one, not even the most discontented Canadian, denied. But the mistaken
data from which many of the arguments were drawn maddened some; and
aristocratic mannerisms, when brought into contact with the democratic
Upper Canadian, gave offence. There was a great deal of the picturesque
about Jean Baptiste, and of him much was known; retiring governors and
officers took with them bulky note-books full of anecdotes. In Upper
Canada there was nothing of the picturesque, and the same note-books,
developed into goodly volumes, tell us it in print without flinching.
True, those intent on learning had Basil Hall’s Sketches, with accounts
of Hall’s five thousand two hundred and thirty-seven miles of travel;
but though the former were beautifully done the latter were meagre, and
with the exception of Niagara make the Upper Province as uninteresting
as its own crows. For foundation they had Charlevoix; but, says
Charlevoix, “The horned owl is good eating, many prefer his flesh to
chickens. He lives in winter on ground mice which he has caught the
previous fall, breaking their legs first, a most useful precaution to
prevent their escape, and then fattens them up with care for daily
use.” Could housewife with Thanksgiving turkey do more!
Now a good many of those who came after Charlevoix and reported on
us took him--perhaps unconsciously, perhaps conscientiously, for
Charlevoix was a good man--for a literary model, pushing to the extreme
limit their rights and privileges as travellers. They read, did these
mighty and well-meaning statesmen, in their leisure hours. Nor in later
years were the English less credulous when Canadian curiosities came to
them bodily. When a party of Indians were nightly attracting large and
wondering masses of the classes, one of the Royal Household, with two
others as white as himself, one of the trio six feet two of apparent
savagedom, arrayed themselves as magnificent Bois Brûlé, a Sac and a
Sioux respectively, to appear before a brilliant array of fashion,
wealth and beauty, carry out an unusually thrilling programme and be
loaded with gifts by the spectators. The “interpreter” of the three got
into rather a mess through his attempt to interpret too much, and in a
final frenzy of dancing they danced off some paint made liquid by their
desire to be honest in giving enough for their lavish remuneration.
An earl in the audience failed to recognize his brother in one of the
chief actors, voice and speech being disguised by a rifle bullet held
in the mouth. The sequel was the return of the presents and a chase
home to lodgings, followed by a yelling crowd of ragamuffins who turned
out to be truer savages than those whom they termed Hopjibbeways. The
Indian came first in romantic interest to the Englishman, particularly
when got ready for an audience by a clever manager. To hear a handsome,
strapping Bois Brûlé sing “To the land of my fathers, white man, let
me go,” was enough to draw tears. Next in point of interest to this
link between red and white came the habitant. The Upper Canadian was
very tame after these two, and Toronto was but “a place of considerable
importance ... in the eyes of its inhabitants.”
Another writes of travel by water as he finds it in America: “There is
no toothbrush in the country, simply I believe the article is entirely
unknown to the American toilet. A common towel, however, passes from
hand to hand, and suffices for the perfunctory ablutions of the
whole party on board.” No man in England would take the trouble to
contradict this; it was much easier to buy the book, read, be amused,
and believe--as he did with the Indian party.
Much as Mackenzie was instrumental in doing for his country, he was
scarcely a person to make his province interesting when he presented
himself in London.
“Now Willie’s awa’ frae the land o’ contention,
Frae the land o’ mistake and the friends o’ dissension;
He’s gane o’er the waves as an agent befitting
Our claims to support in the councils o’ Britain,”
sang a Canadian bard in 1832, when Mackenzie, with his monster
grievance book under his arm, set sail for the Home Office.
The quiet of the vessel after his late life in Little York was irksome;
so this stormy petrel went aloft one night in a howling tempest,
no doubt in a fit of home-sickness, and remained for hours at the
masthead. Scarcely had he descended when one of the sails was blown
away.
“Then there the Reformers shall cordially meet him,
An’ there his great namesake, King William, shall greet him.”
He lost no time in putting himself in communication with Hume,
Roebuck, Cobbett and O’Connell, and with Lord Goderich, then Colonial
Secretary; but just how far the meeting was cordial, with those from
whom cordiality was expected, only a long comparison of data can show.
