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The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier: A Chronicle of Our Own Time

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Title: The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier: A Chronicle of Our Own Time

Author: Oscar D. Skelton


        
Release date: January 21, 2010 [eBook #31041]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAY OF SIR WILFRID LAURIER: A CHRONICLE OF OUR OWN TIME ***




Produced by Al Haines









[Frontispiece:  SIR WILFRID LAURIER 'IN ACTION' After an instantaneous
photograph taken during an address in the open air at Sorel, 1911]




THE DAY OF

SIR WILFRID LAURIER

A Chronicle of Our Own Times

BY

OSCAR D. SKELTON




TORONTO

GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY

1916




_Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
  the Berne Convention_




{vii}

PREFATORY NOTE

In conformity with its title, this volume, save for the earlier
chapters, is history rather than biography, is of the _day_, more than
of the man.  The aim has been to review the more significant events and
tendencies in the recent political life of Canada.  In a later and
larger work it is hoped to present a more personal and intimate
biography of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

O. D. SKELTON.

KINGSTON, 1915.




{ix}

CONTENTS


                                                                  Page

        PREFATORY NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   vii
    I.  THE MAKING OF A CANADIAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     1
   II.  POLITICS IN THE SIXTIES  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    18
  III.  FIRST YEARS IN PARLIAMENT  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    32
   IV.  IN OPPOSITION, 1878-1887 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    53
    V.  LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION, 1887-1896  . . . . . . . . . .    91
   VI.  LOOKING TO WASHINGTON  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   101
  VII.  AN EMPIRE IN TRANSITION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   126
 VIII.  THE END OF A RÉGIME  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   153
   IX.  NEW MEN AT THE HELM  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   169
    X.  CANADA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD  . . . . . . . . . . . .   176
   XI.  THE COMING OF PROSPERITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   218
  XII.  CANADA AND FOREIGN POWERS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   249
 XIII.  NATION AND EMPIRE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   270
  XIV.  FIFTY YEARS OF UNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   321
        BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   331
        INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   333




{xi}

ILLUSTRATIONS

SIR WILFRID LAURIER IN ACTION  . . . . . . . . . . .    _Frontispiece_
  After an instantaneous photograph taken during
    an address in the open air at Sorel, 1911.

SIR ANTOINE AIMÉ DORION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  _Facing page_ 12
  From a photograph.

PRIME MINISTERS OF CANADA, 1867-1915 . . . . . . . .        "       36
  From photographs.

GOVERNORS-GENERAL OF THE DOMINION  . . . . . . . . .        "       48
  From photographs by Topley.

VICE-REGAL CONSORTS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        "       64
  From photographs by Topley.

HONORÉ MERCIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        "       90
  From a photograph.

SIR WILFRID LAURIER  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        "      128
  From a photograph by Topley.

THE LIBERAL GOVERNMENT FORMED BY MR LAURIER IN 1896         "    168-9
  From photographs.

SIR ROBERT BORDEN  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        "      194
  From a photograph by Montminy, Quebec.

SIR WILFRID LAURIER IN ENGLAND, 1911 . . . . . . . .        "      294
  From a photograph.




{1}

CHAPTER I

THE MAKING OF A CANADIAN

Early days at St Lin--Seven years of college--Student at
law--Arthabaska days


Wilfrid Laurier was born at St Lin, Quebec, on November 20, 1841.  His
ancestral roots were sunk deep in Canadian soil.  For six generations
Quebec had been the home of Laurier after Laurier.  His kinsmen traced
their origin to Anjou, a province that ever bred shrewd and thrifty
men.  The family name was originally Cottineau.  In a marriage covenant
entered into at Montreal in 1666 the first representative of the family
in Canada is styled 'Francois Cottineau dit Champlauriet.'  Evidently
some ancestral field or garden of lauriers or oleanders gave the
descriptive title which in time, as was common, became the sole family
name.  The Lauriers came to Canada shortly after Louis XIV took the
colony under his royal wing in 1663, in the first era of real
settlement, and hewed out homes for themselves in the forest, first on
the island of Jesus, at the mouth of the {2} Ottawa, and later in the
parish of Lachenaie, on the north bank of the same river, where they
grew in numbers until Lauriers, with Rochons and Matthieus, made up
nearly all the parish.

Charles Laurier, grandfather of Wilfrid Laurier, was a man of strong
character and marked ability.  In face of many difficulties he mastered
mathematics and became a self-taught land surveyor, so that he was able
to make the surveys of the great Pangman seigneury at Lachenaie.  Early
in the nineteenth century he settled his son Carolus on a farm just
hewn out of the forest, near the little village of St Lin, a frontier
settlement nestling at the foot of the Laurentian hills north of
Montreal.  He himself continued to reside at Lachenaie until far on in
years, when he went to live with his son at St Lin.

