The Canadian Dominion: a Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor

Chapter I. the First Fifty Years

Scarcely more than half a century has passed since the Dominion of Canada, in its present form, came into existence. But thrice that period has elapsed since the fateful day when Montcalm and Wolfe laid down their lives in battle on the Plains of Abraham, and the lands which now comprise the Dominion finally passed from French hands and came under British rule.

The Peace of Paris, which brought the Seven Years' War to a close in 1763, marked the termination of the empire of France in the New World. Over the continent of North America, after that peace, only two flags floated, the red and yellow banner of Spain and the Union Jack of Great Britain. Of these the Union Jack held sway over by far the larger domain--over the vague territories about Hudson Bay, over the great valley of the St. Lawrence, and over all the lands lying east of the Mississippi, save only New Orleans. To whom it would fall to develop this vast claim, what mighty empires would be carved out of the wilderness, where the boundary lines would run between the nations yet to be, were secrets the future held. Yet in retrospect it is now clear that in solving these questions the Peace of Paris played no inconsiderable part. By removing from the American colonies the menace of French aggression from the north it relieved them of a sense of dependence on the mother country and so made possible the birth of a new nation in the United States. At the same time, in the northern half of the continent, it made possible that other experiment in democracy, in the union of diverse races, in international neighborliness, and in the reconciliation of empire with liberty, which Canada presents to the whole world, and especially to her elder sister in freedom.

In 1763 the territories which later were to make up the Dominion of Canada were divided roughly into three parts. These parts had little or nothing in common. They shared together neither traditions of suffering or glory nor ties of blood or trade. Acadia, or Nova Scotia, by the Atlantic, was an old French colony, now British for over a generation. Canada, or Quebec, on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, with seventy thousand French habitants and a few hundred English camp followers, had just passed under the British flag. West and north lay the vaguely outlined domains of the Hudson's Bay Company, where the red man and the buffalo still reigned supreme and almost unchallenged.

The old colony of Acadia, save only the island outliers, Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, now ceded by the Peace of Paris, had been in British hands since 1713. It was not, however, until 1749 that any concerted effort had been made at a settlement of this region. The menace from the mighty fortress which the French were rebuilding at that time at Louisbourg, in Cape Breton, and the hostility of the restless Acadians or old French settlers on the mainland, had compelled action and the British Government departed from its usual policy of laissez faire in matters of emigration. Twenty-five hundred English settlers were brought out to found and hold the town and fort of Halifax. Nearly as many Germans were planted in Lunenburg, where their descendants flourish to this day. Then the hapless Acadians were driven into exile and into the room they left, New Englanders of strictest Puritan ancestry came, on their own initiative, and built up new communities like those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Other waves of voluntary immigration followed--Ulster Presbyterians, driven out by the attempt of England to crush the Irish woolen manufacture, and, still later, Highlanders, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian, who soon made Gaelic the prevailing tongue of the easternmost counties. By 1767 the colony of Nova Scotia, which then included all Acadia, north and east of Maine, had a prosperous population of some seven thousand Americans, two thousand Irish, two thousand Germans, barely a thousand English, and well over a thousand surviving Acadian French. In short, this northernmost of the Atlantic colonies appeared to be fast on the way to become a part of New England. It was chiefly New Englanders who had peopled it, and it was with New England that for many a year its whole social and commercial intercourse was carried on. It was no accident that Nova Scotia later produced the first Yankee humorist, "Sam Slick."

With the future sister province of Canada, or Quebec, which lay along the St. Lawrence as far as the Great Lakes, Acadia or Nova Scotia had much less in common than with New England. Hundreds of miles of unbroken forest wilderness lay between the two colonies, and the sea lanes ran between the St. Lawrence, the Bay of Fundy, or Halifax and Havre or Plymouth, and not between Quebec and Halifax. Even the French settlers came of different stocks. The Acadians were chiefly men of La Rochelle and the Loire, while the Canadians came, for the most part, from the coast provinces stretching from Normandy and Picardy to Poitou and Bordeaux.

The situation in Canada proper presented the British authorities with a problem new in their imperial experience. Hitherto, save for Acadia and New Netherland, where the settlers were few in numbers and, even in New Netherland, closely akin to the conquerors in race, religion, and speech, no colony containing men of European stocks had been acquired by conquest. Canada held some sixty or seventy thousand settlers, French and Catholic almost to a man. Despite the inefficiency of French colonial methods the plantation had taken firm root. The colony had developed a strength, a social structure, and an individuality all its own. Along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu the settlements lay close and compact; the habitants' whitewashed cottages lined the river banks only a few arpents apart. The social cohesion of the colony was equally marked. Alike in government, in religion, and in industry, it was a land where authority was strong. Governor and intendant, feudal seigneur, bishop and Jesuit superior, ruled each in his own sphere and provided a rigid mold and framework for the growth of the colony. There were, it is true, limits to the reach of the arm of authority. Beyond Montreal stretched a vast wilderness merging at some uncertain point into the other wilderness that was Louisiana. Along the waterways which threaded this great No Man's Land the coureurs-de-bois roamed with little heed to law or license, glad to escape from the paternal strictness that irked youth on the lower St. Lawrence. But the liberty of these rovers of the forest was not liberty after the English pattern; the coureur-de-bois was of an entirely different type from the pioneers of British stock who were even then pushing their way through the gaps in the Alleghanies and making homes in the backwoods. Priest and seigneur, habitant and coureur-de-bois were one and all difficult to fit into accepted English ways. Clearly Canada promised to strain the digestive capacity of the British lion.

The present western provinces of the Dominion were still the haunt of Indian and buffalo. French-Canadian explorers and fur traders, it is true, had penetrated to the Rockies a few years before the Conquest, and had built forts on Lake Winnipeg, on the Assiniboine and Red rivers, and at half a dozen portages on the Saskatchewan. But the "Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay" had not yet ventured inland, still content to carry on its trade with the Indians from its forts along the shores of that great sea. On the Pacific the Russians had coasted as far south as Mount Saint Elias, but no white man, so far as is known, had set foot on the shores of what is now British Columbia.

Two immediate problems were bequeathed to the British Government by the Treaty of Paris: what was to be done with the unsettled lands between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi; and how were the seventy thousand French subjects in the valley of the St. Lawrence to be dealt with? The first difficulty was not solved. It was merely postponed. The whole back country of the English colonies was proclaimed an Indian reserve where the King's white subjects might trade but might not acquire land. This policy was not devised in order to set bounds to the expansion of the older colonies; that was an afterthought. The policy had its root in an honest desire to protect the Indians from the frauds of unscrupulous traders and from the encroachments of settlers on their hunting grounds. The need of a conciliatory, if firm, policy in regard to the great interior was made evident by the Pontiac rising in 1763, the aftermath of the defeat of the French, who had done all they could to inspire the Indians with hatred for the advancing English.

How to deal with Canada was a more thorny problem. The colony had not been sought by its conquerors for itself. It was counted of little worth. The verdict of its late possessors, as recorded in Voltaire's light farewell to "a few arpents of snow," might be discounted as an instance of sour grapes; but the estimate of its new possessors was evidently little higher, since they debated long and dubiously whether in the peace settlement they should retain Canada or the little sugar island of Guadeloupe, a mere pin point on the map. Canada had been conquered not for the good it might bring but for the harm it was doing as a base for French attack upon the English colonies--"the wasps' nest must be smoked out." But once it had been taken, it had to be dealt with for itself.

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