POLITICS IN THE SIXTIES
Parties in flux--Church and state--The war on the Institute--Le
Defricheur
The year 1841, when Wilfrid Laurier was born, was the year of the Union
of Upper and Lower Canada as a single province. There followed, as he
came to manhood, a time of intense political activity, of bitter party
and personal rivalry, of constant shift in the lines of political
groups and parties. The stage was being set and many of the players
were being trained for the greater drama which was to open with
Confederation.
Canadian political parties had originally been formed on the plain
issue whether or not the majority of the people were to be allowed to
rule. In Upper Canada the governing party, known as the 'Family
Compact,' composed chiefly of representatives of the Crown and men who
had inherited position or caste from their Loyalist fathers, had been
attacked by a motley and shifting opposition, sober Whig and fiery
Radical, newcomers from Britain or from the States, and {19}
native-born, united mainly by their common antagonism to clique rule.
In Lower Canada the same contest, on account of the monopoly of
administration held by the English-speaking minority, dubbed
'Bureaucrats' or the 'Chateau Clique,' had taken on the aspect of a
racial struggle.
When at last self-government in essentials had been won, the old
dividing lines began to melt away. All but a small knot of Tory
irreconcilables now agreed that the majority must rule, and that this
would neither smash the Empire nor make an end of order and justice in
the province itself. But who were to unite to form that majority, and
what was to be their platform? In the Reform party there had been many
men of essentially conservative mind, men such as John Redmond before
the winning of Irish Home Rule, who on one point had been forced into
hostility to an order of society with which, on other points, they were
in almost complete sympathy. Particularly in Quebec, as John A.
Macdonald was quick to see, there were many such, quite ready to rally
to authority now that opportunity was open to all. Other factors
hastened the breakdown of the old groupings. Economic interests came
to the fore. In the {20} discussion of canal and railway projects,
banking and currency, trade and tariffs, new personal, class, or
sectional interests arose. Once, too, that the machinery of
responsible government had been installed, differences in political
aptitude, in tactics and ideals, developed, and personal rivalries
sharpened.
As a result of this unsettling and readjustment, a new party developed
in the early fifties, composed of the moderate sections of both the
older parties, and calling itself Liberal-Conservative. It took over
the policy of the Reformers, on self-government, on the clergy
reserves, on seigneurial tenure. The old Tory party dwindled and its
platform disappeared. Yet a strong Opposition is essential to the
proper working of the British system of parliamentary government; if it
did not exist, it would have to be created. No artificial effort,
however, was now needed to produce it. A Liberalism or a
Liberal-Conservatism which stood still as time marched by soon ceased
to be true Liberalism; and new groups sprang up, eager to press forward
at a swifter pace.
In Canada West the 'Clear Grit' party, founded by Radicals such as John
Rolph, Peter Perry, and William M'Dougall, and later {21} under the
leadership of George Brown, declared war to the knife on all forms of
special privilege. Denominational privilege, whether the claim of
Anglicans to clergy reserves, or of Roman Catholics to separate schools
in Canada West and to ecclesiastical supremacy above the civil law in
Canada East; class privilege, like the claim of the seigneurs to feudal
dues and powers; sectional privilege, such as it was asserted Canada
East enjoyed in having half the members in the Union parliament though
her population had ceased to be anything like half--all these Brown
attacked with tremendous energy, if not always with fairness and
judgment.
In Canada East the _Rouges_ carried on a similar but far more hopeless
fight. The brilliant group of young men who formed the nucleus of this
party, Dorion, Doutre, Daoust, Papin, Fournier, Laberge, Letellier,
Laflamme, Geoffrion, found a stimulus in the struggle which democratic
Europe was waging in 1848, and a leader in Papineau. The great
agitator had come back from exile in Paris to find a country that knew
not Joseph, to find former lieutenants who now thought they could lead,
and a province where the majority had wearied of the old cries of New
France and were {22} suspicious of the new doctrines of Old France. He
threw himself into violent but futile opposition to LaFontaine and
rallied these fiery young crusaders about him. In _L'Avenir_, and
later in _Le Pays_, they tilted against real and imaginary ogres, and
the hustings of Quebec rang with their eloquence. Their demands were
most sweeping and heterogeneous. They called for a vigorous policy of
colonization and of instruction and experiment in agriculture; for
simplification of judicial procedure and the forms of government; for
the election, on the American plan, of administrative as well as
legislative authorities; for annual parliaments; for increased powers
of local government; for universal suffrage; for the abolition of
clergy reserves, seigneurial tenure, and church tithes; and for the
repeal of the Union. They joined the disgruntled Tories of their
province in demanding, for very different reasons, annexation to the
United States. Many of these demands have been approved, some have
been disapproved, by time. Right or wrong, they were too advanced for
their day and place. The country as a whole wanted, and doubtless
needed, a period of noncontentious politics, of recuperation after long
agitation, of constructive {23} administration, and this the
Liberal-Conservative majority was for the time better able to give,
even though corruption was soon to vitiate its powers for good.
