his brief term of office, insured a great
advance along this very path toward freedom. His easy-going temper
predisposed him to play the part of constitutional monarch rather than of
Prime Minister, and in any case he faced a majority in the Assembly
resolute in its determination.
The policy of swamping French influence had already proved a failure.
Sydenham had given it a full trial. He had done his best, or his worst, by
unscrupulous manipulation, to keep the French Canadians from gaining their
fair quota of the members in the Union Assembly. Those who were elected he
ignored.﹃They have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing by the
Rebellion,﹄he declared,﹃and are more unfit for representative government
than they were in 1791.﹄This was far from a true reading of the
situation. The French stood aloof, it is true, a compact and sullen group,
angered by the undisguised policy of Anglicization that faced them and by
Sydenham's unscrupulous tactics. But they had learned restraint and had
found leaders and allies of the kind most needed. Papineau's place—for
the great tribune was now in exile in Paris, consorting with the
republicans and socialists who were to bring about the Revolution of 1848—had
been taken by one of his former lieutenants. Louis Hippolyte La Fontaine
still stands out as one of the two or three greatest Canadians of French
descent, a man of massive intellect, of unquestioned integrity, and of
firm but moderate temper. With Baldwin he came to form a close and
lifelong friendship. The Reformers of Canada West, as Upper Canada was now
called, formed a working alliance with La Fontaine which gave them a
sweeping majority in the Assembly. Bagot bowed to the inevitable and
called La Fontaine and Baldwin to his Council. Ill health made it
impossible for him to take much part in the government, and the Council
was far on the way to obtaining the unity and the independence of a true
Cabinet when Bagot's death in 1843 brought a new turn in affairs.
The British Ministers had seen with growing uneasiness Bagot's
concessions. His successor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, a man of honest and
kindly ways but accustomed to governing oriental peoples, determined to
make a stand against the pretensions of the Reformers. In this attitude he
was strongly backed both by Stanley and by his successor, that brilliant
young Tory, William Ewart Gladstone. Metcalfe insisted once more that the
Governor must govern. While the members of the Council, as individuals,
might give him advice, it was for him to decide whether or not to take it.
The inevitable clash with his Ministers came in the autumn of 1843 over a
question of patronage. They resigned, and after months of effort Metcalfe
patched up a Ministry with W. H. Draper as the leading member. In an
election in which Metcalfe himself took the platform and in which once
more British connection was said to be at stake, the Ministry obtained a
narrow majority. But opinion soon turned, and when Metcalfe, the third
Governor in four years to whom Canada had proved fatal, went home to die,
he knew that his stand had been in vain. The Ministry, after a precarious
life of three years, went to the country only to be beaten by an
overwhelming majority in both East and West. When, in 1848, Baldwin and La
Fontaine were called to office under the new Governor General, Lord Elgin,
the fight was won. Many years were to pass before the full implications of
responsible government were worked out, but henceforth even the straitest
Tory conceded the principle. Responsible government had ceased to be a
party cry and had become the common heritage of all Canadians.
Lord Elgin, who was Durham's son-in-law, was a man well able to bear the
mantle of his predecessors. Yet he realized that the day had passed when
Governors could govern and was content rather to advise his advisers, to
wield the personal influence that his experience and sagacity warranted.
Hitherto the stages in Canadian history had been recorded by the term of
office of the Governors; henceforth it was to be the tenure of Cabinets
which counted. Elgin ceased even to attend the Council, and after his time
the Governor became more and more the constitutional monarch, busied in
laying corner stones and listening to tiresome official addresses. In
emergencies, and especially in the gap or interregnum between Ministries,
the personality of the Governor might count, but as a rule this power
remained latent. Yet in two turning points in Canadian history, both of
which had to do with the relations of Canada to the United States, Elgin
was to play an important part: the Annexation Movement of 1849 and the
Reciprocity Treaty of 1854.
In the struggle for responsible government, loyalty to the British Crown,
loyalty of a superior and exclusive brand, had been the creed and the war
cry of the Tory party. Yet in 1849 men saw the hotheads of this group in
Montreal stoning a British Governor General and setting fire to the
Parliament Buildings, while a few months later their elders issued a
manifesto urging the annexation of Canada to the United States. Why this
sudden shift? Simply because the old colonial system they had known and
supported had come to an end. The Empire had been taken to mean racial
ascendancy and trade profit. Now both the political and the economic
pillars were crumbling, and the Empire appeared to have no further excuse
for existence.
In the past British connection had meant to many of the English minority
in Lower Canada a means of redressing the political balance, of retaining
power in face of a body of French-speaking citizens outnumbering them
three or four to one. Now that support had been withdrawn. Britain had
consented, unwillingly, to the setting up of responsible government and
the calling to office of men who a dozen years before had been in arms
against the Queen or fleeing from the province. This was gall and wormwood
to the English. But when the Ministry introduced, and the Assembly passed,
the Rebellion Losses Bill for compensating those who had suffered
destruction of property in the outbreak, and when the terms were so drawn
as to make it possible, its critics charged, that rebels as well as
loyalists would be compensated, flesh and blood could bear no more. The
Governor was pelted with rotten eggs when he came down to the House to
sign the bill, and the buildings where Parliament had met since 1844, when
the capital had been transferred from Kingston to Montreal, were stormed
and burned by a street mob.
The anger felt against the Ministry thus turned against the British
Government. The English minority felt like an advance guard in a hostile
country, deserted by the main forces, an Ulster abandoned to Home Ruler
and Sinn Feiner. They turned to the south, to the other great
English-speaking Protestant people. If the older branch of the race would
not give them protection or a share in dominance, perhaps the younger
branch could and would. As Lord Durham had suggested, they were resolved
that "Lower Canada must be ENGLISH, at the expense, if necessary, of not
being BRITISH."
But it was not only the political basis of the old colonial system that
was rudely shattered. The economic foundations, too, were passing away,
and with them the profits of the Montreal merchants, who formed the
backbone of the annexation movement. It has been seen that under this
system Great Britain had aimed at setting up a self-contained empire, with
a monopoly of the markets of the colonies. Now for her own sake she was
sweeping away the tariff and shipping monopoly which had been built up
through more than two centuries. The logic of Adam Smith, the experiments
of Huskisson, the demands of manufacturers for cheap food and raw
materials, the passionate campaigns of Cobden and Bright, and the rains
that brought the Irish famine, at last had their effect. In 1846 Peel
himself undertook the repeal of the Corn Laws. To Lower Canada this was a
crushing blow. Until of late the preference given in the British market on
colonial goods in return for the control of colonial trade had been of
little value; but in 1848 the duties on Canadian wheat and flour had been
greatly lowered, resulting in a preference over foreign grain reckoned at
eighteen cents a bushel. While in appearance an extension of the old
system of preference and protection, in reality this was a step toward its
abandonment. For it was understood that American grain, imported into
Canada at a low duty, whether shipped direct or ground into flour, would
be admitted at the same low rates. The Act, by opening a back door to
United States wheat, foreshadowed the triumph of the cheap food agitators
in England. But the merchants, the millers, and the forwarders of Montreal
could not believe this. The canal system was rushed through; large flour
mills were built, and heavy investments of capital were made. Then in 1846
came the announcement that the artificial basis of this brief prosperity
had vanished. Lord Elgin summed up the results in a dispatch in 1849:
"Property in most of the Canadian towns, and more especially in the
capital, has fallen fifty per cent in value within the last three years.
Three-fourths of the commercial men are bankrupt, owing to free trade. A
large proportion of the exportable produce of Canada is obliged to seek a
market in the United States. It pays a duty of twenty per cent on the
frontier. How long can such a state of things endure?"
In October, 1849, the leading men of Montreal issued a manifesto demanding
annexation to the United States. A future Prime Minister of Canada, J. J.
C. Abbott, four future Cabinet Ministers, John Rose, Luther Holton, D. L.
Macpherson, and A. A. Dorion, and the commercial leaders of Montreal, the
Molsons, Redpaths, Torrances, and Workmans, were among the signers.
Besides Dorion, a few French Canadians of the Rouge or extreme Radical
party joined in. The movement found supporters in the Eastern Townships,
notably in A. T. Galt, a financier and railroad builder of distinction,
and here and there in Canada West. Yet the great body of opinion was
unmistakably against it. Baldwin and La Fontaine opposed it with
unswerving energy, the Catholic Church in Canada East denounced it, and
the rank and file of both parties in Canada West gave it short shrift.
Elgin came out actively in opposition and aided in negotiating the
Reciprocity Treaty with the United States which met the economic need.
Montreal found itself isolated, and even there the revival of trade and
the cooling of passions turned men's thoughts into other channels. Soon
the movement was but a memory, chiefly serviceable to political opponents
for taunting some signer of the manifesto whenever he later made parade of
his loyalty. It had a more unfortunate effect, however, in leading public
opinion in the United States to the belief for many years that a strong
annexationist sentiment existed in Canada. Never again did annexation
receive any notable measure of popular support. A national spirit was
slowly gaining ground, and men were eventually to see that the alternative
to looking to London for salvation was not looking to Washington but
looking to themselves.
In the provinces by the sea the struggle for responsible government was
won at much the same time as in Canada. The smaller field within which the
contest was waged gave it a bitter personal touch; but racial hostility
did not enter in, and the British Government proved less obdurate than in
the western conflicts. In both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick little
oligarchies had become entrenched. The Government was unprogressive, and
fees and salaries were high. The Anglican Church had received privileges
galling to other denominations which surpassed it in numbers. The﹃powers
that were﹄found a shrewd defender in Haliburton, who tried to teach his
fellow Bluenoses through the homely wit of "Sam Slick" that they should
leave governing to those who had the training, the capacity, and the
leisure it required. In Prince Edward Island the land question still
overshadowed all others. Every proposal for its settlement was rejected by
the influence of the absentee landlords in England, and the agitation went
wearily on.
In Nova Scotia the outstanding figure in the ranks of reform was Joseph
Howe. The son of a Loyalist settler, Howe early took to his father's work
of journalism. At first his sympathies were with the governing powers, but
a controversy with a brother editor, Jotham Blanchard, a New Hampshire man
who found radical backing among the Scots of Pictou, gave him new light
and he soon threw his whole powers into the struggle on the popular side.
Howe was a man lavishly gifted, one of the most effective orators America
has produced, fearing no man and no task however great, filled with a
vitality, a humor, a broad sympathy for his fellows that gave him the
blind obedience of thousands of followers and the glowing friendship of
countless firesides. There are still old men in Nova Scotia whose proudest
memory is that they once held Howe's horse or ran on an errand for a look
from his kingly eye.
Howe took up the fight in earnest in 1835. The western demand for
responsible government pointed the way, and Howe became, with Baldwin, its
most trenchant advocate. In spite of the determined opposition of the
sturdy old soldier Governor, Sir Colin Campbell, and of his successor,
Lord Falkland, who aped Sydenham and whom Howe threatened to﹃hire a black
man to horse-whip,﹄the reformers won. In 1848 the first responsible
Cabinet in Nova Scotia came to power.
In New Brunswick the transition to responsible government came gradually
and without dramatic incidents or brilliant figures on either side. Lemuel
Wilmot, and later Charles Fisher, led the reform ranks, gradually securing
for the Assembly control of all revenues, abolishing religious
inequalities, and effecting some reform in the Executive Council, until at
last in 1855 the crowning demand was tardily conceded.
From the Great Lakes to the Atlantic the political fight was won, and men
turned with relief to the tasks which strife and faction had hindered.
Self-government meant progressive government. With organized Cabinets
coordinating and controlling their policy the provinces went ahead much
faster than when Governor and Assembly stood at daggers drawn. The forties
and especially the fifties were years of rapid and sound development in
all the provinces, and especially in Canada West. Settlers poured in, the
scattered clearings; widened until one joined the next, and pioneer
hardships gave way to substantial, if crude, prosperity. Education,
notably under the vigorous leadership of Egerton Ryerson in Canada West,
received more adequate attention. Banks grew and with them all commercial
facilities increased.
The distinctive feature of this period of Canadian development, however,
was the growth of canals and railroads. The forties were the time of canal
building and rebuilding all along the lakes and the St. Lawrence to salt
water. Canada spent millions on what were wonderful works for their day,
in the hope that the St. Lawrence would become the channel for the trade
of all the growing western States bordering on the Great Lakes. Scarcely
were these waterway improvements completed when it was realized they had
been made largely in vain. The railway had come and was outrivaling the
canal. If Canadian ports and channels were even to hold their own, they
must take heed of the enterprise of all the cities along the Atlantic
coast of the United States, which were promoting railroads to the interior
in a vigorous rivalry for the trade of the Golden West. Here was a
challenge which must be taken up. The fifties became the first great
railway era of Canada. In 1850 there were only sixty-six miles of railway
in all the provinces; ten years later there were over two thousand. Nearly
all the roads were aided by provincial or municipal bonus or guarantee.
Chief among the lines was the Grand Trunk, which ran from the Detroit
border to Riviere du Loup on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and which, though
it halted at that eastern terminus in the magnificent project of
connecting with the railways of the Maritime Provinces, was nevertheless
at that time the longest road in the world operating under single control.
The railways brought with them a new speculative fever, a more complex
financial structure, a business politics which shaded into open
corruption, and a closer touch with the outside world. The general
substitution of steam for sail on the Atlantic during this period aided
further in lessening the isolation of what had been backwoods provinces
and in bringing them into closer relation with the rest of the world.
It was in closer relations with the United States that this emergence from
isolation chiefly manifested itself. In the generation that followed the
War of 1812 intercourse with the United States was discouraged and was
remarkably insignificant. Official policy and the memories of 1783 and
1812 alike built up a wall along the southern border. The spirit of
Downing Street was shown in the instructions given to Lord Bathurst,
immediately after the close of the war, to leave the territory between
Montreal and Lake Champlain in a state of nature, making no further grants
of land and letting the few roads which had been begun fall into decay
thus a barrier of forest wilderness would ward off republican contagion.
This Chinese policy of putting up a wall of separation proved impossible
to carry through, but in less extreme ways this attitude of aloofness
marked the course of the Government all through the days of oversea
authority.
The friction aroused by repeated boundary disputes prevented friendly
relations between Canada and the United States. With unconscious irony the
framers of the Peace of 1783 had prefaced their long outline of the
boundaries of the United States by expressing their intention﹃that all
disputes which might arise in future on the subject of the boundaries of
the said United States may be prevented.﹄So vague, however, were the
terms of the treaty and so untrustworthy were the maps of the day that
ultimately almost every clause in the boundary section gave rise to
dispute.
As settlement rolled westward one section of the boundary after another
came in question. Beginning in the east, the line between New Brunswick
and New England was to be formed by the St. Croix River. There had been a
St. Croix in Champlain's time and a St. Croix was depicted on the maps,
but no river known by that name existed in 1783. The British identified it
with the Schoodic, the Americans with the Magaguadavic. Arbitration in
1798 upheld the British in the contention that the Schoodic was the St.
Croix but agreed with the Americans in the secondary question as to which
of the two branches of the Schoodic should be followed. A similar
commission in 1817 settled the dispute as to the islands in Passamaquoddy
Bay.
More difficult, because at once more ambiguous in terms and more vitally
important, was the determination of the boundary in the next stage
westward from the St. Croix to the St. Lawrence. The British position was
a difficult one to maintain. In the days of the struggle with France,
Great Britain had tried to push the bounds of the New England colonies as
far north as might be, making claims that would hem in France to the
barest strip along the south shore of the St. Lawrence. Now that she was
heir to the territories and claims of France and had lost her own old
colonies, it was somewhat embarrassing, but for diplomats not impossible,
to have to urge a line as far south as the urgent needs of the provinces
for intercommunication demanded. The letter of the treaty was impossible
to interpret with certainty. The phrase,﹃the Highlands which divide those
rivers that empty themselves into the river St. Lawrence from those which
fall into the Atlantic Ocean,﹄meant according to the American reading a
watershed which was a marshy plateau, and according to the British version
a range of hills to the south which involved some keen hairsplitting as to
the rivers they divided. The intentions of the parties to the original
treaty were probably much as the Americans contended. From the standpoint
of neighborly adjustment and the relative need for the land in question, a
strong case in equity could be made out for the provinces, which would be
cut asunder for all time if a wedge were driven north to the very brink of
the St. Lawrence.
As lumbermen and settlers gathered in the border area, the risk of
conflict became acute, culminating in the Aroostook War in 1838-39, when
the Legislatures of Maine and New Brunswick backed their rival lumberjacks
with reckless jingoism. Diplomacy failed repeatedly to obtain a compromise
line. Arbitration was tried with little better success, as the United
States refused to accept the award of the King of the Netherlands in 1831.
The diplomats tried once more, and in 1842 Daniel Webster, the United
States Secretary of State, and Lord Ashburton, the British Commissioner,
made a compromise by which some five thousand miles of the area in dispute
were assigned to Great Britain and seven thousand to the United States.
The award was not popular on either side, and the public seized eagerly on
stories of concealed "Red Line" maps, stories of Yankee smartness or of
British trickery. Webster, to win the assent of Maine, had exhibited in
the Senate a map found in the French Archives and very damaging to the
American claim. Later it appeared that the British Government also had
found a map equally damaging to its own claims. The nice question of
ethics involved, whether a nation should bring forward evidence that would
tell against itself, ceased to have more than an abstract interest when it
was demonstrated that neither map could be considered as one which the
original negotiators had used or marked.*
* See "The Path, of Empire", by Carl Russell Fish (in "The
Chronicles of America").
The boundary from the St. Lawrence westward through the Great Lakes and
thence to the Lake of the Woods had been laid down in the Treaty of 1783
in the usual vague terms, but it was determined in a series of
negotiations from 1794 to 1842 with less friction and heat than the
eastern line had caused. From the Lake of the Woods to the Rockies a new
line, the forty-ninth parallel, was agreed upon in 1818. Then, as the
Pacific Ocean was neared, the difficulties once more increased. There were
no treaties between the two countries to limit claims beyond the Rockies.
Discovery and settlement, and the rights inherited from or admitted by the
Spaniards to the south and by the Russians to the north, were the grounds
put forward. British and Canadian fur traders had been the pioneers in
overland discovery, but early in the forties thousands of American
settlers poured into the Columbia Valley and strengthened the practical
case for their country. "Fifty-four forty or fight"—in other words,
the calm proposal to claim the whole coast between Mexico and Alaska—became
the popular cry in the United States; but in face of the firm attitude of
Great Britain and impending hostilities with Mexico, more moderate
counsels ruled. Great Britain held out for the Columbia River as the
dividing line, and the United States for the forty-ninth parallel
throughout. Finally, in 1846, the latter contention was accepted, with a
modification to leave Vancouver Island wholly British territory. A
postscript to this settlement was added in 1872, when the German Emperor
as arbitrator approved the American claim to the island of San Juan in the
channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland.*
* See "The Path of Empire".
