CANADA.
There is not in the world a nobler outlook than that from off the
terrace at Quebec. You stand upon a rock overhanging city and river, and
look down upon the guardship‘s masts. Acre upon acre of timber comes
floating down the stream above the city, the Canadian songs just
reaching you upon the heights; and beneath you are fleets of great
ships, English, German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber from the
floating-docks. The Stars and Stripes are nowhere to be seen. Such are
the distances in North America, that here, farther from the sea than is
any city in Europe west of Moscow, we have a seaport town, with
gunboats and three-decker; morning and evening guns, and bars of “God
save the Queen,” to mark the opening and closing of the port.
The St. Lawrence runs in a chasm in a flat table-land, through which
some earlier Niagara seems to have cut for it a way. Some of the
tributaries are in sight, all falling from a cliff into the deep still
river. In the distance, seaward, a silver ribbon on the rock represents
the grand falls of Montmorenci. Long villages of white tiny cots
straggle along the roads that radiate from the city; the great black
cross of the French parish church showing reverently from all.
On the north, the eye reaches to the rugged outlines of the Laurentian
range, composed of the oldest mountains in the world, at the foot of
which is Lake St. Charles, full of fiord-like northern beauty, where at
a later time I learnt to paddle the Indian canoe of birch bark.
Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the European middle ages. Gates
and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to lofty gabled houses, with
sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like those of Liege; processions of
the Host; altars decked with flowers; statues of the Virgin; sabots;
blouses; and the scarlet of the British linesman,--all these are seen in
narrow streets and markets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace
cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east Yankee State of Maine.
It is not far from New England to old France.
Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in Guernsey. Norman-French
inhabitants, guarded by British troops, step-built streets, thronged
fruit-market, and citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the quays,
are alike in each. A slight knowledge of the Upper Normandy patois is
not without its use; it procured me an offer of a pinch of snuff from an
old _habitante_ on board one of the river boats. Her gesture was worthy
of the _ancien regime_.
There has been no dying-out of the race among the French Canadians. They
number twenty times the thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The
American soil has left their physical type, religion, language, laws,
and habits absolutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling
villages, dance to the fiddle, after mass on Sundays, as gayly as once
did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys and the memory of
Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canadian
_habitants_.
Not only here, but everywhere, a French “dependency” is France
transported; not a double of the France of to-day, but a mummy of the
France of the time of the “colony‘s” foundation. In Säigon, you find
Imperial France; here the France of Louis Quatorze. The Englishman
founds everywhere a New England--new in thought as in soil; the
Frenchman carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying
recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives a great
French capitalist, who, since 1849, has been the originator of every
successful Californian speculation. He cannot speak a word of English,
and his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine, is to bid
his old French servant assure him, upon honor, that his whole dessert,
from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France.
There is much in the colonizing instinct of our race, but something,
perhaps, in the consideration that the English are hardly happy enough
at home to be always looking back to what they have left in the old
country.
There is about this old France something of Dutch sleepiness and
content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market-place, where the
grand old dames, in snowy caps, sit selling plums and pears; there is
much singing made over the lading of the timber-ships; there are rafts
in hundreds gliding down the river; old French carts in dozens, creaking
and wheezing on their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of whips
and clappering of wooden shoes. All these things there are, but then
there are these and more in Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix--in all those
towns which in Europe come nearest to old France. There is quiet bustle,
subdued trade, prosperity deep, not noisy; but the life is sleepy; the
rafts float, and are not tugged nor rowed; the old Norman horses seem to
draw the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear
noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply because they
cannot help it.
In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British troops are here
employed as guardians of the only true French colony in the world
against the inroads of the English race. “Nos institutions, notre
langue, nos lois,” is the motto of the _habitants_. Their newspapers are
filled with church celebrations, village fêtes, speeches of “M. le Curé”
at the harvest-home, announcements by the “scherif,” speech of M.
Cartier at the consecration of Monseigneur Laroque, blessings of bells,
of ships; but of life, nothing--of mention of what is passing in
America, not a word. One corner is given to the world outside America:
“Emprunt Pontifical, Emission Américaine, quatre millions de piastres,”
heads a solid column of holy finance. The pulse-beat of the continent
finds no echo here.
It is not only in political affairs that there is a want of energy in
French or Lower Canada; in journeying from Portland to Quebec, the
moment the frontier was passed, we seemed to have come from a land of
life to one of death. No more bustling villages, no more keen-eyed
farmers: a fog of unenterprise hung over the land; roads were wanting,
houses rude, swamps undrained, fields unweeded, plains untilled.
