CANADA AND IRELAND
In comparing the history of Canada with the closely allied history of
Ireland, we must bear in mind that in the last half of the eighteenth
century the present British North America consisted of three distinct
portions: Acadia, or the Maritime Provinces, which we now know as
Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island,
colonized originally by a few Frenchmen and later by Scotch and Irish;
Lower Canada, extensively colonized by the French, which we now know as
the Province of Quebec; and Upper Canada, which we now know as Ontario,
colonized last of all by Americans under circumstances to be described.
In 1763, before the repeal of any part of the Penal Code against Irish
Roman Catholics, the French Catholic Colony of Lower Canada, with a
population of about seventy thousand souls and the two small towns of
Quebec and Montreal, passed definitely into British possession under the
Treaty of Paris, which brought to a conclusion the Seven Years' War.
Fortunately, there was no question, as in Ireland, of expropriating the
owners of the soil in favour of State-aided British planters, and hence
no question of a Penal Code, even on the moderate scale current in Great
Britain at the same period. On the contrary, it became a matter of
urgent practical expediency to conciliate the conquered Province in view
of the growing disaffection of the American Colonies bordering it on the
South. This disaffection, assuming ominous proportions on the enactment
of the Stamp Act in 1765, was itself an indirect result of the conquest
of Canada a few years before; for the claim to tax the Americans for
Imperial purposes arose from the enormous expense of the war of conquest
and of the subsequent charges for defence and upkeep. It was forgotten
that American volunteers had captured Louisburg in 1745, and had borne
a distinguished part in later operations, and that to lay a compulsory
tax upon them would banish glorious memories common to America and
Britain. Henceforward, conquered French Canada was made a political
bulwark against rebellious America. The French colonists, a peaceable,
primitive folk, as attached to their religion as the Irish, and devoted
mainly to agriculture, retained, as long as they desired it, the old
French system of law known as the Custom of Paris and the free exercise
of their religion. Like the Irish, they were strongly monarchical and
strongly conservative in feeling, and as impervious to the Republican
propaganda emanating from their American neighbours as the Catholic
Irish always at heart remained to the revolutionary principles of Wolfe
Tone's school. Unmolested in their habits and possessions, they
philosophically accepted the transference from the Bourbon to the
Hanoverian dynasty, and became an indispensable source of strength to
George III. when that monarch was using his German troops to coerce his
American subjects and his British troops to overawe the Ulster
Volunteers.
In 1774, immediately before the outbreak of a war against which Ireland
was protesting, and in which, with the soundest justification, the
Irish-Americans, Catholic and Protestant, took such a prominent part
against the British arms, the Quebec Act was passed giving formal
statutory sanction to the Catholic religion, and setting up a nominated
legislative Council, whose members were subject to no religious test. In
Ireland it was not till six years later, and, as we have seen, by means
of precisely the same pressure--British fear of America--that the Irish
Protestant Volunteers obtained the abolition of the test for Dissenters,
while Catholics in Ireland were still little more than outlaws, and had
to wait for nearly sixty years for complete emancipation. The result of
the Quebec Act, together with the sympathetic administration of that
great Irishman, Sir Guy Carleton, was the firm allegiance of the French
Province in spite of an exceedingly formidable invasion, during the
whole of the American War, and even after the intervention of European
France. It is part of the dramatic irony of these occurrences that some
of the invading army was composed of Morgan's Irish-American riflemen,
and that one of the two joint leaders of the invasion was the
Irish-American, General Richard Montgomery, who fell at the unsuccessful
assault of Quebec on December 31, 1775.
In spite of Burke's noble appeal in the House of Commons, toleration in
the abstract had nothing to do with the treatment of the French
Catholics. British Catholics in the neighbouring Prince Edward Island
were denied all civil rights in 1770, and only gained them in 1830. In
England, the Quebec Act with difficulty survived a storm of indignation,
in which even Chatham joined. The small minority of British settled in
Quebec and Montreal made vehement protests, while the American Congress
itself in 1774 committed the irreparable blunder of making the
establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in Canada one of its
formally published grievances against Great Britain. When war broke out,
and the magnitude of the mistake was seen, efforts were made to seduce
the Canadians by hints of a coming British tyranny, but the Canadians
very naturally abode by their first impressions.
The peace of 1783 and the final recognition of American Independence led
to results of far-reaching importance for the further development of the
British Empire. Out of the loss of the American Colonies came the
foundation of Australia and of British Canada. Before the war it had
been the custom to send convicts from the United Kingdom to penal
settlements in the American Colonies. The United States stopped this
traffic. Pitt's Government decided, after several years of doubt and
delay, to divert the stream of convicts to the newly acquired and still
unpopulated territory of New South Wales, made known by the voyages of
Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks. At the same period a very different
class of men, seeking a new home, were thrown upon the charity of the
British Government. These were the "United Empire Loyalists," as they
styled themselves, some 40,000 Americans, with a sprinkling of Irishmen
among them, such as Luke Carscallion, Peter Daly, Willet Casey, and John
Canniff,[20] who had fought on the Royalist side throughout the war, and
at the end of it found their fortunes ruined and themselves the objects
of keen resentment. Pitt, with a "total lack of Imperial imagination,"
as Mr. Holland Rose puts it,[21] does not seem to have considered the
plan of colonizing Australia with a part of these men, 433 of whom were
reported to be living in destitution in London three years after the
war. No more alacrity was shown in relieving the distress of those still
in America. In 1788, however, a million and a quarter pounds were voted
by Parliament for relief, and large grants of land were made in Canada,
whither most of the Loyalists had already begun to emigrate. Some went
to the Maritime Provinces, notably to the region now known as New
Brunswick; a few went to the towns of the Quebec Province, for the
country lands on the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence were already
monopolized by the French "habitants"; the rest, estimated at 10,000, to
the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence and along the shores of the Lakes
Ontario and Erie, in short, to what we now know as the Province of
Ontario, and to what then became known as Upper Canada.
From this moment the three Canadas gain sharp definition. To the west
Upper Canada, exclusively American or, as we must now say, British in
character; next to the east, and cutting off its neighbour from the sea,
the ancient Province of Lower Canada, predominantly French, with a
minority of British traders in the two towns Quebec and Montreal; last
of all the Maritime Provinces, small communities with an almost
independent history of their own, although, like Upper and Lower Canada,
they eventually presented a problem similar fundamentally to the Irish
problem on the other side of the Atlantic. Prince Edward Island is the
closest parallel, for, besides the Catholic disabilities of 1770, in
1767 the whole of its land had been granted away by ballot in a single
day to a handful of absentee English proprietors, who sublet to
occupiers without security of tenure, with the result that a land
question similar to that of Ireland arose, which inflamed society and
retarded the development of the island for a whole century. Ultimately,
moreover, statesmen were driven to an even more drastic
solution--compulsory and universal State-aided land purchase.[22] Before
the period we have now reached, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island,
which was carved out of it, had been given rude systems of
representative Government, and New Brunswick, also at one time a part of
Nova Scotia, received a Constitution in 1784.
The great question after the American War was how to govern the two
contiguous Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, the one newly settled by
men of British race and Protestant faith, the other also under the
British flag, but overwhelmingly French and Catholic, both, in the
critical half-century to come, to be reinforced by immigrants from the
Old World, and to a large extent from misgoverned Ireland. But let the
reader once and for all grasp this point, that, once out of Ireland,
there ceases, not immediately, but in course of time, to be any racial
or political distinction between the different classes of Irishmen,
whose antagonism at home, artificially provoked and fomented by the bad
form of government under which they lived, so often made Ireland itself
a very hell on earth. I want to dwell on this point in order to avoid
confusion when I speak of the bi-racial conditions of Lower Canada and
Ireland respectively.
