Such, then, was the imperial policy of Britain under the man who carried it farthest forward, before the great renaissance at the end of Queen Victoria's reign. To Grey, Canada was all that it had meant to Durham—a province peopled bysubjects of the Queen, and one destined by providence to have a great future—a fundamental part of the Empire, and one without which the imperial whole must be something meaner and less glorious. Like Durham he planned for it a constitution on the most generous lines, and conferred great gifts upon it. And, in exchange, he claimed a loyalty proportionate to the generosity of the Crown, and a propriety of political behaviour worthy of citizens of so great a state. In the last resort he held that in abnormal crises, or in response to great and beneficial policies, Canadians must forget their provincial outlook, or, if they could not, at least accept the ruling of an imperial parliament and a crown more enlightened and authoritative on these matters than a colonial ministry or people could be. Having conceded all the rights essential to a free existence, he mentioned duties, and called the sum of these duties Empire.
The concluding stage in the evolution of mid-Victorian opinion concerning Canada, which must now be described, differs essentially from the earlier stages, although, as it seems to me, the chief factor in the development is still Durham and his group. It is the period of separatism.
One thing has appeared very prominently in theforegoing argument—the prevalence of a fear, or even a fixed belief, that the connection between Britain and Canada must soon cease. Excluding, for the present, the entire group of extreme radicals, there was hardly a statesman of the earlier years of Victoria, who had not confessed that Canada must soon leave England, or be left. Many instances have been already cited. Among the Tories, Stanley thought that Bagot had already begun the process of separation, and that Metcalfe's failure would involve the end of the connection. Peel, ever judicial, gave his verdict in favour of separation, should Canadians persist in resenting imperial action. As Lord John Russell's view of autonomy expanded, his hopes for continued British supremacy contracted; and, on the evidence of a letter from Grey quoted above, Russell was not alone among the Whigs in his opinion, nor Peel among his immediate followers. The reckless and partizan use of the term Little-Englander has largely concealed the fact that apart from Durham, whose faith was not called upon to bear the test of experience, and Buller, Grey, and Elgin, who had special grounds for their confidence, all the responsible politicians of the years between 1840 and 1860 moved steadily towards a "Little England" position.The reasons for that movement are worthy of examination.
So far as the Tories were concerned, the change, already traced in detail, was not unnatural. In the eighteenth century, the colonies, possessed of just that responsible government for which Canadian reformers were clamouring, had with one accord left the Empire. The earlier nineteenth century had witnessed in the British American colonies a steadily increasing demand for the liberties, formerly possessed by the New England states. Representative assemblies had been granted; then a modified form of responsibility of the executive to these assemblies; then the complete surrender of executive to legislature. Attempts had been made to gain some countervailing powers by bargain; but, in Canada, the civil list had now been surrendered to local control, the endowment of the Church of England was practically at an end, patronage was in the hands of the provincial ministry, and all the exceptions which the central authority had claimed as essential to its continued existence followed in the wake of the lost executive supremacy. Neither Whigs nor Tories quite understood how an Empire was possible, in which there was no definite federating principle; or, if therewere, where the federating principle existed only to be neutralized as, one by one, the restrictions imposed by it were felt by the colonists to be annoying to their sense of freedom. Empire on these terms seemed to mean simply a capacity in the mother country for indefinite surrender. The accomplishment of the purpose proclaimed by Durham, Russell, and Grey, would, to a Tory even less peremptory than the Duke of Wellington, mean the end of the connection; and as they felt, so they spoke and acted. They were separatists, not of good-will, but from necessity and the nature of things.