If the Eastern Townships and country round Quebec are a wilderness, they
are not a desert. The country on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in
summer it is hot--mosquitoes are not unknown: even at Tadousac, where
the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, there is sunlight as strong as
that of Paris. Once in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy,
arctic--no house, no boat, no sign of man‘s existence, no beasts, no
birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck and loons. The river
is a straight, cold, black fiord, walled in by tremendous cliffs, which
go sheer down into depths to which their height above water is as
nothing; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold, inky water. Fish
there are, seal and salmon--that is all. The “whales and porpoises,”
which are advertised by the Tadousac folks as certain to “disport
themselves daily in front of the hotel,” are never to be seen in this
earth-crack of the Saguenay.
The cold, for summer, was intense; nowhere in the world does the limit
of ever-frozen ground come so far south as in the longitude of the
Saguenay. At night we had a wonderful display of northern lights. A
white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died away, and was
succeeded by broad white clouds, stretching from east to west, and
sending streamers northward. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery
columns in the north, northwest, and northeast, on which all the colors
of the rainbow danced and played. After moonrise, the whole seemed
gradually to fade away.
At Ha Ha Bay, the head of navigation, I found a fur-buying station of
the Hudson‘s Bay Company; but that association has enough to answer for
without being charged with the desolation of the Saguenay. The company
has not here, as upon the Red River, sacrificed colonists to minks and
silver-foxes. There is something more blighting than a monopoly that
oppresses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the boat that I was
aboard touched at St. Paschal, now called Rivière du Loup, the St.
Lawrence terminus of the Grand Trunk line: we found there immense
wharves, and plenty of bells and crosses, but not a single ship, great
or small. Even in Virginia I had seen nothing more disheartening.
North of the St. Lawrence religion is made to play as active a part in
politics as in the landscape. Lower Canada, as we have seen, is French
and Catholic; Upper Canada is Scotch and Presbyterian, though the
Episcopalians are strong in wealth and the Irish Catholics in numbers.
Had the Catholics been united, they might, since the fusion of the two
Canadas, have governed the whole country: as it is, the Irish and French
neither worship nor vote together, and of late the Scotch have had
nearly their own way.
Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the French threw in their lot
with the scheme for the confederation of the provinces, and their clergy
took up the cause with a zeal which they justified to their flocks by
pointing out that the alternative was annexation to America, and
possible confiscation of the church lands.
Confederation of the provinces means separation of the Canadas, which
regain each its Parliament; and the French Catholics begin to hope that
the Irish of Upper Canada, now that they are less completely overshaded
by the more numerous French, will again act with their co-religionists:
the Catholic vote in the new confederation will be nearly half the
whole. In Toronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in Montreal
their presence is not unknown: it is a question whether the whole of the
Canadian Irish are not disaffected. The Irish of the chief city have
their Irish priests, their cathedral of St. Patrick, while the French
have theirs upon the Place d‘Armes. The want of union may save the
dominion from the establishment of Catholicism as a State Church.
The confederation of our provinces was necessary, if British North
America was to have a chance for life; but it cannot be said to be
accomplished while British Columbia and the Red River tract are not
included. To give Canada an outlet on one side is something, but
communication with the Atlantic is a small matter by the side of
communication at once with Atlantic and Pacific through British
territory. We shall soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior,
and thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that the line is
far north, and exposed to heavy snows and bitter cold; but, on the other
hand, it is well supplied with wood, and if it possess no such fertile
tracts as that of Kansas and Colorado, it at least escapes the frightful
wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains.
We are now even left in doubt how long we shall continue to possess so
much as a route across the continent on paper. Since the cession of
Russian America to the United States, a map of North America has been
published in which the name of the Great Republic sprawls across the
continent from Behring‘s Straits to Mexico, with the “E” in “United”
ominously near Vancouver‘s Island, and the “T” actually planted upon
British territory. If we take up the _British Columbian_, we find the
citizens of the mainland portion of the province proposing to sell the
island for twenty million dollars to the States.
Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and California, and situated,
for purposes of reinforcement, immigration, and supply, at a distance of
not less than twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific
colonies can hardly be considered strong in their allegiance to the
crown: we have here the _reductio ad absurdum_ of home government.
Our hindering trade, by tolerating the presence of two sets of
custom-houses and two sets of coins between Halifax and Lake Superior,
was less absurd than our altogether preventing its extension now. Under
a so-called confederation of our American possessions, we have left a
country the size of civilized Europe, and nearly as large as the United
States--lying too, upon the track of commerce and highroad to China--to
be despotically governed by a company of traders in skins and peltries,
and to remain as long as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and
desertion needed to insure the presence of fur-bearing beasts.