With the most troublesome boundary questions out of the way, it became
possible to discuss calmly closer trade relations between the Provinces
and the United States. The movement for reciprocal lowering of the tariffs
which hampered trade made rapid headway in the Provinces in the late
forties and early fifties. British North America was passing out of the
pioneer, self-sufficient stage, and now had a surplus to export as well as
townbred needs to be supplied by imports. The spread of settlement and the
building of canals and railways brought closer contact with the people to
the south. The loss of special privileges in the English market made the
United States market more desired. In official circles reciprocity was
sought as a homeopathic cure for the desire for annexation. William
Hamilton Merritt, a Niagara border business man and the most persistent
advocate of closer trade relations, met little difficulty in securing
almost unanimous backing in Canada, while the Maritime Provinces lent
their support.
It was more difficult to win over the United States. There the people
showed the usual indifference of a big and prosperous country to the needs
or opportunities of a small and backward neighbor. The division of power
between President and Congress made it difficult to carry any negotiation
through to success. Yet these obstacles were overcome. The depletion of
the fisheries along the Atlantic coast of the United States made it worth
while, as I.D. Andrews, a United States consul in New Brunswick, urged
persistently, to gain access to the richer grounds to the north and, if
necessary, to offer trade concessions in exchange. At Washington, the
South was in the saddle. Its sympathies were strongly for freer trade, but
this alone would not have counted had not the advocates of reciprocity
convinced the Democratic leaders of the bearing of their policy on the
then absorbing issue of slavery. If reciprocity were not arranged, the
argument ran, annexation would be sure to come and that would mean the
addition to the Union of a group of freesoil States which would definitely
tilt the balance against slavery for all time. With the ground thus
prepared, Lord Elgin succeeded by adroit and capable diplomacy in winning
over the leaders of Congress as well as the Executive to his proposals.
The Reciprocity Treaty was passed by the Senate in August, 1854, and by
the Legislatures of the United Kingdom, Canada, Prince Edward Island, New
Brunswick, and Nova Scotia in the next few months, and of Newfoundland in
1855. This treaty provided for free admission into each country of
practically all the products of the farm, forest, mine, and fishery, threw
open the Atlantic fisheries, and gave American vessels the use of the St.
Lawrence and Canadian vessels the use of Lake Michigan. The agreement was
to last for ten years and indefinitely thereafter, subject to termination
on one year's notice by either party.
To both countries reciprocity brought undoubted good. Trade doubled and
trebled. Each country gained by free access to the nearest sources of
supply. The same goods figured largely in the traffic in both directions,
the United States importing grain and flour from Canada and exporting it
to the Maritime Provinces. In short the benefits which had come to the
United States from free and unfettered trade throughout half a continent
were now extended to practically a whole continent.
Yet criticism of the new economic regime was not lacking. The growth of
protectionist feeling in both countries after 1857 brought about incidents
and created an atmosphere which were dangerous to the continuance of close
trade relations. In 1858 and 1859 the Canadian Government raised
substantially the duties on manufactured goods in order to meet the bills
for its lavish railway policy. This increase hit American manufacturers
and led to loud complaints that the spirit of the Reciprocity Treaty had
been violated. Alexander T. Galt, Canadian Minister of Finance, had no
difficulty in showing that the tariff increases were the only feasible
sources of revenue, that the agreement with the United States did not
cover manufactures, and that the United States itself, faced by war
demands and no longer controlled by free trade Southerners, had raised
duties still higher. The exports of the United States to the Provinces in
the reciprocity period were greater, contrary to the later traditions,
than the imports. On economic grounds the case for the continuance of the
reciprocity agreement was strong, and probably the treaty would have
remained in force indefinitely had not the political passions roused by
the Civil War made sanity and neighborliness in trade difficult to
maintain.
When the Civil War broke out, the sympathies of Canadians were
overwhelmingly on the side of the North. The railway and freer trade had
been bringing the two peoples closer together, and time was healing old
sores. Slavery was held to be the real issue, and on that issue there were
scarcely two opinions in the British Provinces.
Yet in a few months sympathy had given way to angry and suspicious
bickering, and the possibility of invasion of Canada by the Northern
forces was vigorously debated. This sudden shift of opinion and the danger
in which it involved the provinces were both incidents in the quarrel
which sprang up between the United States and Great Britain. In Britain as
in Canada, opinion, so far as it found open expression, was at first not
unfriendly to the North. Then came the anger of the North at Great
Britain's legitimate and necessary, though perhaps precipitate, action in
acknowledging the South as a belligerent. This action ran counter to the
official Northern theory that the revolt of the Southern States was a
local riot, of merely domestic concern, and was held to foreshadow a
recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The angry taunts were
soon returned. The ruling classes in Great Britain made the discovery that
the war was a struggle between chivalrous gentlemen and mercenary
counterhoppers and cherished the hope that the failure of the North would
discredit, the world over, the democracy which was making uncomfortable
claims in England itself. The English trading classes resented the
shortage of cotton and the high duties which the protectionist North was
imposing. With the defeat of the Union forces at Bull Run the prudent
hesitancy of aristocrat and merchant in expressing their views
disappeared. The responsible statesmen of both countries, especially
Lincoln and Lord John Russell, refused to be stampeded, but unfortunately
the leading newspapers served them ill. The "Times", with its constant
sneers and its still more irritating patronizing advice, and the New York
"Herald", bragging and blustering in the frank hope of forcing a war with
Britain and France which would reunite South and North and subordinate the
slavery issue, did more than any other factors to bring the two countries
to the verge of war.
In Canada the tendency in some quarters to reflect English opinion, the
disappointment in others that the abolition of slavery was not explicitly
pledged by the North, and above all resentment against the threats of the
"Herald" and its followers, soon cooled the early friendliness. The
leading Canadian newspaper, for many years a vigorous opponent of slavery,
thus summed up the situation in August, 1861:
"The insolent bravado of the Northern press towards Great Britain and the
insulting tone assumed toward these Provinces have unquestionably produced
a marked change in the feelings of our people. When the war commenced,
there was only one feeling, of hearty sympathy with the North, but now it
is very different. People have lost sight of the character of the struggle
in the exasperation excited by the injustice and abuse showered upon us by
the party with which we sympathized."*
* Toronto "Globe", August 7, 1861.
The Trent affair brought matters to a sobering climax.* When it was
settled, resentment lingered, but the tension was never again so acute.
Both Great Britain and in Canada the normal sympathy with the cause of the
Union revived as the war went on. In England the classes continued to be
pro-Southern in sympathy, but the masses, in spite of cotton famines, held
resolutely to their faith in the cause of freedom. After Lincoln's
emancipation of the slaves, the view of the English middle classes more
and more became the view of the nation. In Canada, pro-Southern sentiment
was strong in the same classes and particularly in Montreal and Toronto,
where there were to be found many Southern refugees, some of whom made a
poor return for hospitality by endeavoring to use Canada as a base for
border raids. Yet in the smaller towns and in the country sympathy was
decidedly on the other side, particularly after the "Herald" had ceased
its campaign of bluster and after Lincoln's proclamation had brought the
moral issue again to the fore. The fact that a large number of Canadians,
popularly set at forty thousand, enlisted in the Northern armies, is to be
explained in part by the call of adventure and the lure of high bounties,
but it must also be taken to reflect the sympathy of the mass of the
people.
* See "Abraham Lincoln and the Union", by Nathaniel W.
Stephenson (in "The Chronicles of America").
In the United States resentment was slower in passing. While the war was
on, prudence forbade any overt act. When it was over, the bill for the
Alabama raids and the taunts of the "Times" came in. Great Britain paid in
the settlement of the Alabama claims.* Canada suffered by the abrogation
of the Reciprocity Treaty at the first possible date, and by the
connivance of the American authorities in the Fenian raids of 1866 and
1870. Yet for Canada the outcome was by no means ill. If the Civil War did
not bring forth a new nation in the South, it helped to make one in the
far North. A common danger drew the scattered British Provinces together
and made ready the way for the coming Dominion of Canada.
*See "The Day of the Confederacy", by Nathaniel W.
Stephenson; and "The Path of Empire" (in "The Chronicles of
America").
It was not from the United States alone that an impetus came for the
closer union of the British Provinces. The same period and the same events
ripened opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of some practical means of
altering a colonial relationship which had ceased to bring profit but
which had not ceased to be a burden of responsibility and risk.
The British Empire had its beginning in the initiative of private business
men, not in any conscious policy of state. Yet as the Empire grew the
teaching of doctrinaires and the example of other colonial powers had
developed a definite policy whereby the plantations overseas were to be
made to serve the needs of the nation at home. The end of empire was
commercial profit; the means, the political subordination of the colonies;
the debit entry, the cost of the military and naval and diplomatic
services borne by the mother country. But the course of events had now
broken down this theory. Britain, for her own good, had abandoned
protection, and with it fell the system of preference and monopoly in
colonial markets. Not only preference had gone but even equality. The
colonies, notably Canada, which was most influenced by the United States,
were perversely using their new found freedom to protect their own
manufacturers against all outsiders, Britain included. When Sheffield
cutlers, hard hit by Canada's tariff, protested to the Colonial Secretary
and he echoed their remonstrance, the Canadian Minister of Finance, A. T.
Galt, stoutly refused to heed.﹃Self-government would be utterly
annihilated,﹄Galt replied in 1860,﹃if the views of the Imperial
Government were to be preferred to those of the people of Canada. It is
therefore the duty of the present government distinctly to affirm the
right of the Canadian legislature to adjust the taxation of the people in
the way they deem best—even if it should unfortunately happen to
meet the disapproval of the Imperial Ministry.﹄Clearly, if trade
advantage were the chief purpose of empire, the Empire had lost its reason
for being.
With the credit entry fading, the debit entry loomed up bigger. Hardly had
the Corn Laws been abolished when Radical critics called on the British
Government to withdraw the redcoat garrisons from the colonies: no profit,
no defense. Slowly but steadily this reduction was effected. To fill the
gaps, the colonies began to strengthen their militia forces. In Canada
only a beginning had been made in the way of defense when the Trent
episode brought matters to a crisis. If war broke out between the United
States and Great Britain, Canada would be the battlefield. Every Canadian
knew it; nothing could be clearer. When the danger of immediate war had
passed, the Parliament of Canada turned to the provision of more adequate
defense. A bill providing for a compulsory levy was defeated in 1862, more
on personal and party grounds than on its own merits, and the Ministry
next in office took the other course of increasing the volunteer force and
of providing for officers' training. Compared with any earlier
arrangements for defense, the new plans marked a great advance; but when
judged in the light of the possible necessity of repelling American
invasion, they were plainly inadequate. A burst of criticism followed from
England; press and politicians joined in denouncing the blind and supine
colonials. Did they not know that invasion by the United States was
inevitable? "If the people of the North fail," declared a noble lord,
﹃they will attack Canada as a compensation for their losses; if they
succeed, they will attack Canada in the drunkenness of victory.﹄If such
an invasion came, Britain had neither the power nor the will, the "Times"
declared, to protect Canada without any aid on her part; not the power,
for "our empire is too vast, our population too small, our antagonist too
powerful"; not the will, for﹃we no longer monopolize the trade of the
colonies; we no longer job their patronage.﹄To these amazing attacks
Canadians replied that they knew the United States better than Englishmen
did. They were prepared to take their share in defense, but they could not
forget that if war came it would not be by any act of Canada. It was soon
noted that those who most loudly denounced Canada for not arming to the
teeth were the Southern sympathizers. "The 'Times' has done more than its
share in creating bad feeling between England and the United States,"
declared a Toronto newspaper, "and would have liked to see the Canadians
take up the quarrel which it has raised.... We have no idea of Canada
being made a victim of the Jefferson Bricks on either side of the
Atlantic."
The question of defense fell into the background when the war ended and
the armies of the Union went back to their farms and shops. But the
discussion left in the minds of most Englishmen the belief that the
possession of such colonies was a doubtful blessing. Manchester men like
Bright, Liberals like Gladstone and Cornewall Lewis, Conservatives like
Lowe and Disraeli, all came to believe that separation was only a question
of time. Yet honor made them hesitate to set the defenseless colonies
adrift to be seized by the first hungry neighbor.
At this juncture the plans for uniting all the colonies in one great
federation seemed to open a way out; united, the colonies could stand
alone. Thus Confederation found support in Britain as well as a stimulus
from the United States. This, however, was not enough. Confederation would
not have come when it did—and that might have meant it would never
have come at all—had not party and sectional deadlock forced
Canadian politicians to seek a remedy in a wider union.
At first all had gone well with the Union of 1841. It did not take the
politicians long to learn how to use the power that responsible government
put into their hands. After Elgin's day the Governor General fell back
into the role of constitutional monarch which cabinet control made easy
for him. In the forties, men had spoken of Sydenham and Bagot, Metcalfe
and Elgin; in the fifties, they spoke of Baldwin and La Fontaine, Hincks
and Macdonald and Cartier and Brown, and less and less of the Governors in
whose name these men ruled. Politics then attracted more of the country's
ablest men than it does now, and the party leaders included many who would
have made their mark in any parliament in the world. Baldwin and La
Fontaine, united to the end, resigned office in 1851, believing that they
had played their part in establishing responsible government and feeling
out of touch with the radical elements of their following who were
demanding further change. Their place was taken in Canada West by Hincks,
an adroit tactician and a skilled financier, intent on railway building
and trade development; and in Canada East by Morin, a somewhat colorless
lieutenant of La Fontaine.
But these leaders in turn soon gave way to new men; and the political
parties gradually fell into a state of flux. In Canada West there were
still a few Tories, survivors of the Family Compact and last-ditch
defenders of privilege in Church and State, a growing number of moderate
Conservatives, a larger group of moderate Liberals, and a small but
aggressive extreme left wing of "Clear Grits," mainly Scotch
Presbyterians, foes of any claim to undue power on the part of class or
clergy. In Canada East the English members from the Townships, under A. T.
Galt, were ceasing to vote as a unit, and the main body of French-Canadian
members were breaking up into a moderate Liberal party, and a smaller
group of Rouges, fiery young men under the leadership of Papineau, now
returned from exile, were crusading against clerical pretensions and all
the established order.
The situation was one made to the hand of a master tactician. The time
brought forth the man. John A. Macdonald, a young Kingston lawyer of Tory
upbringing, or "John A.", as generation after generation affectionately
called him, was to prove the greatest leader of men in Canada's annals.
Shrewd, tactful, and genial, never forgetting a face or a favor, as
popular for his human frailties as for his strength, Macdonald saw that
the old party lines drawn in the days of the struggle for responsible
government were breaking down and that the future lay with a union of the
moderate elements in both parties and both sections. He succeeded in 1854
in bringing together in Canada West a strong Liberal-Conservative group
and in effecting a permanent alliance with the main body of
French-Canadian Liberals, now under the leadership of Cartier, a vigorous
fighter and an easy-going opportunist. With the addition of Galt as the
financial expert, these allies held power throughout the greater part of
the next dozen years. Their position was not unchallenged. The Clear Grits
had found a leader after their own heart in George Brown, a Scotchman of
great ability, a hard hitter and a good hater—especially of slavery,
the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and "John A." Through his newspaper, the
Toronto "Globe", he wielded a power unique in Canadian journalism. The
Rouges, now led by A. A. Dorion, a man of stainless honor and essentially
moderate temper, withdrew from. their extreme anticlerical position but
could not live down their youth or make head against the forces of
conservatism in their province. They did not command many votes in the
House, but every man of them was an orator, and they remained through all
vicissitudes a power to reckon with.
Step by step, under Liberal and under Liberal Conservative Governments,
the programme of Canadian Liberalism was carried into effect.
Self-government, at least in domestic affairs, had been attained. An
effective system of municipal government and a good beginning in popular
education followed. The last link between Church and State was severed in
1854 when the Clergy Reserves were turned over to the municipalities for
secular purposes, with life annuities for clergymen who had been receiving
stipends from the Reserves. In Lower Canada the remnants of the old feudal
system, the rights of the seigneurs, were abolished in the same year with
full compensation from the state. An elective upper Chamber took the place
of the appointed Legislative Council a year later. The Reformers, as the
Clear Grits preferred to call themselves officially, should perhaps have
been content with so much progress. They insisted, however, that a new and
more intolerable privilege had arisen—the privilege which Canada
East held of equal representation in the Legislative Assembly long after
its population had fallen behind that of Canada West.
The political union of the two Canadas in fact had never been complete.
Throughout the Union period there were two leaders in each Cabinet, two
Attorney Generals, and two distinct judicial systems. Every session laws
were passed applying to one section alone. This continued separation had
its beginning in a clause of the Union Act itself, which provided that
each section should have equal representation in the Assembly, even though
Lower Canada then had a much larger population than Upper Canada. When the
tide of overseas immigration put Canada West well in the lead, it in its
turn was denied the full representation its greater population warranted.
First the Conservatives, and later the Clear Grits, took up the cry of
"Representation by Population." It was not difficult to convince the
average Canada West elector that it was an outrage that three
French-Canadian voters should count as much as four English-speaking
voters. Macdonald, relying for power on his alliance with Cartier, could
not accept the demand, and saw seat after seat in Canada West fall to
Brown and his "Rep. by Pop." crusaders. Brown's success only solidified
Canada East against him, until, in the early sixties, party lines
coincided almost with sectional lines. Parties were so closely matched
that the life of a Ministry was short. In the three years ending in 1864
there were two general elections and four Ministries. Political
controversy became bitterly personal, and corruption was spreading fast.
Constant efforts were made to avert the threatened deadlock. Macdonald,
who always trusted more to personal management than to constitutional
expedients, won over one after another of the opponents who troubled him,
and thus postponed the day of reckoning. Rival plans of constitutional
reform were brought forward. The simplest remedy was the repeal of the
union, leaving each province to go its own way. But this solution was felt
to be a backward step and one which would create more problems than it
would solve. More support was given the double majority principle, a
provision that no measure affecting one section should be passed unless a
majority from that section favored it, but this method broke down when put
to a practical test. The Rouges, and later Brown, put forward a plan for
the abolition of legislative union in favor of a federal union of the two
Canadas. This lacked the wide vision of the fourth suggestion, which was
destined to be adopted as the solution, namely, the federation of all
British North America.
Federal union, it was urged, would solve party and sectional deadlock by
removing to local legislatures the questions which created the greatest
divergence of opinion. The federal union of the Canadas alone or the
federal union of all British North America would either achieve this end.
But there were other ends in view which only the wider plan could serve.
The needs of defense demanded a single control for all the colonies. The
probable loss of the open market of the United States made it imperative
to unite all the provinces in a single free trade area. The first faint
stirrings of national ambition, prompting the younger men to throw off the
leading strings of colonial dependence, were stimulated by the vision of a
country which would stretch from sea to sea. The westward growth of the
United States and the reports of travelers were opening men's eyes to the
possibilities of the vast lands under the control of the Hudson's Bay
Company and the need of asserting authority over these northern regions if
they were to be held for the Crown. Eastward, also, men were awaking to
their isolation. There was not, in the Maritime Provinces, any popular
desire for union with the Canadas or any political crisis compelling
drastic remedy, but the need of union for defense was felt in some
quarters, and ambitious politicians who had mastered their local fields
were beginning to sigh for larger worlds to conquer.