Among the Whigs, an even more important process was at work. By 1850 the disintegration of the Whig party was already far advanced. Finality in reform had already been found impossible, and Russell and the advanced men were slowly drawing ahead of conservatives like Melbourne and Palmerston. After 1846, the liberalizing power of Peel's steady scientific intelligence was at work, transforming the ideas of his allies, as he had formerly shattered those of his old friends, and, of Peel's followers, Gladstone at least seemed to be looking in the same direction as his master—towards administrative liberalism. TheWhig creed and programme were in the melting pot. Now, what made the final product not Whig, but Liberal, was on the whole the increasing influence of the parliamentary Radicals; and in colonial matters the Radicals, who told on the revived and quickened Whig party, were pronouncedly in favour of separation. It is too often assumed that the imperial creed of Durham and Buller was shared in by their fellow Radicals. That is a grave mistake. One may trace a descent towards separatism from Molesworth to Roebuck and Brougham. In Molesworth, the tendency was comparatively slight. No doubt in 1837, under the stress of the news of rebellion, he had proclaimed the end of the British dominion in America as his sincere desire.[52] But he believed in a colonial empire, if England would only guarantee good government. "The emancipation of colonies," he said, in a cooler mood, "must be a question of time and a question, in each case, of special expediency ... a question which would seldom or never arise between a colony and its mother country if all colonies were well governed"; and he explained his language about Canada on grounds of bad government. "I hope that the people ofthat country (Lower Canada) will either recover the constitution which we have violated, or become wholly independent of us."[53] It is not necessary to quote Hume's confused but well-intentioned wanderings—views sharing with those of the people whom Hume represented, their crude philanthropy and imperfect clearness. But Roebuck marked a definite stage in advance; for, while he was willing to keep "the connexion," where it could be kept with honour, he seems to have regarded separation as inevitable—"come it must," he said—and his best hopes were that the separation might take place in amity and that a British North American federation might counterbalance the Union to the south.[54] Grote's placid and facile radicalism accepted the growing breach with Canada as the most desirable thing which could happen both to the mother country and the colony; and Brougham directed all his eccentric and ill-ordered energy and eloquence, not only to denounce the Whig leaders, but to proclaim the necessity of the new Canadian republic. "Not only do I consider the possession as worth no breach of the Constitution ... but in a national view I really hold those colonies tobe worth nothing. I am well assured that we shall find them very little worth the cost they have entailed on us, in men, in money, and in injuries to our trade; nay, that their separation will be even now a positive gain, so it be effected on friendly terms, and succeeded by an amicable intercourse."[55]
Separation was indubitably a dogma of philosophic radicalism; and yet it was not so much the influence of this metaphysical and doctrinaire belief which moved Whig opinion. It was rather the plain business-like and matter-of-fact radicalism of the economist statesmen, led by Bright and Cobden. Of the two forces represented by Peel and by Cobden, which completed the formation of a modern Liberal party, the latter was on the whole the stronger; and Bright and Cobden took the views of their Radical predecessors, and out of airy and ineffectual longings created solid political facts. "I cannot disguise from myself," wrote Grey to Elgin in 1850, "that opinion in this country is tending more and more to the rejection of any burden whatever, on account of our colonies"; and the reason for the tendency was certainly the purely economic views to whichCobden was accustoming Britain, and the cogency of the arguments by which he was driving amateur politicians from their earlier indefensible positions. That trade was all-important, and that the operations of trade disregarded the irrelevant facts of nationality and race; that no one community could interfere in the social and political life of another without disaster to both; that the defence of colonies was not only dangerous to peace as provoking suspicious neighbours, but needless expense to the mother country; in short thatlaissez-fairewas the dominating principle in politics, and thatlaissez-faireshattered the earlier dreams of imperial supremacy and colonial dependency—these were the views introduced by Cobden and Bright into a newly awakened and imperfectly educated England; and they played just such havoc with earlier political ideas, as Darwin and evolution did with pre-existing theological orthodoxy.[56]
It was hardly wonderful then that the Whigs moved steadily onward until they almost acquiesced in the idea of imperial disruption; and, since Peelhad left his party moved almost wholly by Cobden's economic propaganda, it was not unnatural that the Peelites should share the views of their Whig allies. It is indeed possible to find some cold consolation in Gladstone's Chester speech in 1855, when he predicted that if only the colonies were left freedom of judgment, it would be hard to say when the day of separation might come.[57] But Grey had already suspected Gladstone of pessimism on the point, and we now know that as an imperialist Gladstone's course from 1855 had a downward tendency. He could not resist the arguments of his Radical friends and teachers.
Almost all the important relevant facts and events which concerned the connection after 1846 assisted these party movements towards belief in separation.
Grey, whose confidence in the beneficial results of free trade challenged that of Cobden himself, believed that with Protection there vanished an awkward enemy of the connection between Canada and Britain.[58] But Grey was unmistakably doctrinaire on the point. Elgin warned him, again and again, of "the uneasy feeling which thefree-trade policy of the mother country ... has tended to produce in the colonial mind,"[59] and that uneasiness passed gradually over to Britain. It would be to trespass unduly beyond the limits prescribed in this essay to deal with the introduction of the Canadian tariff in 1858 and 1859; yet the statements of Galt who introduced the budget in the latter year strike the reader now, as they must have struck the British reader then, with a sense that the connection was practically at an end: "The government of Canada cannot, through those feelings of deference which they owe to the Imperial authorities, in any measure waive or diminish the right of the people of Canada to decide for themselves both as to the mode and extent to which taxation shall be imposed.... The Imperial government are not responsible for the debts and engagements of Canada. They do not maintain its judicial, educational, or civil service. They contribute nothing to the internal government of the country; and the Provincial Legislature, acting through a ministry directly responsible to it, has to make provision for all these wants. They must necessarily claim and exercise the widest latitude, as to the nature, andthe extent of the burdens, to be placed upon the industry of the people."[60] There was almost everything to be said in favour of this enlightened selfishness; and yet a growing coolness on the part of British legislators was, under the circumstances, very comprehensible. It was all the more so, because the innovations in Canada influenced British diplomacy in its relations with the United States; and between 1854, the date of Elgin's Reciprocity Treaty, and 1867, British statesmen learned some of the curious ramifications of their original gift of autonomy to Canada. In diplomacy as in economic relations, their appreciation of the value of the connection did not increase.
