British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

CHAPTER I.. Introductory.

INTRODUCTORY.

There are antinomies in politics as in philosophy, problems where the difficulty lies in reconciling facts indubitably true but mutually contradictory. For growth in the political world is not always gradual; accidents, discoveries, sudden developments, call into existence new creations, which only the generous logic of events and the process of time can reconcile with pre-existing facts and systems. It is the object of this essay to examine one of these political antinomies--the contradiction between imperial ascendancy and colonial autonomy--as it was illustrated by events in early Victorian Canada.

The problem was no new one in 1839. Indeed it was coeval with the existence of the empire, and sprang from the very nature of colonial government. Beneath the actual facts of the great {2} American revolution--reaching far beyond quarrels over stamp duties, or the differentiation between internal and external taxation, or even the rights of man--was the fundamental difficulty of empire, the need to reconcile colonial independence with imperial unity. It was the perception of this difficulty which made Burke so much the greatest political thinker of his time. As he wrote in the most illuminating of his letters, "I am, and ever have been, deeply sensible of the difficulty of reconciling the strong presiding power, that is so useful towards the conservation of a vast, disconnected, infinitely diversified empire, with that liberty and safety of the provinces, which they must enjoy (in opinion and practice, at least), or they will not be provinces at all. I know, and have long felt, the difficulty of reconciling the unwieldy haughtiness of a great ruling nation, habituated to command, pampered by enormous wealth, and confident from a long course of prosperity and victory, to the high spirit of free dependencies, animated with the first glow and activity of juvenile heat, and assuming to themselves as their birthright, some part of that very pride which oppresses them."

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Dissatisfied as he ever was with merely passive or negative views, Burke was led to attempt a solution of the problem. He had never been under any illusion as to the possibility of limiting colonial constitutional pretensions. A free government was what the colonists thought free, and only they could fix the limit to their claims. But many considerations made him refuse to despair of the empire. His intensely human view of politics led him to put more trust in the bonds of kindred and affection than in constitutional forms. He hated the petty quibbles of political legists and pedants--their dilemmas, and metaphysical distinctions, and catastrophes. In his opinion the bulk of mankind was not excessively curious concerning any theories whilst they were really happy. But perhaps his political optimism depended most on his belief that institutions, as living things, were indefinitely adaptable, and that the logic of life and progress naturally overcame all opposing arguments. In his ideal state there was room for many mansions, and he did not speak of disaster when American colonists proposed to build according to designs not ratified in Westminster.

I have dwelt on the views of Burke because here, as in Indian affairs, he was the first of British {4} statesmen to recognize what was implied in the empire, and because his views still stand. But his contemporaries failed utterly, either to see the danger as he saw it, or to meet it as he bade them meet it. Save Chatham, they had no understanding of provincial opinion; in their political methods they were corrupt individualists, and their general equipment in imperial politics was contemptibly inadequate.

After the loss of the American colonies, the government in England contrived for a time to evade the problems and responsibilities of colonial empire. The colonies which remained to England were limited in extent and population; and such difficulties as existed were faced, not so much by the government in London, as beyond the seas by statesmen with local knowledge, like Dorchester. At the same time, the consequences of the French Revolution and the great wars drew to themselves the attention of all active minds. Under these circumstances imperial policy lost much of its prestige, and imperial problems either vanished or were evaded. It was a period of "crown colony" administration. The connexion, as it was called, was maintained through oligarchic {5} institutions, strictly controlled from Westminster; local officials were selected from little groups of semi-aristocrats, more English than the home government itself; and the only policy which recommended itself to a nation, which still lacked both information and imagination, was to try no rash constitutional experiments, and to conciliate colonial opinion by economic favours and low taxation.

Yet the old contradiction between British ascendancy and colonial autonomy could not for long be ignored; and as in the early nineteenth century a new colonial empire arose, greater and more diversified than the old, the problem once more recurred, this time in Canada. It is not the purpose of this book to discuss the earlier stages of the Canadian struggle. The rebellions under Mackenzie in the West and Papineau in the East were abnormal and pathological episodes, in considering which the attention is easily diverted from the essential questions to exciting side issues and personal facts. In any case, that chapter in Canadian history has received adequate attention. But after Colborne's firmness had repressed the {6} armed risings, and Durham's imperious dictatorship had introduced some kind of order, there followed in Canada a period of high constitutional importance, in which the old issue was frankly faced, both in England and in Canada, almost in the very terms that Burke had used. It is not too much to say that the fifteen years of Canadian history which begin with the publication, in 1839, of Durham's Report, are the most important in the history of the modern British empire; and that in them was made the experiment on the success of which depended the future of that empire.