It took the patient and courageous striving of many men to make this
vision of a united country a reality. The roll of the Fathers of
Confederation is a long and honored one. Yet on that roll there are some
outstanding names, the names of men whose services were not merely devoted
but indispensable. The first to bring the question within the field of
practical politics was A. T. Galt, but when attempt after attempt in 1864
to organize a Ministry with a safe working majority had failed, it was
George Brown who proposed that the party leaders should join hands in
devising some form of federation. Macdonald had hitherto been a stout
opponent of all change but, once converted, he threw himself into the
struggle, with energy. He never appeared to better advantage than in the
negotiations of the next few years, steering the ship of Confederation
through the perilous shoals of personal and sectional jealousies. Few had
a harder or a more important task than Cartier's-reconciling Canada East
to a project under which it would be swamped, in the proposed federal
House, by the representatives of four or five English-speaking provinces.
McDougall, a Canada West Reformer, shared with Brown the credit for
awakening Canadians to the value of the Far West and to the need of
including it in their plans of expansion. D'Arcy McGee, more than any
other, fired the imagination of the people with glowing pictures of the
greatness and the limitless possibilities of the new nation. Charles
Tupper, the head of a Nova Scotia Conservative Ministry which had
overthrown the old tribune, Joseph Howe, had the hardest and seemingly
most hopeless task of all; for his province appeared to be content with
its separate existence and was inflamed against union by Howe's eloquent
opposition; but to Tupper a hard fight was as the breath of his nostrils.
In New Brunswick, Leonard Tilley, a man of less vigor but equal
determination, led the struggle until Confederation was achieved.
It was in June, 1864, that the leaders of the Parliament of Canada became
convinced that federation was the only way out. A coalition Cabinet was
formed, with Sir Etienne Tache as nominal Premier, and with Macdonald,
Brown, Cartier, and Galt all included. An opening for discussing the wider
federation was offered by a meeting which was to be held in Charlottetown,
Prince Edward Island, of delegates from the three Maritime Provinces to
consider the formation of a local union. There, in September, 1864, went
eight of the Canadian Ministers. Their proposals met with favor. A series
of banquets brought the plans before the public, seemingly with good
results. The conference was resumed a month later at Quebec. Here, in
sixteen working days, delegates from Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick,
Prince Edward Island, and also from Newfoundland, thirty-three in all,
after frank and full deliberation behind closed doors, agreed upon the
terms of union. Macdonald's insistence upon a legislative union, wiping
out all provincial boundaries, was overridden; but the lesson of the
conflict between the federal and state jurisdiction in the United States
was seen in provisions to strengthen the central authority. The general
government was empowered to appoint the lieutenant governors of the
various provinces and to veto any provincial law; to it were assigned all
legislative powers not specifically granted to the provinces; and a
subsidy granted by the general government in lieu of the customs revenues
resigned by the provinces still further increased their dependence upon
the central authority.
It had taken less than three weeks to draw up the plan of union. It took
nearly three years to secure its adoption. So far as Canada was concerned,
little trouble was encountered. British traditions of parliamentary
supremacy prevented any direct submission of the question to the people;
but their support was clearly manifested in the press and on the platform,
and the legislature ratified the project with emphatic majorities from
both sections of the province. Though it did not pass without opposition,
particularly from the Rouges under Dorion and from steadfast supporters of
old ways like Christopher Dunkin and Sandfield Macdonald, the fight was
only halfhearted. Not so, however, in the provinces by the sea. The
delegates who returned from the Quebec Conference were astounded to meet a
storm of criticism. Local pride and local prejudice were aroused. The
thrifty maritime population feared Canadian extravagance and Canadian high
tariffs. They were content to remain as they were and fearful of the
unknown. Here and there advocates of annexation to the United States
swelled the chorus. Merchants in Halifax and St. John feared that trade
would be drawn away to Montreal. Above all, Howe, whether because of
personal pique or of intense local patriotism, had put himself at the head
of the agitation against union, and his eloquence could still play upon
the prejudices of the people. The Tilley Government in New Brunswick was
swept out of power early in 1865. Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland
both drew back, the one for eight years, the other to remain outside the
fold to the present day. In Nova Scotia a similar fate was averted only by
Tupper's Fabian tactics. Then the tide turned. In New Brunswick the Fenian
Raids, pressure from the Colonial Office, and the blunders of the
anti-Confederate Government brought Tilley back to power on a
Confederation platform a year later. Tupper seized the occasion and
carried his motion through the Nova Scotia House. Without seeking further
warrant the delegates from Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick met in
London late in 1866, and there in consultation with the Colonial Office
drew up the final resolutions. They were embodied in the British North
America Act which went through the Imperial Parliament not only without
raising questions but even without exciting interest. On July 1, 1867, the
Dominion of Canada, as the new federation was to be known, came into
being. It is a curious coincidence that the same date witnessed the
establishment of the North German Bund, which in less than three years was
to expand into the German Empire.
* See "The Path of Empire".
Macdonald was offered and accepted with misgivings a post as one of the
five British Commissioners. He pressed the traditional Canadian policy of
offering fishery for trade privileges but found no backing in this or
other matters from his British colleagues, and he met only unyielding
opposition from the American Commissioners. He fell back, under protest,
on a settlement of narrower scope, which permitted reciprocity in
navigation and bonding privileges, free admission of Canadian and
Newfoundland fish to United States markets and of American fishermen to
Canadian and Newfoundland waters, and which provided for a subsidiary
commission to fix the amount to be paid by the United States for the
surplus advantage thus received. The Fenian Raids claims were not even
considered, and Macdonald was angered by this indifference on the part of
his British colleagues. "They seem to have only one thing in their minds,"
he reported privately to Ottawa,﹃that is, to go home to England with a
treaty in their pocket, settling everything, no matter at what cost to
Canada.﹄Yet when the time came for the Canadian Parliament to decide
whether to ratify the fishery clauses of the Treaty of Washington in which
the conclusions of the commission were embodied, Macdonald, in spite of
the unpopularity of the bargain in Canada,﹃urged Parliament to accept the
treaty, accept it with all its imperfections, to accept it for the sake of
peace and for the sake of the great Empire of which we form a part.﹄The
treaty was ratified in 1871 by all the powers concerned; and the stimulus
to the peaceful settlement of international disputes given by the Geneva
Tribunal which followed* justified the subordination of Canada's specific
interests.
* See "The Path of Empire"
A change in party now followed in Canada, but the new Government under
Alexander Mackenzie was as fully committed as the Government of Sir John
Macdonald to the policy of bartering fishery for trade advantage. Canada
therefore proposed that instead of carrying out the provisions for a money
settlement, the whole question should be reopened. The Administration at
Washington was sympathetic. George Brown was appointed along with the
British Ambassador, Sir Edward Thornton, to open negotiations. Under
Brown's energetic leadership a settlement of all outstanding issues was
drafted in 1874, which permitted freedom of trade in natural and in most
manufactured products for twenty-one years, and settled fishery, coasting
trade, navigation, and minor boundary issues. But diplomats proposed, and
the United States Senate disposed. Protectionist feeling was strong at
Washington, and the currency problem absorbing, and hence this broad and
statesmanlike essay in neighborliness could not secure an hour's
attention. This plan having failed, the Canadian Government fell back on
the letter of the treaty. A Commission which consisted of the Honorable E.
H. Kellogg representing the United States, Sir Alexander T. Galt
representing Canada, and the Belgian Minister to Washington, M. Delfosse,
as chairman, awarded Canada and Newfoundland $5,500,000 as the excess
value of the fisheries for the ten years the arrangement was to run. The
award was denounced in the United States as absurdly excessive; but a
sense of honor and the knowledge that millions of dollars from the Alabama
award were still in the Treasury moved the Senate finally to acquiesce,
though only for the ten-year term fixed by treaty. In Canada the award was
received with delight as a signal proof that when left to themselves
Canadians could hold their own. The prevailing view was well summed up in
a letter from Mackenzie to the Canadian representative on the Halifax
commission, written shortly before the decision: "I am glad you still have
hopes of a fair verdict. I am doubly anxious to have it, first, because we
are entitled to it and need the dollars, and, second, because it will be
the first Canadian diplomatic triumph, and will justify me in insisting
that we know our neighbors and our own business better than any
Englishmen."
Mackenzie's insistence that Canada must take a larger share in the control
of her foreign affairs was too advanced a stand for many of his more
conservative countrymen. For others, he did not go far enough. The early
seventies saw the rise of a short-lived movement in favor of Canadian
independence. To many independence from England seemed the logical sequel
to Confederation; and the rapid expansion of Canadian territory over half
a continent stimulated national pride and national self-consciousness
Opinion in England regarding Canadian independence was still more
outspoken. There imperialism was at its lowest ebb. With scarcely an
exception, English politicians, from Bright to Disraeli, were hostile or
indifferent to connection with the colonies, which had now ceased to be a
trade asset and had clearly become a military liability.
But no concrete problem arose to make the matter a political issue. In
England a growing uneasiness over the protectionist policies and the
colonial ambitions of her European rivals were soon to revive imperial
sentiment. In Canada the ties of affection for the old land, as well as
the inertia fostered by long years of colonial dependence, kept the
independence movement from spreading far. For the time the rising national
spirit found expression in economic rather than political channels. The
protectionist movement which a few years later swept all Canada before it
owed much of its strength to its claim to be the national policy.
But it was not imperial or foreign relations that dominated public
interest in the seventies. Domestic politics were intensely absorbing and
bitterly contested. Within five years there came about two sudden and
sweeping reversals of power. Parties and Cabinets which had seemed firmly
entrenched were dramatically overthrown by sudden changes in the personal
factors and in the issues of the day. In the summer of 1872 the second
general election for the Dominion was held. The Opposition had now gained
in strength. The Government had ceased to be in any real sense a
coalition, and most of the old Liberal rank and file were back in the
party camp. They had found a vigorous leader in Alexander Mackenzie.
Mackenzie had come to Canada from Scotland in 1842 as a lad of twenty. He
worked at his trade as a stonemason, educated himself by wide reading and
constant debating, became a successful contractor and, after
Confederation, had proved himself one of the most aggressive and
uncompromising champions of Upper Canada Liberalism. In the first Dominion
Parliament he tacitly came to be regarded as the leader of all the groups
opposed to the Macdonald Administration. He was at the same time active in
the Ontario Legislature since, for the first five years of Confederation,
no law forbade membership in both federal and provincial Parliaments, and
the short sessions of that blessed time made such double service feasible.
Here he was aided by two other men of outstanding ability, Edward Blake
and Oliver Mowat. Blake, the son of a well-to-do Irishman who had been
active in the fight for responsible government, became Premier of Ontario
in 1871 but retired in 1872 when a law abolishing dual representation made
it necessary for him to choose between Toronto and Ottawa. His place was
taken by Mowat, who for a quarter of a century gave the province thrifty,
honest, and conservatively progressive government.
In spite of the growing forces opposed to him Macdonald triumphed once
more in the election of 1872. Ontario fell away, but Quebec and the
Maritime Provinces stood true. A Conservative majority of thirty or forty
seemed to assure Macdonald another five-year lease of power. Yet within a
year the Pacific Scandal had driven him from office and overwhelmed him in
disgrace.
The Pacific Scandal occurred in connection with the financing of the
railway which the Dominion Government had promised British Columbia, when
that province entered Confederation in 1871, would be built through to the
Pacific coast within ten years. The bargain was good politics but poor
business. It was a rash undertaking for a people of three and a half
millions, with a national revenue of less than twenty million dollars, to
pledge itself to build a railway through the rocky wilderness north of
Lake Superior, through the trackless plains and prairies of the middle
west, and across the mountain ranges that barred the coast. Yet Macdonald
had sufficient faith in the country, in himself, and in the happy
accidents of time—a confidence that won him the nickname of "Old
Tomorrow"—to give the pledge. Then came the question of ways and
means. At first the Government planned to build the road. On second
thoughts, however, it decided to follow the example set by the United
States in the construction of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, and
to entrust the work to a private company liberally subsidized with land
and cash. Two companies were organized with a view to securing the
contract, one a Montreal company under Sir Hugh Allan, the foremost
Canadian man of business and the head of the Allan steamship fleet, and
the other a Toronto company under D. L. Macpherson, who had been concerned
in the building of the Grand Trunk. Their rivalry was intense. After the
election of 1872 a strong compromise company was formed, with Allan at the
head, and to this company the contract was awarded.
When Parliament met in 1872, a Liberal member, L. S. Huntington, made the
charge that Allan had really been acting on behalf of certain American
capitalists and that he had made lavish contributions to the Government
campaign fund in the recent election. In the course of the summer these
charges were fully substantiated. Allan was proved by his own
correspondence, stolen from his solicitor's office, to have spent over
$350,000, largely advanced by his American allies, in buying the favor of
newspapers and politicians. Nearly half of this amount had been
contributed to the Conservative campaign fund, with the knowledge and at
the instance of Cartier and Macdonald. Macdonald, while unable to disprove
the charges, urged that there was no connection between the contributions
and the granting of the charter. But his defense was not heeded. A wave of
indignation swept the country; his own supporters in Parliament fell away;
and in November, 1873, he resigned. Mackenzie, who was summoned to form a
new Ministry, dissolved Parliament and was sustained by a majority of two
to one.
Mackenzie gave the country honest and efficient administration. Among his
most important achievements were the reform of elections by the
introduction of the secret ballot and the requirement that elections
should be held on a single day instead of being spread over weeks, a
measure of local option in controlling the liquor traffic, and the
establishment of a Canadian Supreme Court and the Royal Military College—the
Canadian West Point. But fate and his own limitations were against him. He
was too absorbed in the details of administration to have time for the
work of a party leader. In his policy of constructing the Canadian Pacific
as a government road, after Allan had resigned his charter, he manifested
a caution and a slowness that brought British Columbia to the verge of
secession. But it was chiefly the world-wide depression that began in his
first year of office, 1873, which proved his undoing. Trade was stagnant,
bankruptcies multiplied, and acute suffering occurred among the poor in
the larger cities. Mackenzie had no solution to offer except patience and
economy; and the Opposition were freer to frame an enticing policy. The
country was turning toward a high tariff as the solution of its ills.
Protection had not hitherto been a party issue in Canada, and it was still
uncertain which party would take it up. Finally Mackenzie, who was an
ardent free trader, and the Nova Scotia wing of his party triumphed over
the protectionists in their own ranks and made a low tariff the party
platform. Macdonald, who had been prepared to take up free trade if
Mackenzie adopted protection, now boldly urged the high tariff panacea.
The promise of work and wages for all, the appeal to national spirit made
by the arguments of self-sufficiency and fully rounded development, the
desire to retaliate against the United States, which was still deaf to any
plea for more liberal trade relations, swept the country. The Conservative
minority of over sixty was converted into a still greater majority in the
general election of 1878, and the leader whom all men five years before
had considered doomed, returned to power, never to lose it while life
lasted.
The first task of the new Government, in which Tupper was Macdonald's
chief supporter, was to carry out its high tariff pledges.﹃Tell us how
much protection you want, gentlemen,﹄said Macdonald to a group of Ontario
manufacturers, "and we'll give you what you need." In the new tariff needs
were rated almost as high as wants. Particularly on textiles, sugar, and
iron and steel products, duties were raised far beyond the old levels and
stimulated investment just as the world-wide depression which had lasted
since 1873 passed away. Canada shared in the recovery and gave the credit
to the well-advertised political patent medicine taken just before the
turn for the better came. For years the National Policy or "N.P.," as its
supporters termed it, had all the vogue of a popular tonic.
The next task of the Government was to carry through in earnest the
building of the railway to the Pacific. For over a year Macdonald
persisted in Mackenzie's policy of government construction but with the
same slow and unsatisfactory results. Then an opportunity came to enlist
the services of a private syndicate. Four Canadians, Donald A. Smith, a
former Hudson's Bay Company factor, George Stephen, a leading merchant and
banker of Montreal, James J. Hill and Norman W. Kittson, owners of a small
line of boats on the Red River, had joined forces to revive a bankrupt
Minnesota railway.* They had succeeded beyond all parallel, and the
reconstructed road, which later developed into the Great Northern, made
them all rich overnight. This success whetted their appetite for further
western railway building and further millions of rich western acres in
subsidies. They met Macdonald and Tupper half way. By the bargain
completed in 1881 the Canadian Pacific Railway Company undertook to build
and operate the road from the Ottawa Valley to the Pacific coast, in
return for the gift of the completed portions of the road (on which the
Government spent over $37,000,000), a subsidy of $25,000,000 in cash,
25,000,000 selected acres of prairie land, exemption from taxes, exemption
from regulation of rates until ten per cent was earned, and a promise on
the part of the Dominion to charter no western lines connecting with the
United States for twenty years. The terms were lavish and were fiercely
denounced by the Opposition, now under the leadership of Edward Blake. But
the people were too eager for railway expansion to criticize the terms.
The Government was returned to power in 1882 and the contract held.
* See "The Railroad Builders", by John Moody (in "The
Chronicles of America").
The new company was rich in potential resources but weak in available
cash. Neither in New York nor in London could purse strings be loosened
for the purpose of building a road through what the world considered a
barren and Arctic wilderness. But in the faith and vision of the
president, George Stephen, and the ruthless energy of the general manager,
William Van Horne, American born and trained, the Canadian Pacific had
priceless assets. Aided in critical times by further government loans,
they carried the project through, and by 1886, five years before the time
fixed by their contract, trains were running from Montreal to Port Moody,
opposite Vancouver.
A sudden burst of prosperity followed the building of the road. Settlers
poured into the West by tens of thousands, eastern investors promoted
colonization companies, land values soared, and speculation gave a fillip
to every line of trade. The middle eighties were years of achievement, of
prosperity, and of confident hope. Then prosperity fled as quickly as it
had come. The West failed to hold its settlers. Farm and factory found
neither markets nor profits. The country was bled white by emigration.
Parliamentary contest and racial feud threatened the hard-won unity.
Canada was passing through its darkest hours.
During this period, political friction was incessant. Canada was striving
to solve in the eighties the difficult question which besets all
federations—the limits between federal and provincial power. Ontario
was the chief champion of provincial rights. The struggle was intensified
by the fact that a Liberal Government reigned at Toronto and a
Conservative Government at Ottawa, as well as by the keen personal rivalry
between Mowat and Macdonald. In nearly every constitutional duel Mowat
triumphed. The accepted range of the legislative power of the provinces
was widened by the decisions of the courts, particularly of the highest
court of appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England.
The successful resistance of Ontario and Manitoba to Macdonald's attempt
to disallow provincial laws proved this power, though conferred by the
Constitution, to be an unwieldy weapon. By the middle nineties the veto
had been virtually abandoned.
More serious than these political differences was the racial feud that
followed the second Riel Rebellion. For a second time the Canadian
Government failed to show the foresight and the sympathy required in
dealing with an isolated and backward people. The valley of the
Saskatchewan, far northwest of the Red River, was the scene of the new
difficulty. Here thousands of metis, or French half-breeds, had settled.