The alliance of the _Rouges_ with the 'Clear Grits,' who were ever
denouncing French Canada's 'special privileges,' was a great source of
weakness to them in their own province. It was, however, the hostility
of a section of the Catholic hierarchy which was most effective in
keeping these agitators long in a powerless minority. In the early
days of the party this hostility was not unwarranted. Many of the
young crusaders had definitely left the fold of the Church to criticize
it from without, to demand the abolition of the Pope's temporal power
in Europe and of the Church's tithing privileges in Canada, and to
express heterodox doubts on matters of doctrine. This period soon
passed, and the radical leaders confined themselves to demanding
freedom of thought and expression and political activity; but the
conflict went on. Almost inevitably the conflict was waged in both the
political and the religious field. Where the chief question at issue
was the relation of church and state, it was difficult to keep politics
out of religion or religion out of politics. It was {24} to be one of
the signal services of Wilfrid Laurier, in his speech on Political
Liberalism, to make clear the dividing line.
The conflict in Canada was in large part an echo of European struggles.
In the past Canada had taken little notice of world-movements. The
Reform agitation in Upper Canada had been, indeed, influenced by the
struggle for parliamentary reform in Great Britain; but the
French-speaking half of Canada, carefully sheltered in the quiet St
Lawrence valley, a bit of seventeenth-century Normandy and Brittany
preserved to the nineteenth, had known little and cared less for the
storms without. But now questions were raised which were
world-questions, and in the endeavour to adjust satisfactorily the
relations of church and state both ultramontanes and liberals became
involved in the quarrels which were rending France and Italy, and
Canada felt the influence of the European stream of thought or passion.
When in 1868 five hundred young Canadians, enrolled as Papal Zouaves,
sailed from Quebec to Rome, to support with their bayonets the
tottering temporal power of the Pope, it was made clear that the moving
forces of Europe had taken firm hold on the mind and heart of Quebec.
{25}
In Old France there had been much strife of Pope and King. The Pope
had claimed authority over the Church in France, and the right to
intervene in all state matters which touched morals or religion. King
after king had sought to build up a national or Gallican Church, with
the king at its head, controlled by its own bishops or by royal or
parliamentary authority. Then had come the Revolution, making war on
all privilege, overturning at once king and noble and prelate who had
proved faithless to their high tasks. But in the nineteenth century,
after the storm had spent itself, the Church, purified of internal
enemies, had risen to her former position.
Within the Church itself widely different views were urged as to the
attitude to be taken towards the new world that was rising on the ruins
of the old order, towards the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and
other ideas of '89. One wing called for relentless hostility, for an
alliance of altar and throne to set up authority once more on its
pedestal and to oppose at once the anarchy of democratic rule and the
scepticism of free-thought. This ultramontane attitude--this looking
'beyond the mountains' to a supreme authority in Rome to give stability
in a shifting {26} world--found able and aggressive exponents. De
Maistre denied the right of individual judgment in politics any more
than in religion, insisting on the divine source of kingly power and
the duty of the Pope to oversee the exercise of this power. Lamennais
brought De Maistre's opinions into practical politics, and insisted
with burning eloquence on the need for the submission of all mankind to
the Pope, the 'living tradition of mankind,' through whom alone
individual reason receives the truth. Veuillot continued the crusade
with unpitying logic and unquenchable zeal. In this era the disputes
turned most significantly on control of press and school, for, as the
revolution progressed, it gave the masses political power and made
control of the means of shaping popular opinion as important as control
of feudal fiefs or episcopal allegiance had been in earlier days.
Opposed to this school stood men like Montalembert, Lacordaire, and
Bishop Dupanloup--men who clung to the old Gallican liberties, or who
wished to make peace with liberalism, to set up a Catholic liberalism,
frankly accepting the new order, the right of the people to rule
themselves, and seeking to show that by liberty of thought and
discussion the true interests of {27} the Church would be advanced and
its power be broadest based. Now one wing, now the other won, but in
the main the current flowed strongly towards ultramontanism. Pius IX,
liberal in sympathies up to 1848, completely reversed his position
after that date. In the Syllabus which he issued in 1864 he gave no
quarter to modern tendencies. The doctrines that 'every man is free to
embrace the religion which his reason assures him to be true,' that 'in
certain Catholic countries immigrant non-Catholics should have the free
exercise of their religion,' and that 'the Roman Pontiff can and ought
to be reconciled with progress, liberalism, and modern civism,' he
explicitly condemned as false and heretical.
