The Framework of Home Rule Part 4
CHAPTER V
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 circ.u.mstances 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, pa.s.sed 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, a.s.suming 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 pa.s.sed 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 emanc.i.p.ation. 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 a.s.sault of Quebec on December 31, 1775.
In spite of Burke's n.o.ble 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 cla.s.s 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 dest.i.tution 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 sh.o.r.es 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 Const.i.tution 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 cla.s.ses 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce of half a century by the Const.i.tutional Act of 1791, pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembly 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, a.n.a.logy 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, const.i.tutionally 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 pa.s.s 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 Const.i.tutional Act pa.s.sed 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 Const.i.tutional Act of 1791, had a real popular a.s.sembly, 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 a.s.sembly. 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 a.s.sembly. 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 a.s.sembly, 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 const.i.tuted 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 a.s.sembly itself, which retained its original Const.i.tution 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 cla.s.ses 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 fict.i.tious 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 t.i.the war in other Irish Provinces. All these cla.s.ses 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 Willc.o.c.ks 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 a.s.sembly, 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 const.i.tutional effort. They may be found summarized in the "Seventh Report of Grievances," a temperate and truthful doc.u.ment drawn up by a Committee of the a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sault 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 n.o.bles 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 cla.s.s and the French lower cla.s.s 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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembly. It will be observed that, although Ireland never had anything worth calling an a.s.sembly, 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 a.s.sembly 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 const.i.tutional 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 a.s.sumed 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 cla.s.ses. As Sir John c.o.c.kburn 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 cla.s.ses." 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 a.s.sembly 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 pa.s.sed 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 Const.i.tution 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 pa.s.sed for Upper Canada, all the provincial revenues were placed under the control of the a.s.sembly in return for the voting of a fixed Civil List. This well-meant half-measure made matters worse, because it left the a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembly of Lower Canada, at Papineau's instance, pa.s.sed the equally celebrated "Ninety-two Resolutions." Bombastic and diffuse, like parts of O'Connell's speech, this historic doc.u.ment 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 Const.i.tution prevailed as in Upper and Lower Canada, had been pa.s.sing 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 Const.i.tution 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 a.s.suming 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 a.s.semblies control of the provincial revenue, and with an eye, no doubt, on the t.i.the war barely at an end in Ireland, he said: "Let n.o.ble 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 a.n.a.logy, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 embarra.s.sing possessions, which, nevertheless, it was the duty of every self-respecting Briton to dragoon into obedience. Both dependencies were a.s.sumed 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. Pet.i.tions 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 const.i.tutional 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.n.a.logy with Ireland, was seized on to the exclusion of the underlying and far more important political question in both Provinces.