The passing of the buffalo, which had been their chief subsistence, and
the arrival of settlers from the East caused them intense alarm. They
pressed the Government for certain grants of land and for the retention of
the old French custom of surveying the land along the river front in deep
narrow strips, rather than according to the chessboard pattern taken over
by Canada from the United States. Red tape, indifference, procrastination,
rather than any illwill, delayed the redress of the grievances of the
half-breeds. In despair they called Louis Riel back from his exile in
Montana. With his arrival the agitation acquired a new and dangerous
force. Claiming to be the prophet of a new religion, he put himself at the
head of his people and, in the spring of 1885, raised the flag of revolt.
His military adviser, Gabriel Dumont, an old buffalo hunter, was a
natural-born general, and the half-breeds were good shots and brave
fighters. An expedition of Canadian volunteers was rushed west, and the
rebellion was put down quickly, but not without some hard fighting and
gallant strokes and counterstrokes.
The racial passions roused by this conflict, however, did not pass so
quickly. The fate to be meted out to Riel was the burning question.
Ontario saw in him the murderer of Scott and an ambitious plotter who had
twice stirred up armed rebellion. Quebec saw in him a man of French blood,
persecuted because he had stood up manfully for the undoubted rights of
his kinsmen. Today experts agree that Riel was insane and should have been
spared the gallows on this if on no other account. But at the moment the
plea of insanity was rejected. The Government made up for its laxity
before the rebellion by severity after it; and in November, 1885, Riel was
sent to the scaffold. Bitterness rankled in many a French-Canadian heart
for long years after; and in Ontario, where the Orange order was strongly
entrenched, a faction threatened﹃to smash Confederation into its original
fragments﹄rather than submit to "French domination."
Racial and religious passions, once aroused, soon found new fuel to feed
upon. Honore Mercier, a brilliant but unscrupulous leader who had ridden
to power in the province of Quebec on the Riel issue, roused Protestant
ire by restoring estates which had been confiscated at the conquest in
1763 to the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic authorities, in proportions
which the act provided were to be determined by﹃Our Holy Father the
Pope.﹄In Ontario restrictions began to be imposed on the freedom of
French-Canadian communities on the border to make French the sole or
dominant tongue in the schoolroom. A little later the controversy was
echoed in Manitoba in the repeal by a determined Protestant majority of
the denominational school privileges hitherto enjoyed by the Roman
Catholic minority.
Economic discontent was widespread. It was a time of low and falling
prices. Farmers found the American market barred, the British market
flooded, the home market stagnant. The factories stimulated by the "N. P."
lacked the growing market they had hoped for. In the West climatic
conditions not yet understood, the monopoly of the Canadian Pacific, and
the competition of the States to the south, which still had millions of
acres of free land, brought settlement to a standstill. From all parts of
Canada the "exodus" to the United States continued until by 1890 there
were in that country more than one-third as many people of Canadian birth
or descent as in Canada itself.
It was not surprising that in these extremities men were prepared to make
trial of drastic remedies. Nor was it surprising that it was beyond the
borders of Canada itself that they sought the unity and the prosperity
they had not found at home. Many looked to Washington, some for
unrestricted trade, a few for political union. Others looked to London,
hoping for a revival of the old imperial tariff preferences or for some
closer political union which would bring commercial advantages in its
train.
The decade from 1885 to 1895 stands out in the record of the relations of
the English-speaking peoples as a time of constant friction, of petty pin
pricks, of bluster and retaliation. The United States was not in a
neighborly mood. The memories of 1776, of 1812, and of 1861 had been kept
green by exuberant comment in school textbooks and by "spread-eagle"
oratory. The absence of any other rivalry concentrated American opposition
on Great Britain, and isolation from Old World interests encouraged a
provincial lack of responsibility. The sins of England in Ireland had been
kept to the fore by the agitation of Parnell and Davitt and Dillon; and
the failure of Home Rule measures, twice in this decade, stirred
Irish-American antagonism. The accession to power of Lord Salisbury,
reputed to hold the United States in contempt, and later the foolish
indiscretion of Sir Lionel Sackville-West, British Ambassador at
Washington, in intervening in a guileless way in the presidential election
of 1888, did as much to nourish ill-will in the United States as the
dominance of Blaine and other politicians who cultivated the gentle art of
twisting the tail of the British lion.
Protection, with the attitude of economic warfare which it involved and
bred, was then at its height. Much of this hostility was directed against
Canada, as the nearest British territory. The Dominion, on its part, while
persistently seeking closer trade relations, sometimes sought this end in
unwise ways. Many good people in Canada were still fighting the War of
1812. The desire to use the inshore fishery privileges as a lever to force
tariff reductions led to a rigid and literal enforcement of Canadian
rights and claims which provoked widespread anger in New England. The
policy of discrimination in canal tolls in favor of Canadian as against
United States ports was none the less irritating because it was a retort
in kind. And when United States customs officials levied a tax on the tin
cans containing fish free by treaty, Canadian officials had retaliated by
taxing the baskets containing duty-free peaches.
The most important specific issue was once more the northeastern
fisheries. As a result of notice given by the United States the fisheries
clauses of the Treaty of Washington ceased to operate on July 1, 1885.
Canada, for the sake of peace, admitted American fishing vessels for the
rest of that season, though Canadian fish at once became dutiable. No
further grace was given. The Canadian authorities rigidly enforced the
rules barring inshore fishing, and in addition denied port privileges to
deep-sea fishing vessels and forbade American boats to enter Canadian
ports for the purpose of trans-shipping crews, purchasing bait, or
shipping fish in bond to the United States. Every time a Canadian fishery
cruiser and a Gloucester skipper had a difference of opinion as to the
exact whereabouts of the three-mile limit, the press of both countries
echoed the conflict. Congress in 1887 empowered the President to retaliate
by excluding Canadian vessels and goods from American ports. Happily this
power was not used. Cleveland and Secretary of State Bayard were genuinely
anxious to have the issue settled. A joint commission drew up a
well-considered plan, but in the face of a presidential election the
Senate gave it short shrift. Fortunately, however, a modus vivendi was
arranged by which American vessels were admitted to port privileges on
payment of a license. Healing time, a healthful lack of publicity,
changing fishing methods, and Canada's abandonment of her old policy of
using fishing privileges as a makeweight, gradually eased the friction.
Yet if it was not the fishing question, there was sure to be some other
issue—bonding privileges, Canadian Pacific interloping in western
rail hauls, tariff rates, or canal tolls-to disturb the peace. Why not
seek a remedy once for all, men now began to ask, by ending the unnatural
separation between the halves of the continent which God and geography had
joined and history and perverse politicians had kept asunder?
The political union of Canada and the United States has always found
advocates. In the United States a large proportion, perhaps a majority, of
the people have until recently considered that the absorption of Canada
into the Republic was its manifest destiny, though there has been little
concerted effort to hasten fate. In Canada such course of action has found
much less backing. United Empire Loyalist traditions, the ties with
Britain constantly renewed by immigration, the dim stirrings of national
sentiment, resentment against the trade policy of the United States, have
all helped to turn popular sentiment into other channels. Only at two
periods, in 1849, and forty years later, has there been any active
movement for annexation.
In the late eighties, as in the late forties, commercial depression and
racial strife prepared the soil for the seed of annexation. The chief
sower in the later period was a brilliant Oxford don, Goldwin Smith, whose
sympathy with the cause of the North had brought him to the United States.
In 1871, after a brief residence at Cornell, he made his home in Toronto,
with high hopes of stimulating the intellectual life and molding the
political future of the colony. He so far forsook the strait﹃Manchester
School﹄of his upbringing as to support Macdonald's campaign for
protection in 1878. But that was the limit of his adaptability. To the end
he remained out of touch with Canadian feeling. His campaign for
annexation, or for the reunion of the English-speaking peoples on this
continent, as he preferred to call it, was able and persistent but moved
only a narrow circle of readers. It was in vain that he offered the
example of Scotland's prosperity after her union with her southern
neighbor, or insisted that Canada was cut into four distinct and unrelated
sections each of which could find its natural complement only in the
territory to the south. Here and there an editor or a minor politician
lent some support to his views, but the great mass of the people strongly
condemned the movement. There was to be no going back to the parting of
the ways: the continent north of Mexico was henceforth to witness two
experiments in democracy, not one unwieldy venture.
Commercial union was a half-way measure which found more favor. A North
American customs union had been supported by such public men as Stephen A.
Douglas, Horace Greeley, and William H. Seward, by official investigators
such as Taylor, Derby, and Larned, and by committees of the House of
Representatives in 1862, 1876, 1880, and 1884. In Canada it had been
endorsed before Confederation by Isaac Buchanan, the father of the
protection movement, and by Luther Holton and John Young. Now for the
first time it became a practical question. Erastus Wiman, a Canadian who
had found fortune in the United States, began in 1887 a vigorous campaign
in its favor both in Congress and among the Canadian public. Goldwin Smith
lent his dubious aid, leading Toronto and Montreal newspapers joined the
movement, and Ontario farmers' organizations swung to its support. But the
agitation proved abortive owing to the triumph of high protection in the
presidential election of 1888; and in Canada the red herring of the
Jesuits' Estates controversy was drawn across the trail.
Yet the question would not down. The political parties were compelled to
define their attitude. The Liberals had been defeated once more in the
election of 1887, where the continuance of the National Policy and of aid
to the Canadian Pacific had been the issue. Their leader, Edward Blake,
had retired disheartened. His place had been taken by a young Quebec
lieutenant, Wilfrid Laurier, who had won fame by his courageous resistance
to clerical aggression in his own province and by his indictment of the
Macdonald Government in the Riel issue. A veteran Ontario Liberal, Sir
Richard Cartwright, urged the adoption of commercial union as the party
policy. Laurier would not go so far, and the policy of unrestricted
reciprocity was made the official programme in 1888. Commercial union had
involved not only absolute free trade between Canada and the United States
but common excise rates, a common tariff against the rest of the world,
and the division of customs and excise revenues in some agreed proportion.
Unrestricted reciprocity would mean free trade between the two countries,
but with each left free to levy what rates it pleased on the products of
other countries.
When in 1891 the time came round once more for a general election, it was
apparent that reciprocity in some form would be the dominant issue. Though
the Republicans were in power in the United States and though they had
more than fulfilled their high tariff pledges in the McKinley Act, which
hit Canadian farm products particularly hard, there was some chance of
terms being made. Reciprocity, as a form of tariff bargaining, really fits
in better with protection than with free trade, and Blaine, Harrison's
Secretary of State, was committed to a policy of trade treaties and trade
bargaining. In Canada the demand for the United States market had grown
with increasing depression. The Liberals, with their policy of
unrestricted reciprocity, seemed destined to reap the advantage of this
rising tide of feeling. Then suddenly, on the eve of the election, Sir
John Macdonald sought to cut the ground from under the feet of his
opponents by the announcement that in the course of a discussion of
Newfoundland matters the United States had taken the initiative in
suggesting to Canada a settlement of all outstanding difficulties,
fisheries, coasting trade, and, on the basis of a renewal and extension of
the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854. This policy promised to meet all
legitimate economic needs of the country and at the same time avoid the
political dangers of the more sweeping policy. Its force was somewhat
weakened by the denials of Secretary Blaine that he had taken the
initiative or made any definite promises. As the election drew near and
revelations of the annexationist aims of some supporters of the wider
trade policy were made, the Government made the loyalty cry its strong
card. "The old man, the old flag, and the old policy," saved the day. In
Ontario and Quebec the two parties were evenly divided, but the West and
the Maritime Provinces, the "shreds and patches of Confederation," as Sir
Richard Cartwright, too ironic and vitriolic in his speech for political
success, termed them, gave the Government a working majority, which was
increased in by-elections.
Again in power, the Government made a formal attempt to carry out its
pledges. Two pilgrimages were made to Washington, but the negotiators were
too far apart to come to terms. With the triumph of the Democrats in 1899.
and the lowering of the tariff on farm products which followed, there came
a temporary improvement in trade relations. But the tariff reaction and
the silver issue brought back the Republicans and led to that climax in
agricultural protection, the Dingley Act of 1897, which killed among
Canadians all reciprocity longings and compelled them to look to
themselves for salvation. Although Canadians were anxious for trade
relations, they were not willing to be bludgeoned into accepting one-sided
terms. The settlement of the Bering Sea dispute in 1898 by a board of
arbitration, which ruled against the claims of the United States but
suggested a restriction of pelagic sealing by agreement, removed one
source of friction. Hardly was that out of the way when Cleveland's
Venezuela message brought Great Britain and the United States once more to
the verge of war. In such a war Canadians knew they would be the chief
sufferers, but in 1895, as in 1862, they did not flinch and stood ready to
support the mother country in any outcome. The Venezuela episode stirred
Canadian feeling deeply, revived interest in imperialism, and ended the
last lingering remnants of any sentiment for annexation. As King Edward I
was termed "the hammer of the Scots," so McKinley and Cleveland became
"the hammer of the Canadians," welding them into unity.
While most Canadians were ceasing to look to Washington for relief, an
increasing number were looking once more to London. The revival of
imperial sentiment which began in the early eighties, seemed to promise
new and greater possibilities for the colonies overseas. Political union
in the form of imperial federation and commercial union through reciprocal
tariff preferences were urged in turn as the cure for all Canada's ills.
Neither solution was adopted. The movement greatly influenced the actual
trend of affairs, but there was to be no mere turning back to the days of
the old empire.
The period of laissez faire in imperial matters, of Little Englandism,
drew to a close in the early eighties. Once more men began to value
empire, to seek to annex new territory overseas, and to bind closer the
existing possessions. The world was passing through a reaction destined to
lead to the earth-shaking catastrophe of 1914. The ideals of peace and
free trade preached and to some degree practiced in the fifties and
sixties were passing under an eclipse. In Europe the swing to free trade
had halted, and nation after nation was becoming aggressively
protectionist. The triumph of Prussia in the War of 1870 revived and
intensified military rivalry and military preparations on the part of all
the powers of Europe. A new scramble for colonies and possessions overseas
began, with the late comers nervously eager to make up for time lost. In
this reaction Britain shared. Protection raised its head again in England;
only by tariffs and tariff bargaining, the Fair Traders insisted, could
the country hold its own. Odds and ends of territory overseas were annexed
and a new value was attached to the existing colonies. The possibility of
obtaining from them military support and trade privileges, the
desirability of returning to the old ideal of a self-contained and
centralized empire, appealed now to influential groups. This goal might be
attained by different paths. From the United Kingdom came the policy of
imperial federation and from the colonies the policy of preferential trade
as means to this end.
In 1884 the Imperial Federation League was organized in London with
important men of both parties in its ranks. It urged the setting up in
London of a new Parliament, in which the United Kingdom and all the
colonies where white men predominated would be represented according to
population. This Parliament would have power to frame policies, to make
laws, and to levy taxes for the whole Empire. To the colonist it offered
an opportunity to share in the control of foreign affairs; to the
Englishman it offered the support of colonies fast growing to power and
the assurance of one harmonious policy for all the Empire. Both in Britain
and overseas the movement received wide support and seemed for a time
likely to sweep all before it. Then a halt came.
Imperial federation had been brought forward a generation too late to
succeed. The Empire had been developing upon lines which could not be made
to conform to the plans for centralized parliamentary control. It was not
possible to go back to the parting of the ways. Slowly, unconsciously,
unevenly, yet steadily, the colonies had been ceasing to be dependencies
and had been becoming nations. With Canada in the vanguard they had been
taking over one power after another which had formerly been wielded by the
Government of the United Kingdom. It was not likely that they would
relinquish these powers or that self-governing colonies would consent to
be subordinated to a Parliament in London in which each would have only a
fragmentary representation.
The policy of imperial cooperation which began to take shape during this
period sought to reconcile the existing desire for continuing the
connection with the mother country with the growing sense of national
independence. This policy involved two different courses of action: first,
the colonies must assert and secure complete self-government on terms of
equality with the United Kingdom; second, they must unite as partners or
allies in carrying out common tasks and policies and in building up
machinery for mutual consultation and harmonious action.
It was chiefly in matters of trade and tariffs that progress was made in
the direction of self-government. Galt had asserted in 1859 Canada's right
to make her own tariffs, and Macdonald twenty years later had carried
still further the policy of levying duties upon English as well as foreign
goods. That economic point was therefore settled, but it was a slower
matter to secure control of treaty-making powers. When Galt and Huntington
urged this right in 1871 and when Blake and Mackenzie pressed it ten years
later, Macdonald opposed such a demand as equivalent to an effort for
independence. Yet he himself was compelled to change his conservative
attitude. After 1877 Canada ceased to be bound by commercial treaties made
by the United Kingdom, unless it expressly desired to be included. In 1879
Galt was sent to Europe to negotiate Canadian trade agreements with France
and Spain; and in the next decade Tupper carried negotiations with France
to a successful conclusion, though the treaty was formally concluded
between France and Britain. By 1891 the Canadian Parliament could assert
with truth that "the self-governing colonies are recognized as possessing
the right to define their respective fiscal relations to all countries."
But Canada as yet took no step toward assuming a share in her own naval
defense, though the Australasian colonies made a beginning, along colonial
rather than national lines, by making a money contribution to the British
navy.
The second task confronting the policy of imperial cooperation was a
harder one. For a partnership between colony and mother country there were
no precedents. Centralized empires there had been; colonies there had been
which had grown into independent states; but there was no instance of an
empire ceasing to be an empire, of colonies becoming self-governing states
and then turning to closer and cooperative union with one another and with
the mother country.
Along this unblazed trail two important advances were made. The initiative
in the first came from Canada. In 1880 a High Commissioner was appointed
to represent Canada in London. The appointment of Sir Alexander Galt and
the policy which it involved were significant. The Governor-General had
ceased to be a real power; he was becoming the representative not of the
British Government but of the King; and, like the King, he governed by the
advice of the responsible ministers in the land where he resided. His
place as the link between the Government of Canada and the Government of
Britain was now taken in part by the High Commissioner. The relationship
of Canada to the United Kingdom was becoming one of equality not of
subordination.
The initiative in the second step came from Britain, though Canada's
leaders gave the movement its final direction. Imperial federationists
urged Lord Salisbury to summon a conference of the colonies to discuss the
question they had at heart. Salisbury doubted the wisdom of such a policy
but agreed in 1887 to call a conference to discuss matters of trade and
defense. Every self-governing colony sent representatives to this first
Colonial Conference; but little immediate fruit came of its sessions. In
1894 a second Conference was held at Ottawa, mainly to discuss
intercolonial preferential trade. Only a beginning had been made, but
already the Conferences were coming to be regarded as meetings of
independent governments and not, as the federationists had hoped, the germ
of a single dominating new government. The Imperial Federation League
began to realize that it was making little progress and dissolved in 1893.
Preferential trade was the alternative path to imperial federation.
Macdonald had urged it in 1879 when he found British resentment strong
against his new tariff. Again, ten years later, when reciprocity with the
United States was finding favor in Canada, imperialists urged the
counterclaims of a policy of imperial reciprocity, of special tariff
privileges to other parts of the Empire. The stumbling-block in the way of
such a policy was England's adherence to free trade. For the protectionist
colonies preference would mean only a reduction of an existing tariff. For
the United Kingdom, however, it would mean a complete reversal of fiscal
policy and the abandonment of free trade for protection in order to make
discrimination possible. Few Englishmen believed such a reversal possible,
though every trade depression revived talk of "fair trade" or tariffs for
bargaining purposes. A further obstacle to preferential trade lay in the
existence of treaties with Belgium and Germany, concluded in the sixties,
assuring them all tariff privileges granted by any British colony to Great
Britain or to sister colonies. In 1892 the Liberal Opposition in Canada
indicated the line upon which action was eventually to be taken by urging
a resolution in favor of granting an immediate and unconditional
preference on British goods as a step toward freer trade and in the
interest of the Canadian consumer.