Parallel with this disruptive tendency in the new economic policy, another in military matters began to make itself felt. As Canada received her successive grants of liberties, and ever new liberties, the imperial authorities began to consider the advisability of withdrawing imperial troops by degrees, and of leaving Canada to meet the ordinary demands of her own defence. Grey and Elgin had corresponded largely on the point; and the result had been a very general reduction of British troopsin Canada, the assumption being that Canada would look to her own protection. To discover the character of the change thus introduced, and its bearing on imperial politics, it again becomes necessary to travel beyond the limit set, and to examine its results between 1860 and 1867. In these years the military situation developed new and alarming possibilities for Canada. The re-organization of the Canadian tariff excited much ill-feeling in the United States, for it seemed an infringement of the arrangements made by Elgin in 1854.[61] Then followed theTrentepisode, the destruction created by theAlabama, the questionable policy both of England and of Canada in taking sides, no matter how informally, in the war. In addition, the Irish-American section of the population, which had furnished its share, both of rank and file, and of leaders, to the war, was in those years bitterly hostile to the British Empire, and plotted incessantly some secret stroke which should wound Britain through Canada. The gravest danger threatening British peace and supremacy at that time lay, not in Europe, but along the Canadianfrontier, nor would it be fair to say that Britain alone, not Canada, had helped to provoke the threatened American attack. Under these circumstances, partly because of the expense, but partly also through factiousness and provincial shortsightedness, the Canadian assembly rejected a scheme for providing an adequate militia, and left a situation quite impossible from the military point of view. Instantly a storm of criticism broke over the heads of the colonies, so bitter and unqualified that there are those who believe that to this day the mutual relations of Britain and Canada have never quite recovered their old sincerity.[62] A member of the Canadian parliament, who was travelling at the time in England, found the country in arms against his province: "You have no idea of the feeling that exists here about the Militia Bill, and the defences of Canada generally. No one will believe that there is not a want of loyalty among the Canadians, and whenever I try to defend Canada, the answer is always the same, that 'the English look for actions not assertions'; many hard and unjust things are now said about the country, all of which add strength to the Goldwin Smith party, which, afterall, is not a very small one; and the Derbyites make no secret of what they would do if they were in power,—let Canada take her chance."[63] Even Earl Grey was prepared, at that crisis, to submit to the British and Canadian parliaments a clear issue, calling on the latter to afford adequate support to the British forces left in British North America, or to permit the last of them to leave a country heedless of its own safety.[64] From that time forth, more especially after Lee, Jackson, Grant, and Sherman had revealed the military possibilities of the American Republic, even military men began to accept the strategic arguments against the retention of Canada as unanswerable, and joined the ranks of those who called for separation. Richard Cartwright, who had opportunities for testing British opinion, more especially among military officers, found a universal agreement that Canada was indefensible, and that separation had better take place, before rather than after war.[65] So John Bright and the leaders of the British army had at last found a point in diplomacy and strategy on which they might agree.
A considerable portion of authoritative British opinion has now been traversed; and beneath all its contradictions and varieties a deep general tendency has been discovered. That tendency made for the separation of Canada from England and the Empire. It is strange to see how resolutely writers have evaded the conclusion, and yet, if the views discussed above have been fairly stated, only four men of note and authority, Durham, Buller, Elgin, and Grey remained unaffected by the growing pessimism of the time, and of these, the last seemed at the end to find it difficult to maintain the confidence of 1853 under the trials of 1862. Britain was, in fact, undergoing a great secular change of policy. She had been driven, step by step, from the old position of supremacy and authority. As in commerce the security of protection had been abandoned for the still doubtful advantages of free trade, so, in the colonies, the former cast-iron system of imperial control had been abandoned for one oflaissez-faireand self-government. It would have been impossible for British statesmen to follow any other course than that which they actually chose. Self-government, and self-government to the last detail and corollary of the argument they must perforce concede. Butin the stress of their imperial necessities, it was not strange that they should discern all the signs of disruption, rather than the gleams of hope; and men like Disraeli who claimed at a later date that they had never despaired of the Empire, did so at the expense of their sincerity, and could do so only because the false remedies they prescribed were happily incapable of application. Little Englandism, if that unfortunate term may be used to describe an essential and inevitable phase of imperial expansion, was the creed of all but one or two of the most capable and daring statesmen of the mid-Victorian age.