Even then our opinions had weight, as in ’31 when Brougham wrote: “Dear
Lord Grey, the enclosed is from a Canadian paper; they have let you
off well, as being priggish and having a Newcastle burr, and _also_ as
_not_ being like O’Connell.” Mackenzie was in the nick of time to see
that wonderful sight for eyes such as his--a great aristocracy bowing
to the will of a great people--to hear the third reading of the Reform
Bill. He was lucky enough to get into that small gallery in the House
of Lords which accommodates only some eighty persons. He noticed that
but few peers had arrived, and that a number of members from the Lower
House stood about. To stand they were forced, or sit upon the matting,
for there were neither chairs nor benches for them--a state of things
highly displeasing to the fiery little democratic demagogue perched
aloft, anxious to hear and determined that others should yet hear him.
At the Colonial Office he was simply a person interested in Canadian
affairs, and useful as one able to furnish information. But he
furnished it in such a discursive manner and adorned it with so much
rhetoric that the Colonial Secretary found his document “singularly
ill-adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and importance
to a definite issue.” The impression Mackenzie might have made was
nullified by the counter-document adroitly sent in ahead of his own by
the Canadian party in power, wherein a greater number of signatures
than he had been able to get appended to dissatisfaction testified to
satisfaction with affairs as they then existed in the Upper Province.
The customary despatch followed. Some of Mackenzie’s arguments were
treated with cutting severity; but an impression must have been made by
them, for the despatch carried news most distressing to the oligarchy,
which was modelled after the spirit of St.Paul,--that there should be
no schism in the body, that the members should have the same care one
for the other.
To these Tories of York it was all gall and wormwood. Nor could they
accept it. Mackenzie had spent six days and six nights in London, with
only an occasional forty winks taken in his chair, while he further
expressed himself and those he represented. His epistolary feat was
regarded by the Upper Canadian House with unqualified contempt, and
Lord Goderich’s moderately lengthy one as “not calling for the serious
attention of the Legislative Council.” Mackenzie had ventured to
predict in his vigil of ink and words that unless the system of the
government of Upper Canada was changed civil war must follow. But
peers also sometimes have insomnia and know the distressing results;
so he was warned: “Against gloomy prophecies of this nature, every man
conversant with public business must fortify his mind.” The time was
not far distant when he might say, “I told you so.” The Home Office
listened with great attention, but observed close reticence in regard
to itself. The Colonial Minister looked upon such predictions as a
mode to extort concessions for which no adequate reason could be
offered. Nevertheless, the two Crown officers who were Mr. Mackenzie’s
most particular aversions at that time had to go. The weapon of
animadversion sent skipping across seas for the purpose of his
humiliation had proved a kind of boomerang, and the Attorney-General
and Solicitor-General were left free to make as many contemptuous
expressions as they pleased concerning the Colonial Secretary and his
brethren, being looked upon by the last-named as rebels themselves,
since they had, “in their places in the Assembly, taken a part directly
opposed to the assured policy of His Majesty’s Government.” Such is
the strength of point of view; for the libellous rebel doing his
busiest utmost against them was to them “an individual who had been
twice expelled” this same House of Assembly. Under the first affected
hauteur of the dismissed officials there had been many qualms; the
Attorney-General thought it ill became the Colonial Secretary to
“sit down and answer this rigmarole trash” (Mackenzie’s hard work
of seventy-two sleepless hours), “and it would much less become the
Canadian House of Assembly to give it further weight by making it
more public.” One, a little more sane, thought that if Mackenzie’s
papers contained such an amount of falsehood and fallacy, the best way
to expose such was by publication. But a large vote decided that it
should not go upon the Journals, and the official organ called Lord
Goderich’s despatch an elegant piece of fiddle-faddle, ... full of
clever stupidity and condescending impertinence. The removal of the two
Crown officers was described as “as high-handed and arbitrary stretch
of power as has been enacted before the face of high heaven, in any of
the four quarters of this nether world for many and many a long day.”
The organ’s vocabulary displayed such combinations as “political
mountebank--fools and knaves--all fools and knaves who listened to the
silly complaints of the swinish multitude against the honourable and
learned gentlemen connected with the administration of government.”