Little came of looking either to London or to Washington. Until the middle
nineties Canada remained commercially stagnant and politically distracted.
Then came a change of heart and a change of policy. The Dominion realized
at last that it must work out its own salvation.
In March, 1891, Sir John Macdonald was returned to office for the sixth
time since Confederation, but he was not destined to enjoy power long. The
winter campaign had been too much for his weakened constitution, and he
died on June 6, 1891. No man had been more hated by his political
opponents, no man more loved by his political followers. Today the hatred
has long since died, and the memory of Sir John Macdonald has become the
common pride of Canadians of every party, race, and creed. He had done
much to lower the level of Canadian politics; but this fault was forgiven
when men remembered his unfailing courage and confidence, his constructive
vision and fertility of resource, his deep and unquestioned devotion to
his country.
The Conservative party had with difficulty survived the last election.
Deprived of the leader who for so long had been half its force, the party
could not long delay its break-up. No one could be found to fill
Macdonald's place. The helm was taken in turn by J. J. C. Abbott,﹃the
confidential family lawyer of the party,﹄by Sir John Thompson, solid and
efficient though lacking in imagination, and by Sir Mackenzie Bowell, an
Ontario veteran. Abbott was forced to resign because of ill health;
Thompson died in office; and Bowell was forced out by a revolt within the
party. Sir Charles Tupper, then High Commissioner in London, was summoned
to take up the difficult task. But it proved too great for even his
fighting energy. The party was divided. Gross corruption in the awarding
of public contracts had been brought to light. The farmers were demanding
a lower tariff. The leader of the Opposition was proving to have all the
astuteness and the mastery of his party which had marked Macdonald and a
courage in his convictions which promised well. Defeat seemed inevitable
unless a new issue which had invaded federal politics, the Manitoba school
question, should prove more dangerous to the Opposition than to the forces
of the Government.
The Manitoba school question was an echo of the racial and religious
strife which followed the execution of Riel and in which the Jesuits'
Estates controversy was an episode. In the early days of the province,
when it was still uncertain which religion would be dominant among the
settlers, a system of state-aided denominational schools had been
established. In 1890 the Manitoba Government swept this system away and
replaced it by a single system of non-sectarian and state-supported
schools which were practically the same as the old Protestant schools. Any
Roman Catholic who did not wish to send his children to such a school was
thus compelled to pay for the maintenance of a parochial school as well as
to pay taxes for the public schools. A provision of the Confederation Act,
inserted at the wish of the Protestant minority in Quebec, safeguarded the
educational privileges of religious minorities. A somewhat similar clause
had been inserted in the Manitoba Act of 1870. To this protection the
Manitoba minority now appealed. The courts held that the province had the
right to pass the law but also that the Dominion Government had the
constitutional right to pass remedial legislation restoring in some
measure the privileges taken away. The issue was thus forced into federal
politics.
A curious situation then developed. The leader of the Government, Sir
Mackenzie Bowell, was a prominent Orangeman. The leader of the Opposition,
Wilfrid Laurier, was a Roman Catholic. The Government, after a vain
attempt to induce the province to amend its measure, decided to pass a
remedial act compelling it to restore to the Roman Catholics their rights.
The policy of the Opposition leader was awaited with keen expectancy.
Strong pressure was brought upon Laurier by the Roman Catholic hierarchy
of Quebec. Most men expected a temporizing compromise. Yet the leader of
the Opposition came out strongly and flatly against the Government's
measure. He agreed that a wrong had been done but insisted that compulsion
could not right it and promised that, if in power, he would follow the
path of conciliation. At once all the wrath of the hierarchy was unloosed
upon him, and all its influence was thrown to the support of the
Government. Yet when the Liberals blocked the Remedial Bill by obstructing
debate until the term of Parliament expired, and forced an election on
this issue in the summer of 1896, Quebec gave a big majority to Laurier,
while Manitoba stood behind the party which had tried to coerce it. The
country over, the Liberals had gained a decisive majority. The day of new
leaders and anew policy had dawned at last.
* During the Great War it became necessary for the Federal
Government to take over both the National Transcontinental,
running from Moncton in New Brunswick to Winnipeg, and the
Canadian Northern, running from ocean to ocean, and to
incorporate both, along with the Intercolonial, in the
Canadian National Railways, a system fourteen thousand miles
in length.
The opening of the West brought new prosperity to every corner of the
East. Factories found growing markets; banks multiplied branches and
business; exports mounted fast and imports faster; closer relations were
formed with London and New York financial interests; mushroom
millionaires, country clubs, city slums, suburban subdivisions, land
booms, grafting aldermen, and all the apparatus of an advanced
civilization grew apace. A new self-confidence became the dominant note
alike of private business and of public policy.
With industrial prosperity, political unity became assured. Canada became
more and more a name of which all her sons were proud. Expansion brought
men of the different provinces together. The Maritime Provinces first felt
fully at one with the rest of Canada when Vancouver and Winnipeg rather
than Boston and New York called their sons. Even Ontario and Quebec made
some advance toward mutual understanding, though clerical leaders who
sought safety for their Church in the isolation of its people,
imperialists who drove a wedge between Canadians by emphasizing
Anglo-Saxon racial ties, and politicians of the baser sort exploiting race
prejudice for their own gain, opened rifts in a society already seamed by
differences of language and creed. In the West unity was still harder to
secure, for men of all countries and of none poured into a land still in
the shaping. The divergent interests of the farming, free trade West and
of the manufacturing, protectionist East made for friction. Fortunately
strong ties held East and West together. Eastern Canadians or their sons
filled most of the strategic posts in Government and business, in school
and church and press in the West. Transcontinental railways, chartered
banks with branches and interests in every province, political parties
organizing their forces from coast to coast, played their part. Much had
been accomplished; but much remained to be done. With this background of
rapid industrial development and growing national unity, Canada's
relations with the Empire, with her sister democracy across the border,
and with foreign states, took on new importance and divided interest with
the changes in her internal affairs.
From being a state wherein the mother country exercised control and the
colonies yielded obedience the Empire was rapidly being transformed into a
free and equal partnership of independent commonwealths under one king.
Out of the clash of rival theories and conflicting interests a new ideal
and a new reality had developed. The policy of imperial cooperation—the
policy whereby each great colony became independent of outside control but
voluntarily acted in concert with the mother country and the sister states
on matters of common concern—sought to reconcile liberty and unity,
nationhood and empire, to unite what was most practicable in the aims of
the advocates of independence and the advocates of imperial federation.
The movement developed unevenly. At the outbreak of the Great War, it was
still incomplete. The ideal was not always clearly or consciously held in
the Empire itself and was wholly ignored or misunderstood in Europe and
even in the United States. Yet in twenty years' space it had become
dominant in practice and theory and had built up a new type of political
organization, a virtual league of nations, fruitful for the future
ordering of the world.
The three fields in which this new policy was worked out were trade,
defense, and political organization. Canada had asserted her right to
control her tariff and commercial treaty relations as she pleased. Now she
used this freedom to offer, without asking any return in kind, tariff
privileges to the mother country. In the first budget brought down by the
Minister of Finance in the Laurier Cabinet, William S. Fielding, a
reduction, by instalments, of twenty-five per cent in tariff duties was
offered to all countries with rates as low as Canada's—that is, to
the United Kingdom and possibly to the Netherlands and New South Wales.
The reduction was meant both as a fulfilment of the Liberal party's free
trade pledges and as a token of filial good will to Britain. It was soon
found that Belgium and Germany, by virtue of their special treaty rights,
would claim the same privileges as Britain, and that all other countries
with most favored nation clauses could then demand the same rates. This
might serve the free trade aims of the Fielding tariff but would block its
imperial purpose. If this purpose was to be achieved, these treaties must
be denounced. To effect this was one of the tasks Laurier undertook in his
first visit to England in 1897.
The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, celebrating the sixtieth
anniversary of her reign, was made the occasion for holding the third
Colonial Conference. It was attended by the Premiers of all the colonies.
Among them Wilfrid Laurier, or Sir Wilfrid as he now became, stood easily
preeminent. In the Jubilee festivities, among the crowds in London streets
and the gatherings in court and council, his picturesque and courtly
figure, his unmistakable note of distinction, his silvery eloquence, and,
not least, the fact that this ruler of the greatest of England's colonies
was wholly of French blood, made him the lion of the hour. In the Colonial
Conference, presided over by Joseph Chamberlain, the new Colonial
Secretary, Laurier achieved his immediate purpose. The British Government
agreed to denounce the Belgian and German treaties, now that the
preference granted her came as a free gift and not as part of a bargain
which involved Britain's abandonment of free trade. The other Premiers
agreed to consider whether Canada's preferential tariff policy could be
followed. Chamberlain in vain urged defense and political policies
designed to centralize power in London. He praised the action of the
Australian colonies in contributing money to the British navy but could
get no promise of similar action from the others. He urged the need of
setting up in London an imperial council, with power somewhat more than
advisory and likely "to develop into something still greater," but for
this scheme he elicited little support. After the Conference Sir Wilfrid
visited France and in ringing speeches in Paris did much to pave the way
for the good understanding which later developed into the entente
cordiale.
The glitter and parade of the Jubilee festivities soon gave way to a
sterner phase of empire. For years South Africa had been in ferment owing
to the conflicting interests of narrow, fanatical, often corrupt Boer
leaders, greedy Anglo-Jewish mining magnates, and British
statesmen-Rhodes, Milner, Chamberlain—dominated by the imperial idea
and eager for an "all-red" South Africa. Eventually an impasse was reached
over the question of the rights and privileges of British subjects in the
Transvaal Republic. On October 9, 1899, President Kruger issued his
fateful ultimatum and war began.
What would be Canada's attitude toward this imperial problem? She had
never before taken part in an overseas war. Neither her own safety nor the
safety of the mother country was considered to be at stake. Yet war had
not been formally declared before a demand arose among Canadians that
their country should take a hand in rescuing the victims of Boer tyranny.
The Venezuela incident and the recent Jubilee ceremonies had fanned
imperialist sentiment. The growing prosperity was increasing national
pride and making many eager to abandon the attitude of colonial dependence
in foreign affairs. The desire to emulate the United States, which had
just won more or less glory in its little war with Spain, had its
influence in some quarters. Belief in the justice of the British cause was
practically universal, thanks to the skillful manipulation of the press by
the war party in South Africa. Leading newspapers encouraged the campaign
for participation. Parliament was not in session, and the Government
hesitated to intervene, but the swelling tide of public opinion soon
warranted immediate action. Three days after the declaration of war an
order in council was passed providing for a contingent of one thousand
men. Other infantry battalions, Mounted Rifles, and batteries of artillery
were dispatched later. Lord Strathcona, formerly Donald Smith of the
Canadian Pacific syndicate, by a deed recalling feudal days, provided the
funds to send overseas the Strathcona Horse, roughriders from the Canadian
West. In the last years of the war the South African Constabulary drew
many recruits from Canada. All told, over seven thousand Canadians crossed
half the world to share in the struggle on the South African veldt.
The Canadian forces held their own with any in the campaign. The first
contingent fought under Lord Roberts in the campaign for the relief of
Kimberley; and it was two charges by Canadian troops, charges that cost
heavily in killed and wounded, that forced the surrender of General
Cronje, brought to bay at Paardeberg. One Canadian battery shared in the
honor of raising the siege of Mafeking, where Baden-Powell was besieged,
and both contingents marched with Lord Roberts from Bloemfontein to
Pretoria and fought hard and well at Doornkop and in many a skirmish.
Perhaps the politic generosity of the British leaders and the patriotic
bias of correspondents exaggerated the importance of the share of the
Canadian troops in the whole campaign; but their courage, initiative, and
endurance were tested and proved beyond all question. Paardeberg sent a
thrill of pride and of sorrow through Canada.
The only province which stood aloof from wholehearted participation in the
war was Quebec. Many French Canadians had been growing nervous over the
persistent campaign of the imperialists. They exhibited a certain
unwillingness to take on responsibilities, perhaps a survival of the
dependence which colonialism had bred, a dawning aspiration toward an
independent place in the world's work, and a disposition to draw tighter
racial and religious lines in order to offset the emphasis which
imperialists placed on Anglo-Saxon ties. Now their sympathies went out to
a people, like themselves an alien minority brought under British rule,
and in this attitude they were strengthened by the almost unanimous
verdict of the neutral world against British policy. Laurier tried to
steer a middle course, but the attacks of ultra-imperialists in Ontario
and of ultra-nationalists in Quebec, led henceforward by a brilliant and
eloquent grandson of Papineau, Henri Bourassa, hampered him at every turn.
The South African War gave a new unity to English-speaking Canada, but it
widened the gap between the French and English sections.
The part which Australia and New Zealand, like Canada, had taken in the
war gave new urgency to the question of imperial relations. English
imperialists were convinced that the time was ripe for a great advance
toward centralization, and they were eager to crystallize in permanent
institutions the imperial sentiment called forth by the war. When,
therefore, the fourth Colonial Conference was summoned to meet in London
in 1902 on the occasion of the coronation of Edward VII, Chamberlain urged
with all his force and keenness a wide programme of centralized action.
"Very great expectations," he declared in his opening address,﹃have been
formed as to the results which may accrue from our meeting.﹄The
expectations, however, were doomed to disappointment. He and those who
shared his hopes had failed to recognize that the war had called forth a
new national consciousness in the Dominions, as the self-governing
colonies now came to be termed, even more than it had developed imperial
sentiment. In the smaller colonies, New Zealand, Natal, Cape of Good Hope,
the old attitude of colonial dependence survived in larger measure; but in
Canada and in Australia, now federated into commonwealths, national
feeling was uppermost.
Chamberlain brought forward once more his proposal for an imperial
council, to be advisory at first and later to attain power to tax and
legislate for the whole Empire, but he found no support. Instead, the
Conference itself was made a more permanent instrument of imperial
cooperation by a provision that it should meet at least every four years.
The essential difference was that the Conference was merely a meeting of
independent Governments on an equal footing, each claiming to be as much
"His Majesty's Government" as any other, whereas the council which
Chamberlain urged in vain would have been a new Government, supreme over
all the Empire and dominated by the British representatives. Chamberlain
then suggested more centralized means of defense, grants to the British
navy, and the putting of a definite proportion of colonial militia at the
disposal of the British War Office for overseas service. The Cape and
Natal promised naval grants; Australia and New Zealand increased their
contributions for the maintenance of a squadron in Pacific waters; but
Canada held back. The smaller colonies were sympathetic to the militia
proposal; but Canada and Australia rejected it on the grounds that it was
"objectionable in principle, as derogating from the powers of
self-government enjoyed by them, and would be calculated to impede the
general improvement in training and organization of their defense forces."
Chamberlain's additional proposal of free trade within the Empire and of a
common tariff against all foreign countries found little support. That
each part of the Empire should control its own tariff and that it should
make what concessions it wished on British imports, either as a part of a
reciprocal bargain or as a free gift, remained a fixed idea in the minds
of the leaders of the Dominions. Throughout the sessions it was Laurier
rather than Chamberlain who dominated the Conference.
Balked in his desire to effect political or military centralization,
Chamberlain turned anew to the possibilities of trade alliance. His tariff
reform campaign of 1903, which was a sequel to the Colonial Conference of
1902, proposed that Great Britain set up a tariff, incidentally to protect
her own industries and to have matter for bargaining with foreign powers,
but mainly in order to keep the colonies within her orbit by offering them
special terms. In this way the Empire would become once more
self-sufficient. The issue thus thrust upon Great Britain and the Empire
in general was primarily a contest between free traders and
protectionists, not between the supporters of cooperation and the
supporters of centralization. On this basis the issue was fought out in
Great Britain and resulted in the overwhelming victory of free trade and
the Liberal party, aided as they were by the popular reaction against the
jingoist policy which had culminated in the war. When the fifth
Conference, now termed Imperial instead of Colonial, met in 1907, there
was much impassioned advocacy of preference and protection on the part of
Alfred Deakin of Australia and Sir L.S. Jameson of the Cape; but the
British representatives stuck to their guns and, in Winston Churchill's
phrase, the door remained "banged, barred, and bolted" against both
policies. At this conference Laurier took the ground that, while Canada
would be prepared to bargain preference for preference, the people of
Great Britain must decide what fiscal system would best serve their own
interests. A consistent advocate of home rule, he was willing, unlike some
of his colleagues, from the other Dominions, to let the United Kingdom
control its own affairs.
The defense issue had slumbered since the Boer War. Now the unbounded
ambitions of Germany gave it startling urgency. It was about 1908 that the
British public first became seriously alarmed over the danger involved in
the lessening margin of superiority of the British over the German navy.
The alarm was echoed throughout the Dominions. The Kaiser's challenge
threatened the safety not only of the mother country but of every part of
the Empire. Hitherto the Dominions had done little in the way of naval
defense, though they had one by one assumed full responsibility for their
land defense. The feeling had been growing that they should take a larger
share of the common burden. Two factors, however, had blocked advance in
this direction. The British Government had claimed and exercised full
control of the issues of peace and war, and the Dominions were reluctant
to assume responsibility for the consequences of a foreign policy which
they could not direct. The hostility of the British Admiralty, on
strategic and political grounds, to the plan of local Dominion navies, had
prevented progress on the most feasible lines. The deadlock was a serious
one. Now the imminence of danger compelled a solution. Taking the lead in
this instance in the working out of the policy of colonial nationalism,
Australia had already insisted upon abandoning the barren and inadequate
policy of making a cash contribution for the support of a British squadron
in Australasian waters and had established a local navy, manned,
maintained, and controlled by the Commonwealth. Canada decided to follow
her example. In March, 1909, the Canadian House of Commons unanimously
adopted a resolution in favor of establishing a Canadian naval service to
cooperate in close relation with the British navy. During the summer a
special conference was held in London attended by ministers from all the
Dominions. At this conference the Admiralty abandoned its old position;
and it was agreed that Australia and Canada should establish local forces,
cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, with auxiliary ships and naval
bases.
When the Canadian Parliament met in 1910, Sir Wilfrid Laurier submitted a
Naval Service Bill, providing for the establishment of local fleets, of
which the smaller vessels were to be built in Canada. The ships were to be
under the control of the Dominion Government, which might, in case of
emergency, place them at the disposal of the British Admiralty. The bill
was passed in March. In the autumn two cruisers, the Rainbow and the
Niobe, were bought from Britain to serve as training ships. In the
following spring a naval college was opened at Halifax, and tenders were
called for the construction, in Canada, of five cruisers and six
destroyers. In June, 1911, at the regular Imperial Conference of that
year, an agreement was reached regarding the boundaries of the Australian
and Canadian stations and uniformity of training and discipline.