These years are the more instructive, because in them there are few distracting events drawing the attention from the main constitutional question. There were minor points--whether voluntaryism, or the principle of church establishment, was best for Canada; what place within the empire might safely be conceded to French-Canadian nationalism; how Canadian commerce was to relate itself to that of Britain and of the United States. All of these, however, were included in, or dominated by, the essential difficulty of combining, in one empire, Canadian self-government and British supremacy.

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The phrase, responsible government, appears everywhere in the writings and speeches of those days with a wearisome iteration. Yet the discussion which hinged on that phrase was of primary importance. The British government must either discover the kind of self-government required in the greater dependencies, the modus vivendi to be established between the local and the central governments, and the seat of actual responsibility, or cease to be imperial. Under four governors-general the argument proceeded, and it was not until 1854 that Elgin, in his departure from Canada, was able to assure the British government that the question had been for the time settled.

The essay which follows will describe the character of the political community within which the question was raised; the fortunes and policy of the governors-general concerned in the discussion; the modifications introduced into British political thought by the Canadian agitation; and the consequences, in England and Canada, of the firm establishment of colonial self-government.

Burke, Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol.

Sir C. P. Lucas, Introduction to Lord Durham's Report, p. 266.

Its latest statement may be found in Sir C. P. Lucas's admirable edition of Lord Durham's Report, Oxford, 1912.

I omit from my reckoning the brief and unimportant tenure of office by the Earl Cathcart, who filled a gap between Metcalfe's retirement and Elgin's arrival.

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CHAPTER II.. The Canadian Community.

THE CANADIAN COMMUNITY.

To understand the political evolution of Canada it is essential to begin with a study of the elements of Canadian society. Canadian constitutionalists would have written to better purpose, had they followed the example of the Earl of Durham, in whose Report the concluding practical suggestions develop naturally from the vivid social details which occupy its earlier pages, and raise it to the level of literature. In pioneering communities there is no such thing as the constitution, or politics, per se; and the relation between the facts, sordid and mean as they often are, of the life of the people, and the growth of institutions and political theories, is fundamental.

Canadian society, in 1839 and long afterwards, was dominated by the physical characteristics of the seven hundred miles of country which stretched from Quebec to the shores of Lake Huron, with {9} its long water-front and timid expansion, north and south; its forests stubbornly resisting the axes of the settlers; its severe extremities of heat and cold; the innumerable inconveniences inflicted by its uncultivated wastes on those who first invaded it; and the imperfect lines of land communication which multiplied all distances in Canada at least four-fold. It was perhaps this sense of distance, and difficulty of locomotion, which first impressed the settler and the visitor. To begin with, the colony was, for practical purposes, more than a month's distance from the centre of government. Steam was gradually making its way, and the record passage by sailing ship, from Quebec to Portsmouth, had occupied only eighteen days and a half, but sails were still the ordinary means of propulsion, and the average length of voyage of 237 vessels arriving at Quebec in 1840 was well over forty days. To the immigrant, however, the voyage across the Atlantic was the least of his troubles; for the internal communications of Canada left much to be desired. The assistance {10} of railway transportation might be entirely ignored,--as late as 1847 only twenty-two miles of railway lines had been laid and worked. There was, of course, during the open season, the wonderful passage by river and lake into the heart of the continent; although the long winter months broke into the regularity of the traffic by water, and the St. Lawrence rapids added to the traveller's difficulties and expenses. Even the magic of a governor-general's wand could not dispel the inconveniences of this simplest of Canadian routes. "I arrived here on Thursday week," grumbled Poulett Thomson, writing from Toronto in 1839. "The journey was bad enough; a portage to Lachine; then the steamboat to the Cascades, twenty-four miles further; then road again (if road it can be called) for sixteen miles; then steam to Cornwall forty miles; then road, twelve miles; then, by a change of steamers on to Lake Ontario to Kingston, and thence here. I slept one night on the road, and two on board the steamers. Such, as I have described it, is the boasted navigation of the St. Lawrence!" For military purposes there was the alternative route, up the Ottawa to Bytown, {11} and thence by the Rideau military canal to Kingston and the Lakes. On land, progress was much more complicated, for even the main road along the river and lake front was in shamefully bad condition, more especially when autumn passed into winter, or when spring once more loosened up the roads. There is a quite unanimous chorus of condemnation from all--British, Americans, and Canadians. One lively traveller in 1840 protested that on his way from Montreal, he was compelled to walk at the carriage side for hours, ankle-deep in mud, with the reins in his hands, and that, with infinite fatigue to both man and beast, he accomplished sixty miles in two days--a wonderful performance. In the very heart of the rebellion, W. L. Mackenzie seems to have found the roads fighting against him, for he speaks of the march along Yonge Street as over "thirty or forty miles of the worst roads in the world"; and attributes part of the disheartening of his men to what one may term mud-weariness. Local tradition still remembers with a sense of wonder that Sydenham, eager to return to his work in Lower Canada, once travelled by sleigh {12} the 360 miles from Toronto to Montreal in thirty-six hours.

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