Whenever time dragged withal in the Upper Canadian House they
re-expelled Mackenzie and fulminated anew against “the united factions
of Mackenzie, Goderich, and the Yankee Methodists.”
Mackenzie’s friends lost no time in celebrating what was to be a
short-lived triumph:
“They sneered at Mackenzie and quizzed his red wig;
That the man was too poor they delighted to show,
Nor dreamed with such triumph the future was big,
As chanting the death song of Boulton and Co.
Rail on, and condemn the corps baronial,
Lord Goderich and Howick despatched at a blow,
Those peers who knew nothing of interests colonial,
In proof read the march route of Boulton and Co.”
Lord Goderich’s polite wish not to hamper any nor coerce--that these
gentlemen might be “at full liberty, as members of the Legislature, to
follow the dictates of their own judgment”--ended in the dictates of
anger appearing in hard words in the official press. The affections of
these tried Loyalists were said to have been estranged; moreover, “they
were casting about in their mind’s eye for some new state of political
existence” which would put them and their colony beyond “the reach
of injury and insult from any and every ignoramus whom the political
lottery of the day may chance to elevate to the chair of the Colonial
Office.”
Now Mackenzie himself could not have done better than this, nor had he
yet gone even thus far.
But the official in that chair was used to many hard knocks, and the
individual was changed so often that the blows had no time to take
effect. Nor was the incomer ever anxious to avenge the woes of his
predecessor.
“Prosperity Robinson,” _alias_ “Goosey Goderich,” soon to be Lord
Ripon, “the dodo of the Reform party,” stepped out. Mr. Stanley,
“Rupert of debate,” stepped in. The two dispossessed of Canadian
power lost no time in presenting themselves at the Colonial Office,
one of them going in as his small adversary, Mr. Mackenzie, happened
to be coming out, and the personal interview with the possessors of
“alienated affections” made the new Secretary make a bid for the return
of these valuables by reinstating the ex-Solicitor-General, and giving
the ex-Attorney-General the Chief-Justiceship of
“Some place abroad,
Where sailors gang to fish for cod,”
in what was called the Cinderella of the colonies, Newfoundland.
History is silent, as far as we can learn, on the state of his
affections thereafter, transplanted and uprooted so often. We presume
they withered and a’ wede awa’.
Now this Chief-Justice had formerly called Mackenzie a reptile, and the
other gentleman had dubbed him a spaniel dog--quite a leap from the
general to the special, had but Darwin, then somewhere near American
waters casting his search-light of enquiry from H. M. S. _Beagle_,
known of it.
Mackenzie was in despair: “I am disappointed. The prospect before us
is indeed dark and gloomy.” But rallying from this despondency, in his
usual peppery style he told Mr. Stanley the appointments would be “a
spoke in the wheel in another violent revolution in America.” Hume
wrote that he judged the disposition of the Secretary was to promote
rather than to punish for improper conduct, and thereby encourage the
misgovernment in Canada, which Lord Goderich’s policy had been likely
to prevent.
Well might a Canadian paper, announcing the advent of the new
Attorney-General, Jameson, say: “It is to be hoped he will view the
real situation of the people of this province from his own observation.”
The Iroquois was always ready to drink to the King’s health, be
he a George or a William; Stanley might declaim about “the most
odious and blood-thirsty tyranny of French republicanism;” but this
little Canadianized Scotchman, with his clever pen and tongue, misty
conceptions of statesmanship, real grievances and revolutionary speech,
was more than the Home Government could “thole.” The Earl of Ripon, in
1839, stated that Mackenzie in his correspondence of 1835 sought to
make himself appear a very great man, whereas in reality he was a very
little man. In his apologetic we find: “Well, he saw Mr. Mackenzie. He
did not know that Mr. Mackenzie was a broken-down peddler. He knew that
Mr. Mackenzie was an exceedingly troublesome person. He was perfectly
satisfied, from the conduct of the individual, that Mr. Mackenzie
was as vain and shallow a person as he had ever encountered. If the
conference alluded to by Mr. Mackenzie was of only two hours’ duration,
he must say it was the longest two hours he had ever known.”