Then came the reciprocity fight and the defeat of the Government. No
tenders had been finally accepted, and the new Administration of Premier
Borden was free to frame its own policy.
The naval issue had now become a party question. The policy of a Dominion
navy, a policy which was the logical extension of the principles of
colonial nationalism and imperial cooperation which had guided imperial
development for many years, was attacked by ultra-imperialists in the
English-speaking provinces as strategically unsound and as leading
inevitably to separation from the Empire. It was also attacked by the
Nationalists of Quebec, the ultra-colonialists or provincialists, as they
might more truly be termed, under the vigorous leadership of Henri
Bourassa, as yet another concession to imperialism and to militarism. In
November, 1910, by alarming the habitant by pictures of his sons being
dragged away by naval press gangs, the Nationalists succeeded in defeating
the Liberal candidate in a by-election in Drummond-Arthabaska, at one time
Laurier's own constituency. In the general election which followed in
1911, the same issue cost the Liberals a score of seats in Quebec.
When, therefore, the new Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, faced the
issue, he endeavored to frame a policy which would suit both wings of his
following. In 1912 he proposed as an emergency measure to appropriate a
sum sufficient to build three dreadnoughts for the British navy, subject
to recall if at any time the Canadian people decided to use them as the
nucleus of a Canadian fleet. At the same time he undertook to submit to
the electorate his permanent naval policy, as soon as it was determined.
What that permanent policy would be he was unwilling to say, but the Prime
Minister made clear his own leanings by insisting that it would take half
a century to form a Canadian navy, which at best would be a poor and weak
substitute for the organization the Empire already possessed. The
contribution to the British navy satisfied the ultra-imperialists, while
the promise of a referendum and the call for money alone, and not men,
appealed to the Nationalist wing. Under the impetuous control of its new
head, Winston Churchill, the British Admiralty showed that it had repented
its brief conversion to the Dominion navy policy, by preparing an
elaborate memorandum to support Borden's proposals, and also by
formulating plans for imperial flying squadrons to be supplied by the
Dominions, which made clear its wish to continue the centralizing policy
permanently. The Liberal Opposition vigorously denounced the whole
dreadnought programme, advocating instead two Canadian fleet units
somewhat larger than at first contemplated. Their obstruction was overcome
in the Commons by the introduction of the closure, but the Liberal
majority in the Senate, on the motion of Sir George Ross, a former Premier
of Ontario, threw out the bill by insisting that it should not be passed
before being "submitted to the judgment of the country." This challenge
the Government did not accept. Until the outbreak of the war no further
steps were taken either to arrange for contribution or to establish a
Canadian navy, though the naval college at Halifax was continued, and the
training cruisers were maintained in a half-hearted way.
In the Imperial Conference of 1911, one more attempt was made to set up a
central governing authority in London. Sir Joseph Ward, of New Zealand,
acting as the mouthpiece of the imperial federationists, urged the
establishment, first of an Imperial Council of State and later of an
Imperial Parliament. His proposals met no support.﹃It is absolutely
impracticable,﹄was Laurier's verdict.﹃Any scheme of representation—no
matter what you call it, parliament or council—of the overseas
Dominions, must give them so very small a representation that it would be
practically of no value,﹄declared Premier Morris of Newfoundland.﹃It is
not a practical scheme,﹄Premier Fisher of Australia agreed;﹃our present
system of responsible government has not broken down.﹄"The creation of
some body with centralized authority over the whole Empire," Premier Botha
of South Africa cogently insisted,﹃would be a step entirely antagonistic
to the policy of Great Britain which has been so successful in the past
.... It is the policy of decentralization which has made the Empire—the
power granted to its various peoples to govern themselves.﹄Even Premier
Asquith of the United Kingdom declared the proposals "fatal to the very
fundamental conditions on which our empire has been built up and carried
on."
Stronger than any logic was the presence of Louis Botha in the conferences
of 1907 and 1911. On the former occasion it was only five years since he
had been in arms against Great Britain. The courage and vision of Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman in granting full and immediate self-government to
the conquered Boer republics had been justified by the results. Once more
freedom proved the only enduring basis of empire. Botha's task in
attempting to make Boer and Briton work together, first in the Transvaal,
and, after 1910, in the Union of South Africa, had not been an easy one.
Attacked by extremists from both directions, he faced much the same
difficulties as Laurier, and he found in Laurier's friendship, counsel,
and example much that stood him in good stead in the days of stress to
come.
Not less important than the relations with the United Kingdom in this
period were the relations with the United States. The Venezuela episode
was the turning point in the relations between the United States and the
British Empire. Both in Washington and in London men had been astounded to
find themselves on the verge of war. The danger passed, but the shock
awoke thousands to a realization of all that the two peoples had in common
and to the need of concerted effort to remove the sources of friction.
Then hard on the heels of this episode followed the Spanish-American War.*
Not the least of its by-products was a remarkable improvement in the
relations of the English-speaking nations. The course of the war, the
intrigues of European courts to secure intervention on behalf of Spain,
and the lining up of a British squadron beside Dewey in Manila Bay when a
German Admiral blustered, revealed Great Britain as the one trustworthy
friend the United States possessed abroad. The annexation of the
Philippines and the definite entry of the United States upon world
politics broke down the irresponsible isolation which British ministers
had found so much of a barrier to diplomatic accommodations. With John Hay
and later Elihu Root at the State Department, and Lansdowne and Grey at
the Foreign Office in London, there began an era of good feeling between
the two countries.
* See "The Path of Empire".
Ottawa and Washington were somewhat slower in coming to terms. Many
difficulties can arise along a three thousand mile border, and with a
people so sure of themselves as the Americans were at this period and a
people so sensitive to any infringements of their national rights as the
Canadians were, petty differences often loomed large. The Laurier
Government, therefore, proposed shortly after its accession to power in
1896 that an attempt should be made to clear away all outstanding issues
and to effect a trade agreement. A Joint High Commission was constituted
in 1898. The members from the United States were Senator Fairbanks,
Senator Gray, Representative Nelson Dingley, General Foster, J.A. Kasson,
and T.J. Coolidge of the State Department. Great Britain was represented
by Lord Herschell, who acted as chairman, Newfoundland by Sir James
Winter, and Canada by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Sir Richard Cartwright, Sir
Louis Davies, and John Charlton, M.P.
The Commission held prolonged sittings, first at Quebec and later at
Washington, and reached tentative agreement on nearly all of the
troublesome questions at issue. The bonding privileges on both sides the
border were to be given an assured basis; the unneighborly alien labor
laws were to be relaxed; the Rush-Bagot Convention regarding armament on
the Great Lakes was to be revised; Canadian vessels were to abandon
pelagic sealing in Bering Sea for a money compensation; and a reciprocity
treaty covering natural products and some manufactures was sketched out.
Yet no agreement followed. One issue, the Alaska boundary, proved
insoluble, and as no agreement was acceptable which did not cover every
difference, the Commission never again assembled after its adjournment in
February, 1899.
The boundary between Alaska and the Dominion was the only bit of the
border line not yet determined. As in former cases of boundary disputes,
the inaccuracies of map makers, the ambiguities of diplomats, the clash of
local interests, and stiff-necked national pride made a settlement
difficult. In 1825 Russia and Great Britain had signed a treaty which
granted Russia a long panhandle strip down the Pacific coast. With the
purchase of Alaska in 1867 the United States succeeded to Russia's claim.
With the growth of settlement in Canada this long barrier down half of her
Pacific coast was found to be irksome. Attempt after attempt to have the
line determined only added to the stock of memorials in official
pigeonholes. Then came the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896, and
the question of easy access by sea to the Canadian back country became an
urgent one. Canada offered to compromise, admitting the American title to
the chief ports on Lynn Canal, Dyea and Skagway, if Pyramid Harbor were
held Canadian. She urged arbitration on the model the United States had
dictated in the Venezuela dispute. But the United States was in possession
of the most important points. Its people believed the Canadian claims had
been trumped up when the Klondike fields were opened. The Puget Sound
cities wanted no breach in their monopoly of the supply trade to the
north. The only concession the United States would make was to refer the
dispute to a commission of six, three from each country, with the proviso
that no area settled by Americans should in any event pass into other
bands. Canada felt that arbitration under these conditions would either
end in deadlock, leaving the United States in possession, or in concession
by one or more of the British representatives, and so declined to accept
the proposed arrangement.
Finally, in 1903, agreement was reached between London and Washington to
accept the tribunal proposed by the United States, which in turn withdrew
its veto on the transfer of any settled area. Canada's reluctant consent
was won by a provision that the members of the tribunal should be
"impartial jurists of repute," sworn to render a judicial verdict. When
Elihu Root, Senator Lodge, and Senator Turner were named as the American
representatives, Ottawa protested that eminent and honorable as they were,
their public attitude on this question made it impossible to consider them
"impartial jurists." The Canadian Government in return nominated three
judges, Lord Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir Louis Jette,
of Quebec, and Mr. Justice Armour, succeeded on his death by A. B.
Aylesworth, a leader of the Ontario bar. The tribunal met in London, where
the case was thoroughly argued.
The Treaty of 1825 had provided that the southern boundary should follow
the Portland Canal to the fifty-sixth parallel of latitude and thence the
summits of the mountains parallel to the coast, with the stipulation that
if the summit of the mountains anywhere proved to be more than ten marine
leagues from the ocean, a line drawn parallel to the windings of the coast
not more than ten leagues distant should form the boundary. Three
questions arose: What was the Portland Canal? Did the treaty assure Russia
an unbroken strip by making the boundary run round the ends of deep
inlets? Did mountains exist parallel to the coast within ten leagues'
distance? In October these questions received their answer. Lord
Alverstone and the three American members decided in favor of the United
States on the main issues. The two Canadian, representatives refused to
sign the award and denounced it as unjudicial and unwarranted.
The decision set Canada aflame. Lord Alverstone was denounced in
unmeasured terms. From Atlantic to Pacific the charge was echoed that once
more the interests of Canada had been sacrificed by Britain on the altar
of Anglo-American friendship. The outburst was not understood abroad. It
was not, as United States opinion imagined, merely childish petulance or
the whining of a poor loser. It was against Great Britain, not against the
United States, that the criticism was directed. It was not the decision,
but the way in which it was made, that roused deep anger. The decision on
the main issue, that the line ran back of even the deepest inlets and
barred Canada from a single harbor, though unwelcome, was accepted as a
judicial verdict and has since been little questioned. The finding that
the boundary should follow certain mountains behind those Canada urged,
but short of the ten league line, was attacked by the Canadian
representatives as a compromise, and its judicial character is certainly
open to some doubt. But it was on the third finding that the thunders
broke. The United States had contended that the Portland Channel of the
treaty makers ran south of four islands which lay east of Prince of Wales
Island, and Canada that it ran north of these islands. Lord Alverstone,
after joining in a judgment with the Canadian commissioners that it ran
north, suddenly, without any conference with them, and, as the wording of
the award showed, by agreement with the United States representatives,
announced that it ran where no one had ever suggested it could run, north
of two and south of two, thus dividing the land in dispute. The islands
were of little importance even strategically, but the incontrovertible
evidence that instead of a judicial finding a political compromise had
been effected was held of much importance. After a time the storm died
down, but it revealed one unmistakable fact: Canadian nationalism was
growing fully as fast as Canadian imperialism.
The relations between Canada and the United States now came to show the
effect of increasingly close business connections. The northward trek of
tens of thousands of American farmers was under way. United States
capitalists began to invest heavily in farm and timber lands. Factory
after factory opened a Canadian branch. Ten years later these investments
exceeded six hundred millions. In the West, James J. Hill was planning the
expansion of the Great Northern system throughout the prairie provinces
and was securing an interest in the great Crow's Nest Pass coal fields.
Tourist travel multiplied. The two peoples came to know each other better
than ever before, and with knowledge many prejudices and misunderstandings
vanished. Canada's growing prosperity did not merely bring greater
individual intercourse; it made the United States as a whole less
patronizing in its dealings with its neighbor and Canada less querulous
and thin-skinned.
In this more favorable temper many old issues were cleared off the slate.
The northeastern fisheries question, revived by a conflict between
Newfoundland and the United States as to treaty privileges, was referred
to the Hague Court in 1909. The verdict of the arbitrators recognized a
measure of right in the contentions of both sides. A detailed settlement
was prescribed which was accepted without demur in the United States,
Newfoundland, and Canada alike. Pelagic sealing in the North Pacific was
barred in 1911 by an international agreement between the United States,
Great Britain, Japan, and Russia. Less success attended the attempt to
arrange joint action to regulate and conserve the fisheries of the Great
Lakes and the salmon fisheries of the Pacific, for the treaty drawn up in
1911 by the experts from both countries failed to pass the United States
Senate.
But the most striking development of the decade was the businesslike and
neighborly solution found for the settlement of the boundary waters
controversy. The growing demands for the use of streams such as the
Niagara, the St. Lawrence, and the Sault for power purposes, and of
western border rivers for irrigation schemes, made it essential to take
joint action to reconcile not merely the conflicting claims from the
opposite sides of the border but the conflicting claims of power and
navigation and other interests in each country. In 1905 a temporary
waterways commission was appointed, and four years later the Boundary
Waters Treaty provided for the establishment of a permanent Joint High
Commission, consisting of three representatives from each country, and
with authority over all cases of use, obstruction, or diversion of border
waters. Individual citizens of either country were allowed to present
their case directly before the Commission, an innovation in international
practice. Still more significant of the new spirit was the inclusion in
this treaty of a clause providing for reference to the Commission, with
the consent of the United States Senate and the Dominion Cabinet, of any
matter whatever at issue between the two countries. With little discussion
and as a matter of course, the two democracies, in the closing years of a
full century of peace, thus made provision for the sane and friendly
settlement of future line-fence disputes.
The chief barrier to good relations was the customs tariff. Protectionism,
and the attitude of which it was born and which it bred in turn, was still
firmly entrenched in both countries. Tariff bars, it is true, had not been
able to prevent the rapid growth of trade; imports from the United States
to Canada had grown especially fast and Canada now ranked third in the
list of the Republic's customers. Yet in many ways the tariff hindered
free intercourse. Though every dictate of self-interest and good sense
demanded a reduction of duties, Canada would not and did not take the
initiative. Time and again she had sought reciprocity, only to have her
proposals rejected, often with contemptuous indifference. When Sir Wilfrid
Laurier announced in 1900 that there would be no more pilgrimages to
Washington, he voiced the almost unanimous opinion of a people whose pride
had been hurt by repeated rebuffs.
Meanwhile protectionist sentiment had grown stronger in Canada. The
opening of the West had given an expanding market for eastern factories
and had seemingly justified the National Policy. The Liberals, the
traditional upholders of freer trade, after some initial redemptions of
their pledges, had compromised with the manufacturing interests. The
Conservatives, still more protectionist in temper, voiced in Parliament
little criticism of this policy, and the free trade elements among the
farmers were as yet unorganized and inarticulate. Signs of this
protectionist revival, which had in it, as in the seventies, an element of
nationalism, were many. A four-story tariff was erected. The lowest rates
were those granted the United Kingdom; then came the intermediate tariff,
for the products of countries giving Canada special terms; next the
general tariff; and, finally, the surtax for use against powers
discriminating in any special degree against the Dominion. The provinces
one by one forbade the export of pulp wood cut on Crown Lands, in order to
assure its manufacture into wood pulp or paper in Canada. The Dominion in
1907 secured the abrogation of the postal convention made with the United
States in 1875 providing for the reciprocal free distribution of second
class mail matter originating in the other country. This step was taken at
the instance of Canadian manufacturers, alarmed at the effect of the
advertising pages of United States magazines in directing trade across the
line. Yet even with such developments, the Canadian tariff remained lower
than its neighbor's.
In the United States the tendency was in the other direction. With the
growth of cities, the interests of the consumers of foods outweighed the
influence of the producers. Manufacturers in many cases had reached the
export stage, where foreign markets, cheap food, and cheap raw materials
were more necessary than a protected home market. The "muckrakers" were at
the height of their activity; and the tariff, as one instrument of
corruption and privilege, was suffering with the popular condemnation of
all big interests. United States newspapers were eager for free wood pulp
and cheaper paper, just as Canadian newspapers defended the policy of
checking export. It was not surprising, therefore, that reciprocity with
Canada, as one means of increasing trade and reducing the tariff, took on
new popularity. New England was the chief seat of the movement, with Henry
M. Whitney and Eugene N. Foss as its most persistent advocates. Detroit,
Chicago, St. Paul, and other border cities were also active.
Official action soon followed this unofficial campaign. Curiously enough,
it came as an unexpected by-product of a further experiment in protection,
the Payne-Aldrich tariff. For the first time in the experience of the
United States this tariff incorporated the principle of minimum and
maximum schedules. The maximum rates, fixed at twenty-five per cent ad
valorem above the normal or minimum rates, were to be enforced upon the
goods of any country which had not, before March 10, 1910, satisfied the
President that it did not discriminate against the products of the United
States. One by one the various nations demonstrated this to President
Taft's satisfaction or with wry faces made the readjustments necessary. At
last Canada alone remained. The United States conceded that the preference
to the United Kingdom did not constitute discrimination, but it insisted
that it should enjoy the special rates recently extended to France by
treaty. In Canada this demand was received with indignation. Its tariff
rates were much lower than those which the United States imposed, and its
purchases in that country were twice as great as its sales. The demand was
based on a sudden and complete reversal of the traditional American
interpretation of the most favored nation policy. The President admitted
the force of Canada's contentions, but the law left him no option.
Fortunately it did leave him free to decide as to the adequacy of any
concessions, and thus agreement was made possible at the eleventh hour. At
the President's suggestion a conference at Albany was arranged, and on the
30th of March a bargain was struck. Canada conceded to the United States
its intermediate tariff rates on thirteen minor schedules—chinaware,
nuts, prunes, and whatnot. These were accepted as equivalent to the
special terms given France, and Canada was certified as being entitled to
minimum rates. The United States had saved its face. Then to complete the
comedy, Canada immediately granted the same concessions to all other
countries, that is, made the new rates part of the general tariff. The
United States ended where it began, in receipt of no special concessions.
The motions required had been gone through; phantom reductions had been
made to meet a phantom discrimination.
This was only the beginning of attempts at accommodation. The threat of
tariff war had called forth in the United States loud protests against any
such reversion to economic barbarism. President Taft realized that he had
antagonized the growing low-tariff sentiment of the country by his support
of the Payne-Aldrich tariff and was eager to set himself right. A week
before the March negotiations were concluded, a Democratic candidate had
carried a strongly Republican congressional district in Massachusetts on a
platform of reciprocity with Canada. The President, therefore, proposed a
bold stroke. He made a sweeping offer of better trade relations.
Negotiations were begun at Ottawa and concluded in Washington. In January,
1911, announcement was made that a broad agreement had been effected.
Grain, fruit, and vegetables, dairy and most farm products, fish, hewn
timber and sawn lumber, and several minerals were put on the free list. A
few manufactures were also made free, and the duties on meats, flour,
coal, agricultural implements, and other products were substantially
reduced. The compact was to be carried out, not by treaty, but by
concurrent legislation. Canada was to extend the same terms to the most
favored nations by treaty, and to all parts of the British Empire by
policy.
