_Formation op Canadian Character.--The Rival Colonies.--England
and France.--New England.--Characteristics op Race.--Military
Qualities.--The Church.--The English Conquest._
|Not institutions alone, but geographical position, climate, and many
other conditions unite to form the educational influences that, acting
through successive generations, shape the character of nations and
communities.
It is easy to see the nature of the education, past and present, which
wrought on the Canadians and made them what they were. An ignorant
population, sprung from a brave and active race, but trained to
subjection and dependence through centuries of feudal and monarchical
despotism, was planted in the wilderness by the hand of authority,
and told to grow and flourish. Artificial stimulants were applied, but
freedom was withheld. Perpetual intervention of government, regulations,
restrictions, encouragements sometimes more mischievous than
restrictions, a constant uncertainty what the authorities would do
next, the fate of each man resting less with himself than with another,
volition enfeebled, self-reliance paralyzed,--the condition, in
short, of a child held always under the rule of a father, in the main
well-meaning and kind, sometimes generous, sometimes neglectful, often
capricious, and rarely very wise,--such were the influences under which
Canada grew up. If she had prospered, it would have been sheer miracle.
A man, to be a man, must feel that he holds his fate, in some good
measure, in his own hands.
But this was not all. Against absolute authority there was a counter
influence, rudely and wildly antagonistic. Canada was at the very portal
of the great interior wilderness. The St. Lawrence and the Lakes
were the highway to that domain of savage freedom; and thither the
disfranchised, half-starved seignior, and the discouraged _habitant_
who could find no market for his produce, naturally enough betook
themselves. Their lesson of savagery was well learned, and for many a
year a boundless license and a stiff-handed authority battled for
the control of Canada. Nor, to the last, were church and state fairly
masters of the field. The French rule was drawing towards its close when
the intendant complained that though twenty-eight companies of regular
troops were quartered in the colony, there were not soldiers enough
to keep the people in order. * One cannot but remember that in a
neighboring colony, far more populous, perfect order prevailed, with no
other
* Mémoire de 1736 (printed by the Historical Society of
Quebec).
guardians than a few constables chosen by the people themselves.
Whence arose this difference, and other differences equally striking,
between the rival colonies? It is easy to ascribe them to a difference
of political and religious institutions; but the explanation does
not cover the ground. The institutions of New England were utterly
inapplicable to the population of New France, and the attempt to apply
them would have wrought nothing but mischief. There are no political
panaceas, except in the imagination of political quacks. To each
degree and each variety of public development there are corresponding
institutions, best answering the public needs; and what is meat to one
is poison to another. Freedom is for those who are fit for it. The rest
will lose it, or turn it to corruption. Church and state were right
in exercising authority over a people which had not learned the first
rudiments of self-government. Their fault was not that they exercised
authority, but that they exercised too much of it, and, instead of
weaning the child to go alone, kept him in perpetual leading-strings,
making him, if possible, more and more dependent, and less and less fit
for freedom.
In the building up of colonies, England succeeded and France failed.
The cause lies chiefly in the vast advantage drawn by England from the
historical training of her people in habits of reflection, forecast,
industry, and self-reliance,--a training which enabled them to adopt and
maintain an invigorating system of self-rule, totally inapplicable to
their rivals.
The New England colonists were far less fugitives from oppression than
voluntary exiles seeking the realization of an idea. They were neither
peasants nor soldiers, but a substantial Puritan yeomanry, led by
Puritan gentlemen and divines in thorough sympathy with them. They were
neither sent out by the king, governed by him, nor helped by him. They
grew up in utter neglect, and continued neglect was the only boon they
asked. Till their increasing strength roused the jealousy of the
Crown, they were virtually independent; a republic, but by no means a
democracy. They chose their governor and all their rulers from among
themselves, made their own government and paid for it, supported their
own clergy, defended themselves, and educated themselves. Under the hard
and repellent surface of New England society lay the true foundations of
a stable freedom,--conscience, reflection, faith, patience, and public
spirit. The cement of common interests, hopes, and duties compacted the
whole people like a rock of conglomerate; while the people of New France
remained in a state of political segregation, like a basket of pebbles
held together by the enclosure that surrounds them.