“Red River” should be a second Minnesota, Halifax a second Liverpool,
Esquimault a second San Francisco; but double government has done its
work, and the outposts of the line of trade are already in American, not
British hands. The gold mines of Nova Scotia, the coal mines and forests
of British Columbia, are owned in New England and New York, and the
Californians are expecting the proclamation of an American territorial
government in the capital of Vancouver‘s Island.
As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of the “colonization” of
Red River by citizens of the United States, such as preceded the
hoisting of the “lone star” in Texas, and the “bear flag” in California,
by Fremont; and resistance by the Hudson‘s Bay Company will neither be
possible, nor, in the interests of civilization, desirable.
Even supposing a great popular awakening upon colonial questions, and
the destruction of the Hudson‘s Bay monopoly, we never could make the
Canadian dominion strong. With the addition of Columbia and Red River,
British America would hardly be as powerful or populous as the two
Northwestern States of Ohio and Illinois, or the single State of New
York--one out of forty-five. “Help us for ten years, and then we‘ll help
ourselves,” the Canadians say; “help us to become ten millions, and then
we will stand alone;” but this becoming ten millions is not such an easy
thing.
The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British territories are
derived from maps of North America, made upon Mercator‘s projection,
which are grossly out in high latitudes, though correct at the equator.
The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their proper size, and
such gigantic proportions are given to the northern parts of the Hudson
territory that we are tempted to believe that in a country so vast there
must be some little value. The true size is no more shown upon the map
than is the nine-months’ winter.
To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is not for lack of asking
that population fails to come. Admirably executed gazettes give the
fullest information about the British possessions in the most glowing of
terms; offices and agencies are established in Liverpool, London, Cork,
Londonderry, and a dozen other cities; government immigration agents and
information offices are to be found in every town in Canada; the
government immigrant is looked after in health, comfort, and religion;
directions of the fullest kind are given him in the matters of money,
clothes, tools, luggage; Canada, he is told by the government papers,
possesses perfect religious, political, and social freedom; British
subjects step at once into the possession of political rights; the
winter is but bracing, the climate the healthiest in the world. Millions
of acres of surveyed crown lands are continually in the market. To one
who knows what the northern forests are there is perhaps something of
satire in the statement that “there is generally on crown lands an
unlimited supply of the best fuel.” What of that, however? The intending
immigrant knows nothing of the struggle with the woods, and fuel is fuel
in Old England. The mining of the precious metals, the fisheries,
petroleum, all are open to the settler--let him but come. Reading these
documents, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how it is that human
selfishness allows the Canadian officials to disclose the wonders of
their El Dorado to the outer world, and invite all men to share
blessings which we should have expected them to keep as a close preserve
for themselves and their nearest and dearest friends. Taxation in the
States, the immigrants are told, is five and a half times what it is in
Canada, two and a half times the English rate. Laborers by the thousand,
merchants and farmers by the score, are said to be flocking into Canada
to avoid the taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life in
Canada is 37 per cent. higher than in the States. Yet, in the face of
all these facts, only twenty or two and twenty thousand immigrants come
to Canada for three hundred thousand that flock annually to the States,
and of the former many thousands do but pass through on their way to the
Great West. Of the twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year, but
four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada; and there are a
quarter of a million of persons born in British America now naturalized
in the United States.
The passage of the immigrants to the Western States is not for want of
warning. The Canadian government advertise every Coloradan duel, every
lynching in Montana, every Opposition speech in Kansas, by way of
teaching the immigrants to respect the country of which they are about
to become free citizens.
It is an unfortunate fact, that these strange statements are not
harmless--not harmless to Canada, I mean. The Provincial government by
these publications seems to confess to the world that Canada can live
only by running down the great republic. Canadian sympathy for the
rebellion tends to make us think that these northern statesmen must not
only share in our old-world confusion of the notions of right and wrong,
but must be sadly short-sighted into the bargain. It is only by their
position that they are blinded, for few countries have abler men than
Sir James Macdonald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Galt; but,
like men standing on the edge of a cliff, Canadian statesmen are always
wanting to jump off. Had Great Britain left them to their own devices,
we should have had war with America in the spring of 1866.