For fifty years the administrations of the two countries had never been so
nearly at one. More difficulty was met with in the legislatures. In
Congress, farmers and fishermen, standpat Republicans and Progressives
hostile to the Administration, waged war against the bargain. It was only
in a special session, and with the aid of Democratic votes and a
Washington July sun, that the opposition was overcome. In the Canadian
Parliament, after some initial hesitation, the Conservatives attacked the
proposal. The Government had a safe majority, but the Opposition resorted
to obstruction; and late in July, Parliament was suddenly dissolved and
the Government appealed to the country.
When the bargain was first concluded, the Canadian Government had imagined
it would meet little opposition, for it was precisely the type of
agreement that Government after Government, Conservative as well as
Liberal, had sought in vain for over forty years. For a day or two that
expectation was justified. Then the forces of opposition rallied, timid
questioning gave way to violent denunciation, and at last agreement and
Government alike were swept away in a flood of popular antagonism.
One reason for this result was that the verdict was given in a general
election, not in a referendum. The fate of the Government was involved;
its general record was brought up for review; party ambitions and passions
were stirred to the utmost. Fifteen years, of office-holding had meant the
accumulation of many scandals, a slackening in administrative efficiency,
and the cooling by official compromise of the ardent faith of the
Liberalism of the earlier day. The Government had failed to bring in
enough new blood. The Opposition fought with the desperation of fifteen
years of fasting and was better served by its press.
Of the side issues introduced into the campaign, the most important were
the naval policy in Quebec and the racial and religious issue in the
English-speaking provinces. The Government had to face what Sir Wilfrid
Laurier termed "the unholy alliance" of Roman Catholic Nationalists under
Bourassa in Quebec and Protestant Imperialists in Ontario. In the
French-speaking districts the Government was denounced for allowing Canada
to be drawn into the vortex of militarism and imperialism and for
sacrificing the interests of Roman Catholic schools in the West. On every
hand the naval policy was attacked as inevitably bringing in its train
conscription to fight European wars a contention hotly denied by the
Liberals. The Conservative campaign managers made a working arrangement
with the Nationalists as to candidates and helped liberally in circulating
Bourassa's newspaper, Le Devoir. On the back "concessions" of Ontario a
quieter but no less effective campaign was carried on against the
domination of Canadian politics by a French Roman Catholic province and a
French Roman Catholic Prime Minister. In vain the Liberals appealed to
national unity or started back fires in Ontario by insisting that a vote
for Borden meant a vote for Bourassa. The Conservative-Nationalist
alliance cost the Government many seats in Quebec and apparently did not
frighten Ontario.
Reciprocity, however, was the principal issue everywhere except in Quebec.
Powerful forces were arrayed against it. Few manufactures had been put on
the free list, but the argument that the reciprocity agreement was the
thin edge of the wedge rallied the organized manufacturers in almost
unbroken hostile array. The railways, fearful that western traffic would
be diverted to United States roads, opposed the agreement vigorously under
the leadership of the ex-American chairman of the board of directors of
the Canadian Pacific, Sir William Van Horne, who made on this occasion one
of his few public entries into politics. The banks, closely involved in
the manufacturing and railway interests, threw their weight in the same
direction. They were aided by the prevalence of protectionist sentiment in
the eastern cities and industrial towns, which were at the same stage of
development and in the same mood as the cities of the United States some
decades earlier. The Liberal fifteen-year compromise with protection made
it difficult in a seven weeks' campaign to revive a desire for freer
trade. The prosperity of the country and the cry, "Let well enough alone,"
told powerfully against the bargain. Yet merely from the point of view of
economic advantage, the popular verdict would probably have been in its
favor. The United States market no longer loomed so large as it had in the
eighties, but its value was undeniable. Farmer, fisherman, and miner stood
to gain substantially by the lowering of the bars into the richest market
in the world. Every farm paper in Canada and all the important farm
organizations supported reciprocity. Its opponents, therefore, did not
trust to a direct frontal attack. Their strategy was to divert attention
from the economic advantages by raising the cry of political danger. The
red herring of annexation was drawn across the trail, and many a farmer
followed it to the polling booth.
From the outset, then, the opponents of reciprocity concentrated their
attacks on its political perils. They denounced the reciprocity agreement
as the forerunner of annexation, the deathblow to Canadian nationality and
British connection. They prophesied that the trade and intercourse built
up between the East and the West of Canada by years of sacrifice and
striving would shrivel away, and that each section of the Dominion would
become a mere appendage to the adjacent section of the United States.
Where the treasure was, there would the heart be also. After some years of
reciprocity, the channels of Canadian trade would be so changed that a
sudden return to high protection on the part of the United States would
disrupt industry and a mere threat of such a change would lead to a
movement for complete union.
This prophecy was strengthened by apposite quotations showing the existing
drift of opinion in the United States. President Taft's reference to the
﹃light and imperceptible bond uniting the Dominion with the mother
country﹄and his "parting of the ways" speech received sinister
interpretations. Speaker Champ Clark's announcement that he was in favor
of the agreement because he hoped﹃to see the day when the American flag
will float over every square foot of the British North American
possessions﹄was worth tens of thousands of votes. The anti-reciprocity
press of Canada seized upon these utterances, magnified them, and
sometimes, it was charged, inspired or invented them. Every American
crossroads politician who found a useful peroration in a vision of the
Stars and Stripes floating from Panama to the North Pole was represented
as a statesman of national power voicing a universal sentiment. The action
of the Hearst papers in sending pro-reciprocity editions into the border
cities of Canada made many votes—but not for reciprocity. The
Canadian public proved that it was unable to suffer fools gladly. It was
vain to argue that all men of weight in the United States had come to
understand and to respect Canada's independent ambitions; that in any
event it was not what the United States thought but what Canada thought
that mattered; or that the Canadian farmer who sold a bushel of good wheat
to a United States miller no more sold his loyalty with it than a Kipling
selling a volume of verse or a Canadian financier selling a block of stock
in the same market. The flag was waved, and the Canadian voter, mindful of
former American slights and backed by newly arrived Englishmen admirably
organized by the anti-reciprocity forces, turned against any﹃entangling
alliance.﹄The prosperity of the country made it safe to express
resentment of the slights of half a century or fear of this too sudden
friendliness.
The result of the elections, which were held on September 21, 1911, was
the crushing defeat of the Liberal party. A Liberal majority of forty-four
in a house of two hundred and twenty-one members was turned into a
Conservative majority of forty-nine. Eight cabinet ministers went down to
defeat. The Government had a slight majority in the Maritime Provinces and
Quebec, and a large majority in the prairie West, but the overwhelming
victory of the Opposition in Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia
turned the day.
The appeal to loyalty revealed much that was worthy and much that was
sordid in Canadian life. It was well that a sturdy national self-reliance
should be developed and expressed in the face of American prophets of
"manifest destiny," and that men should be ready to set ideals above
pocket. It was unfortunate that in order to demonstrate a loyalty which
might have been taken for granted economic advantage was sacrificed; and
it was disturbing to note the ease with which big interests with unlimited
funds for organizing, advertising, and newspaper campaigning, could
pervert national sentiment to serve their own ends. Yet this was possibly
a stage through which Canada, like every young nation, had to pass; and
the gentle art of twisting the lion's tail had proved a model for the
practice of plucking the eagle's feathers.
The growth of Canada brought her into closer touch with lands across the
sea. Men, money, and merchandise came from East and West; and with their
coming new problems faced the Government of the Dominion. With Europe they
were trade questions to solve, and with Asia the more delicate issues
arising out of oriental immigration.
In 1907 the Canadian Government had established an intermediate tariff,
with rates halfway between the general and the British preferential
tariffs, for the express purpose of bargaining with other powers. In that
year an agreement based substantially on these intermediate rates was
negotiated with France, though protectionist opposition in the French
Senate prevented ratification until 1910. Similar reciprocal arrangements
were concluded in 1910 with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy. The
manner of the negotiation was as significant as the matter. In the case of
France the treaty was negotiated in Paris by two Canadian ministers, W.S.
Fielding and L.P. Brodeur, appointed plenipotentiaries of His Majesty for
that purpose, with the British Ambassador associated in what Mr. Arthur
Balfour termed a "purely technical" capacity. In the case of the other
countries even this formal recognition of the old colonial status was
abandoned. The agreement with Italy was negotiated in Canada between﹃the
Royal Consul of Italy for Canada, representing the government of the
Kingdom of Italy, and the Minister of Finance of Canada, representing His
Excellency the Governor General acting in conjunction with the King's
Privy Council for Canada.﹄The conclusions in these later instances were
embodied in conventions, rather than formal treaties.
With one country, however, tariff war reigned instead of treaty peace. In
1899 Germany subjected Canadian exports to her general or maximum tariff,
because the Dominion refused to grant her the preferential rates reserved
for members of the British Empire group of countries. After four years'
deliberation Canada eventually retaliated by imposing on German goods a
special surtax of thirty-three and one-third per cent. The trade of both
countries suffered, but Germany's, being more specialized, much the more
severely. After seven years' strife, Germany took the initiative in
proposing a truce. In 1910 Canada agreed to admit German goods at the
rates of the general—not the intermediate—tariff, while
Germany in return waived her protest against the British preference and
granted minimum rates on the most important Canadian exports.
Oriental immigration had been an issue in Canada ever since Chinese
navvies had been imported in the early eighties to work on the government
sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mine owners, fruit farmers, and
contractors were anxious that the supply should continue unchecked; but,
as in the United States, the economic objections of the labor unions and
the political objections of the advocates of a "White Canada" carried the
day.
Chinese immigration had been restricted in 1885 by a head tax of $50 on
all immigrants save officials, merchants, or scholars; in 1901 this tax
was doubled; and in 1904 it was raised to $500. In each case the tax
proved a barrier only for a year or two, when wages would rise
sufficiently to warrant Orientals paying the higher toll to enter the
Promised Land. Japanese immigrants did not come in large numbers until
1906, when the activities of employment companies brought seven thousand
Japanese by way of Hawaii. Agitators from the Pacific States fanned the
flames of opposition in British Columbia, and anti-Chinese and
anti-Japanese riots broke out in Vancouver in 1907. The Dominion
Government then grappled with the question. Japan's national sensitiveness
and her position as an ally of Great Britain called for diplomatic
handling. A member of the Dominion Cabinet, Rodolphe Lemieux, succeeded in
1907 in negotiating at Tokio an agreement by which Japan herself undertook
to restrict the number of passports issued annually to emigrants to
Canada.
The Hindu migration, which began in 1907, gave rise to a still more
delicate situation. What did the British Empire mean, many a Hindu asked,
if British subjects were to be barred from British lands? The only reply
was that the British Government which still ruled India no longer ruled
the Dominions, and that it was on the Dominions that the responsibility
for the exclusion policy must rest. In 1909 Canada suggested that the
Indian Government itself should limit emigration, but this policy did not
meet with approval at the time. Failing in this measure, the Laurier
Government fell back on a general clause in the Immigration Act
prohibiting the entrance of immigrants except by direct passage from the
country of origin and on a continuous ticket, a rule which effectually
barred the Hindu because of the lack of any direct steamship line between
India and Canada. An Order-in-Council further required that immigrants
from all Asiatic countries must possess at least $200 on entering Canada.
The Borden Government supplemented these restrictions by a special
Order-in-Council in 1913 prohibiting the landing of artisans or unskilled
laborers of any race at ports in British Columbia, ostensibly because of
depression in the labor market. The leaders of the Hindu movement, with
apparently some German assistance, determined to test these restrictions.
In May, 1914, there arrived at Vancouver from Shanghai a Japanese ship
carrying four hundred Sikhs from India. A few were admitted, as having
been previously domiciled in Canada; the others, after careful inquiry,
were refused admittance and ordered to be deported. Local police were
driven away from the ship when attempting to enforce the order, and the
Government ordered H.M.C.S. Rainbow to intervene. By a curious irony of
history, the first occasion on which this first Canadian warship was
called on to display force was in expelling from Canada the subjects of
another part of the British Empire. Further trouble followed when the
Sikhs reached Calcutta in September, 1914, for riots took place involving
serious loss of life and later an abortive attempt at rebellion.
Fortunately there were good prospects that the Indian Government would in
future accept the proposal made by Canada in 1909. At the Imperial
Conference of 1917, where representatives of India were present for the
first time, it was agreed to recommend the principle of reciprocity in the
treatment of immigrants, India thus being free to save her pride by
imposing on men from the Dominions the same restrictions the Dominions
imposed on immigrants from India.
But all these dealings with lands across the sea paled into insignificance
beside the task imposed on Canada by the Great War. In the sudden crisis
the Dominion attained a place among the nations which the slower changes
of peace time could scarcely have made possible in decades.
When the war party in Germany and Austria-Hungary plunged Europe into the
struggle the world had long been fearing, there was not a moment's
hesitation on the part of the people of Canada. It was not merely the
circumstance that technically Canada was at war when Britain was at war
that led Canadians to instant action. The degree of participation, if not
the fact of war, was wholly a matter for the separate Dominions. It was
the deep and abiding sympathy with the mother country whose very existence
was to be at stake. Later, with the unfolding of Germany's full designs of
world dominance and the repeated display of her callous and ruthless
policies, Canada comprehended the magnitude of the danger threatening all
the world and grimly set herself to help end the menace of militarism once
for all.
On August 1, 1914, two days before Belgium was invaded, and three days
before war between Britain and Germany had been declared, the Dominion
Government cabled to London their firm assurance that the people of Canada
would make every sacrifice necessary to secure the integrity and honor of
the Empire and asked for suggestions as to the form aid should take. The
financial and administrative measures the emergency demanded were carried
out by Orders-in-Council in accordance with the scheme of defense which
only a few months before had been drawn up in a "War Book". Two weeks
later, Parliament met in a special four day session and without a
dissenting voice voted the war credits the Government asked and conferred
upon it special war powers of the widest scope. The country then set about
providing men, money, and munitions of war.
The day after war was declared, recruiting was begun for an expeditionary
force of 21,000 men. Half as many more poured into the camp at Valcartier
near Quebec; and by the middle of October this first Canadian contingent,
over 30,000 strong, the largest body of troops which had ever crossed the
Atlantic, was already in England, where its training was to be completed.
As the war went on and all previous forecasts of its duration and its
scale were far outrun, these numbers were multiplied many times. By the
summer of 1917 over 400,000 men had been enrolled for service, and over
340,000 had already gone overseas, aside from over 25,000 Allied
reservists.
Naturally enough it was the young men of British birth who first responded
in large numbers to the recruiting officer's appeal. A military
background, vivid home memories, the enlistment of kinsmen or friends
overseas, the frequent slightness of local ties, sent them forth in
splendid and steady array. Then the call came home to the native-born, and
particularly to Canadians of English speech. Few of them had dreamed of
war, few had been trained even in militia musters; but in tens of
thousands they volunteered. From French-speaking Canada the response was
slower, in spite of the endeavors of the leaders of the Opposition as well
as of the Government to encourage enlistment. In some measure this was
only to be expected. Quebec was dominantly rural; its men married young,
and the country parishes had little touch with the outside world. Its
people had no racial sympathy with Britain and their connection with
France had long been cut by the cessation of immigration from that
country. Yet this is not the complete explanation of that aloofness which
marked a great part of Quebec. Account must be taken also of the
resentment caused by exaggerated versions of the treatment accorded the
French-Canadian minority in the schools of Ontario and the West, and
especially of the teaching of the Nationalists, led by Henri Bourassa, who
opposed active Canadian participation in the war. Lack of tact on the part
of the Government and reckless taunts from extremists in Ontario made the
breach steadily wider. Yet there were many encouraging considerations.
Another grandson of the leader of '37, Talbot Papineau, fell fighting
bravely, and it was a French-Canadian battalion, Les Vingt Deuxiemes,
which won the honors at Courcelette.
When the war first broke out, no one thought of any but voluntary methods
of enlistment. As the magnitude of the task came home to men and the
example of Great Britain had its influence, voices began to be raised in
favor of compulsion. Sir Robert Borden, the Premier, and Sir Wilfrid
Laurier alike opposed the suggestion. Early in 1917 the adoption of
conscription in the United States, and the need of reenforcements for the
Canadian forces at the front led the Prime Minister, immediately after his
return from the Imperial Conference in London, to bring down a measure for
compulsory service. He urged in behalf of this course that the need for
men was urgent beyond all question; that the voluntary system, wasteful
and unfair at best, had ceased to bring more than six or seven thousand
men a month, chiefly for other than infantry ranks; and that only by
compulsion could Quebec be brought to shoulder her fair share and the
slackers in all the provinces be made to rise to the need. It was
contended, on the other hand, that great as was the need for men, the need
for food, which Canada could best of all countries supply, was greater
still; that voluntary recruiting had yielded over four hundred thousand
men, proportionately equivalent to six million from the United States, and
was slackening only because the reservoir was nearly drained dry; and that
Quebec could be brought into line more effectively by conciliation than by
compulsion.
The issue of conscription brought to an end the political truce which had
been declared in August, 1914. The keener partisans on both sides had not
long been able to abide on the heights of non-political patriotism which
they had occupied in the first generous weeks of the war. But the public
was weary of party cries and called for unity. Suggestions of a coalition
were made at different times, but the party in power, new to the sweets of
office, confident of its capacity, and backed by a strong majority, gave
little heed to the demand. Now, however, the strong popular opposition
offered to the announcement of conscription led the Prime Minister to
propose to Sir Wilfrid Laurier a coalition Government on a conscription
basis. Sir Wilfrid, while continuing to express his desire to cooperate in
any way that would advance the common cause, declined to enter a coalition
to carry out a programme decided upon without consultation and likely, in
his view, to wreck national unity without securing any compensating
increase in numbers beyond what a vigorous and sympathetic voluntary
campaign could yet obtain.
For months negotiations continued within Parliament and without. The
Military Service Act was passed in August, 1917, with the support of the
majority of the English-speaking members of the Opposition. Then the
Government, which had already secured the passage of an Act providing for
taking the votes of the soldiers overseas, forced through under closure a
measure depriving of the franchise all aliens of enemy birth or speech who
had been admitted to citizenship since 1902, and giving a vote to every
adult woman relative of a soldier on active service. Victory for the
Government now appeared certain. Leading English-peaking Liberals,
particularly from the West, convinced that conscription was necessary to
keep Canada's forces up to the need, or that the War Times Election Act
made opposition hopeless, decided to accept Sir Robert Borden's offer of
seats in a coalition Cabinet.
In the election of December, 1917, in which passion and prejudice were
stirred as never before in the history of Canada, the Unionist forces won
by a sweeping majority. Ontario and the West were almost solidly behind
the Government in the number of members elected, Quebec as solidly against
it, and the Maritime Provinces nearly evenly divided. The soldiers' vote,
contrary to Australian experience, was overwhelmingly for conscription.