To return to the question of Government. The American Colonies were
lost. Here in Canada was an opportunity for a new Imperial policy,
better calculated to retain the affections of the colonists. Three
distinct problems were involved:
1. Was French or Lower Canada, with its small minority of British, to be
given representative Government at all?
2. If so, was it to be left as a separate unit, or was it to be
amalgamated in a Union with its neighbour, Upper Canada?
3. Whichever course was taken, what was to be the relation between the
Home Government and Canada?
All these questions arise in the case of Ireland itself, and the
parallel in each case is interesting. In Canada they were determined for
the space of half a century by the Constitutional Act of 1791, passed at
the period when Grattan's unreformed Parliament was hastening to its
fall, and Wolfe Tone was founding his Society of United Irishmen. Let us
take in turn the three questions posed above.
1. The British minority in Lower Canada, supported by a corresponding
school in England, were strong for an undisguised British ascendancy,
without any recognition of the French. They urged, what was true, that
the French were unaccustomed to representative government, and implied,
what was neither true nor politic, that they could not, and ought not
to, be educated to it. If there was to be an Assembly at all, it should,
they claimed, be wholly British and Protestant, or, in the alternative,
the Protestant minority only should be represented at Westminster. In
other words, they wished either for the pre-Union Irish system or for
the post-Union Irish system, both of them, as time was just beginning to
prove, equally disastrous to the interests of Ireland. We are not
surprised to find these ideas supported by the Irishman Burke, in whom
horror of the French Revolution had destroyed the last particle of
Liberalism. If Pitt lacked "Imperial imagination," he knew more than
most of his contemporaries about the elementary principles of governing
white men. It was only a few years before that he had urged upon his
Irish Viceroy, Rutland, a reform of the Irish Parliament which might
have united the races and averted all the disasters to come, and in this
very year (1791) he was pressing forward the Catholic franchise in
Ireland. The French in Canada must, he said, be represented in a popular
Assembly equally with the British, and on the broadest possible
franchise, and they were.
2. The next question was that of the union or separation of Upper and
Lower Canada. Here, and from the same underlying motive, the British
minority in Lower Canada were for the Union, partly on commercial
grounds, but mainly as a step in the direction of overcoming French
influence. Upper Canada, wholly British, was, on the whole, neutral.
Pitt, on high principle, again took correct ground. He did not, indeed,
foresee that separation, for geographical reasons, would cause certain
inconveniences; but he did understand--and experience in both Provinces
ultimately proved him right--that it was absolutely hopeless to try and
avert social and racial discord by artificially swamping the French
element. He declared, then, for the separation of the two Canadas into
two distinct Provinces. Note the beginnings of another, though a
distant, analogy with the relations of Ireland and Great Britain,
distant because the French at this time largely outnumbered the British
of both Provinces, and in after-years maintained something very near a
numerical equality. But the same underlying principle was involved.
Pitt, in the Legislative Union of Ireland and Great Britain nine years
later, constructed without geographical necessity, indeed, in defiance
of geography and humanity, the very system which, in a form by
comparison almost innocuous, he had condemned for Canada; but not, we
must in fairness remember, before doing his part at an earlier date to
arrive at a solution which, given a fair chance, would have rendered the
Union of Ireland and England unnecessary.
3. So far, good. But there still remained a further question far
transcending the other in importance--What was to be the relation
between the Home Government and the new Colonies? Here all British
intellects, that of Fox alone excepted, were as much at a loss as ever.
One simple deduction was made from what had happened in America, namely,
that the new Colonies must not be forced to contribute to Imperial funds
by taxes levied from London. That claim had already been abandoned in
1778 by the Colonial Tax Repeal Act, which nevertheless expressly
reserved the King's right to levy "such duties as it may be expedient to
impose for the regulation of commerce," the sum so raised to be retained
for the use of the Colony. No one made the more comprehensive deduction,
even in the case of wholly British Upper Canada, that Colonial affairs
should be controlled by Colonial opinion, constitutionally ascertained,
and that the British Governor should act primarily through advisers
chosen by the majority of the people under his rule. We must bear in
mind that, had Grattan's Parliament been reformed, and the warring races
in Ireland been brought into harmony, it would still have had to pass
through the crucial phase of establishing its right to choose Ministers
by whose advice the Lord-Lieutenant should be guided, that is, if it
were to become a true Home Rule Parliament of the kind we aim at to-day.
From the date of the Constitutional Act passed for Canada in 1791, it
took fifty-six troubled years and an armed rebellion in each Province to
establish the principle of what we call "responsible Government" for
Canada, and, through Canada, for the rest of the white Colonies of the
Empire. During these fifty-six years, which correspond in Irish history
to a period dating from the middle of Grattan's Parliament down to the
great Famine, ascendancies, with the symptoms of disease which always
attended ascendancies, grew up in Canada, as they had in Ireland, in
spite of conditions which were far more favourable in Canada to healthy
political growth. Canada started with this great advantage over Ireland,
that instead of a corrupt parody of a Parliament, each of her Provinces,
under the Constitutional Act of 1791, had a real popular Assembly,
elected without regard to race or religion. It was the Upper House or
Legislative Council, as it was called, that interposed the first
obstacle to the free working of popular institutions. In both Provinces
this Council was nominated by the Governor, and could be used, and was
naturally used, to represent minority interests and obstruct the popular
assembly. Fox had correctly prophesied that it would soon come "to
inspire hatred and contempt." But he did not mean that such a chamber
was in itself an insuperable bar to harmony. Nominated or hereditary
second chambers are not necessarily inconsistent with popular
government, provided that the Executive Government itself possesses the
confidence of the representative Assembly. Under that lever, obstruction
eventually gives way. But this idea of a tie of confidence between the
Governors and the governed was exactly what was lacking.
The Executive Council in each Province was also chosen by the British
Governor or Lieutenant-Governor, generally a military man, from persons
representing either his own purely British policy or the ideas of a
privileged colonial minority, and without regard to the wishes or
opinions of the Colonial Assembly, just as the Executive officers in
Ireland, both before and after the Union, were chosen out of
corresponding elements by the Lord-Lieutenant or Chief Secretary, acting
under the orders of the British Government, and without any regard to
the wishes or opinions of the majority of Irishmen. Behind all, in
remote Downing Street stood the British Government, in the shape of the
Colonial Office for Canada and the Irish Office for Ireland, both
working in dense ignorance of the real needs of the countries for which
they were responsible, and permeated with prejudice and pedantry. To
complete the parallel, there was now a foreign Power in the close
neighbourhood of each dependency, the United States in the case of
Canada, France in the case of Ireland, both of them Republican Powers,
and both able and willing to take advantage of disaffection in the
dependencies in order to further a quarrel with the Mother Country. We
have seen the results in Ireland. Let us now observe the results in
Canada, taking especial care to notice that an ascendancy Government
gives rise to the same type of evil in a uni-racial as in a bi-racial
community.
Let us glance first at what happened in Upper Canada, which was
uni-racial, that is, composed of settlers from the United Kingdom
(including Ireland) and America. Here the original settlers, the "United
Empire Loyalists" from America, formed from the first, and maintained
for half a century, an ascendancy of wealth and religion over the
incoming settlers, who soon constituted the majority of the population.
As in Ireland, though in a degree small by comparison, there was a land
question and a religious question, closely related to one another.
Happily, it was not a case of robbery, but of simple monopoly.
Excessively large grants of land, nine-tenths of which remained
uncultivated, were obtained by the original settlers, most of whom were
Episcopalian in faith, and, under the Act of 1791, further tracts of
enormous extent, which for the most part lay waste and idle, were set
apart in each township, under the name of "Clergy Reserves" for the
Episcopalian Church. Since the majority of the incoming settlers were
Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, or Roman Catholics, many of them
from the Protestant and Catholic parts of Ireland, some from America,
some even from Germany, these conditions caused intense irritation,
checking both the development of the country and the growth of solid
character among the colonists. Absentee ownership was a grave economic
evil, though happily it was not complicated and embittered by a vicious
system of tenure. Education suffered severely through the diversion of
the income from public lands to private purposes.
