MR. GOLDWIN SMITH.
No discussion of the relation of Canada to the Empire, much less
any more general discussion of British unity, would be complete
which omits special reference to Mr. Goldwin Smith and the views
on national questions which he has for many years persistently
and strenuously advocated. To these views he has challenged
attention anew in his latest volume, _Canada and the Canadian
Question_, which may fairly be supposed to condense all that can
be said in favour of the separation of Canada from the Empire,
and generally in support of that form of national disintegration
which is involved in the great colonies becoming separate states
or annexing themselves to other nations. Very considerable
interest is given to this latest utterance of Mr. Smith from the
fact that he is almost the last conspicuous representative of a
school of thinkers which twenty-five or thirty years ago
appeared likely to dominate English opinion on colonial affairs.
To these men the United Kingdom was, and was to be, sufficient
unto itself; the outlying portions of the Empire were but
incidental and temporary {164} connections; the greater colonies
were to be voluntarily dropped when they had developed strength
to stand alone, or as convenient opportunities to get rid of
them arose.
The splendid edifice of Empire built up by the toil and
statesmanship of generations was an illusion which gave nothing
more than a false prestige; its dissolution was to herald the
dawn of a better day.
It will be generally admitted that in England this school of
thought is practically dead. In his vigorous and persistent
attempt to revive it in Canada Mr. Smith has met with little
success. That one of the most brilliant writers and masters of
style in the English world should in a distant colony have
devoted well-nigh twenty years of his life to weakening the
political bond between Britain and that colony with practically
no visible result, is of itself a phenomenon which indicates the
true tendency of national life. But that in the pursuit of his
fixed idea Mr. Smith has done much harm is, I think, scarcely
open to doubt. Both in Britain and the United States he has
produced false impressions on Canadian affairs. The useful
efforts which he has made for the elevation of journalism and
for the purification of public life in Canada, the greater
service which he might have done in giving high ideals to the
Young Dominion, have been neutralized or made impossible by his
intellectual slavery to a set of ideas which rendered him
incapable of entering into or sympathizing with the deeper
motives of {165} Canadian life. A great contemporary thinker and
satirist, James Russell Lowell, made the 'barbed arrows of his
indignant wit' the terror of corrupt politicians, while still
retaining the love of the people whom he served. This he did in
virtue of his constant sympathy with national aspirations and
the firm faith in his country's future which shines through
every page of his bitterest criticisms. In a similar sphere of
effort Goldwin Smith has failed, because he has permitted an
atrabilious and pessimistic temperament, a preference of epigram
to accuracy, and an impatience at the non-fulfilment of his own
political prophecies to distort his studies of Canadian
problems, and to take away much of their value.
For those many Canadians who welcomed his coming to Canada, as
one of the happiest omens for the political and intellectual
life of the country, in whom even yet admiration struggles with
disappointment, the duty of pointing out his unfitness to
interpret the political history and actual position of Canada,
is as painful as it is imperative.
Mr. Smith's book on Canada is manifestly intended primarily for
readers in England. It is to his English audience that he
appeals when he says that 'he does not think that the honour or
true interest of his native country can for a moment be absent
from his breast.' Of this, Englishmen must judge; Canadians, who
respect patriotic sentiment, only ask of Mr. Smith (and they
have some reason for emphasizing the request) that they may be
credited with sincerity {166} when they claim that the honour
and true interests of their native country compel them to
dispute his arguments and repudiate the main conclusions about
Canada's destiny which he outlines for his English readers.
Unfortunately they must do no more than this. Mr. Smith claims
'that he has done his best to take his readers to the heart of
it (the Canadian question) by setting the whole case before
them: that his opinions have not been hastily formed: that they
have not, so far as he is aware, been biassed by personal
motives of any kind.' This is a pledge of fairness and
impartiality in discussion. It is a pledge which, in Canadian
opinion, is not fulfilled. No man in Canada speaks or writes
with a deeper sense of responsibility than Principal Grant, as a
clergyman, as the head of an important university, and as one of
the most active moral forces in the Dominion. He knows Canada,
too, from end to end, better than any living man. Yet in a
formal review of _Canada and the Canadian Question_ Principal
Grant endorses the opinion of another writer that Mr. Smith's
book is 'so brilliant, so inaccurate, so malicious even, that it
is enough to make one weep.' The criticism does not seem to me
too strong. Nor must Mr. Smith think that it is only upon
super-sensitive Canadian minds that this impression is left. One
of the closest thinkers and most brilliant writers on political
subjects in England, a man of cool judgment, who has observed
Canadian institutions on the spot, said to me after perusing
_Canada and the Canadian Question_ that he considered {167} it
the most unfair book he had ever read. At the high table of an
Oxford college a Canadian ventured to deprecate the acceptance
by English people of Mr. Smith's brilliant and epigrammatic
statement of half-truths as truths upon Dominion affairs. The
reply of one of the clearest thinkers in the University was not
unsatisfactory to the colonist. 'We in England know Mr. Smith
well, and we know that, where every sentence has to be so
sharply pointed as his, a liberal allowance must be made for
accuracy. Canadians need have no fear that his views are
accepted without question here.'
Nor has the impression been different even at the Antipodes. We
read in the _Australian Critic_: 'To say that the book before us
is written by Mr. Goldwin Smith is to say that it is eminently
readable, that its style is forcible and epigrammatic, and that
its historical descriptions are clear and vivacious. But we have
a right to expect something more in a book describing the
history and institutions of a country. We have a right to expect
fairness, and fairness in this book we do not get.'
This unfairness of statement, thus generally recognized, and
evident to every reader from the moment that those phases of
Canadian politics are dealt with which led up to and followed
upon Confederation, accounts for the irritation so commonly
manifested in Canadian criticism of Mr. Smith's views. It is an
unfairness the more irritating because often so clever and
subtle that it half eludes criticism, and because {168} it is
closely interwoven with much vigorous thought on Canadian
affairs. More than this, many to whom it gives the greatest
annoyance hesitate to criticise it as they would, from a
conviction that it is the offspring of temperament and literary
habit, rather than deliberate insincerity[1].
Only a few of Mr. Smith's arguments can be dealt with here, and
it is perhaps better first to refer to such as are conspicuous
by their fallacy rather than those marked by unfairness.
I have pointed out the remarkable naval position which the
Empire holds in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific through
the possession of Canada. Let us see what Mr. Smith suggests in
substitution for this advantage when, as he proposes, it has
been voluntarily abandoned.
'Great Britain may need a coaling station on the Atlantic coast
of North America, not for the purposes of blockade, which could
no longer have place when all danger of war was at an end but
for the general defence of her trade. Safe coaling stations and
harbours of refuge, rather than territorial dependencies, are
apparently what the great exporting country and the mistress of
the carrying trade now wants. Newfoundland would be a safe and
uninvidious possession, and it has coal, though bituminous and
not yet worked. The Americans do not covet islands, {169} for
the defence of which they would have to keep up a navy. The
island itself would be the gainer: there would be some chance of
the development of its resources; with nothing but the fishing
the condition of its people seems to be poor. Let England then
keep Newfoundland. Cape Breton is rather too close to the coast,
otherwise it has coal in itself, and Louisbourg might be
restored.' Clearly we have here an Englishman who has learned in
his new home to talk a language unfamiliar for some centuries at
least to the English ear, and one who fails to grasp the
fundamental conditions of England's existence as a great nation.
The greatest naval power in the world, bound to defend a
world-wide commerce and above all to defend that main food route
across the Atlantic which would almost certainly be the first
point of attack in a Great European war, because it is the one
point at which a well-nigh mortal blow could be delivered, is
quietly asked to hand over to another nation her well-nigh
impregnable naval station at Halifax, her command of a hundred
minor ports, of the St. Lawrence, and of the splendid coal
fields of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, and to relegate herself
to the rock-bound, fog-encircled and sometimes ice-beset coasts
of Newfoundland: to content herself with coal 'bituminous and
not yet worked,' and all because the possession would be 'safe
and uninvidious' and because 'the Americans do not covet
islands.' In this casual redistribution of the bases of naval
power it is {170} extremely characteristic and noteworthy that
on the Pacific where the trade of a great ocean is to be
protected, and where Russia has a great naval depot, not even an
island is reserved for British people, probably because again
Vancouver is 'rather too near to the coast,' to be outside the
range of American covetousness, and its coal deposits too
extensive for it to be considered 'uninvidious.' In reading the
lines I have quoted from Mr. Smith expressing his conception of
the relation of the United States to Great Britain, it is
impossible not to recall the words which Shakspere puts into the
mouth of Cassius;--
'Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.'
Let us not fail, however, to recognize that Mr. Smith does dimly
see and admit the conditions under which Britain holds her
maritime power. 'Safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge,
rather than territorial dependencies are apparently what the
great exporting country and the mistress of the carrying trade
now wants.' The admission that British naval power rests upon
safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge is fundamental. But
the most superficial study of the facts or even a glance at the
map makes it plain that in the Empire the command of these
positions is inseparably connected with territorial possession.
Britain cannot turn away her great colonies to work out an
independent destiny while {171} at the same time she retains in
each the best points in naval and military vantage for the
creation of a series of Gibraltars such as Mr. Smith apparently
has in his mind. Sir Charles Dilke has clearly pointed out that
while we cannot possibly with any regard to commercial security
give up the military station which we hold at the extremity of
Africa, on the other hand we cannot retain it permanently
without the friendship of the colonists and a maintenance of
national control over the surrounding country. Still more true
is this of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Let Mr. Smith try
to arrange a plan by which Australia, South Africa and Canada
will accept independence with its national responsibilities and
at the same time hand over to England their 'safe coaling
stations and harbours of refuge' which he himself admits are the
very conditions of her existence, and he will find himself face
to face with a problem much more difficult than any which he
propounds to Imperial Federationists when he demands of them a
plan.
'Surely,' says Mr. Smith, 'the appearance of a world-wide power,
grasping all the waterways and all the points of maritime
vantage, instead of propagating peace, would, like an alarm gun,
call the nations to battle.' To this it must straightway be
answered that the case is one in which as things stand no
'grasping' is required. What British people need for their great
national purposes they hold already. Their possessions have been
won in a long course of national {172} development and are held
in most cases under the solemn confirmation of ancient or modern
treaty, or at least by the tacit consent of all the nations. No
title-deeds in the world are more secure according to any
recognized code of international relation. Nor is her moral
right to consolidate her position less strong or more likely to
be questioned. Self-defence is a primary instinct and admitted
necessity of nature--recognized as such by communities as well
as individuals. 'In strengthening her navy, England is pursuing
a policy in the strict sense defensive. We threaten nobody. We
cherish no ambitious design. It is more and more the wise policy
of England to keep out of engagements in matters with which
neither we of the mother-country nor our sons in the colonies
have any concern. The external policy of England is directed to
one object, which is to secure from attack the highway of the
sea[2].' To different nations the problem of self-defence comes
in different forms. France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia,
find vast military organization the necessary condition of safe
national existence. To none of them would exclusion from
commerce with the rest of the world be fatal: their own
resources can, in emergency, supply their wants. Resistance to a
flood of hostile invasion they must be prepared to make at any
moment, and to this the public thought is mainly directed. No
one questions their right to equip themselves for this
resistance, however much the necessity may be deplored.
{173}
The United States, again, have been hitherto comparatively
independent of external commerce. Even the carrying trade has
been allowed to slip chiefly into foreign hands. Continental
isolation and vast population give a sufficient range for
national industry and sufficient security from hostile invasion.
They enable the people to turn their attention mainly to
internal development and the complex or even threatening
problems involved in the assimilation and elevation of the
confluent races which are taking possession of the soil. Very
different is the position of British people. To them, whether at
home or abroad, the steady flow of commerce is as the flow of
blood through the veins; the safety of the waterways is
practically a question of life or death. The very fact that
Britain is not compelled to be a great military power, in the
sense that European nations are military powers, adds millions
to her armies of industry, increases indefinitely her producing
forces and so makes more imperative the necessity for absolutely
safe commercial intercourse. Britain, as the result of natural
growth, now possesses the unquestionable right and the manifest
opportunity, without a single stroke of aggression, to organize
a naval power adequate to the protection of the chief waterways
of the world, and of the enormous commerce which the industry of
her people has created thereon. To any combination thus planned
to guard the very life of the nation, what just or reasonable
objection can be made? To any objection not just or reasonable
{174} what answer must English people make? For a race of
traders scattered over all quarters of the globe, peace is a
supreme interest, and peace, as the world is now constituted,
can only rest on organized power. For the first time in history
we see a nation which unites under its flag all the
comprehensiveness of a world-wide Empire and a wonderful
relative compactness secured by that practical contraction of
our planet which has taken place under the combined influences
of steam and electricity. No other nation ever has had--it is
well nigh impossible to believe that any other nation ever will
have--so commanding a position for exercising the functions of
what I have called an oceanic Empire, interested in developing
and able to protect the commerce of the world. Such an Empire is
probably the best guarantee of permanent peace the world has
ever had or is likely to have this side of the millennium. Who
shall question our right and duty to organize it for the great
ends manifestly within our reach?
But Mr. Smith questions not merely our right, but our capacity.
We are told that however much steam and telegraph have
annihilated distance 'they have not annihilated the parish
steeple. They have not carried the thoughts of the ordinary
citizen beyond the circle of his own life and work. They have
not qualified a common farmer, tradesman, plough man, or artizan
to direct the politics of a world-wide state[3].' Shall we {175}
then give up all large statesmanship, and adopt the parish
steeple as the measure of our political ideas? The parish
steeple has its place and limiting power in England as
elsewhere, but it has not prevented the creation of a great
Empire, its successful administration and its retention. In the
end it is the strongest men and the clearest minds of a country
which give direction to its destiny, and nowhere is this more
the case than among Anglo-Saxon people. The common farmer,
tradesman, plough man, or artizan may not be able to direct the
policy of a state, but he has a marvellous instinct for
discovering and supporting the man who can, be he a Cromwell or
a Cecil, a rail-splitter or a Hohenzollern. When he has made up
his mind, moreover, we have more to fear, apparently, from a too
complete surrender of his own judgment than from ignorant
interference in matters which he does not fully comprehend. That
the spread of modern democracy involves no necessity of
abandoning large statesmanship the history of the colonies
clearly proves. Canadians may not, as Mr. Smith suggests, know
much of Australian or South African politics, but they have
given themselves up with singular persistence to the guidance of
a statesman with an imperial range of ideas and policy. In
Australia the masses, however much they may be absorbed in their
labour struggles and social problems, choose, as their leaders,
with occasional change, but on the whole singular steadiness,
men like Sir Henry Parkes, Mr. Service, Sir Samuel Griffiths,
Mr. Gillies, or {176} Sir Henry Atkinson, every one of them men
who, even when most absorbed with the affairs of their own
colonies, are thinking constantly on national questions, and
dreaming of some great British unity in the future, as their
written and spoken thoughts fully testify. Even in South Africa,
with its intensified localism, we see the reins of power
committed to a man who stakes his political career equally upon
working out a South African unity, and upon securing that it
shall be consistent with the policy of a united Empire.
I fear that it is impossible to acquit Mr. Smith of at times
making statements disingenuous in themselves and especially
misleading to the English reader. Perhaps the peculiar animosity
with which he has always regarded those Canadian Railways whose
construction has falsified his prophecy that the Dominion could
not be welded together, explains, if it does not excuse, a
special recklessness of statement when he describes them to
English people. Mr. Smith speaks of the Intercolonial Railway as
'spanning the vast and irreclaimable wilderness which separates
Halifax from Quebec.' Again he says: 'The maritime Provinces are
divided from Old Canada by the wilderness of many hundred miles,
through which the Intercolonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a
passenger or a bale of freight by the way.' Would the ordinary
reader outside of Canada believe, after reading this
description, that in the course of the 688 miles of rail between
Halifax and Quebec the {177} Intercolonial traverses large
counties like Cumberland and Westmorland, among the most fertile
and productive in Canada; that though running through forest
country in the immediate rear of the settled coast line it is
closely connected by a score of short branches with the coal
areas and all the thickly populated districts along the Bay of
Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that for 100 miles it
follows the still more populous shores of the River St.
Lawrence, and that the comparatively short distance, scarcely
more than 100 miles, between the settlements at the head of Bay
Chaleur and those of the St. Lawrence is alone responsible for
the epithets 'vast and irreclaimable' which Mr. Smith applies to
the whole length of the road? Would the reader believe that it
is a railway which carries about a million passengers and more
than a million tons of freight every year? That it has conferred
the enormous advantage of swift communication with the outside
world on some hundreds of thousands of people to whom its
construction was an object of eager desire for years before it
was accomplished? It is true that, worked as a State Railway for
the good of the communities through which it passes, for the
avowed purpose of uniting the provinces more closely, kept at a
high state of efficiency, and under some unusual expense for
clearing away snow in winter, a loss is at present annually
incurred, but it is doubtful if any public expenditure made in
the Dominion confers so great an advantage on so many people,
while subserving great national purposes. {178} Not in Canada
alone, but in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India,
Russia and South America, railways, which do not directly pay,
are for the public good, or for prospective and indirect
advantage, constructed and worked to the content of those who
pay for them. In Great Britain state subventions are given to
steamship, postal, and cable lines which would not in themselves
be at once commercially profitable. For many years a large
deficit has been paid on the ordinary English telegraph system;
a deficit which even last year amounted to no less than £190,000
sterling. The money has been paid cheerfully, because it gives
to the mass of the people the advantages of the sixpenny
telegram.
Why should all the vials of wrath, ridicule, and, we may now
add, misrepresentation, be reserved for the one State Railway of
Canada, because the people are willing to pay the deficiency of
£50,000 or £100,000 involved in its operation, for the sake of
the consolidation which it has given to the Dominion, and the
unmeasured benefit which it confers on immense districts and
large populations which would otherwise be singularly isolated,
socially and commercially, from the rest of Canada and the rest
of the world.
Once more, speaking in disparagement of the same railway as a
military route, Mr. Smith says: 'At the time when the
Intercolonial was projected, the two British officers of
artillery, whose pamphlet has been already cited, pointed out
that the line would be fatally liable to snow blocks. It would
be awkward if, at a crisis {179} like that of the Great Mutiny,
or that of a Russian invasion in India, the reinforcements were
blockaded by snow in the wilderness between Halifax and Quebec.'
What can we think of a writer who claims to be fair, and yet
parades as authorities two young gentlemen whose haphazard
forecast has been belied by twenty years of actual working
experience? So far from being 'fatally' liable to snow block,
the Intercolonial is operated during the two or three months of
deep snow with less risk of delay than is incurred every day of
the year by ships passing through the Suez Canal, the other most
available route in an Indian Crisis. It has been my own lot to
suffer a longer detention on a steamship at Ismailia, a
detention accepted by the ship's officers as in the course of
ordinary experience, than I can remember having met with in many
years' experience of the Intercolonial.
When Mr. Smith turns from the Intercolonial, which does not pay,
to the Canada Pacific, which does, we find no improvement in
fairness of statement. Of the Canada Pacific he says: 'The fact
is constantly overlooked in vaunting the importance of this line
to the Empire, that its Eastern section passes through the State
of Maine, and would, of course, be closed to troops in case of
war with any power at peace with the United States.' In a note
it is added: 'The _Quarterly Review_, for example, spoke of the
Canadian Pacific Railway as running from "start to finish" over
British ground, though the line was at that very moment applying
for bonding privileges to the Government of {180} the United
States.' This is evidently a deliberate statement. What are the
facts? During the months of open navigation Montreal is the
water terminus of the Canada Pacific Railway, and the only point
from which transfers would be made across the continent. From
Montreal to Vancouver, that is, from ocean to ocean, from 'start
to finish,' the line is entirely on British soil. Connection
further east with the winter ports of Halifax and St. John, has
from the first been made by means of the Grand Trunk and
Intercolonial lines, the route yet from 'start to finish'
running over British territory alone. From the St. Lawrence
there is even the alternative of a double route to the sea
coast, one down the St. John valley, chiefly owned and
controlled, I think, by the Canada Pacific, the other along the
Gulf of St. Lawrence, while a third has been projected by the
Grand Trunk, the rival of the Canada Pacific, through the heart
of New Brunswick. Only a year and a half ago the Canada Pacific,
to save distance, built still another line from Montreal
eastward to make connection with the Intercolonial, and it is on
the ground that a portion of this third line passes through the
State of Maine that Mr. Smith informs English people that
Canada's trans-continental railway 'would, of course, be closed
to troops in case of war with any power at peace with the United
States.' Whether this statement, made in a very critical point
of Mr. Smith's argument, is a _suppressio veri_ or _suggestio
falsi_, I leave others to decide. On which side is the correct
statement of {181} facts I can safely leave to the adjudication
of the Canadian reader, the Canadian press, or of any person who
has access to a good railway map of the Dominion. So flagrant
seems to me the distortion of fact that I have sometimes
wondered whether Mr. Smith was not testing the limits of that
English ignorance of colonial matters of which he makes much in
another part of his volume.
I must quote once more: 'In opening a trade among the provinces,
a natural trade at least, these inter-provincial railroads have
failed, for the simple reason that the provinces have hardly any
products to exchange with each other, and that means of
conveyance are futile where there is nothing to be conveyed.'
The answer to this may be put into a question which business men
will appreciate even if an author in his study at Toronto does
not. Why is it, if there is nothing to be conveyed between the
provinces, that, in addition to the Intercolonial, two competing
lines have already been constructed and a third projected, all
on purely business principles, to unite the maritime provinces
to those of the St. Lawrence?
In his excessive eagerness to make points, Mr. Smith exposes
himself to no slight suspicion of a willingness to open up
unnecessarily, if not maliciously, old sores between the
mother-land and the colony. He says: 'That in all diplomatic
questions with the United States the interest of Canada has been
sacrificed to the Imperial exigency of keeping peace with {182}
the Americans is the constant theme of Canadian complaint. ...
By the treaty of 1783, confirming the independence of the United
States, England not only resigned the territory claimed by each
State of the Union severally, but abandoned to the general
government immense territories "unsettled, unexplored, and
unknown."' After explaining that this was partly due to
ignorance, he continues: 'This is the beginning of a long and
uniform story, in the course of which not only great tracts of
territory, but geographical unity has been lost. To understand
how deeply this iron has entered into the Canadian soul, the
Englishman must turn to his map and mark out how much of
geographical compactness, of military security, and of
commercial convenience was lost when Britain gave up Maine. ...
A large portion of Minnesota, Dakota, Montana, and Washington,
Canada also thinks she has wrongfully lost. These are causes of
discontent; discontent may one day breed disaffection;
disaffection may lead to another calamitous rupture; and instead
of going forth into the world when the hour of maturity has
arrived with the parent's blessing, the child may turn in anger
from the parental door.'
To conjure up these historic mistakes as the cause of a possible
national rupture will only raise a smile in Canada; upon readers
outside of Canada who do not understand the circumstances the
passage leaves a false impression. That mistakes were made most
people agree; that they were partly due to the ignorance {183}
of English diplomatists is true; but Canadians must admit that
they were due to Canadian ignorance as well. As late as 1874 a
Cabinet Minister of the Dominion on a public platform described
the splendid wheat areas of the North-West as a country only
fitted to be the home of the wolf and the bear. Among the
separate and unsympathetic provinces, prior to confederation,
there were ignorance and indifference as well as among English
statesmen. 'Every intelligent Canadian now knows that most of
these mistakes were far more due to the want of a nexus between
the Colony and the Empire which would have brought colonial
knowledge and experience to the assistance of British diplomacy.
He knows that since the acceptance of this assistance as a part
of the public policy of Britain, such mistakes can no longer
occur, as the Fishery Award at Halifax and the Fishery Treaty at
Washington, when Canadian interests were represented by
Canadians, sufficiently testify; as the Behring Sea negotiations
testify, in which, acting upon the information supplied by the
Dominion Government, and recognizing the justice of the case,
Lord Salisbury did not hesitate to say the final word which made
aggressive diplomacy pause and submit to impartial arbitration.
'Disintegration, surely, is on the point of being complete,' and
'the last strand of political connection is worn almost to the
last thread,' Mr. Smith exclaims, using as the illustration of
his point Newfoundland's claim to make a commercial treaty of
her own independently {184} of Canada. He refuses to see what
others see, that the invitation to Newfoundland to have her
interests directly represented in the arbitration with France;
the fact that Canada has been thus represented at Halifax, at
Washington, in the Behring Sea difficulties; the formal
introduction, in short, of colonial opinion and knowledge into
national diplomacy, marks the creation of new threads of
connection, new bonds of union, which promise to be permanent,
because constructed on true and primary political principles.
It is, I think, a fatal flaw in Mr. Smith's discussion of the
Canadian Question, a fatal comment on his claim to have 'done
his best to take his readers to the heart of it by setting the
whole case before them,' that he makes no mention of this
decisive change in national policy, or of the consequent change
in the Canadian mind, which, if not reconciled to losses in the
past, has no reason to dread them in the future, and in this
confidence is content. That he should treat as present and
gravely irritating, grievances which have become purely
historical, is unfair and misleading.
If the difficulties with the United States which have arisen on
the Pacific and Atlantic coasts are not settled amicably and
justly, it will not be from any want of willingness on the part
of British people or Canadians. Britain and Canada agreed to a
settlement of the St Lawrence Fishery Question which an American
Democratic President and Cabinet accepted as fair. A Republican
Senate rejected it as a move in the party {185} game, and has
preferred to leave it open ever since. Any reader of the
correspondence in the Behring Sea Question can judge for himself
on which side was the spirit of conciliation and compromise.
Only in the last resort did Lord Salisbury utter the warning
words which seem to have done more than anything else to prepare
the way for fair adjudication upon the points at issue.
How curiously and completely Mr. Smith is out of touch and
sympathy with the organizing movements of the British world: how
oddly inconsistent he can be even while pressing his own
theories, one or two further illustrations will suffice to show.
Apparently he looks upon Australian Federation as a step in the
wrong direction. 'We cannot help once more warning the
Australians that Federation under the Elective system involves
not merely the union of the several states under a central
government with powers superior to them all; but the creation of
Federal parties with all the faction, demagogism, and corruption
which party conflicts involve over a new field and on a vastly
extended scale. It is surprising how little this obvious and
momentous consideration appears to be present to the minds of
statesmen when the question of Federation is discussed[4].'
Warnings like this are repeated. Anxious as he seems to be for
the unification of the American continent by the absorption of
Canada into the United States, Mr. Smith would apparently urge
Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland to avoid even the
example of Canadian {186} confederation in gaining for
themselves effective unity, although he knows, that for them
confederation means the freedom of the continental market and
the same breaking down of tariff walls which is the one supreme
bribe he has to offer to Canadians in exchange for the surrender
of their nationality. Another turn of the intellectual wheel and
even American unification is forgotten in a new ideal of
disintegration. 'There is no reason why Ontario should not be a
nation if she were minded to be one. Her territory is compact.
Her population is already as large as that of Denmark, and
likely to be a good deal larger, probably as large as that of
Switzerland; and it is sufficiently homogeneous if she can only
repress French encroachment on her eastern border. She would
have no access to the sea: no more has Switzerland, Hungary, or
Servia ... The same thing might have been said with regard to
the maritime Provinces--supposing them to have formed a
legislative union--Quebec, British Columbia, or the North West.
In the North West, rating its cultivable area at the lowest,
there would be room for no mean nation.' This passage may
explain to English or Australian readers why Mr. Smith has no
acceptance in the Dominion as the prophet of Canada's political
future. One remembers with astonishment that it is the writer of
these lines who, on the one hand, assures Canadians that they
cannot resist absorption into the United States, and who, on the
other, tells the advocates of British unity that they are
impracticable dreamers.
{187}
After this it does not seem surprising to find that Mr. Smith
himself proceeds to knock away the foundations on which his own
argument on the Canadian question has been built? These
foundations are practically two in number--the fear of war on
the American continent arising from irritation at the presence
of Britain there--and the necessity for Canada of commercial
intercourse with her own continent. These are the reasons why
the Empire is to be disintegrated, and Canada is to seek a new
national connection.
Following upon this we read: 'Of conquest there is absolutely no
thought. The Southern violence and the Western lawlessness which
forced the Union into the war of 1812 are things of the past.
The American people could not now be brought to invade the homes
of an unoffending neighbour. They have no craving for more
territory. They know that while a despot who annexes may govern
through a viceroy with a strong hand, a republic which annexes
must incorporate, and would only weaken itself by incorporating
disaffection. The special reason for wishing to bring Canada at
once into the Union, that she might help to balance the Slave
Power, has with the Slave Power departed. So far as the
Americans are concerned, Canada is absolute mistress of her own
destiny.'
Canada, therefore, in Mr. Smith's later opinion, has nothing to
fear from war with the United States.
Once more, discussing the McKinley tariff, we read:--,
{188}
'However, the manifest faults of the measure, combined with the
enormous waste of public money incurred in baling out surplus
revenue to avert a reform of the tariff, have proved too much
for the superstition or the sufferance of the American people.
Symptoms of a change of opinion had even before appeared. New
England is now praying for free admission of raw materials. The
Republican party in the United States is the war party, kept on
foot for the sake of maintaining the war tariff in the interest
of the protected manufactures. It has made a desperate effort to
retain power and to rivet its policy on the nation by means
which have estranged from it the best of its supporters; but in
the late elections it has received a signal, and probably
decisive overthrow. What all the preachings of economic science
were powerless to effect has been brought about at last by the
reduction of the public debt, and of the necessity for duties as
revenue. A new commercial era has apparently dawned for the
United States, and the lead of the United States will be
followed in time by the rest of the world.'
This means, if words mean anything, that in Mr. Smith's opinion,
the United States are soon to throw open their markets to the
world, and so, without political humiliation, Canada will have
the commercial freedom of her own continent. One asks why
'Canada and the Canadian Question' was ever written.
An explanation may perhaps be found. Mr. Smith quotes (page 247)
Sir Henry Taylor's opinion that {189} the North American
colonies are useless and dangerous possessions for Britain, and
thus goes on to remark: 'It may be said that this was written in
1852 and that since that time we have had new lights. Some
persons have had new lights, but those who have not are no more
unpatriotic in saying that the possession and its uses are as
dust in the balance compared with its evil contingencies than
was Sir Henry Taylor.' That is to say, though within the last
half century the relations of the empire have absolutely
changed, though the safety of its enormously multiplied commerce
has come to depend on steam and coaling stations in every corner
of the world, though the colonies have become great
self-governing and self-sustaining communities, though the world
has been recreated by steam and electricity, Mr. Smith frankly
admits that these facts have given him no 'new lights' on
questions of empire. He is living among the memories of the
past; he devotes himself to the task of maintaining a theory
based upon facts which have become fossilized under the drift of
half a century of extraordinary change. Even if we are prepared
in such a case to admit his sincerity, we have a right from the
outset to challenge any claim to adequacy of treatment or
correctness of judgment.
One more criticism of British Federation may be referred to as
illustrating the inconsistency in argument of which a clever
writer is capable:--
'Are the negroes of the West Indies to be included? {190} Is
Quashee to vote on imperial policy?' says Mr. Smith, in fine
scorn of the British federationist, who doubtless has no special
fear or thought about a carefully restricted and controlled
coloured vote in a few scattered colonies: a vote which in the
aggregate represents not more than a very minute fraction of one
per cent. of the enfranchised citizenship of the Empire.
Strangely out of place, however, does this scorn seem when we
find the same pages embody an argument for Canadians throwing in
their political lot with a Republic where the Quashee vote,
unconditionally and irrevocably granted, will far outweigh their
own; where it will become enormously influential as soon as the
free exercise is permitted of the rights granted by
constitutional law, as, one would think, must ultimately be the
case in a country which claims to give exceptional political
freedom. Equally inconsistent does it seem when placed beside
the romantic political enterprize to which Mr. Smith would
commit Canadians. He says, 'The native American element in which
the tradition of self-government resides is hard-pressed by the
foreign element untrained to self-government, and stands in need
of the reinforcement which the entrance of Canada into the Union
would bring it[5].' Nay, more, Mr. Smith wishes Canada to enter
the Union for Britain's sake, that she may 'neutralize the votes
of her enemies[6].' Does he reflect that if the Canadian {191}
vote chanced to be barely insufficient to neutralize the votes
of Britain's enemies, Canada would, as I have elsewhere pointed
out, be constitutionally forced into active hostility to the
mother-land? The path which he points out has on it possible
natural dishonour from which Canadians will instinctively
shrink. They will prefer to retain the right to neutralize the
influence of Britain's enemies, if the necessity arise, by other
means, such as they have found effective before.
[1] A _Times_' editorial has spoken of Mr. Smith's views about
the relations of Canada to the Empire as 'one of those crazes
that are scarcely intelligible in a man of great intellectual
power.'
[2] Lord Brassey, _Naval Annual_, 1890
[3] _Canada and the Canadian Question_, p. 260.
[4] _Canada and the Canadian Question_, p. 232.
[5] _Canada and the Canadian Question_, p. 274.
[6] _Idem_, p. 269.
{192}