Carolus Laurier followed in his father's footsteps, surveying and
farming by turns as opportunity offered.  He had not his father's
rugged individuality, but his handsome figure, his alert wit, and his
amiable and generous nature made him a welcome guest through all the
French and Scottish settlements in the north country.  That he had
something of his father's progressiveness {3} is shown by the fact that
he was the first farmer in the neighbourhood to set up a threshing
machine in his barn, to take the place of the old-time flail.  It was
his liberal views that gave the first bent to his son's sympathies; and
he was, as we shall see, progressive enough to give the brilliant lad
the education needed for professional success, and far-seeing and
broad-minded enough to realize how great an asset a thorough knowledge
of English speech and English ways would be.

Yet it was rather to his mother that Wilfrid Laurier, like so many
other notable men, owed his abilities and his temperament.  Marcelle
Martineau, kin to the mother of the poet Fréchette, was a woman of much
strength of character, of fine mind and artistic talents.  She lived
only five years after her son was born, but in those few years she had
so knit herself into his being that the warm and tender memory of her
never faded from his impressionable mind.  The only other child of this
marriage, a daughter, Malvina, died in infancy.  Carolus Laurier
married again, his second wife being Adeline Ethier.  She was much
attached to his children and they to her.  Of this second marriage
three sons were born: {4} Ubalde, who became a physician and died at
Arthabaska in 1898; Charlemagne, a merchant in St Lin and later member
for the county at Ottawa, who lived until 1907; and Henri, the
prothonotary at Arthabaska, who passed away in 1906.  Carolus Laurier
himself lived on in his little village home forty years after the birth
of his eldest son, and his wife lived nearly twenty years longer.

It was a quiet, strength-shaping country home in which the future
statesman's boyhood was cast.  The little village was off the beaten
track of travel; not yet had the railway joined it to the river front.
There were few distractions to excite or dissipate youthful energies.
Roaming amid the brooding silence of the hills, fishing for trout,
hunting partridges and rabbits, and joining in the simple village
games, the boy took his boyish pleasures and built for his manhood's
calm and power.  His home had an intellectual atmosphere quite out of
the ordinary, and it enjoyed a full measure of that grace or native
courtesy which is not least among Quebec's contributions to the common
Canadian stock.

He had his first schooling in the elementary parish school of St Lin,
where the boys learned their _A-B-C_, their _two-times-two_, and their
{5} catechism.  Then  his father determined to give him a broader
outlook by enabling him to see something of the way of life and to
learn the tongue of his English-speaking compatriots.  Some eight miles
west of St Lin on the Achigan river lay the village of New Glasgow.  It
had been settled about 1820 by Scottish Protestants belonging to
various British regiments.  Carolus Laurier had carried on surveys
there, knew the people well, and was thoroughly at home with them.  The
affinity so often noted between Scottish and French has doubtless more
than a mere historical basis.  At any rate, son, like father, soon
found a place in the intimate life of the Murrays, the Guthries, the
Macleans, the Bennetts and other families of the settlement.  His
experience was further varied by boarding for a time in the home of an
Irish Catholic family named Kirk.  Later, he lived with the Murrays,
and often helped behind the counter in John Murray's general store.

The school which he attended for two years, 1852-53 and 1853-54, was a
mixed school, for both boys and girls, taught by a rapidly shifting
succession of schoolmasters, often of very unconventional training.  In
the first session the school came to an abrupt close in April, {6}
owing to the sudden departure of Thompson, the teacher in charge.  A
man of much greater ability, Sandy Maclean, took his place the
following term.  He had read widely, and was almost as fond of poetry
as of his glass.  His young French pupil, who was picking up English in
the playground and in the home as well as in the school, long cherished
the memory of the man who first opened to him a vista of the great
treasures of English letters.

The experience, though brief, had a lasting effect.  Perhaps the
English speech became rusty in the years of college life that followed
at L'Assomption, but the understanding, and the tolerance and goodwill
which understanding brings, were destined to abide for life.  It was
not without reason that the ruling motive of the young schoolboy's
future career was to be the awakening of sympathy and harmony between
the two races.  It would be fortunate for Canada if more experiments
like that which Carolus Laurier tried were even to-day to be attempted,
not only by French but by English families.