The ascendancy was maintained on lines familiar in Ireland--through the
mutual dependence of the colonial minority and the Home Government
acting through its Governor. A few leading Episcopalian families from
among the United Empire Loyalists, installed at Toronto, with the
support of a succession of High Tory Lieutenant-Governors, monopolized
the Executive Council, the Legislative Council, the Bench, the Bar, and
all offices of profit, denying a Canadian career to the vast majority of
Upper Canadians, just as Irishmen were excluded from an Irish career.
For a long time the Assembly itself, which retained its original
Constitution long after the influx of immigrants had rendered necessary
its enlargement on a new electoral basis, was a subject of monopoly
also. Even when enlarged in 1821 it was helpless against the nominated
Council and Executive, backed by Downing Street. The oligarchy came to
be known by the name of the "family compact," and, as the reader will
observe, it bore a close resemblance in form to the "undertaker" system
in Ireland before the Union, and to the monopoly of patronage obtained
by certain families, notably the Beresfords.
While the Colony was still small, the system worked tolerably well; but
from the second decade of the nineteenth century onwards, when the
population grew from 150,000 to 250,000 in 1832, and to 500,000 a few
years later, and the Episcopalians sank into a numerical minority as low
as a quarter, troubles of the Irish type became proportionately acute.
The Colony was in reality perfectly content with its position under the
Crown, and in the war with America in 1812 all classes and creeds united
to repel invasion with enthusiasm. One of the prominent leaders was an
Irishman, James Fitzgibbon, and a poor Irish private, James O'Hara, won
fame by refusing to surrender at the capture of Toronto Fort. As usual,
however, a fictitious standard of "loyalty," which, in fact, meant
privilege, was set up, obscuring those questions of good government
which were the only real matters at issue in Canada, as in Ireland.
There were Republican immigrants of many denominations from America,
Radicals of Cobbett's school from England and Scotland, tenants of a
democratic turn from Ulster, and a growing stream of Catholic cottiers
flying from the "clearances" and tithe war in other Irish Provinces. All
these classes of men made excellent settlers, and only wanted fair and
equal treatment to make them perfectly peaceable citizens. To the
official oligarchy, however, even their moderate leaders came to be
viewed as rebels, and were often subjected to imprisonment or to
banishment.
Among others William Gourlay, a Scotsman, Stephen Willcocks and Francis
Collins, Irishmen, all three perfectly respectable reformers, suffered
in this way. Bidwell, the great Robert Baldwin, and other good men were
rendered powerless for good. As invariably happens in any part of the
world where a course is pursued which estranges moderate men and
embitters extreme men, agitators came to the front lacking that
self-control and sense of responsibility which the sobering education of
office alone can give, and generally ruining themselves while they
benefit humanity at large. Chief of these was W.L. Mackenzie, a
Presbyterian Scot from Dundee. All this man really wanted was what
exists to-day as a matter of course in all self-governing
countries--responsible government. He even conceived that great idea of
the Confederation of British North America, which came to birth in 1867.
Thwarted in his attacks on the oligarchy, he degenerated into violent
courses, and ultimately organized, or rather was provoked into
organizing, the rebellion of 1837. The grievances which led to this
outbreak were genuine and severe, and were all in course of time
admitted and redressed. One, the powerlessness of the Assembly, owing to
the control by the Executive of annual sums sufficient to pay the
official expenses of Government, corresponded to a pre-Union Irish
grievance, and was remedied by an Act of 1831. Most of the other
grievances were incurable by constitutional effort. They may be found
summarized in the "Seventh Report of Grievances," a temperate and
truthful document drawn up by a Committee of the Assembly in 1835. The
huge unsettled Clergy Reserves and Crown Lands were the worst concrete
abuse, and matters had just then been aggravated by the sudden
establishment of scores of sinecure rectories. Jobbery,
maladministration, and the dependence of the judges on the Executive
were other complaints; but the main assault was made quite rightly on
the form of the Colonial Government, which rendered peaceful reform of
any abuse as impossible as in Ireland, and the cardinal claim was that
the Executive should act, not under the dictation of Downing Street, of
an irresponsible Governor, or of a narrow colonial oligarchy, but in
accordance with popular opinion. Mackenzie's rebellion of 1837 was a no
more formidable affair than the similar efforts in Ireland made under
incomparably greater provocation by Emmett in 1803 and Smith O'Brien in
1848, and was as easily suppressed; but, unlike the Irish outbreaks, and
in conjunction with a revolt arising in the same year and from similar
causes in the adjoining Province of Lower Canada, it led to a complete
change of system.
In Lower Canada the same preposterous system of government was
aggravated by the presence of the two races, French and English. Yet
there was nothing inherently dangerous or unwholesome about this
situation. The French, like the Catholics in Ireland, never showed the
smallest tendency towards religious intolerance, nor were they less
loyal at heart than the Radicals of Upper Canada or the Tories of either
Province. They took the same energetic part in repelling the American
invasion of 1812, and produced at least one remarkable leader in the
person of Colonel Salaberry, who commanded the French-Canadian
Voltigeurs. Like their co-religionists in Ireland, they were
temperamentally averse to Republicanism in any shape, whether on the
American model over the border or on the model of revolutionary France,
where Republicanism since 1793 was anti-Catholic and the result of
miseries and oppressions as bad as those in Ireland; whence, moreover,
many priests and nobles fled from persecution to Lower Canada. As in
eighteenth-century Ireland, we find that the Roman Catholic clergy, the
_seigneurs_ or aristocrats, and the _habitants_ or peasants, were of a
Conservative cast, throwing their weight, often even against their own
interests, into the scale of the established Government, while the
lawyers and journalists alone produced determined agitators. The racial
cleavage, moreover, as in Ireland, was artificially accentuated by the
political system. There was in reality a strong community of interest
between the British lower class and the French lower class against the
tyranny of an official clique, and to the end a substantial number of
Englishmen worked with the French for reform; but with the failure of
their efforts came that inevitable tightening of the bonds of race, even
against interest, which we have seen operating with such lamentable
effect in Ireland. And, as in Ireland, we find the best instincts of
the people withered and perverted into rebellion by "Fitzgibbonism," the
policy of distrust and coercion.
The British official ascendancy, supreme from the first, became
extraordinarily rigid. The Executive Council and Legislative Council
were almost entirely British, the Assembly overwhelmingly French. There
were no regular heads of departments, so that the Governor had no
skilled advice, much less responsible advice. The Councils blocked all
legislation they disliked, and for more than forty years, by means of
unrestricted control over a large part of the provincial revenues, were
able to defy the Assembly. It will be observed that, although Ireland
never had anything worth calling an Assembly, her structure both before
and after the Union was essentially the same, in that Irish public
opinion, whether voiced by the Volunteers against the unreformed
Parliament or after the Union by the Nationalist party at Westminster,
was powerless. The existence of a popular Assembly in Canada only made
the anomalies more obvious.
There were, of course, marked divergencies of character and less marked
divergencies of interest between the French majority and the British
minority in Canada. The French, by comparison, were a backward and
conservative race, less well educated and less progressive and energetic
both in agriculture and commerce than the British. On the other hand,
subsequent experience showed that, under free constitutional government,
British intelligence, wealth, and energy would, here as elsewhere, have
preserved their full legitimate influence. Under a system which
throttled French ideas and aspirations, and treated the most harmless
popular movements as treasonable machinations, deadlock and anarchy were
in the long run inevitable.