Strangely enough, while they had exhausted the materials for their argument so far as these lay in Britain, they had all failed to regard the one really important factor in the situation—the inclinations of the Canadian people. For the connection of Britain with Canada depended less on what the ministers of the Crown thought of Canada than on what the Canadians thought of their mother country.
[1] In Fenwick (Scotland), the Improvement of Knowledge Society discussed Canadian affairs on 1 January, 1839, when James Taylor proposed the sentiment, "The speedy success of the Canadian struggle for emancipation from British thraldom." The toast, according to the minute book, was enthusiastically honoured.
[2] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 1 November, 1851.
[3] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 11 May, 1849.
[4] Allin and Jones,Annexation, Preferential Trade, and Reciprocity, Chap. IX.
[5]Responsible Government for the Colonies, London, 1840. See the extract made by Wakefield in hisView of the Art of Colonization, p. 279.
[6]The Autobiography of Sir Henry Taylor, passim.
[7]Ibid.ii. pp. 302-3.
[8] Leslie Stephen,Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, p. 49. "On the appointment of a Governor-general of Canada, shortly before his resignation of office, he observes in a diary, that it is not unlikely to be the last that will ever be made."
[9] Wakefield,Art of Colonization, p. 317.
[10]Ibid.pp. 312-3.
[11] Froude,Early Life of Carlyle, ii. p. 446.
[12]Responsible Government for the Colonies, p. 65.
[13]Responsible Government for the Colonies, p. 37.
[14]Responsible Government for the Colonies, p. 98.
[15] I am inclined to accept John Stuart Mill's account of the authorship—"written by Charles Buller, partly under the influence of Wakefield."
[16] Quoted by Hincks inA Lecture on the Political History of Canada, p. 9.
[17] Kaye,Papers and Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe, pp. 414-15.
[18]Lord Durham's Report(Lucas), ii. p. 280.
[19] See an admirable discussion of the point in Lucas's edition of theReport, i. p. 146 and ii. p. 281.
[20]Ibid.ii. p. 282.
[21] A speech by Charles Buller inHansard, 30 May, 1844.
[22] Arthur to Normanby, 21 August, 1839.
[23]Ibid.15 October, 1839.
[24] Protest of the Duke of Wellington against the Third Reading of a bill, etc., 13 July, 1840.
[25] Parker,Life of Sir Robert Peel, iii. pp. 382-3.
[26] Stanley to Metcalfe, 18 June, 1845.
[27] Gladstone to Cathcart, 3 February, 1846.
[28] Gladstone's speech in Hansard, 14 June, 1849.
[29] Parker,Life of Sir Robert Peel, iii. p. 389.
[30]Hansard, 4 March, 1853.
[31]Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, i. p. 344: Disraeli to Malmesbury, 13 August, 1852.
[32]The Speeches of the Earl of Beaconsfield, ii. p. 530.
[33]Hansard, 9 March, 1876. The whole speech is an admirable example of Disraeli's gift of irresponsible paradox.
[34]Hansard, 3 June, 1839.
[35]Ibid.30 May, 1844.
[36]Hansard, 16 January, 1838.
[37] Walpole,Life of Lord John Russell, pp. 339-40.
[38] Walpole,Life of Lord John Russell, pp. 339-40.
[39] The reference is to the Rebellion Losses Act riots.
[40] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 8 August, 1849.
[41]Hansard, 30 May, 1844.
[42] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 18 May, 1849.
[43]Ibid.: Grey to Elgin, 6 April, 1849.
[44] Earl Grey to Sir John Harvey, 3 November, 1846.
[45] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 22 February, 1848.
[46] Grey,Colonial Policy, i. p. 25.
[47] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 5 December, 1850.
[48] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 25 October, 1849.
[49] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 20 July, 1849.
[50]Ibid.: Grey to Elgin, 22 March, 1848.
[51] Grey,Colonial Policy, i. pp. 13-14.
[52] Molesworth inHansard, 22 December, 1837.
[53] Molesworth inHansard, 6 March, 1838.
[54] Roebuck before the House of Commons, 22 January, 1838.
[55] Brougham inHansard, 18 January, 1838.
[56] See, for a very complete statement of Bright's views on the point, his speech onCanadian Fortifications, 23 March, 1865. Cobden's colonial policy is scattered broadcast through his speeches.
[57] Morley,Life of Gladstone, i. p. 269.
[58] See the preliminary chapter in hisColonial Policy.
[59] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 6 December, 1848.
[60] See Galt,Canada from1849to1859, and his memorandum of 25 October, 1859.
[61] See a despatch from Lord Lyons respecting the Reciprocity Treaty, Washington, 28 February, 1862: enclosing a copy of the report of the committee of the House of Representatives on the Reciprocity Treaty.