How to make a common unity, a compact and harmonious people, out of
their uncommon ancestors became the problem. “Not that our heads are
some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald,” said the Canadian
mélange, “but that our wits are so diversely coloured.” Some of
the men who were to solve the problem do not read as if equipped by
appearance or culture to handle with their delicate fingers such homely
subjects. Scarcely a week passed without a fresh turn up of the cards
in Canada; and although Mr. Warburton wondered if the colony were worth
retaining, the game worth the candle, the young Queen, in that part of
her speech which dealt with the Canadian question, had an undertone
of determination “to maintain her supremacy throughout the whole of
the North American colonies,” and how the game would finally turn out
became daily involved at Westminster in greater doubt and difficulty.
At this time an editor in the United States uttered prophecy: “We do
earnestly believe that the Virgin Queen of England is destined to be
one of the most extraordinary characters of the present age or any
country. She is a little Napoleon in petticoats--as determined, as
lofty, as generous, as original as he was. Wait and see.”
“My Lords,” said the Great Duke, referring to her speech quoted from,
“I could have wished that this declaration of Her Majesty had been
accompanied by corresponding efforts to enable Her Majesty to carry
those intentions into effect.”
“Sir Robert Peel, who played upon the House as upon an old fiddle,”
regretted that there was not also in that speech a stronger expression
of sympathy for the sufferings of their brave and loyal fellow-subjects
in the colonies--at which there were cheers from both sides of the
House. He could not too much admire the bravery, the loyalty, the
devotedness of the Canadians. Nor did this arise from interested
motives; it was sincere attachment to monarchical principles, and
sincere opposition to a republican form of government.
There were many men, interesting in themselves, in debate on us then;
but individually, and as he borrowed interest from his position towards
that centre of all observation, the young Queen, came Melbourne.
While still William Lamb he had hated what he called the creeping
palsy of misgiving, tried hard to resist it, and developed into one of
those not afraid to advance with the age. He had no “extreme faith in
religion, politics, or love.” Accordingly, to him patriotism and wisdom
were not confined to the Whigs alone. The oh-oh’s and ironical cheers
from what he knew to be a powerful majority moved him not; he was as
easy, comfortable, good-humoured, as ever. Quaintness, originality of a
manner fitful, abrupt, full of irony, at times of a tenderness almost
feminine, distinguished him, together with an insuperable aversion to
“platitudes, palaverings,”--and bishops. In an age when swearing was
as common in drawing-rooms as in the field, England’s Prime Minister
was an acknowledged past-master in the art, and by inflections gave a
dozen changes to the small familiar four-lettered British adjective in
most common use. In ordinary transactions he loved a chirpy oath; but
in his dealings with the bishops was forced to coin a “superdamnable.”
The Order of the Garter was a great favourite with him, “because there
was no damned merit about it.” Utilitarian levelling like Bentham’s
he regarded as nonsense; state parsimony like Hume’s, a “pettifogging
blunder;” radicalism after the manner of Cobbett and others he called
mere ragamuffinism; but he told his peers plainly that the time had
gone by when any set of men could put themselves up as a check against
national opinion, that antique usages could not prevail against reason
and argument--truths spoken with the voice of the Commons in that place
where such a voice was almost unknown, seldom heard. Yet rancour was
foreign to his nature: “The great fault of the present time (1835) is
that men hate each other so damnably; for my part, I love them all.”
And all with the air of a good-tempered, jovial gentleman.
“If something of his amiable spirit could be caught by others,” said a
friend, “and grafted on Lord Wellesley’s counsel to ‘_demolish these
people_,’ matters would not be difficult.”
Called upon frantically by friend and foe at a time of crisis “_to do_
something,” the responsibility of the times thrown on him, he sat tight
and calmly answered, “Whenever you are in doubt what should be done--do
nothing.”
This all sounds like the man for the Canadas. Nine hundred or so of his
peers gnashed their teeth at him,--if peers ever so use their molars;
and in Canada they wrote of “the prolific source of political evil, the
profligate course of imbecile rulers.”