The popular demands were much the same as those in Upper Canada: control
of the purse, the independence of the judges, an elective Legislative
Council, and a curtailment of the arbitrary powers and privileges of the
Executive, which led to gross jobbery, favouritism, and extravagance. As
in Upper Canada, the greatest practical grievance, though it assumed a
somewhat different form, was the disposal of the public lands. Here,
too, there were extensive and undeveloped Clergy Reserves for the
Episcopalian Church, as well as free grants on a large scale to
speculators. The estates of the Jesuit Order had been confiscated, so
that disputes about their disposal were tinged with religious
bitterness. But most of the friction over the land question came from
the operations of a chartered land company, which, under the protection
of the Government, and with financial and political support from
England, dealt with the unsettled land in a manner very unfair and often
corrupt, and promoted here, as in Upper Canada and Ireland, absentee
ownership.
The popular agitation ran the same course as in Upper Canada, reached
its crisis at the same moment, threw into prominence the same types of
men, moderate and extreme, and produced the same waste of good human
material and distortion of human character, both in the ascendant and
the subject classes. As Sir John Cockburn tells us in his "Political
Annals of Canada" (p. 177), some of the most incendiary speakers and
writers (in 1836) were "most able and worthy men, who in the subsequent
days of tranquillity occupied most prominent and distinguished positions
in the public service, revered as loyal, true, and able statesmen by all
classes." The popular movement was by no means wholly French. A Scot,
John Neilson; an Englishman, Wilfred Nelson; and an Irish journalist,
Dr. O'Callaghan, were prominent members of a kind of Radical party; but
the ablest and most influential among the agitators, and in every
respect more admirable than Mackenzie, was the Frenchman, Louis
Papineau, who first became Speaker of the Assembly in 1817, and retained
that high position until the verge of the rebellion of 1837. By no means
devoid of superficial faults, but eloquent, honest, accomplished and
adored by his compatriots, here was a man who, if he had been given
reasonable scope for his talents, and steadied by official
responsibility, would have been a tower of strength to the Colony and
the British connection. He corresponds in position and aims, and to a
certain extent in character and gifts, to his great Irish contemporary,
O'Connell. But O'Connell was too conservative to produce great results.
Papineau, dashing himself in vain for twenty years against the
entrenched camp of the ascendancy, finally degenerated, like Mackenzie,
into a commonplace rebel.
The phases through which the agitation passed before it reached this
disastrous point need only a brief review. Naturally enough, owing to
the bi-racial conditions, friction had arisen earlier in Lower than in
Upper Canada, yet the first recognition of the flagrant defects of the
Constitution was not made till 1828, when a Committee of the British
House of Commons published a Report which, though its recommendations
were mild and inadequate, was in effect a censure of the whole political
system of the Province and an admission of the justice of the agitation.
There was no result for four years, while matters went from bad to worse
in the Colony. At last, in 1832, under an Act similar to that passed for
Upper Canada, all the provincial revenues were placed under the control
of the Assembly in return for the voting of a fixed Civil List. This
well-meant half-measure made matters worse, because it left the Assembly
just as powerless as before over the details of legislation and
administration, while giving it the power to paralyze the Government by
refusing all, instead of only part, of the supplies. This it proceeded
to do, and in the next five years large deficits were piled up, and the
Colony became insolvent.
Meanwhile, in February, 1834, a year before the publication of the
"Seventh Report of Grievances" in Upper Canada, and three months before
O'Connell's celebrated motion in the House of Commons for the Repeal of
the Union between England and Ireland, the Assembly of Lower Canada, at
Papineau's instance, passed the equally celebrated "Ninety-two
Resolutions." Bombastic and diffuse, like parts of O'Connell's speech,
this historic document nevertheless was as true in all really essential
respects as Mackenzie's manifesto and as O'Connell's tremendous
indictment of the system of Government in Ireland. All three men,
O'Connell with far the most justification, demanded the same thing, good
government for their respective countries under a responsible Parliament
and Ministry. They all occasionally used wild language, O'Connell the
least wild. O'Connell, who nine years later deliberately quenched a
popular revolt he could have headed, failed in his aim as completely as
Tone, Emmett, and Smith O'Brien, who pressed their efforts to the point
of violence. Mackenzie and Papineau, who took to arms, succeeded in
their aim.
The crisis in Lower Canada was precipitated, and, indeed, provoked, by a
challenge thrown out in March, 1837, from the British House of Commons,
where, at Lord John Russell's instance, the Ten Resolutions were agreed
to, which amounted in effect to a denial of all the colonial claims and
a declaration of war upon those who made them. Papineau had to eat his
words or make them good, and he chose the latter course. His
insurrection was arranged in concert with that of the Upper Province,
broke out simultaneously in the winter of 1837, and was extinguished
with little difficulty. The men who made it suffered. Canada and the
Empire profited. Both Papineau and Mackenzie, following the precedent of
Wolfe Tone with France, endeavoured with little success to engage
American sympathy and the aid of her army, though Canada had as little
desire for American rule as Ireland had for French rule.
Let us remark, as an interesting fact for those who imagine that
Irishmen are always instinctively on the side of turbulence and
disorder, that the Irish immigrants who poured into Canada at the
average annual rate of 20,000 in the years--terrible years in
Ireland--preceding the rebellions,[23] acted much as we might expect. In
the Lower Province, following the lead of the French Catholic hierarchy,
they declared in November, 1837, against Papineau's party, and thus
strengthened the hands of the Government when the crisis approached.[24]
In the Upper Province Catholics were strongly on the side of reform, but
took no part in the rebellion. Orangemen in both Provinces, as we might
guess, sided as strongly with the ascendancy parties, but colonial air
seems to have taken some of the theological venom out of Orangeism. If
Charles Buller is to be trusted, some Catholics joined the societies in
Upper Canada, which were more Tory than religious, and the healths of
William of Orange and the Catholic Bishop Macdonnell were drunk in
impartial amity.[25]
In the meantime, three of the four outlying Provinces of North
America--Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island--where the
same form of Constitution prevailed as in Upper and Lower Canada, had
been passing through a similar phase of misgovernment and agitation
during the previous thirty years. Each suffered under a little
monopolist ascendancy, called by the same name, "the family compact,"
and sustained, against the prevailing sentiment and interest, by the
British Governor, and in each had arisen, or was arising, the same loud
demand for responsible government. Samuel Wilmot in New Brunswick,
Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, were the best-known spokesmen. There was no
violence, but a growing dislocation. In five Provinces of North America,
therefore, the Colonial Government had broken down or was tottering, and
from exactly the same cause as in Ireland, though under provocation
infinitely less grave. For the moment, however, attention was
concentrated upon the Canadas, where, as a result of the rebellion, the
Constitution of Lower Canada was suspended early in 1838. In the summer
of 1838 Lord Durham, the Radical peer, was sent out by Melbourne's
Ministry as Governor-General, with provisionally despotic powers, and
with instructions to advise upon a new form of government.
Before we come to Durham's proposals, let us pause and examine the state
of home opinion on the Irish and Colonial questions. The people of Great
Britain at large had no opinion at all. They were ignorant both of
Canada and Ireland, and had been engaged, and, indeed, were still
engaged, in a political struggle of their own which absorbed all their
energies. The Chartist movement in 1838 was assuming grave proportions.
The Reform, won in 1832 under the menace of revolution and in the midst
of shocking disorders, was in reality a first step toward the domestic
Home Rule that Ireland and the five Provinces of North America were
clamouring for. Tory statesmen were quite alive to this political fact,
and condemned all the political movements, British, Irish, and Colonial,
indiscriminately and on the same broad anti-democratic grounds. The Duke
of Wellington, who was not a friend of the Reform Act, and had only
adopted Catholic Emancipation in order to avoid civil war in Ireland,
speaking about Canada in the House of Lords on January 18, 1838, coupled
together the United States, British North America, and Ireland as
dismal examples of the folly of concession to popular demands. Pointing
to the results of the Canada Act of 1831, to which I have already
alluded, and which gave the Assemblies control of the provincial
revenue, and with an eye, no doubt, on the tithe war barely at an end in
Ireland, he said: "Let noble lords learn from Canada and our other
dominions in North America what it is to hold forth what are called
popular rights, but which are not popular rights here or elsewhere, and
what occasion is given thereby to perpetuate a system of agitation which
ends in insurrection and rebellion."