[62] See Dent,The Last Forty Years, ii. p. 426.
[63] Pope,Life of Sir John Macdonald, i. p. 242.
[64] Earl Grey, inHansard, 18 July, 1862.
[65] Sir Richard Cartwright,Reminiscences, p. 55.
A change so informally achieved, and yet so decisive, as the completion of a system of self-government in Canada could not but have far-reaching and unexpected secondary consequences. It is the object of this chapter to trace the more important of these as they appeared in the institutions and public life of Canada, and in the modification of Canadian sentiment towards Great Britain.
The most obvious and natural effect of Elgin's concessions was a revolution in the programmes of the provincial parties, and in their relations to each other and to government. It may be remembered that all the governors of the period agreed in reprobating the factiousness and pettiness of Canadian party politics. Even Elgin had been unable to see very much rationality in their methods. There was, he held, little of public principle to dividemen, apart from the fundamental question of responsible government.[1] But it is possible to underestimate the reality and importance of the party system as it existed down to 1847. To have admitted that men differed on the principle of responsible government, was to have admitted that party strife had some justification; and all the other details—affections and antipathies, national, sectarian, and personal—were the circumstances natural to party life as that life has everywhere come into existence. Burke himself sought no higher ground for the grouping of men into parties than that of family connection, and common friendships and enmities. No doubt the squalor and pettiness of early Canadian party life contrasted meanly with the glories of the eighteenth century Whigs, and the struggles of Fox and Pitt. But a nation must begin somewhere, and these trivial divisions received a kind of consecration when they centred round the discussion of colonial self-government. After all, so long as autonomy was only partially conceded, and so long as men felt impelled to take opposite sides on that subject, it was foolish to deny that there were Canadian parties, and that their differences were of some importance.
Moreover, before 1847 there were other good reasons for the existence of two distinct parties. It was true, as Sydenham had said, that the British party names were not quite appropriate to the parties in Canada who had adopted them. Yet there were some links between British and Canadian parties. The British and the Canadian Tories had, in 1840, many views in common. In a time of change both stood for a pronounced distrust of democracy; both regarded the creation of responsible government in Canada as disastrous to the connection; both were the defenders of Church and State. On the other hand, it was not unnatural, as Elgin came to see, to compare the party led by Baldwin and La Fontaine with the Reformers in England who looked to Lord John Russell as their true leader. Until the political traditions, which most of the recent immigrants had brought with them from Britain, had disappeared or been transformed into a new Canadian tradition, and so long as certain grave constitutional defects which cried for remedy remained unaltered, Canadian Tories and Reformers must exist, and government, as Metcalfe discovered, was impossible, unless it recognized in these provincial divisions the motive power of local administration.
But between 1847 and 1854 the foundations of these earlier parties had been, not so much undermined, as entirely removed. "The continuance of agitation on these intensely exciting questions," wrote Elgin in his latest despatch from Canada, "was greatly to be deprecated, and their settlement, on terms which command the general acquiescence of those who are most deeply interested, can hardly fail to be attended with results in a high degree beneficial."[2] Elgin had removed the reason for existence of both parties by settling the issues which divided them. At the same time, the growth of a political life different from that of Britain, had, year by year, made the British names more inappropriate. John A. Macdonald, the leader of those who had once called themselves Tories, was confessing the change when he wrote, in 1860, "While I have always been a member of what is called the Conservative party, I could never have been called a Tory, although there is no man who more respects what is called old-fogey Toryism than I do, so long as it is based upon principle."[3] The fierce battles over constitutional theories,which a series of British governors and governments had so long deprecated, had at last been eliminated by the natural development of Canadian political life.
The same natural development provided a substitute for the older party system. Elgin, as has been seen, belonged to the group of Peelites, who, during the lifetime of their leader and long after it, endeavoured to solve the new administrative problems of the nineteenth century without too strict an adherence to party programmes and lines of division. Curiously enough, he was the chief agent in stimulating a similar political movement in Canada. There was, however, this difference, that while in Peel's case, and still more in that of his followers, the British party tradition proved overwhelmingly powerful, in Canada, where tradition was weaker, and the need for sound administration far more vital, the movement became dominant in the form of Liberal-conservatism. In other words, in place of small violently antagonistic parties, moderate men inclined to come together to carry out a broad, non-controversial, national programme.