The Laurier Liberals polled more civilian votes in Ontario, Quebec,
Alberta, and British Columbia, and in the Dominion as a whole, than the
united Liberal party had received in the Reciprocity election of 1911. The
increase in the Unionist popular vote was still greater, however, and gave
the Government fifty-eight per cent of the popular vote and sixty-five per
cent of the seats in the House. Confidence in the administrative capacity
of the new Government, the belief that it would be more vigorous in
carrying on the war, the desire to make Quebec do its share, the influence
of the leaders of the Western Liberals and of the Grain Growers'
Associations, wholesale promises of exemption to farmers, and the working
of the new franchise law all had their part in the result. Eight months
after the Military Service Act was passed, it had added only twenty
thousand men to the nearly five hundred thousand volunteers; but steps
were then taken to cancel exemptions and to simplify the machinery of
administration. Some eighty thousand men were raised under conscription,
but the war, so far as Canada was concerned, was fought and won by
volunteers.
"The self-governing British colonies," wrote Bernhardi before the war,
﹃have at their disposal a militia, which is sometimes only in process of
formation. They can be completely ignored so far as concerns any European
theater of war.﹄This contemptuous forecast might have been justified had
German expectations of a short war been fulfilled. Though large and
increasing sums had in recent years been spent on the Canadian militia and
on a small permanent force, the work of building up an army on the scale
the war demanded had virtually to be begun from the foundation. It was
pushed ahead with vigor, under the direction, for the first three years,
of the Minister of Militia, General Sir Sam Hughes. Many mistakes were
made. Complaints of waste in supply departments and of slackness of
discipline among the troops were rife in the early months. But the work
went on; and when the testing time came, Canada's civilian soldiers held
their own with any veterans on either side the long line of trenches.
It was in April, 1915, at the second battle of Ypres—or, as it is
more often termed in Canada, St. Julien or Langemarck—that the
quality of the men of the first contingent was blazoned forth. The Germans
had launched a determined attack on the junction of the French and
Canadian forces, seeking to drive through to Calais. The use, for the
first time, of asphyxiating gases drove back in confusion the French
colonial troops on the left of the Canadians. Attacked and outflanked by a
German army of 150,000 men, four Canadian brigades, immensely inferior in
heavy artillery and tortured by the poisonous fumes, filled the gap,
hanging on doggedly day and night until reenforcements came and Calais was
saved. In sober retrospection it was almost incredible that the thin khaki
line had held against the overwhelming odds which faced it. A few weeks
later, at Givenchy and Festubert, in the same bloody salient of Ypres, the
Canadian division displayed equal courage with hardly equal success. In
the spring of 1916, when the Canadian forces grew first to three and then
to four divisions, heavy toll was taken at St. Eloi and Sanctuary Wood.
When they were shifted from the Ypres sector to the Somme, the dashing
success at Courcelette showed them as efficient in offense as in defense.
In 1917 a Canadian general, Sir Arthur Currie, three years before only a
business man of Vancouver, took command of the Canadian troops. The
capture of Vimy Ridge, key to the whole Arras position, after months of
careful preparation, the hard-fought struggle for Lens, and toward the
close of the year the winning of the Passchendaele Ridge, at heavy cost,
were instances of the increasing scale and importance of the operations
entrusted to Currie's men.
In the closing year of the war the Canadian corps played a still more
distinctive and essential part. During the early months of 1918, when the
Germans were making their desperate thrusts for Paris and the Channel, the
Canadians held little of the line that was attacked. Their divisions had
been withdrawn in turn for special training in open warfare movements, in
close cooperation with tanks and air forces. When the time came to launch
the Allied offensive, they were ready. It was Canadian troops who broke
the hitherto unbreakable Wotan line, or Drocourt-Queant switch; it was
Canadians who served as the spearhead in the decisive thrust against
Cambrai; and it was Canadians who captured Mons, the last German
stronghold taken before the armistice was signed, and thus ended the war
at the very spot where the British "Old Contemptibles" had begun their
dogged fight four years before.
Through all the years of war the Canadian forces never lost a gun nor
retired from a position they had consolidated. Canadians were the first to
practice trench raiding; and Canadian cadets thronged that branch of the
service, the Royal Flying Corps, where steady nerves and individual
initiative were at a premium. In countless actions they proved their
fitness to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best that Britain and
France and the United States could send: they asked no more than that. The
casualty list of 220,000 men, of whom 60,000 sleep forever in the fields
of France and Flanders and in the plains of England, witnesses the price
this people of eight millions paid as its share in the task of freeing the
world from tyranny.
The realization that in a world war not merely the men in the trenches but
the whole nation could and must be counted as part of the fighting force
was slow in coming in Canada as in other democratic and unwarlike lands.
Slowly the industry of the country was adjusted to a war basis. When the
conflict broke out, the country was pulling itself together after the
sudden collapse of the speculative boom of the preceding decade. For a
time men were content to hold their organization together and to avert the
slackening of trade and the spread of unemployment which they feared.
Then, as the industrial needs and opportunities of the war became clear,
they rallied. Field and factory vied in expansion, and the Canadian
contribution of food and munitions provided a very substantial share of
the Allies' needs. Exports increased threefold, and the total trade was
more than doubled as compared with the largest year before the war.
The financing of the war and of the industrial expansion which accompanied
it was a heavy task. For years Canada had looked to Great Britain for a
large share alike of public and of private borrowings. Now it became
necessary not merely to find at home all the capital required for ordinary
development but to meet the burden of war expenditure, and later to
advance to Great Britain the funds she required for her purchase of
supplies in Canada. The task was made easier by the effective working of a
banking system which had many times proved its soundness and its
flexibility. When the money market of Britain was no longer open to
overseas borrowers, the Dominion first turned to the United States, where
several federal and provincial loans were floated, and later to her own
resources. Domestic loans were issued on an increasing scale and with
increasing success, and the Victory Loan of 1918 enrolled one out of every
eight Canadians among its subscribers. Taxation reached an adequate basis
more slowly. Inertia and the influence of business interests led the
Government to cling for the first two years to customs and excise duties
as its main reliance. Then excess profits and income taxes of steadily
increasing weight were imposed, and the burdens were distributed more
fairly. The Dominion was able not only to meet the whole expenditure of
its armed forces but to reverse the relations which existed before the war
and to become, as far as current liabilities went, a creditor rather than
a debtor of the United Kingdom.
It was not merely the financial relations of Canada with the United
Kingdom which required readjustment. The service and the sacrifices which
the Dominions had made in the common cause rendered it imperative that the
political relations between the different parts of the Empire should be
put on a more definite and equal basis. The feeling was widespread that
the last remnants of the old colonial subordination must be removed and
that the control exercised by the Dominions should be extended over the
whole field of foreign affairs.
The Imperial Conference met in London in the spring of 1917. At special
War Cabinet meetings the representatives of the Dominions discussed war
plans and peace terms with the leaders of Britain. It was decided to hold
a Conference immediately after the end of the war to discuss the future
constitutional organization of the Empire. Premier Borden and General
Smuts both came out strongly against the projects of imperial
parliamentary federation which aggressive organizations in Britain and in
some of the Dominions had been urging. The Conference of 1917 recorded its
view that any coming readjustment must be based on a full recognition of
the Dominions as autonomous nations of an imperial commonwealth; that it
should recognize the right of the Dominions and of India to an adequate
voice in foreign policy; and that it should provide effective arrangements
for continuous consultation in all important matters of common concern and
for such concerted action as the several Governments should determine. The
policy of alliance, of cooperation between the Governments of the equal
and independent states of the Empire, searchingly tested and amply
justified by the war, had compelled assent.
The coming of peace gave occasion for a wider and more formal recognition
of the new international status of the Dominions. It had first been
proposed that the British Empire should appear as a unit, with the
representatives of the Dominions present merely in an advisory capacity or
participating in turn as members of the British delegation. The Dominion
statesmen assembled in London and Paris declined to assent to this
proposal, and insisted upon representation in the Peace Conference and in
the League of Nations in their own right. The British Government, after
some debate, acceded, and, with more difficulty, the consent of the
leading Allies was won. The representatives of the Dominions signed the
treaty with Germany on behalf of their respective countries, and each
Dominion, with India, was made a member of the League. At the same time
only the British Empire, and not any of the Dominions, was given a place
in the real organ of power, the Executive Council of the League, and in
many respects the exact relationship between the United Kingdom and the
other parts of the Empire in international affairs was left ambiguous, for
later events and counsel to determine. Many French and American observers
who had not kept in close touch with the growth of national consciousness
within the British Empire were apprehensive lest this plan should prove a
deep-laid scheme for multiplying British influence in the Conference and
the League. Some misunderstanding was natural in view not only of the
unprecedented character of the Empire's development and polity, but of the
incomplete and ambiguous nature of the compromise affected at Paris
between the nationalist and the imperialist tendencies within the Empire.
Yet the reluctance of the British imperialists of the straiter sect to
accede to the new arrangement, and the independence of action of the
Dominion representatives at the Conference, as in the stand of Premier
Hughes of Australia on the Japanese demand for recognition of racial
equality and in the statement of protest by General Smuts of South Africa
on signing the treaty, made it clear that the Dominions would not be
merely echoes. Borden and Botha and Smuts, though new to the ways of
diplomacy, proved that in clear understanding of the broader issues and in
moderation of policy and temper they could bear comparison with any of the
leaders of the older nations.
The war also brought changes in the relations between Canada and her great
neighbor. For a time there was danger that it would erect a barrier of
differing ideals and contrary experience. When month after month went by
with the United States still clinging to its policy of neutrality, while
long lists of wounded and dead and missing were filling Canadian
newspapers, a quiet but deep resentment, not without a touch of conscious
superiority, developed in many quarters in the Dominion. Yet there were
others who realized how difficult and how necessary it was for the United
States to attain complete unity of purpose before entering the war, and
how different its position was from that of Canada, where the political
tie with Britain had brought immediate action more instinctive than
reasoned. It was remembered, too, that in the first 360,000 Canadians who
went overseas, there were 12,000 men of American birth, including both
residents in Canada and men who had crossed the border to enlist. When the
patience of the United States was at last exhausted and it took its place
in the ranks of the nations fighting for freedom, the joy of Canadians was
unbounded. The entrance of the United States into the war assured not only
the triumph of democracy in Europe but the continuance and extension of
frank and friendly relations between the democracies of North America. As
the war went on and Canada and the United States were led more and more to
pool their united resources, to cooperate in finance and in the supply of
coal, iron, steel, wheat, and other war essentials, countless new strands
were woven into the bond that held the two countries together. Nor was it
material unity alone that was attained; in the utterances of the head of
the Republic the highest aspirations of Canadians for the future ordering
of the world found incomparable expression.
Canada had done what she could to assure the triumph of right in the war.
Not less did she believe that she had a contribution to make toward that
new ordering of the world after the war which alone could compensate her
for the blood and treasure she had spent. It would be her mission to bind
together in friendship and common aspirations the two larger
English-speaking states, with one of which she was linked by history and
with the other by geography. To the world in general Canada had to offer
that achievement of difference in unity, that reconciliation of liberty
with peace and order, which the British Empire was struggling to attain
along paths in which the Dominion had been the chief pioneer.﹃In the
British Commonwealth of Nations,﹄declared General Smuts,﹃this transition
from the old legalistic idea of political sovereignty based on force to
the new social idea of constitutional freedom based on consent, has been
gradually evolving for more than a century. And the elements of the future
world government, which will no longer rest on the imperial ideas adopted
from the Roman law, are already in operation in our Commonwealth of
Nations and will rapidly develop in the near future.﹄This may seem an
idealistic aim; yet, as Canada's Prime Minister asked a New York audience
in 1916, "What great and enduring achievement has the world ever
accomplished that was not based on idealism?"
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For the whole period since 1760 the most comprehensive and thorough work
is "Canada and its Provinces", edited by A. Shortt and A. G. Doughty, 23
vols. (1914). W. Kingsford's "History of Canada", 10 vols. (1887-1898), is
badly written but is an ample storehouse of material. The﹃Chronicles of
Canada﹄series (1914-1916) covers the whole field in a number of popular
volumes, of which several are listed below. F. X. Garneau's﹃Histoire du
Canada﹄(1845-1848; new edition, edited by Hector Garneau, 1913-), the
classical French-Canadian record of the development of Canada down to
1840, is able and moderate in tone, though considered by some critics not
sufficiently appreciative of the Church.
Of brief surveys of Canada's history the best are W. L. Grant's﹃History
of Canada﹄(1914) and H. E. Egerton's "Canada" (1908).
The primary sources are abundant. The Dominion Archives have made a
remarkable collection of original official and private papers and of
transcripts of documents from London and Paris. See D. W. Parker, "A Guide
to the Documents in the Manuscript Room at the Public Archives of Canada"
(1914). Many of these documents are calendared in the﹃Report on Canadian
Archives﹄(1882 to date), and complete reprints, systematically arranged
and competently annotated, are being issued by the Archives Branch, of
which A. Shortt and A. G. Doughty, "Documents Relating to the
Constitutional History of Canada", 1759-1791, and Doughty and McArthur,
"Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada", 1791-1818,
have already appeared. A useful collection of speeches and dispatches is
found in H. E. Egerton and W. L. Grant,﹃Canadian Constitutional
Development﹄(1907), and W. P. M. Kennedy has edited a somewhat larger
collection, "Documents of the Canadian Constitution", 1759-1915 (1918).
The later Sessional Papers and Hansards or Parliamentary Debates are
easily accessible. Files of the older newspapers, such as the Halifax
"Chronicle" (1820 to date, with changes of title), Montreal "Gazette"
(1778 to date), Toronto "Globe" (1844 to date), "Manitoba Free Press"
(1879 to date), Victoria "Colonist" (1858 to date), are invaluable. "The
Dominion Annual Register and Review", ed. by H. J. Morgan, 8 vols.
(1879-1887) and "The Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs", by John
Castell Hopkins (1901 to date), are useful for the periods covered.
For the first chapter, Sir Charles P. Lucas, "A History of Canada",
1765-1812 (1909) and A. G. Bradley, "The Making of Canada" (1908) are the
best single volumes. William Wood, "The Father of British Canada"
("Chronicles of Canada", 1916), records Carleton's defense of Canada in
the Revolutionary War; and Justin H. Smith's﹃Our Struggle for the
Fourteenth Colony﹄(1907) is a scholarly and detailed account of the same
period from an American standpoint. Victor Con's﹃The Province of Quebec
and the Early American Revolution﹄(1896), with a review of the same by
Adam Shortt in the "Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada",
vol. 1 (University of Toronto, 1897), and C. W. Alvord's "The Mississippi
Valley in British Politics", 2 vols. (1917) should be consulted for an
interpretation of the Quebec Act. For the general reader, W. S. Wallace's
"The United Empire Loyalists" ("Chronicles of Canada", 1914) supersedes
the earlier Canadian compilations; C. H. Van Tyne's﹃The Loyalists in the
American Revolution﹄(1902) and A. C. Flick's﹃Loyalism in New York during
the American Revolution﹄(1901) embody careful researches by two American
scholars. The War of 1812 is most competently treated by William Wood in
"The War with the United States" ("Chronicles of Canada", 1915); the naval
aspects are sketched in Theodore Roosevelt's "The Naval War of 1812"
(1882) and analyzed scientifically in A. T. Mahan's﹃Sea Power in its
Relations to the War of 1812﹄(1905).
For the period, 1815-1841, W. S. Wallace's "The Family Compact"
("Chronicles of Canada", 1915) and A. D. De Celles's﹃The Patriotes of
'37﹄("Chronicles of Canada", 1916) are the most concise summaries. J. C.
Dent's "The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion" (1885) is biased but
careful and readable. "William Lyon Mackenzie", by Charles Lindsey,
revised by G. G. S. Lindsey (1908), is a sober defense of Mackenzie by his
son-in-law and grandson. Robert Christie's "A History of the Late Province
of Lower Canada", 6 vols. (1848-1866) preserves much contemporary
material. There are few secondary books taking the anti-popular side: T.
C. Haliburton's "The Bubbles of Canada" (1839) records Sam Slick's
opposition to reform; C. W. Robinson's﹃Life of Sir John Beverley
Robinson﹄(1904) is a lifeless record of the greatest Compact leader. Lord
Durham's "Report on the Affairs of British North America" (1839; available
in Methuen reprint, 1902, or with introduction and notes by Sir Charles
Lucas, 3 vols., 1912) is indispensable. For the Union period there are
several political biographies available. G. M. Wrong's "The Earl of Elgin"
(1905), John Lewis's "George Brown" (1906), W. L. Grant's﹃The Tribune of
Nova Scotia﹄("Chronicles of Canada", 1915), J. Pope's "Memoirs of the
Right Honourable Sir John Alexander Macdonald", 2 vols. (1894), J. Boyd's
"Sir George Etienne Cartier" (1914), and O. D. Skelton's﹃Life and Times
of Sir A. T. Galt﹄(1919), cover the political developments from various
angles. A. H. U. Colquhoun's "The Fathers of Confederation" ("Chronicles
of Canada", 1916) is a clear and impartial account of the achievement of
Confederation; while M. O. Hammond's﹃Canadian Confederation and its
Leaders﹄(1917) records the service of each of its chief architects.
For the years since Confederation biographies again give the most
accessible record. Sir John S. Willison's﹃Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the
Liberal Party﹄(1903) is the best political biography yet written in
Canada. Sir Richard Cartwright's Reminiscences (1912) reflects that
statesman's individual and pungent views of affairs, while Sir Charles
Tupper's "Recollections of Sixty Years" (1914) and John Castell Hopkins's
"Life and Work of Sir John Thompson" (1895) give a Conservative version of
the period. Sir Joseph Pope's "The Day of Sir John Macdonald" ("Chronicles
of Canada", 1915), and O. D. Skelton's "The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier"
("Chronicles of Canada", 1916) between them cover the whole period
briefly. L. J. Burpee's "Sandford Fleming" (1915) is one of the few
biographies dealing with industrial as distinct from political leaders.
Imperial relations may be studied in G. R. Parkin's﹃Imperial Federation,
the Problem of National Unity﹄(1892) and in L. Curtis's﹃The Problem of
the Commonwealth﹄(1916), which advocate imperial federation, and in R.
Jebb's "The Britannic Question; a Survey of Alternatives" (1913), J. S.
Ewart's "The Kingdom Papers" (1912-), and A. B. Keith's﹃Imperial Unity
and the Dominions﹄(1916), which criticize that solution from different
standpoints. The "Reports" of the Imperial Conferences of 1887, 1894,
1897, 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, are of much value. Relations with the United
States are discussed judiciously in W. A. Dunning's﹃The British Empire
and the United States﹄(1914). Phases of Canada's recent development other
than political are covered best in the volumes of "Canada and its
Provinces", a History of the Canadian people and their institutions,
edited by A. Shortt and A. G. Doughty.
A useful guide to recent books dealing with Canadian history will be found
in the annual "Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada",
published by the University of Toronto (1896 to date).
End of Project Gutenberg's The Canadian Dominion, by Oscar D. Skelton
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CANADIAN DOMINION ***
***** This file should be named 2835-h.htm or 2835-h.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/2/8/3/2835/
Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
University; Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, Joe Buersmeyer, and David Widger
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase『Project
Gutenberg』is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the『Right
of Replacement or Refund』described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
gbnewby@pglaf.org
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
http://www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.