William the Fourth had called him “a great gentleman,” although he
and his government had been “kicked out” by that obstinate, morbid,
prejudiced and somewhat imaginative monarch. Naturally, Melbourne
refused an earldom and a garter; but in his final advice to the
sovereign he was as tactful as ever in making the latter partially
modify the note of dismissal, thereby averting a storm of popular
feeling and individual resentment of ministers. “Mind what you are
about in Canada,” said the King when final instructions were given to
Lord Gosford before he left England, and Melbourne and Glenelg--the
Sleeping Beauty--found the monarch as hard to manage as the colony
itself. “By ---- I will never consent to alienate the Crown Lands nor
to make the Council elective. Mind me, my lord, the cabinet is not
my cabinet; they had better take care, or by ---- I will have them
impeached. You are a gentleman, I believe, I have no fear of you; but
take care what you do.”
Posing as a man of pleasure, in reality a capable man of business,
Melbourne lounged through his duties in a way to exasperate friend
and foe. But as he lounged, he learned men and manners, determined to
_see into_ things, and even in Ireland, when Chief Secretary, said,
“If agitation would not go to bed he would like to have a chat with
it.” He was ever pleading for concession to the demands of the people,
dreading the consequences of refusal. “Everything about him seems to
betoken careless desolation; anyone would suppose from his manner that
he was playing at chuck-farthing with human happiness, that he was
always on the heels of fortune, that he would giggle away the great
Charter.... But I accuse our Minister,” said his critic, “of honesty
and diligence; I deny that he is careless and rude; he is nothing
more than a man of good understanding and good principle, disguised
in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political
_roué_.” Perfectly courteous to others, it was impossible for others
to be discourteous to him, always excepting Brougham. But even before
Brougham he did not quail, and always could give tit for tat, much to
the delight of the audience of peers who, like schoolboys, exulted
whenever their terror, the bully of the class, got a drubbing. The
tongue which Brougham sarcastically spoke of as attuned to courtly
airs, made to gloze and flatter, flayed him so completely with its
quiet polish that he winced under its lash and betrayed, by his own
increased violence of invective, the weight of the punishment. Soon
after the accession the press said Lord Melbourne was about to publish
a work on chess--the best method of playing the Queen, of getting
possession of the castle, an entire disregard of the old system as to
bishops, being points in the book. This genial, indolent statesman, who
fearlessly told the truth irrespective of party, was rubicund, with
the aquiline nose of the aristocrat; his large blue eyes sometimes
flashed with fire, but oftener brimmed with merriment. The noble head,
sturdy plainly clad and careless-looking figure, consorted well with
the _laisser aller_ expression of face. Strange to say, he, like Lord
John Russell, usually stuttered out his speeches, thumping the table
or desk before him as if to work out the sentences that would not get
themselves delivered. The Reform Bill made him specially energetic.
Sitting next to him was a very noble earl who wore his hat well over
his brows, weighing the _pros_ and _cons_ of too much liberty--for
other people. Melbourne in his heat took his own white hat in his right
hand, beat the air with it in inarticulate struggle, and brought the
white to bear, crown to crown, upon the black one. The blow was fair,
the arm muscular; the very noble earl looked like the ancient White
Knight, with head apparently wedged between his shoulders. He sat
speechless for a moment, and then nimbly springing to his feet, amid
roars of laughter, twisted his head free and regained his vision. And
when the roar subsided, the Duke of Buckingham thought that the great
statesman so suddenly beclouded could scarcely see his way out of the
difficulty, and the laughter was renewed. To see a way out of the
Canadian difficulty was to find a clue in a maze.
Canadian Tories were triumphant over the fall of the Ministry on the
Jamaica question. “We cannot guess,” says one editor, “into what hands
Her Majesty may be pleased to commit the trust which Lord Melbourne
has declared his unfitness to administer.” The incoming man, Peel,
quoted the state of Canada as among the trying questions which made
the office of premiership the most arduous, the most important that
any human being could be called upon to perform ... the greatest
trust, almost without exception, in the whole civilized world, that
could fall on any individual. A few moments later he had to confess
that there was one question worse than the Canadian one, greater than
colonial politics, a “_question de jupons_.” So the Government, after
forty-eight hours’ attempt at change, reverted to its former holders;
Canadian Tories were as glum as ever, and said Melbourne was again the
governor of the petticoatocracy.