There are few more remarkable developments in Canada between 1840 and 1867 than this tendencytowards government by a single party. It was Sydenham's shrewd insight into the Canadian political situation, even more than his desire to rule, which led him to govern Canada by a coalition of moderate men. His only mistake lay in trying to force on the province what should have come by nature. The Baldwin-La Fontaine compact, which really dominated Canadian politics from 1841, was a partial experiment in government by an alliance of groups; and when the great exciting questions, Responsible Government and Church Establishment, had been settled, and the end in view seemed simply to be the carrying on of the Queen's government, Liberal-conservatism entered gradually into possession. When Baldwin and La Fontaine made way for Hincks and Morin in 1851, the change was recognized as a step towards the re-union of the moderates. For, in the face of George Brown, and his advocacy of a more provocative radical programme, Francis Hincks declared for some kind of coalition: "I regret to say there have been indications given by a section of the party to which I belong, that it will be difficult indeed, unless they change their policy, to preserve the Union. I will tell these persons (the anti-state church reformers of Upper Canada)that if the Union is not preserved by them, as a necessary consequence, other combinations must be formed by which the Union may be preserved.I am ready to give my cordial support to any combination of parties by which the Union shall be maintained."[4] Three years later, the party of moderate reform which had co-operated with Elgin in creating a system of truly responsible government, and which had done so much to restore Canadian political equanimity, fell before a factious combination of hostile groups. But the succeeding administration, nominally Conservative, was actually Liberal-Conservative, and it remained in power chiefly because Francis Hincks, who had led the Reformers, desired his followers to assist it, as Peel and his immediate disciples kept the British Whigs in office after 1846. Robert Baldwin had been the leader of opposition during Sydenham's rule, and before it; indeed, he may be called the organizer of party division in the days before the grant of responsible government. Yet when the opponents of the compact of 1854 quoted his precedent of party division against Hincks' principle of union, Baldwin disowned his would-be supporters: "However disinclined myself toadventure upon such combinations, they are unquestionably, in my opinion, under certain circumstances, not only justifiable, but expedient, and even necessary. The government of the countrymustbe carried on. It ought to be carried on with vigour. If that can be done in no other way than by mutual concessions and a coalition of parties, they become necessary."[5] In consequence, the autumn of 1854 witnessed the remarkable spectacle of a Tory government, headed by Sir Allan MacNab, carrying a bill to end the Clergy Reserve troubles, in alliance with Francis Hincks and their late opponents. The chief dissentients were the extreme radicals, who were now nicknamed the Clear-Grits.[6]
After 1854, and for ten years, the political history of Canada is areductio ad absurdumof the older party system. Government succeeded government, only to fall a prey to its own lack of a sufficient majority, and the unprincipled use by its various opponents of casual combinations andalliances. Apart from a little group of Radicals, British and French, who advocated reforms with an absence of moderation which made them impossible as ministers of state, there were not sufficient differences to justify two parties, and hardly sufficient programme even for one. The old Tories disappeared from power with their leader, Sir Allan MacNab, in 1856. The Baldwin-Hincks reformers had distributed themselves through all the parties—Canadian Peelites they may be called. The great majority of the representatives of the French followed moderate counsels, and were usually sought as allies by whatever government held office. The broader principles of party warfare were proclaimed only by the Clear-Grits of Upper Canada and theRougesof Lower Canada. The latter group was distinct enough in its views to be impossible as allies for any but like-minded extremists: "Le parti rouge," saysLa Minerve, "s'est formé à Montreal sous les auspices de M. Papineau, en haine des institutions anglaises, de notre constitution déclarée vicieuse, et surtout du gouvernement responsable regardé comme une duperie, avec des idées d'innovation en religion et en politique, accompagnées d'une haine profond pour le clergé, et avec l'intentionbien formelle, et bien prononcée d'annexer le Canada aux Etats-Unis."[7]
As for the original Clear-Grits, their distinguishing features were the advocacy of reforming ideas in so extreme a form as to make them useless for practical purposes, an anti-clerical or extreme Protestant outlook in religion, and a moral superiority, partly real, but more largely the Pharisaism so inevitably connected with all forms of radical propaganda. They proved their futility in 1858, when George Brown and A. A. Dorion formed their two-days' administration, and extinguished the credit of their parties, and themselves, as politicians capable of existence apart from moderate allies. Until Canadian politics could have their scope enlarged, and the issues at stake made more vital, and therefore more controversial, it was obvious that the grant of responsible government had rendered the existing party system useless.