The Whig statesmen who, if we except Peel's short Administration of
1834-35, were in power from 1830 to 1841, though by no means democratic
men, were clear enough about Reform for Great Britain, but nearly as
ignorant and quite as wrong about Ireland and Canada as the Tories. The
only prominent Parliamentarian who, as after events proved, correctly
diagnosed and prescribed for the disease in both countries was
O'Connell. Not fully alive to the Irish analogy, but correct from first
to last about Canada, was a small group of independent Radicals, of whom
Roebuck, Hume, Grote, Molesworth, and Leader were the principal
representatives. After the insurrections in Canada came John Stuart
Mill, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Charles Buller, and with them Lord Durham
himself.
No one can understand either Irish or Colonial history without reading
the debates of this period in the Lords and Commons on Canada and
Ireland. Alternating with one another with monotonous regularity, they
nevertheless leave an impression of an extraordinary lack of
earnestness, sympathy, and knowledge, and an extraordinary degree of
prejudice and of bigotry in the Parliament to whose care for better or
worse the welfare of nearly ten millions of British citizens outside
Great Britain was entrusted. Save for an occasional full-dress debate at
some peculiarly critical juncture, the debates were ill-attended. The
prevailing sentiment seems to have been that Ireland and Canada,
leavened by a few respectable "loyalists" and officials, on the whole,
were two exceedingly mutinous and embarrassing possessions, which,
nevertheless, it was the duty of every self-respecting Briton to dragoon
into obedience. Both dependencies were assumed to be equally expensive,
though, in fact, Ireland, as we know now, was showing a handsome profit
at the time, whereas Canada was costing a quarter of a million a year.
For the rest, the pride of power tempered a sort of fatalistic apathy.
In the case of Ireland the element of pure selfishness was stronger,
because the immense vested interests, lay and clerical, in Irish land
were strongly represented. The proximity of Ireland, too, rendered
coercion more obvious and easy. Otherwise, her case was the same as that
of Canada. "The Canadas are endeavouring to escape from us, America has
escaped us, but Ireland shall not escape us," said an English member to
O'Connell just before the Repeal debate of 1834. Such was the current
view.
Yet, as in the case of Ireland and of the lost American Colonies, the
materials for knowledge of Canada were considerable. Petitions poured
in; Committees and Commissions were appointed, and made reports which
were consigned to oblivion. Roebuck, one of the small Radical group, was
himself a Lower Canadian by birth, and acted as agent at Westminster for
the popular party in that Province. He was as impotent as O'Connell, the
spokesman of the Irish popular party. If the Colonial Office was not
quite the "den of peculation and plunder" which Hume called it in
1838,[26] it was an obscure and irresponsible department, where jobbery
was as rife as in Dublin Castle. In the ten years of colonial crisis
(1828-1838), there were eight different Colonial Secretaries and six
Irish Chief Secretaries.
Over and above all this apathy and arrogance was the perfectly genuine
incapacity to comprehend that idea of responsible government which even
the most hot-headed and erratic of the colonial agitators did
instinctively comprehend. Until Durham had at last opened Lord John
Russell's eyes, the great Whig statesman was as positive and explicit as
the Tories, Wellington and Stanley, in declaring that it was utterly
impossible for the Monarch's Representative overseas to govern otherwise
than by instructions from home and through Ministers appointed by
himself in the name of the King. One constitutional King ruled over
Great Britain, Canada, and Ireland. He could not be advised by two sets
of Ministers. The thing was not only an unthinkably absurd nullification
of the whole Imperial theory, but, in practice, would destroy and
dissolve the Empire. William IV. himself told Lord Melbourne that it was
his "fixed resolution never to permit any despatch to be sent ... that
can for a moment hold out the most distant idea of the King ever
permitting the question even to be entertained by His Majesty's
confidential servants of a most remote bearing relative to any change of
the appointment of the King's Councils in the numerous Colonies." Lord
Stanley said, in 1837, that the "double responsibility" was impossible,
that there must either be separation or no responsible government, and
that it was "no longer a question of expediency but of Empire." Lord
John Russell, polished, sober, scorning to descend to the mere vulgar
abuse of the colonials which disfigured the utterances of many of his
opponents, struggling visibly to reconcile Liberalism with Empire,
nevertheless arrived at the same conclusion. In a debate of March 6, for
example, in the same year, in proposing the defiant Resolutions which
provoked the rebellion in Canada, he argued at length that a responsible
Colonial Ministry was "incompatible with the relations of a Mother
Country and a Colony," and would be "subversive of the power of the
British Crown," and again, on December 22, that it meant "independence."
O'Connell rightly replied to the former speech that Russell and his
followers were supporting "principles that had been the fruitful source
of civil war, dissension, and distractions in Ireland for centuries."
The Radical group pushed home the Irish parallel. Hume quoted, as
applicable to Canada, Fox's saying: "I would have the whole Irish
Government regulated by Irish notions and Irish prejudices, and I firmly
believe ... that the more she is under Irish Government the more she
will be bound to English interests." Molesworth declared, what was
perfectly true at that moment of passion and folly, that his extreme
political opponents wanted to make the reconquest of Ireland a precedent
for the reconquest of Canada.
It would repay the reader to turn back from this debate to the Irish
Repeal Debate of three years earlier, and listen to Sir Robert Peel
stating as one of the "truths which be too deep for argument," that the
Repeal of the Union "must lead to the dismemberment of this great
Empire, must make Great Britain a fourth-rate Power, and Ireland a
savage wilderness," which, as a matter of fact, it was at the very time
he was speaking, after thirty years of the Legislative Union, and seven
hundred years of irresponsible government. We must listen to him
claiming that the beneficent and impartial British Government was
"saving Ireland from civil war" between its own "warring sects,"
whereas, in fact, it was that Government which had brought those warring
sects into being, which had fomented and exploited their dissensions,
which had provoked the rebellion of 1798, and by its shameful neglect
and partiality in the succeeding generation had flung Ireland into a
social condition hardly distinguishable from "civil war." And we must
realize that closely similar arguments, with special stress on the right
of taxation, had been used for the coercion of the American Colonies,
and that exactly the same arguments, founded on the same inversion of
cause and effect, were used to defend the coercion of Canada. There,
also, the Fitzgibbonist doctrine of revenge and oppression by a majority
vested with power was freely used, even by Lord John Russell, in his
speech of March 6, 1837, and of December 22 in the same year, when he
spoke of the "deadly animosity" of the French and "of the wickedness of
abandoning the British to proscription, loss of property, and probably
of lives." He ignored the fact that the same state of anarchy had been
reached in uni-racial Upper Canada as in bi-racial Canada, and that the
"loyalists" in both cases were not only in the same state of unreasoning
alarm for their vested rights, but, in the spirit of the Ulstermen of
that day and ever since, were threatening to "cut the painter," and
declare for annexation to the United States if their ascendancy were not
sustained by the Home Government. Then, as to-day, the ascendant
minority were supported in their threats by a section of British
politicians. Lord Stanley's speech of March 8, 1837, where he boasted
that the "loyal minority of wealth, education, and enterprise" would
protect themselves, and, if necessary, call in the United States, is
being matched in speeches of to-day. In all the debates of the period it
is interesting to see the ignorance which prevailed about the troubles
in Upper Canada. The racial question in Lower Canada, owing to the
analogy with Ireland, was seized on to the exclusion of the underlying
and far more important political question in both Provinces.
Against the policy of the two great political parties in England the
little group of Radicals struggled manfully, and in the long run not in
vain, although for years they had to submit to insult and contumely in
their patriotic efforts to expose the vices of the colonial
administration and to avert the rebellion they foresaw in the Canadas.