It may be that the difference of historical antecedents would alone
explain the difference of character between the rival colonies; but
there are deeper causes, the influence of which went far to determine
the antecedents themselves. The Germanic race, and especially the
Anglo-Saxon branch of it, is peculiarly masculine, and, therefore,
peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its action habitually
to the guidance of reason, and has the judicial faculty of seeing both
sides of a question. The French Celt is cast in a different mould.
He sees the end distinctly, and reasons about it with an admirable
clearness; but his own impulses and passions continually turn him away
from it. Opposition excites him; he is impatient of delay, is impelled
always to extremes, and does not readily sacrifice a present inclination
to an ultimate good. He delights in abstractions and generalizations,
cuts loose from unpleasing facts, and roams through an ocean of desires
and theories.
While New England prospered and Canada did not prosper, the French
system had at least one great advantage. It favored military efficiency.
The Canadian population sprang in great part from soldiers, and was
to the last systematically reinforced by disbanded soldiers. Its chief
occupation was a continual training for forest war; it had little or
nothing to lose, and little to do but fight and range the woods. This
was not all. The Canadian government was essentially military. At its
head was a soldier nobleman, often an old and able commander, and those
beneath him caught his spirit and emulated his example. In spite of its
political nothingness, in spite of poverty and hardship, and in spite
even of trade, the upper stratum of Canadian society was animated by
the pride and fire of that gallant _noblesse_ which held war as its only
worthy calling, and prized honor more than life. As for the _habitant_,
the forest, lake, and river were his true school; and here, at least, he
was an apt scholar. A skilful woodsman, a bold and adroit canoe-man,
a willing fighter in time of need, often serving without pay, and
receiving from government only his provisions and his canoe, he was
more than ready at any time for any hardy enterprise; and in the
forest warfare of skirmish and surprise there were few to match him. An
absolute government used him at will, and experienced leaders guided his
rugged valor to the best account.
The New England man was precisely the same material with that of which
Cromwell formed his invincible “Ironsides;” but he had very little
forest experience. His geographical position cut him off completely from
the great wilderness of the interior. The sea was his field of action.
Without the aid of government, and in spite of its restrictions,
he built up a prosperous commerce, and enriched himself by distant
fisheries, neglected by the rivals before whose doors they lay. He knew
every ocean from Greenland to Cape Horn, and the whales of the north
and of the south had no more dangerous foe. But he was too busy to fight
without good cause, and when he turned his hand to soldiering it was
only to meet some pressing need of the hour. The New England troops in
the early wars were bands of raw fishermen and farmers, led by civilians
decorated with military titles, and subject to the slow and uncertain
action of legislative bodies. The officers had not learned to command,
nor the men to obey. The remarkable exploit of the capture of Louisburg,
the strongest fortress in America, was the result of mere audacity and
hardihood, backed by the rarest good luck.
One great fact stands out conspicuous in Canadian history,--the Church
of Rome. More even than the royal power she shaped the character and the
destinies of the colony. She was its nurse and almost its mother; and,
wayward and headstrong as it was, it never broke the ties of faith that
held it to her. It was these ties which, in the absence of political
franchises, formed under the old regime the only vital coherence in
the population. The royal government was transient; the church was
permanent. The English conquest shattered the whole apparatus of
civil administration at a blow, but it left her untouched. Governors,
intendants, councils, and commandants, all were gone; the principal
seigniors fled the colony; and a people who had never learned to control
themselves or help themselves were suddenly left to their own devices.
Confusion, if not anarchy, would have followed but for the parish
priests, who in a character of double paternity, half spiritual and
half temporal, became more than ever the guardians of order throughout
Canada.
This English conquest was the grand crisis of Canadian history. It was
the beginning of a new life. With England came Protestantism, and the
Canadian church grew purer and better in the presence of an adverse
faith. Material growth, an increased mental activity, an education real
though fenced and guarded, a warm and genuine patriotism, all date from
the peace of 1763. England imposed by the sword on reluctant Canada the
boon of rational and ordered liberty. Through centuries of striving she
had advanced from stage to stage of progress, deliberate and calm, never
breaking with her past, but making each fresh gain the base of a new
success, enlarging popular liberties while bating nothing of that height
and force of individual development which is the brain and heart of
civilization; and now, through a hard-earned victory, she taught the
conquered colony to share the blessings she had won. A happier calamity
never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by the British arms.