The significant moment in this period of Canadian history came in 1864, when all the responsible politicians in the country, and more especially the two great personal enemies, John A. Macdonald and George Brown, came together to carry out a scheme of confederation, which was too great tobe the object of petty party strife, and which required the support of all parties to make it successful. Both political parties, as George Brown confessed, had tried to govern the country, and each in turn had failed from lack of steady adequate support. A general election was unlikely to effect any improvement in the situation, and the one hope seemed to lie in a frank combination between opponents to solve the constitutional difficulties which threatened to ruin the province. "After much discussion on both sides," ran the official declaration, "it was found that a compromise might probably be had in the adoption either of the federal principle for the British North American provinces, as the larger question, or for Canada alone, with provisions for the admission of the Maritime Provinces and the North-Western Territory, when they should express the desire": and to secure the most perfect unanimity the ministers, Sir E. P. Taché and Mr. Macdonald, "thereon stated that, after the prorogation, they would be prepared to place three seats in the Cabinet at the disposal of Mr. Brown."[8]
It is not within the scope of this essay to discussdevelopments after Confederation, yet it is an interesting speculation whether, up to a date quite recent, the grant of responsible government did not continue to make a two-party system on the British basis unnatural to Canada. Between 1847 and 1867, the destruction of the dual system, and the creation of government by coalition, were certainly the dominant facts in Canadian politics, and both were the products of the gift of autonomy. Since 1867, it is possible to contend that, while two sets of politicians offer themselves as alternative governments to the electors, their differentiation has reference rather to the holding of office than to a real distinction in programme. Alike in trade, imperial policy, and domestic progress, the inclination has been towards compromise, and either side inclines, or is forced, to steal the programme of the other. Responsible government was the last issue which arrayed men in parties, neither of which could quite accept a compromise with the other. It remains to be seen whether questions of freer trade, imperial organization, and provincial rights, will once more create parties with something deeper in their differences than mere rival claims to hold office.
If the creation of a Liberal-Conservative partywas a direct result of the grant of autonomy, so also was the policy which led to Confederation. It is no part of the present volume to trace the growth of the idea of Confederation, or to determine who the actual fathers of Confederation were. The connection between Autonomy and Confederation in the province of Canada was that the former made the latter inevitable.
Earlier chapters have dealt with the French Canadian problem, and the difficulty of combining Frenchnationalitéwith the Anglo-Saxon elements of the West. In one sense, Elgin's regime saw nationalism lose all its awkward features. Papineau's return to public life in 1848, and the revolutionary stir of that year had left Lower Canada untouched, save in the negligible section represented by theRouges. The inclusion of La Fontaine and his friends in the ministry had proved thebona fidesof the governor, and the French, being, as Elgin said, "quiet sort of people," stood fast by their friend. "Candour compels me to state," he wrote after a year of annexationist agitation, "that the conduct of the Anglo-Saxon portion of our M.P.Ps contrasts most unfavourably with that of the Gallican.... The French have been rescued from the false position into which theyhave been driven, and in which they must perforce have remained, so long as they believed that it was the object of the British government, as avowed by Lord Sydenham and others, to break them down, and to ensure to the British race, not by trusting to the natural course of events, but by dint of management and state craft, predominance in the province."[9]
But while French nationalism had assumed a perfectly normal phase, the operations of autonomy after 1847 made steadily towards the creation of a new nationalist difficulty. That difficulty had two phases.
In the first place, while the Union of Upper and Lower Canada had been based on the assumption that from it a single nationality with common ideals and objects would emerge, experience proved that both the French and the British sections remained aggressively true to their own ways; and the independence bred by self-government only quickened the sense of racial distinction. Now there were questions, such as that of the Clergy Reserves, which chiefly concerned the British section; and others, like the settlement of the seigniorial tenure, of purely French-Canadiancharacter. Others again, chief among them the problem of separate schools, in Lower Canada for Protestants, in Upper Canada for Catholics, seemed to set the two sections in direct opposition. Under the circumstances, a series of conventions was created to meet a situation very involved and dangerous. The happy accident of the dual leadership of La Fontaine and Baldwin furnished a precedent for successive ministries, each of which took its name from a similar partnership of French and English. Further, although the principle never received official sanction, it became usual to expect that, in questions affecting the French, a majority from Lower Canada should be obtained, and in English matters, one from Upper Canada. It was also the custom to expect a government to prove its stability by maintaining a majority from both Upper and Lower Canada. Nothing, for example, so strengthened Elgin's hands in the Rebellion Losses fight as the fact that the majority which passed the bill was one in both sections of the Assembly. Yet nearly all cabinet ministers, and all the governors-general, strongly opposed the acknowledgment of "the double majority" as an accepted constitutional principle. "I have told Colonel Taché," wrote Head, in 1856, "that Iexpect the government formed by him to disavow the principle of a double majority";[10] and both Baldwin, and, after him, John A. Macdonald refused to countenance the practice. Unfortunately, while the idea was a constitutional anomaly, threatening all manner of complications to the government of Canada, there were occasions when it had to receive a partial sanction from use. When the Tories were sustained by a majority of 4 in 1856, government suffered reconstruction because there had been a minority of votes from Upper Canada. As the new Tory leader explained, "I did not, and I do not think that the double majority system should be adopted as a rule. I feel that so long as we are one province and one Parliament, the fact of a measure being carried by a working majority is sufficient evidence that the Government of the day is in power to conduct the affairs of the country. But I could not disguise from myself that it (the recent vote) was not a vote on a measure, but a distinct vote of confidence, or want of confidence; and there having been a vote against us from Upper Canada, expressing a want of confidence in the government, I felt that it was a sufficient indication that the measures of the governmentwould be met with the opposition of those honorable gentlemen who had by their solemn vote withdrawn their confidence from the government."[11] The practice continued in this state of discredit varied by occasional forced use, until a government—that of J. S. Macdonald and Sicotte—which had definitely made the double majority one of the planks in its platform, found that its principal measure, the Separate Schools Act of R. W. Scott, had to be carried by a French majority, although the matter was one of deep concern to Upper Canada. It was becoming obvious that local interests must receive some securer protection than could be afforded by what was after all an evasion of constitutional practice.