What they feared, with only too good cause, was that the American and
Irish precedents would be followed, and war made for the coercion of the
Canadas, to be followed, if successful, by a still more despotic form of
government, which would in its turn provoke a new revolt. Rather than
that such a catastrophe should take place, they went, rightly, to the
extreme point of saying that an "amicable separation" should be
arranged, maintaining, what is indisputable, that the claims of humanity
should supersede the claims of possession. With Russell himself
declaring till the eleventh hour that responsible government was out of
the question because it meant "separation," they were quite justified in
demanding that separation, if indeed inevitable, should come about by
agreement, not as the possible result of a fratricidal war. For such a
war, though Russell could not see it until Durham made him see it, was
the only alternative to the grant of responsible government. But the
Radicals never used this argument unless circumstances forced them to.
Molesworth, in a debate of March 6, 1838, denounced the prevailing view
of the Colonies, insisted that we should be proud of them and study
their interests, that reform, not separation, should be our aim. The
Radicals were fully aware of the alternatives, and were unwearied in
pointing out the justice and policy, in the Imperial interests, of
acceding to the colonial popular demands. Grote had expressed the truth
in the December debate of 1837, when he implored the House "not to use a
tone of triumph at the superior power of England," but to remember that
the colonists, "though freemen, like ourselves," desired to remain, "if
they could do so with honour, in connection with England as the Mother
Country." He was followed by a gentleman named Inglis, who said that "it
was in Canada as in Ireland," a faction called itself Canada, and that
we must bring "back the colonists," like the Irish, "to subordination."
Roebuck, who led the Radicals in Canadian matters, had some of the
faults of Papineau and Mackenzie; yet posterity should give him and his
comrades credit for a constructive Imperialism which the great men of
his day lacked. It is now known that he and Sir William Molesworth
powerfully influenced Durham's policy. In a paper he drew up at Durham's
request on the eve of that nobleman's departure for Canada he sketched a
plan, imperfect in some details, but wise in broad conception, for
pacifying the Canadas, and went further in elaborating a scheme, also
defective, for the Confederation of British North America under the
Crown on the lines conceived by the despised demagogue, Mackenzie.[27]
But the two men who, by influencing Durham, probably did most to save
Canada for the Empire and to lay the foundations of the present Imperial
structure, were Charles Buller, the Radical M.P., and Edward Gibbon
Wakefield, both of whom accompanied the new Governor-General to Canada,
and who are generally believed to have inspired, if they did not
actually write, the greater part of the celebrated Report which became
the Magna Charta of the self-governing Colonies of the Empire.
A word about the events which ended in the publication of this Report.
Durham reached Canada at the end of May, 1838, and in November was
recalled in disgrace for exceeding--strange as it seems!--the almost
absolute powers temporarily entrusted to him. He was an extraordinary
mixture of a despot and a democrat, an extreme Radical in politics, an
autocrat in manners, as vain and tactless as he was generous and
sincere, making bitter enemies and warm friends in turn. He began by
winning and ended by estranging almost every class in both Provinces of
Canada, and returned to England to all appearances a spent and
extinguished meteor. There is some truth, perhaps, in Greville's
observation that, had he been "plain John Lambton," he would never have
been chosen for Canada. It is certain that those who sent him there
little dreamed of the consequences of their action. Lord Melbourne, the
Prime Minister, in a letter to the Queen, charged him with magnifying
the Canadian troubles "in order to give greater _éclat_ to his own
departure."[28] Still, he did his work of investigation faithfully, and
formed his conclusions sanely, and there were plain men of greater
ability at his elbow in the persons of Wakefield and Buller, by whose
advice he was wise enough to be guided. All opinion was against him when
news came of his recall, and even Roebuck was denouncing him in the
_Spectator_ for his autocratic excesses; but a brilliant article by John
Stuart Mill in the _Westminster Review_, pleading for time and
confidence, arrested the tide of obloquy.
Durham's long Report, and the events which followed it, ought to be
studied carefully by every voter, however lowly, who has a voice in
deciding the fate of Irish Home Rule. After an exhaustive discussion of
the causes of disorder in Canada, Durham made two recommendations, the
first of incalculable importance, and proved by subsequent experience to
be right; the second of minor consequence, and proved by subsequent
experience to be wrong.
The first was that responsible government should be inaugurated both in
Canada and in the Maritime Provinces of North America, whose
constitutional troubles Durham also discussed. His proposal was that the
Governor should govern in accordance with advice given by Colonial
Ministers in whom the popular Assembly reposed confidence, and who,
through that Assembly, were in touch with popular opinion; for it was to
the strangulation of popular opinion that Durham attributed all the
disorders and disasters of the past. This recommendation was eventually
adopted, not in the Act subsequently passed, but by instructions to the
Governors concerned; instructions which were first interpreted in the
full liberal spirit by Lord Elgin in 1847. The Maritime Provinces at
various dates and under various Governors received full responsible
government by 1854. Responsible government proved the salvation of
Canada and the Empire, as it would have proved, if given the chance, the
salvation of Ireland and a source of immensely enhanced strength to the
Empire.
The second and less important recommendation, afterwards embodied in the
Act of 1840, was the Union of the two Provinces of Upper and Lower
Canada. Here Lord Durham, misled unhappily by the Irish precedent, fell
into an error. During his visit to Canada he came near to accepting
that higher conception of a Federal Union with local Home Rule for each
Province, outlined by Roebuck and Mackenzie, and eventually consummated
thirty years later. When he came home to London he made a _volte face_,
rejecting the Federal idea and accepting its antitype, that Legislative
and Administrative Union of the two Provinces which had been rejected by
Pitt in 1791. There were, of course, economic arguments for Union apart
from the racial factor; but they do not seem to have been decisive with
Durham. At the last moment he gave way to a dread of predominant French
influence in Lower Canada, similar at bottom to his dread of the
unchecked influence of the British minority. While he feared that the
latter, if let alone, would inaugurate a reign of terror, he added also:
"Never again will the present generation of French-Canadians yield a
loyal submission to a British Government." The argument is inconsistent
with the whole spirit of the Report, which attributes the friction in
both Provinces to bad political institutions. It is probable that Durham
was really more influenced by the quite reasonable recognition that the
French were relatively backward in civilization and ideas. He sought,
therefore, both to disarm them politically and to anglicize them
socially, by amalgamating their political system with that of wholly
British Upper Canada. His calculation was that in a joint assembly the
British would have a small but sufficient majority. The estimated
population of Lower Canada was 550,000, of whom 450,000 were French, and
100,000 British and Irish; that of Upper Canada 400,000, all British and
Irish. That is to say, that in both Provinces together there was a
British and Irish majority of 100,000. The calculation over-estimated
the British element, but in the event this mistake proved to be
immaterial. Though Durham himself appears to have intended
representation to be in strict accordance with population, the Union
Act, passed in 1840, allotted an equal number of representatives in the
Joint Assembly to each of the old Provinces. The assumption here was
that the British Members from Upper Canada would unite with those of old
Lower Canada to vote down the French, just as the Ulster Protestants
voted with English members to vote down the Irish majority.
In practice the Union, after lasting twenty-six years, eventually broke
down. Durham's fear of French disloyalty proved to be as groundless as
his ideal of complete anglicization was futile. It was neither
necessary, sensible, nor possible to extinguish French sentiment, and
human nature triumphed over this half-hearted effort to apply in
dilution the medicine of Fitzgibbonism to the Colonies. Little harm was
done, because the introduction of responsible government, far
transcending the Union in importance, worked irresistibly for good.