In Canada these successive conflicts had found many echoes. During the
French regime Gallican principles of the power of the king over the
Church had been frequently asserted; governor or intendant had, in a
few notable instances, endeavoured to bridle the Church authorities.
When the English came, the Church lost its place as the state church,
but it consolidated its power, and soon was freer from intervention
than it had been under the Most Christian King of France. During the
French Revolution Canada was kept {28} isolated from contact with
France, but after the Restoration, with ultramontanism in the
ascendant, intercourse was favoured; and the most thoroughgoing
principles of clerical supremacy, with the most militant methods of
controversy, found lodgment here. In both private and public life,
among clergy as well as laity, each of the opposing tendencies was
stoutly championed.
When Wilfrid Laurier went to Montreal in 1861, the leaders of the
Liberal or _Rouge_ party had sobered down from the fiery radicalism of
their youth, and were content to leave the authorities of the Church
alone. But leading authorities of the Church remained suspicious of
that party. Bishop Bourget of Montreal, one of the most pious and
energetic of ecclesiastics, firm to the point of obstinacy, seemed
determined to crush it out. And though many eminent churchmen held out
for a broader and more tolerant policy, the ultramontanes, by reason of
their crusading zeal, steadily gained the ascendancy.
The issues raised in Quebec were manifold. Among them were the right
of private judgment, the authority of canon law in the province, civil
or ecclesiastical control over marriage, clerical immunity from the
{29} jurisdiction of civil courts, and the degree of intervention which
was permissible to the clergy in elections.
The first question, that of the right of private judgment, concerned
the future leader of Canadian Liberalism and became acute in connection
with the _Institut Canadien_ of Montreal. This was a literary and
scientific society, founded in 1844 by some members of the same group
who later organized the _Rouge_ party. It supplied the want of a
public library and reading-room in Montreal, and a hundred branches
sprang up throughout the province. The _Institut_ soon fell under the
suspicion of a section of the clergy. It was declared by Bishop
Bourget that immoral or heretical books which had been put on the
_Index_ were contained in the library. Rival societies were founded
under the auspices of the Church and many of the members of the
_Institut_ were induced to secede.
Nevertheless young Laurier joined the _Institut_ shortly after coming
to Montreal. In 1863 he was one of a committee of four who endeavoured
in vain to induce Bishop Bourget to specify what books were under the
ban, and in 1865 and 1866 he was a vice-president of the society. Like
his associates, he was {30} placed in a difficult position by the
bishop's unyielding attitude, for he did not wish to quarrel with his
Church. So far as he was concerned, however, his removal to
Arthabaskaville in 1866 ended the episode.
The remaining members of the _Institut_ struggled on until 1868, when
they published a _Year-Book_ containing an address by Mr L. A.
Dessaules, president of the _Institut_, commending toleration.[1] A
nice question of interpretation followed. Mr Dessaules asserted that
he meant to urge personal toleration and good-will. Bishop Bourget
contended that the address meant dogmatic toleration or indifference,
the attitude that one creed was as good as another. In spite of an
appeal to Rome by Joseph Doutre the work was placed on the _Index_, and
the announcement followed that members who persisted in adhering to the
_Institut_ would be refused the sacraments of the Church. After this
blow the _Institut_ {31} dwindled away and in time disappeared entirely.
Meanwhile Mr Laurier's weekly newspaper at Arthabaskaville, _Le
Defricheur_, had come under the ban of Bishop Lafleche of Three Rivers,
in whose diocese the little village lay. Subscribers refused to take
their copies from the postmaster, or quietly called at the office to
announce that, in spite of their personal sympathy, they were too much
afraid of the cures--or of their own wives--to continue their
subscriptions. The editor warmly protested against the arbitrary
action, which threatened at once to throttle his freedom of speech and
to wipe out his saved and borrowed capital. But the forces arrayed
against him were too strong, and some six months after the first number
under his management appeared, _Le Defricheur_ went the way of many
other Liberal journals in Quebec. It was not likely that Mr Laurier's
growing law practice would have long permitted him to edit the paper,
but at the moment the blow was none the less felt.
[1] 'Is it not permissible,' Mr Dessaules asked, 'when Protestants and
Catholics are placed side by side in a country, in a city, for them to
join in the pursuit of knowledge? ... What is toleration? It is
reciprocal indulgence, sympathy, Christian charity.... It is
fraternity, the spirit, of religion well understood.... It is at
bottom humility, the idea that others are not worthless, that others
are as good as ourselves.... Intolerance is pride; it is the idea that
we are better than others; it is egotism, the idea that we owe others
nothing.'
{32}