Meanwhile complications were arising from another movement, the agitation for a revision of parliamentary representation. The twelfth section of the Union Act had enacted that "the parts of the said Province which now constitute the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada respectively, shall be represented by an equal number of representatives." At the time of Union the balance of population had inclined decisively towardsLower Canada; indeed that part of the province might fairly claim to have a constitutional grievance. But between 1830 and 1860 the balance had altered. In Lower Canada a population, which in 1831 had been 511,922, had increased by 1844 to almost 700,000; while in Upper Canada the numbers had increased from 334,681 to well over 700,000 in 1848;[12] and each year saw the west increase in comparison with the east, until George Brown, speaking no doubt with forensic rather than scientific ends in view, estimated that in 1857 Upper Canada possessed a population of over 1,400,000, as against a bare 1,100,000 in Lower Canada.[13] These changes produced a most interesting complication. The representation after 1840 stood guaranteed by a solemn act—the more solemn because it had been the result of a bargain between Sydenham and the provincial authorities in Upper and Lower Canada. It had the appearance rather of a treaty than of an ordinary Act of Parliament. On the other hand, since self-government had been secured, and since self-government seemed to involve the principle of representation in proportionto the numbers of the population, it was, according to the Upper Canadian politicians, absurd to give to 1,100,000 the same representation as to 1,400,000. So George Brown, speaking from his place in Parliament, and using, at the same time, his extraordinary and unequalled influence as editor ofThe Globe, flung himself into the fray, seeking, as his motion of 1857 ran, "that the representation of the people in Parliament should be based upon population, without regard to a separating line between Upper and Lower Canada."[14] His thesis was too cogent, and appealed too powerfully to all classes of the Upper Canada community, to be anything but irresistible. Even Macdonald, whose political existence depended on his alliance with the French, knew that his rival had made many converts among the British Conservatives. "It is an open question," he wrote of representation by population, in 1861, "and you know two of my colleagues voted in its favour."[15]
Yet nothing was better calculated to rouse into wild agitation the quiescent feeling of French nationalism. The attempt of Durham and his successors to end, by natural operation, the separateexistence of French nationality was now being renewed with far greater vigour, and with all the weight of a normal constitutional reform. If George Brown was hateful to the French electorate because of his Protestant and anti-clerical agitation, he was even more odious as the statesman who threatened, in the name of Canadian autonomy, the existence of old French tradition, custom, and right. It was in answer to this twofold difficulty that Canadian statesmen definitely thought of Confederation. There were many roads leading to that event—the desire of Britain for a more compact and defensible colony; the movement in the maritime provinces for a local federation; the dream, or vague aspiration, cherished by a few Canadians, of a vaster dominion, and one free from petty local divisions and strifes. But it was no dream or imperial ideal which forced Canadian statesmen into action; it was simply the desire, on the one hand, to give to the progressive west the increased weight it claimed as due to its numbers; and on the other, to safeguard the ancient ways and rights of the French community. From this point of view, it was George Brown, the man who preached representation by population in season and out of season, who actually forcedCanadian statesmen to have resort to a measure, the details of which he himself did not at first approve; and the argument used to drive the point home was not imperial, but a bitter criticism of existing conditions. After the great Reform convention of 1859, Brown moved in Parliament "that the existing legislative union between Upper and Lower Canada has failed to realize the anticipations of its promoters: has resulted in a heavy debt, burdensome taxation, great political abuses, and universal dissatisfaction; and it is the matured conviction of this Assembly, from the antagonisms developed through difference of origin, local interests, and other causes, that the union in its present form can be no longer continued with advantage to the people."[16] In 1864 a distracted province found itself at the end of its resources. Its futile efforts at the game of political party had resulted in the defeat of four ministries within three years; its attempt to balance majorities in Upper and Lower Canada had hopelessly broken down; and the moment in which the stronger British west obtained the increased representation it sought, the French feeling for nationality would probably once more produce rebellion.