Parties did not run wholly on racial lines, but racialism was encouraged
by the equal representation of the two Provinces in the Assembly, in
spite of the greater growth of population in the Upper Province. The
system was unhealthy, and at last produced a state of deadlock, in which
two exactly equal parties were balanced, and a stable Government
impossible. When that point was reached, men began to observe the strong
and supple Constitution of the adjacent United States, and to recognize
that a politically feeble Canada was courting an absorption from that
quarter which all Canadians disliked. The Legislative Union was
dissolved by the mutual consent of the Provinces with the approval of
the Mother Country, and in 1867, under the British North America Act,
the Federal Union was formed which exists in such strength and stability
to-day. Fear of French disloyalty or tyranny was a night-mare of the
past, even with the British minority in Lower Canada. It was realized
that French national sentiment was perfectly consistent with racial
harmony under the British flag. Upper Canada became Ontario, Lower
Canada Quebec. Each Province reserved a local autonomy for itself, and
each at the same moment voluntarily surrendered certain high powers to a
supreme centralized Government, in which both had confidence. Such a
political system is capable of indefinite expansion. Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick joined the Federation at the outset, Prince Edward Island and
British Columbia a little later, and were followed in turn by the
successively developed Provinces which now form the united and powerful
Dominion of Canada.
Turn back to Ireland and weigh well the analogy. _Mutatis mutandis_,
almost every paragraph of the Durham Report applied with greater force
to the Ireland of his day. The ascendancy of a caste and creed minority
in Upper Canada; of a race minority in Lower Canada; "the conflict of
races, not of principles"; the consequent obliteration of natural
political divisions, and the substitution of unnatural and vindictive
antagonisms demoralizing both sides to every quarrel; the universal
disgust with and distrust of the British Government, though for reasons
diametrically opposite; the hopelessness of true reforms; the
perpetuation of abuses; the stagnation of trade and agriculture; the
re-emigration to America, and the abuses of a Church Establishment with
endowments from sources by right public--all these phenomena and many
others had their counterpart in Ireland. Some have disappeared. The
Church is disestablished. The land question is on the way to settlement.
The old ascendancy is mitigated. But many of the political, and all the
psychological, features of the situation which Durham described do,
alas! exist to-day in Ireland. Ireland, like the Canada of 1838, is a
land of bewildering paradox. There is a similarly unwholesome arrest of
free political life, the same unnatural division of parties, the same
suppression of moderate opinion, and the same inevitable maintenance of
a Home Rule agitation, harmful in itself, because it retards the country
and accentuates for the time being the very divisions it seeks to cure,
but absolutely necessary for the final salvation of Ireland. Durham, in
the case of Canada, saw the truth, and swept into the limbo of
discredited bogies the old figments of the coercionists. In a singularly
noble and profound passage (p. 229), revealing the ethical basis on
which his philosophy rested, he declared that even if the political
freedom of the Colony were to lead in the distant future to her
separation from the Empire, she nevertheless had an indefeasible moral
right to the blessings of freedom; but he prophesied correctly that the
connection with the Empire "would only become more durable and
advantageous by having more of equality, of freedom, and of local
administration."
If only Irish and British Unionists would realize that these words came
from a profound knowledge of human nature in the mass, and are
applicable to Irishmen in Ireland just as much as to Irish, British,
French, and Dutch in the Colonies!
The tenacity of the old superstition is extraordinary, and we can see it
in the case of Canada. It remains a wonder to this day how responsible
government was ever introduced. There can be no question that the Act of
1840 only secured a smooth passage because, in providing for the Union
of the French and British Provinces, it represented a superficial
analogy to that Union of Britain and Ireland which had paralyzed Irish
aspirations. Durham himself had actually quoted both the Irish and
Scotch Unions as successful expedients for "compelling the obedience of
a refractory population," and thus arrived at the outstanding and
solitary defect of his otherwise noble scheme. And O'Connell, in a
debate upon the Report on June 3, 1839, opposed the Canadian Union for
Irish reasons, and in language which after-experience proved to be
perfectly correct. Happily, as we have seen, the defect was small and
curable, because the analogy with Ireland, where there was no
responsible, but, on the contrary, a separate and wholly irresponsible
Executive Government, and whose interests were upheld by only 100
Members in a House of 670, was exceedingly remote. On responsible
government itself the Canadian Act of 1840 was entirely silent. We may
thank Providence for the fact. Durham's cardinal proposals had received
unbridled vituperation as sentimental rubbish where they were not
treasonable poison, the whole controversy taking precisely the same form
as in 1886 and 1893 over Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills for Ireland.
The _Quarterly Review_ spoke of "this rank and infectious Report,"
though it is fair to say that Peel and Wellington did not join in such
wild language. Five months after the issue of Lord Durham's Report, Lord
John Russell, in the debate of June 3, was denying, with the approval of
all but the Radicals, the possibility of responsible government as
emphatically as ever. Durham seems to have partially converted him in
the summer, for in introducing the Act itself in 1840 he cautiously
committed himself to the plan of instructing the Canadian Governor to
include in his Executive Council, or Cabinet, men expressly chosen
because they possessed the confidence of the Assembly. But the Act as it
stood, ignoring this vital change, was impeccably Conservative, and on
that account went through. In some points it seemed, without good
reason, to be even reactionary, and was regarded in that light with
displeasure by the Radicals, with satisfaction by Whigs and Tories.
While confirming the control of revenue by the Assembly, in return for a
fixed civil list, it took away from the Assembly, and vested in the
Executive, the power of recommending money votes, and it also retained
the Legislative Council or Upper Chamber as a nominated, not as an
elective, body. Provided that the Executive had the confidence of the
representative Assembly or Lower House, the first point was perfectly
sound, and the second was not vital; but there was no security for the
condition precedent other than Russell's vague outline of subsequent
policy. While the supreme power of the King, acting with or without the
Governor, was reaffirmed in the most vigorous terms, there was not a
word in the Act about the composition of the Executive Council or its
relation to the Assembly.
In Canada much the same misconceptions prevailed, and promoted the
acceptance of the Act by the supporters of the old ascendancies. The
question of the Union and the question of responsible government, both
raised by Lord Durham's Report, became inextricably confused, and the
various petitions and resolutions of the time reflect this confusion.
The French opposed the Union and supported responsible government on the
same grounds, and in almost identical terms, as the Irish opposed, and
still oppose, their Union with Great Britain, and ask for responsible
government in Ireland. Moderate Britishers supported both proposals, but
the extremists of the old ascendancy bitterly denounced the whole theory
of responsible government, Union or no Union. Their views are ably and
incisively set forth by a Committee of the old Legislative Council of
Upper Canada, that is, by the members of the "family compact," in a
protest signed and transmitted to London, where it was quoted with
approval by Lord John Russell. It may be found, together with other
petitions of the time, in the "Canadian Constitutional Development" of
Messrs. Grant and Egerton. With a few unessential changes and
modifications, the whole document might be signed to-day by a Committee
of Ulster Unionists, and I heartily wish that every Ulsterman would read
it in a spirit of reason and generosity, and observe how every line of
it was falsified by history, before he declares that the situation of
Ulster is peculiar, and sets his hand or gives his adhesion to a
similar document. The signatories, who, it must be remembered, were a
small ruling minority of the colonists, whose power was artificially
sustained by the British Governor, claim that they alone, in glorifying
and in battling for "colonial dependence," are the true Imperialists.
They hold dear the "unity of the Empire." Responsible government within
their own Colony would lead to the "overthrowal" of that Empire, and the
reduction of Britain to a "second-rate Power." A colonial Cabinet is
absurd; the local and sectional interests are too strong; the British
Government must remain as "umpire" to keep the parties from flying at
one another's throats. The majority, who are themselves a prey to
divisions (and one thinks of Nationalist splits), are seeking only for
illegitimate power; the minority are for "justice and protection, and
impartial government." Yet in the same breath we are told that all is
happy and peaceable as it is. Why subject the Colony to the dissensions
of party? Why foster a spirit of undying enmity among a people disposed
to dwell together in harmony? The signatories argue from the history of
Ireland and Scotland, "which never had responsible government, yet
government became impracticable the moment it approached to equal
rights." Hence a Union, because "government must be conducted with a
view to some supreme ruling power, which is not practicable with several
independent Legislatures." Finally, Loyalists and Imperialists as they
are, they are not going to stand an attempt to "force independence" on
them. They will take the matter into their own hands, and, if necessary,
call in the United States to "replace the British influence needlessly
overthrown."