The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous: of the two chief
sections of our race--that in Britain and that in America--the latter is
again split in twain, and one division governed from across the
Atlantic. For such government there is no pretext, except the wishes of
the governed, who gain by the connection men for their defense, and the
opportunity of gratifying their spite for their neighbors at our
expense. Those who ask why a connection so one-sided, so opposed to the
best interests of our race, should be suffered to continue, are
answered, now that the argument of “prestige” is given up, that the
Canadians are loyal, and that they hate the Americans, to whom, were it
not for us, they must inevitably fall. That the Canadians hate the
Americans can be no reason why we should spend blood and treasure in
protecting them against the consequences of their hate. The world should
have passed the time when local dislikes can be suffered to affect our
policy toward the other sections of our race; but even were it
otherwise, it is hard to see how twelve thousand British troops, or a
royal standard hoisted at Ottawa, can protect a frontier of two thousand
miles in length from a nation of five and thirty millions. Canada,
perhaps, can defend herself, but we most certainly cannot defend her; we
provoke much more than we assist.
As for Canadian “loyalty,” it appears to consist merely of hatred toward
America, for while we were fighting China and conquering Japan, that we
might spread free trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set upon our
goods protective duties of 20 per cent, which they have now in some
degree removed, only that they may get into their hands the smuggling
trade carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, their neighbor. We
might, at least, fairly insist that the connection should cease, unless
Canada will entirely remove her duties.
At bottom, it would seem as though no one gained by the retention of our
hold on Canada. Were she independent, her borders would never again be
wasted by Fenian hordes, and she would escape the terrible danger of
being the battle-field in which European quarrels are fought out. Canada
once republican, the Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most
violent partisans would cease to advocate the adoption of other than
moral means to merge her territories in the Union. An independent Canada
would not long delay the railway across the continent to Puget Sound,
which a British bureau calls impossible. England would be relieved from
the fear of a certain defeat by America in the event of war--a fear
always harmful, even when war seems most unlikely; relieved, too, from
the cost of such panics as those of 1861 and 1866.
Did Canada stand alone, no offense that she could give America would be
likely to unite all sections of that country in an attempt to conquer
her; while, on the other hand, such an attempt would be resisted to the
death by an armed and brave people, four millions strong. As it is, any
offense toward America committed by our agents, at any place or time, or
arising out of the continual changes of policy and of ministry in Great
Britain, united to the standing offense of maintaining the monarchical
principle in North America, will bring upon unhappy Canada the whole
American nation, indignant in some cause, just, or seeming just, and to
be met by a people deceived into putting their trust in a few regiments
of British troops, sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to be
backed by reinforcements which could never come in time, did public
opinion in Great Britain so much as permit their sailing. In all history
there is nothing stranger than the narrowness of mind that has led us to
see in Canada a piece of England, and in America a hostile country.
There are more sons of British subjects in America than in Canada, by
far; and the American looks upon the old country with a pride that
cannot be shared by a man who looks to her to pay his soldiers.
The independence of Canada would put an immediate end to much of the
American jealousy of Great Britain--a consideration which of itself
should outweigh any claim to protection which the Canadians can have on
us. The position which we have to set before us in our external dealings
is, that we are no more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the
Americans of the North or West.
The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa, known as “Hole in the
Woods” among the friends of Toronto and Montreal, and once called
Bytown. It consists of the huge Parliament-house, the government
printing-office, some houseless wildernesses meant for streets, and the
hotel where the members of the legislature “board.” Such was the
senatorial throng at the moment of my visit, that we were thrust into a
detached building made of half-inch planks, with wide openings between
the boards; and as the French Canadian members were excited about the
resignation of Mr. Galt, indescribable chattering and bawling filled the
house.
The view from the Parliament-house is even more thoroughly Canadian than
that from the terrace at Quebec--a view of a land of rapids, of pine
forests, and of lumberers’ homes, full of character, but somewhat bleak
and dreary; even on the hottest summer‘s day, it tells of winter storms
past and to come. On the far left are the island-filled reaches of the
Upper Ottawa; nearer, the roaring Chaudière Falls, a mile across--a mile
of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of jets, of spray. From the
“caldron” itself, into which we can hardly see, rises a column of
rainbow-tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now fast
falling before the settler‘s axe. Below you is the river, swift, and
covered with cream-like foam; on the right, a gorge--the mouth of the
Rideau Canal.
When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudière is but little
behind Niagara; but it may be doubted whether in any fall there is that
which can be called sublimity. Natural causes are too evident; water,
rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. How different
from a storm upon the coast, or from a September sunset, where the
natural causes are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to see
the immediate hand of God! It is excusable in Americans, who have no
sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as the perfection of
the sublime; but it is strange that a people who have Birling Gap and
Bantry Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a cry.
Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the great
Chaudière: the awesome slowness with which the deep-green flood, in the
center of the Horseshoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf.