E-text prepared by Al Haines
THE CANADIAN COMMONWEALTH
by
AGNES C. LAUT
Author of
Lords of the North, Pathfinders of the West,
Hudson's Bay Company, etc.
Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers
Copyright 1915
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
II FOUNDATION FOR HOPE
III THE TIE THAT BINDS
IV AMERICANIZATION
V WHY RECIPROCITY WAS REJECTED
VI THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH
VII THE COMING OF THE FOREIGNER
VIII THE COMING OF THE ORIENTAL
IX THE HINDU
X WHAT PANAMA MEANS
XI TO EUROPE BY HUDSON BAY
XII SOME INDUSTRIAL PROBLEMS
XIII HOW GOVERNED
XIV THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE
XV EMIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT
XVI DEFENSE
XVII THE DOMAIN OF THE NORTH
XVIII FINDING HERSELF
INDEX
THE CANADIAN COMMONWEALTH
CHAPTER I
NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
I
An empire the size of Europe setting out on her career of world history
is a phenomenon of vast and deep enough import to stir to national
consciousness the slumbering spirit of any people. Yet when you come
to trace when and where national consciousness awakened, it is like
following a river back from the ocean to its mountain springs. From
the silt borne down on the flood-tide you can guess the fertile plains
watered and far above the fertile plains, regions of eternal snow and
glacial torrent warring turbulently through the adamantine rocks. You
can guess the eternal striving, the forward rush and the throwback that
have carved a way through the solid rocks; but until you have followed
the river to its source and tried to stem its current you can not know.
So of peoples and nations.
Fifty years ago, as far as world affairs were concerned, Japan did not
exist. Came national consciousness, and Japan rose like a star
dominating the Orient. A hundred years ago Germany did not exist.
Came national consciousness welding chaotic principalities into unity,
and the mailed fist of the empire became a menace before which Europe
quailed. So of China with the ferment of freedom leavening the whole.
So of the United States with the Civil War blending into a union the
diversities of a continent. When you come to consider the birth of
national consciousness in Canada, you do not find the germ of an
ambition to dominate, as in Japan and Germany. Nor do you find a fight
for freedom. Canada has always been free--free as the birds of passage
that winged above the canoe of the first voyageur who pointed his craft
up the St. Lawrence for the Pacific; but what you do find from the very
first is a fight for national existence; and when the fight was won,
Canada arose like a wrestler with consciousness of strength for new
destiny.
II
Go back to the beginning of Canada!
She was not settled by land-seekers. Neither was she peopled by
adventurers seeking gold. The first settlers on the banks of the St.
Lawrence came to plant the Cross and propagate the Faith. True, they
found they could support their missions and extend the Faith by the fur
trade; and their gay adventurers of the fur trade threaded every river
and lake from the St. Lawrence to the Columbia; but, primarily, the
lure that led the French to the St. Lawrence was the lure of a
religious ideal. So of Ontario and the English provinces. Ontario was
first peopled by United Empire Loyalists, who refused to give up their
loyalty to the Crown and left New England and the South, abandoning all
earthly possessions to begin life anew in the backwoods of the Great
Lakes country. The French came pursuing an ideal of religion. The
English came pursuing an ideal of government. We may smile at the
excesses of both devotees--French nuns, who swooned in religious
ecstasy; old English aristocrats, who referred to democracy as "the
black rot plague of the age"; but the fact remains--these colonists
came in unselfish pursuit of ideals; and they gave of their blood and
their brawn and all earthly possessions for those ideals; and it is of
such stuff that the spirit of dauntless nationhood is made. Men who
build temples of their lives for ideals do not cement national mortar
with graft. They build with integrity for eternity, not time. Their
consciousness of an ideal gives them a poise, a concentration, a
stability, a steadiness of purpose, unknown to mad chasers after
wealth. Obstinate, dogged, perhaps tinged with the self-superior
spirit of "I am holier than thou"--they may be; but men who forsake all
for an ideal and pursue it consistently for a century and a half
develop a stamina that enters into the very blood of their race. It is
a common saying even to this day that Quebec is more Catholic than the
Pope, and Ontario more ultra-English than England; and when the
Canadian is twitted with being "colonial" and "crude," his prompt and
almost proud answer is that he "goes in more for athletics than
esthetics." "One makes men. The other may make sissies."
With this germ spirit as the very beginning of national consciousness
in Canada, one begins to understand the grim, rough, dogged
determination that became part of the race. Canada was never
intoxicated with that madness for Bigness that seemed to sweep over the
modern world. What cared she whether her population stood still or
not, whether she developed fast or slow, provided she kept the Faith
and preserved her national integrity? Flimsy culture had no place in
her schools or her social life. A solid basis of the three R's--then
educational frills if you like; but the solid basis first. Worship of
wealth and envy of material success have almost no part in Canadian
life; for the simple reason that wealth and success are not the ideals
of the nation. Laurier, who is a poor man, and Borden, who is only a
moderately well-off man, command more social prestige in Canada than
any millionaire from Vancouver to Halifax. If demos be the spirit of
the mob, then Canada has no faintest tinge of democracy in her; but
inasmuch as the French colonists came in pursuit of a religious ideal
and the English colonists of a political ideal, if democracy stand for
freedom for the individual to pursue his own ideal--then Canada is
supersaturated with that democracy. Freedom for the individual to
pursue his own ideal was the very atmosphere in which Canada's national
consciousness was born.
In the West a something more entered into the national spirit. French
fur-traders, wood-runners, voyageurs had drifted North and West, men of
infinite resources, as much at home with a frying-pan over a camp-fire
as over a domestic hearth, who could wrest a living from life anywhere.
English adventurers of similar caliber had drifted in from Hudson Bay.
These little lords in a wilderness of savages had scattered west as far
as the Rockies, south to California. They knew no law but the law of a
strong right arm and kept peace among the Indians only by a dauntless
courage and rough and ready justice. They could succeed only by a good
trade in furs, and they could obtain a good trade in furs only by
treating the Indians with equity. Every man who plunged into the fur
wilderness took courage in one hand and his life in the other. If he
lost his courage, he lost his life. Indian fray, turbulent rapids,
winter cold took toll of the weak and the feckless. Nature accepts no
excuses. The man who defaulted in manhood was wiped out--sucked down
by the rapids, buried in winter storms, absorbed into the camps of
Indian degenerates. The men who stayed upon their feet had the stamina
of a manhood in them that could not be extinguished. It was a
wilderness edition of that dauntlessness which brought the Loyalists to
Ontario and the French devotees to Quebec. This, too, made for a
dogged, strong, obstinate race. At the time of the fall of French
power at Quebec in 1759 there were about two thousand of these
wilderness hunters in the West. Fifty years later by way of Hudson Bay
came Lord Selkirk's Settlers--Orkneymen and Highlanders, hardy, keen
and dauntless as their native rock-bound isles.
These four classes were the primary first ingredients that went into
the making of Canada's national consciousness and each of the four
classes was the very personification of strength, purpose, courage,
freedom.
III
But Destiny plays us strange tricks. When Quebec fell in 1759, New
France passed under the rule of that English and Protestant race which
she had been fighting for two centuries; and when the American colonies
won their independence twenty years later and the ultra-English
Loyalists trekked in thousands across the boundary to what are now
Montreal and Toronto and Cobourg, there came under one government two
races that had fought each other in raid and counter-raid for two
centuries--alien and antagonistic in religion and speech. It is only
in recent years under the guiding hand of Sir Wilfred Laurier that the
ancient antagonism has been pushed off the boards.
The War of 1812 probably helped Canada's national spirit more than it
hurt it. It tested the French Canadian and found him loyal to the
core; loyal, to be sure, not because he loved England more but rather
because he loved the Americans less. He felt surer of religious
freedom under English rule, which guaranteed it to him, than under the
rule of the new republic, which he had harried and which had harried
him in border raid for two centuries. The War of 1812 left Canada
crippled financially but stronger in national spirit because she had
tested her strength and repelled invasion.
If mountain pines strike strong roots into the eternal rocks because
they are tempest-tossed by the wildest winds of heaven, then the next
twenty years were destined to test the very fiber of Canada's national
spirit. All that was weak snapped and went down. The dry rot of
political theory was flung to dust. Special interests, pampered
privileges, the claims of the few to exploit the many, the claims of
the many to rule wisely as the few--the shibboleth of theorists, the
fine spun cobwebs of the doctrinaires, governmental ideals of
brotherhood that were mostly sawdust and governmental practices that
were mostly theft under privilege--all went down in the smash of the
next twenty years' tempest. All that was left was what was real; what
would hold water and work out in fact.
It is curious how completely all records slur over the significance of
the Rebellion of 1837. Canada is sensitive over the facts of the case
to this day. Only a few years ago a book dealing with the unvarnished
facts of the period was suppressed by a suit in court. As a rebellion,
1837 was an insignificant fracas. The rebels both in Ontario and
Quebec were hopelessly outnumbered and defeated. William Lyon
MacKenzie, the leader in Ontario, and Louis Papineau, the leader in
Quebec, both had to flee for their lives. It is a question if a
hundred people all told were killed. Probably a score in all were
executed; as many again were sent to penal servitude; and several
hundreds escaped punishment by fleeing across the boundary and joining
in the famous night raids of Hunters' Lodges. Within a few years both
the leaders and exiles were permitted to return to Canada, where they
lived honored lives. It was not as a rebellion that 1837 was
epoch-making. It was in the clarifying of Canada's national
consciousness as to how she was to be governed.
Having migrated from the revolting colonies of New England and the
South, the ultra-patriotic United Empire Loyalists unconsciously felt
themselves more British than the French of Quebec. Canada was governed
direct from Downing Street. There were local councils in both Toronto
and Quebec--or Upper and Lower Canada, as they were called--and there
were local legislatures; but the governing cliques were appointed by
the Royal Governor, which meant that whatever little clique gained the
Governor's ear had its little compact or junta of friends and relatives
in power indefinitely. There were elections, but the legislature had
no control over the purse strings of the government. Such a close
corporation of special interests did the governing clique become that
the administration was known in both provinces as a "Family Compact."
Administrative abuses flourished in a rank growth. Judges owing their
appointment to the Crown exercised the most arbitrary tyranny against
patriots raising their voices against government by special interests.
Vast land grants were voted away to favorites of the Compact. Public
moneys were misused and neither account given nor restitution demanded
from the culprit. Ultra-loyalty became a fashionable pose. When
strolling actors played American airs in a Toronto theater they were
hissed; and when a Canadian stood up to those airs, he was hissed.
Special interests became intrenched behind a triple rampart of fashion
and administration and loyalty. Details of the revolt need not be
given here. A great love is always the best cure for a puny
affection--a Juliet for a Rosalind; and when a pure patriotism arose to
oust this spurious lip-loyalty, there resulted the Rebellion of 1837.
The point is--when the rebellion had passed, Canada had overthrown a
system of government by oligarchy. She had ousted special interests
forever from her legislative halls. In a blood and sweat of agony, on
the scaffold, in the chain gang, penniless, naked, hungry and in exile,
her patriots had fought the dragon of privilege, cast out the accursed
thing and founded national life on the eternal rocks of justice to all,
special privileges to none. Her patriots had themselves learned on the
scaffold that law must be as sacredly observed by the good as by the
evil, by the great as by the small. From the death scaffolds of these
patriots sprang that part of Canada's national consciousness that
reveres law next to God. Canada passed through the throes of purging
her national consciousness from 1815 to 1840, as the United States
passed through the same throes in the sixties, but the process cost her
half a century of delay in growth and development.
While the union of Upper and Lower Canada put an end to the evils of
special privileges in government, events had been moving apace in the
far West, where roving traders and settlers were a law unto themselves.
Red River settlers of the region now known as Manitoba were clamoring
for an end to the monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company over all
that region inland from the Great Northern Sea. The discovery of gold
had brought hordes of adventurers pouring into Cariboo, or what is now
known as British Columbia. Both Red River and British Columbia
demanded self-government. Partly because England had delayed granting
Oregon self-government, the settlers of the Columbia had set up their
own provisional government and turned that region over to the United
States. We are surely far enough away from the episodes to state
frankly the facts that similar underground intrigue was at work in both
Red River and British Columbia, fostered, much of it, by Irish
malcontents of the old Fenian raids. Once more Canada's national
consciousness roused itself to a bigger problem and wider outlook.
Either the far-flung Canadian provinces must be bound together in some
sort of national unity or--the Canadian mind did not let itself
contemplate that "or." The provinces must be confederated to be held.
Hence confederation in 1867 under the British North American Act, which
is to Canada what the Constitution is to the United States. It
happened that Sir John Macdonald, the future premier of the Dominion,
had been in Washington during one period of the Civil War. He noted
what he thought was the great defect of the American system, and he
attributed the Civil War to that defect--namely, that all powers not
specifically delegated to the federal government were supposed to rest
with the states. Therefore, when Canada formed her federation of
isolated provinces, Sir John and the other famous Fathers of
Confederation reversed the American system. All power not specifically
delegated to the provinces was supposed to rest with the Dominion.
Only strictly local affairs were left with the provinces. Trade,
commerce, justice, lands, agriculture, labor, marriage laws, waterways,
harbors, railways were specifically put under Dominion control.
IV
Now, stand back and contemplate the situation confronting the new
federation:
Canada's population was less than half the present population of the
state of New York; not four million. That population was scattered
over an area the size of Europe.[1] To render the situation doubly
dark and doubtful the United States had just entered on her career of
high tariff. That high tariff barred Canadian produce out. There was
only one intermittent and unsatisfactory steamer service across the
Atlantic. There was none at all across the Pacific. British
Columbians trusted to windjammers round the Horn. Of railroads binding
East to West there was none. A canal system had been begun from the
lakes and the Ottawa to the St. Lawrence, but this was a measure more
of national defense than commerce. Crops were abundant, but where
could they be sold? I have heard relatives tell how wheat in those
days sold down to forty cents, and oats to twenty cents, and potatoes
to fifteen cents, and fine cattle to forty dollars, and finest horses
to fifty dollars and seventy-five dollars. Fathers of farmers who
to-day clear their three thousand dollars and four thousand dollars a
year could not clear one hundred dollars a year. Commerce was
absolutely stagnant. Canada was a federation, but a federation of
what? Poverty-stricken, isolated provinces. Not in bravado, not in
flamboyant self-confidence, rebuffed of all chance to trade with the
United States, the new Dominion humbly set herself to build the
foundations of a nation. She did not know whether she could do what
she had set herself to do; but she began with that same dogged idealism
and faith in the future which had buoyed up her first settlers; and
there were dark days during her long hard task, when the whiff of an
adverse wind would have thrown her into national bankruptcy--that
winter, for instance, when the Canadian Pacific had no money to go on
building and the Canadian government refused to extend aid. Had the
Kiel Rebellion of '85 not compelled the Dominion government to extend
aid so that the line would be ready for the troops every bank in Canada
would have collapsed, and national credit would have been impaired for
fifty years.
Meanwhile, a country of less than four million people set itself to
link British Columbia with Montreal, and Montreal with Halifax, and
Ottawa with Detroit, and the Great Lakes with the sea. The story is
too long to be related in detail, but on canals alone Canada has spent
a hundred millions. Including stocks, bonds, funded debt and debenture
stock, the Dominion railways have a capital of $1,369,992,574; and the
country that had not a foot of railroads, when the patriots fought the
Family Compact, to-day possesses twenty-nine thousand miles of
trackage,[2] three transcontinental systems of railroads and threescore
lines touching the boundary.[3] Five times more tonnage passes through
the Canadian Soo Canal than is expected for Panama or has passed
through Suez; but consider the burden of this development on a people
whose farmers were scarcely clearing one hundred dollars a year. It is
putting it mildly to say that during these dark days property
depreciated two-thirds in value. Land companies that had loaned up to
two-thirds the value of farm property found themselves saddled with
farms which could not be sold for half they had advanced on the loan.
Three times within the memory of the living generation Canadian
delegates sought trade concessions in Washington; and three times they
came back rebuffed, with but a grimmer determination to work out
Canada's own destiny. Is it any wonder, when the fourth time came and
Canada was offered reciprocity that she voted it down?
During the twenty dark years Canada lost to the United States
one-fourth her native population.[4] During the last ten years she has
drawn back to her home acres not only many of her expatriated native
born but almost two million Americans. In ten years her population has
almost doubled. Uncle Sam has boasted his four billion yearly foreign
trade from Atlantic ports. Canada with a population only one-twelfth
Uncle Sam's to-day has a foreign trade of almost a billion.
V
Take another look at Canada's area! All of Germany and Austria spread
over Eastern Canada would still leave an area uncovered in the East
bigger than the German Empire. England spread out flat would just
cover the maritime provinces. Quebec stands a third bigger than
Germany, Ontario a third bigger than France; and you still have a
western world as large again as the East. Spread the British Isles
flat, they would barely cover Manitoba. France and Germany would not
equal Saskatchewan and Alberta; and two Germanies would not cover
British Columbia--leaving undefined Yukon and MacKenzie River and Peace
River and the hinterland of Hudson Bay, an area equal to European
Russia. If areas in Canada had the same population as areas in Europe,
the Dominion would be supporting four hundred million people.
It would be assuming too much stoicism to say that Canadians are not
conscious of a great destiny. For years they stuck so closely to their
nation-building that they had no time to stand back and view the size
of the edifice of their own structure, but all that is different
to-day. When four hundred thousand people a year flock to the Dominion
to cast in their lot with Canadians, there is testimony of worth.
Canadians know their destiny is upon them, whatever it may be; and they
are meeting the challenge half-way with faces to the front. In the
words of Sir Wilfred Laurier, they know that "the Twentieth Century is
Canada's." What will they do with it? What are their aims and desires
as a people? Will the same ideals light the path to the fore as have
illumined the long hard way in the past? Will Canada absorb into her
national life the people who are coming to her, or will they absorb her?
[1] Canada's area is 3,750,000 square miles. The area of Europe is
3,797,410 square miles.
[2] Canada's railway mileage at the end of 1913 was 29,303.53. The
land grants to Canadian railroads, Dominion and provincial, stand
55,256,429 acres. Cash subsidies to railroads in Canada up to June 30,
1913, stand thus: from the Dominion, $163,251,469.42; from the
provinces, $36,500,015.16; from the municipalities, $18,078,673.60.
[3] The tonnage through both Canadian and U. S. canals at the "Soo" in
1913 was 72,472,676, of which 39,664,874 went through the Canadian
canal.
[4] The U. S. Census reports place the number of Canadians in the
United States at one and a quarter million; but this is obviously far
below the mark. Canada's loss of people shows that. For instance,
from 1898 to 1908, Canada was receiving immigrants at a rate exceeding
200,000 a year, yet the census for this decade showed a gain of only a
million. It was not till 1914 her census showed a gain of two million
for ten years. Her immigrants either went back or drifted over the
line. Port figures show that few went back to Europe.