I do not quote this sort of thing in order to add any tinge of
bitterness to present controversies. The signatories lived to see their
errors and to be ashamed of what they wrote. They, like the Irish
Unionist leaders of to-day, were able and sincere men, unconscious, we
may assume, that their pessimism about the tendencies of their
fellow-citizens was really due to the defective institutions which they
themselves were upholding, and to the forcible suppression of the finer
attributes of human nature; unconscious, we may also assume, of
identifying loyalty with privilege, and "the supreme ruling power" with
their own ruling power; unconscious that what they called "Imperial
Unity" was in reality on the verge of producing Imperial disruption; and
wholly unconscious, certainly, of the ghastly irony of their analogy
drawn from the brutally misgoverned, job-ridden, tithe-ridden,
rack-rented Ireland of their day, living, for no fault of its own, under
a condition of intermittent martial law, and hurrying at that moment
towards the agony of the famine years. Less severe in degree, analogous
abuses perpetuated in their own interest existed in their own Colony,
and were only abolished under the new régime which they attacked with
such vehemence before it came, and which, because it transformed and
elevated their own character and that of their fellow-citizens, while
drawing them closer to the old country, they afterwards learned to
regard with pride and thankfulness.
As an effective contrast to the mistaken views of the Upper Canadian
statesmen, the reader cannot do better than study the letters of Joseph
Howe, the brilliant Nova Scotia "agitator," to Lord John Russell, in
answer to that statesman's speech of June 3, 1839, when he argued
against responsible government, and quoted the Upper Canadian manifesto
as his text. These letters make a wonderful piece of sustained and
humorous satire, of which every word was true and every word applicable
to Ireland. Howe's portrait, for example, of the average Colonial
Governor applies line for line to the average Chief Secretary, coming at
an hour's notice to a country he has never seen, and knows nothing of,
vested with absolute powers of patronage, and often pledged to carry out
a policy in direct conflict with the wishes of the vast majority of the
people whose interests he is supposed to guard.
The Act of 1840 went through, but it had little to do with the
regeneration and reconciliation of Canada. Poulett Thompson, the first
Governor, peremptorily declined to admit the principle of Ministerial
responsibility. Some good reforms were, indeed, made in the early years,
but the Act was on the verge of breaking down when Lord Elgin, Durham's
son-in-law, came to Canada as Governor-General in 1847. After many party
changes and combinations, French influence was temporarily in the
ascendant, and in 1849 a Bill was on the stocks for compensating French
as well as British subjects for losses in the rebellion of 1837. Elgin,
following the advice of his Ministers, of whom Baldwin was one,
Lafontaine another, gave the Royal Assent to the Bill. The British, with
the old cry of "loyalism," and with Orangemen in the van, rioted, mobbed
the Governor, and burnt down the Parliament House at Montreal. Elgin,
expostulating with Lord John Russell, who was as pessimistic as ever,
and threatened with recall, stuck to his guns under fierce obloquy, and
the principle of responsible government was definitely established. It
was applied at about the same period to the other British Provinces of
North America, with the ulterior results I have described, and in a few
years to Australia.
The great year, then, was 1847, the year of the Irish famine, and the
year before the pitiful rebellion of Smith O'Brien, surrendering in the
historic cabbage-garden. Our thoughts go back sixty-four years to 1783,
when the American War of Independence ended; when, as a result of that
war, British Canada and Australia were founded, and when, at the
crisis--premature, alas!--of Ireland's fortunes, the Volunteers in vain
demanded the Reform which might have saved their country. Look into
historical details, read contemporary debates, and watch the contrast.
Within five years of responsible government Canada solved all the great
questions which had been convulsing society for so long, and turned her
liberated energies towards economic development. In Ireland the abuses
of ages lingered to a point which seems incredible. The Church was not
disestablished, amid outcries of imminent ruin and threats of a
Protestant rebellion, till 1869, when Canada had already become a
Federated Dominion. The Irish land question, dating from the seventeenth
century, was not seriously tackled until 1881, not drastically and on
the right lines till 1903. Education languishes at the present day.
Canada started an excellent system of municipal and local government in
the forties. In Ireland, while the minority, in Greville's words, were
"bellowing spoliation and revolution," an Act was passed in 1840 with
the utmost difficulty, removing an infinitesimal part of the gross
abuses of municipal government under the ascendancy system, and it was
not till 1898 that the people at large are admitted to a full share in
county and town government. Even this step inverted the natural order of
things, for the new authorities are hampered in their work by the
incessant political agitation for the Home Rule which should have
preceded their establishment, as it preceded it in Great Britain and
Canada. Home Rule, the tried specific, was resisted, as those who read
the debates of 1886 and 1893 will recognize, on the same grounds as
Canadian Home Rule, in the same spirit, and often in terms absolutely
identical.
Was it because Ireland, unlike Canada, was "so near"? Let us reflect.
Did Durham advocate Canadian Home Rule because Canada was "so far"? On
the contrary, it was a superficial inference, drawn not merely from
Ireland, but from Scotland, and since proved to be false both in Canada
and South Africa, that made him shrink from the full application of a
philosophy which was already far in advance of the political thought and
morality of his day. Is it to be conceived that if he had lived to see
the Canadian Federation, the domestic and Imperial results of South
African Home Rule, and the consequences of seventy more years of
coercive government in Ireland, he would still have regarded the United
Kingdom in the light of a successful expedient for "compelling the
obedience of refractory populations"? In truth, Durham, like ninety-nine
out of a hundred Englishmen of his day, knew nothing of Ireland, not
even that her political system differed, as it still differs, _toto
coelo_ from that of Scotland, and came into being under circumstances
which had not the smallest analogy in Scotland. So far as his knowledge
went, he was a student of human nature as affected by political
institutions. Wakefield, who advised him, was a doctrinaire theorist who
put his preconceived principles into highly successful practice both in
Australia and Canada. They said: "Your coercive system degrades and
estranges your own fellow-citizens. Change it, and you will make them
friendly, manly, and prosperous." They were right, and one reflects once
more on the terrible significance of Mr. Chamberlain's admission in
1893, that "if Ireland had been a thousand miles away, she would have
what Canada had had for fifty years."
FOOTNOTES:
[20] "The Irishman in Canada" (N.F. Davin), a book to which the author
is indebted for much information of the same character.
[21] "William Pitt and the National Revival."
[22] Canadian Archives, 1905; "History of Prince Edward Island," D.
Campbell; "History of Canada," C.D.G. Roberts. In 1875, after a long
period of agitation and discontent, the Land Purchase Act was passed,
and the Dominion Government asked Mr. Hugh Childers to adjudicate on the
land-sale expressly on the ground that he had been associated with the
Irish Land Act of 1870 ("Life of Mr. Childers," by Lieut.-Col. Spencer
Childers, vol. i., p. 232).
[23] Canadian Archives, 1900. Note B. Emigration (1831-1834). Irish
immigrants in 1829, 9,614; in 1830, 18,300; in 1831, 34,155; in 1832,
28,024; in 1833, 12,013; in 1834, 19,206: about double the immigration
of English and Scottish together in the same period.
[24] "Self-government in Canada," F. Bradshaw, p. 96 _et seq_.
[25] "Durham Report," p. 130.
[26] Hansard, January 23.
[27] "Self-government in Canada," F. Bradshaw, p. 17.
[28] "Letters of Queen Victoria," vol. i., November 22, 1838.