In September 1854, when well on in his thirteenth year, Wilfrid Laurier
returned to the normal path prescribed for the keener boys of the
province.  He entered the college {7} or secondary school of
L'Assomption, maintained by secular priests, and the chief seat of
education in the country north of Montreal.  The course was a thorough
one, extending through seven closely filled years.  It followed the
customary classical lines, laying chief stress on Latin, and next on
French literature.  Greek was taught less thoroughly; a still briefer
study of English, mathematics, scholastic philosophy, history, and
geography completed the course.  Judged by its fruits, it was a
training admirably adapted, in the hands of good teachers such as the
fathers at L'Assomption were, to give men destined for the learned
professions a good grounding, to impart to them a glimpse of culture, a
sympathy with the world beyond, a bent to eloquence and literary style.
It was perhaps not so well adapted to train men for success in
business; perhaps this literary and classical training is largely
responsible for the fact that until of late the French-speaking youth
of Quebec have not taken the place in commercial and industrial life
that their numbers and ability warrant.

The life at L'Assomption was one of strict discipline.  The boys rose
at 5.30, and every hour until evening had its task, or was assigned {8}
for mealtime or playtime.  Once a week, on Wednesday afternoon, came a
glorious half-day excursion to the country.  There was ample provision
for play.  But the young student from St Lin was little able to take
part in rough and ready sports.  His health was extremely delicate, and
violent exertion was forbidden.  His recreations took other forms.  The
work of the course of study itself appealed to him, particularly the
glories of the literatures of Rome and France and England.  While
somewhat reserved and retiring, he took delight in vying with his
companions in debate and in forming a circle of chosen spirits to
discuss, with all the courage and fervour of youth, the questions of
their little world, or the echoes that reached them of the political
tempests without.  Occasionally the outer world came to the little
village.  Assize courts were held twice a year, and more rarely
_assemblées contradictoires_ were held in which fiery politicians
roundly denounced each other.  The appeal was strong to the boys of
keener mind and political yearnings; and well disciplined as he usually
was, young Laurier more than once broke bounds to hear the eloquence of
advocate or candidate, well content to bear the punishment that
followed.  {9} Though reserved, he was not in the least afraid to
express strong convictions and to defend them when challenged.  He
entered L'Assomption with the bias towards Liberalism which his
father's inclinations and his own training and reading had developed.
A youth of less sturdy temper would, however, soon have lost this bias.
The atmosphere of L'Assomption was intensely conservative, and both
priests and fellow-pupils were inclined to give short shrift to the
dangerous radicalism of the brilliant young student from St Lin.  A
debating society had been formed, largely at his insistence.  One of
the subjects debated was the audacious theme, 'Resolved, that in the
interests of Canada the French Kings should have permitted Huguenots to
settle here.'  Wilfrid Laurier took the affirmative and urged his
points strongly, but the scandalized _préfet d'études_ intervened, and
there was no more debating at L'Assomption.  The boy stuck to his
Liberal guns, and soon triumphed over prejudices, becoming easily the
most popular as he was the most distinguished student of his day, and
the recognized orator and writer of addresses for state occasions.

Of the twenty-six students who entered L'Assomption in his year, only
nine graduated.  {10} Of these, five entered the priesthood.
Sympathetic as Wilfrid Laurier was in many ways with the Church of his
fathers, he did not feel called to its professional service.  He had
long since made up his mind as to his future career, and in 1861, when
scarcely twenty, he went to Montreal to study law.

By this time the paternal purse was lean, for the demands of a growing
family and his own generous disposition helped to reduce the surveyor's
means, which never had been too abundant.  The young student, thrown on
his own resources, secured a post in the law office of Laflamme and
Laflamme which enabled him to undertake the law course in M'Gill
University.  Rodolphe Laflamme, the head of the firm, one of the
leaders of the bar in Montreal, was active in the interests of the
radical wing of the Liberal party, known as the _Rouges_.

The lectures in M'Gill were given in English.  Thanks to his experience
at New Glasgow and his later reading, the young student found little
difficulty in following them.  Harder to understand at first were the
Latin phrases in Mr, afterwards Judge, Torrance's lectures on Roman
law, for at that time the absurd English pronunciation of Latin was
{11} the universal rule among English-speaking scholars.  Most helpful
were the lectures of Carter in criminal law, admirably prepared and
well delivered.  J. J. C. Abbott, a sound and eminent practitioner, and
a future prime minister of Canada, taught commercial law.  Laflamme had
charge of civil law.  Young Laurier made the most of the opportunities
offered.  While carrying on the routine work of the office, joining in
the political and social activities of his circle, and reading widely
in both French and English, he succeeded admirably in his law studies.
H. L. Desaulniers, a brilliant student whose career came to an untimely
close, and H. Welsh, shared with him the honours of the class.  In
other classes at the same time were Melbourne Tait, C. P. Davidson, and
J. J. Curran, all destined to high judicial rank.  The young student's
success was crowned by his being chosen to give the valedictory.  His
address, while having somewhat of the flowery rhetoric of youth, was a
remarkably broad and sane statement of policy: the need of racial
harmony, the true meaning of liberty, the call for straightforward
justice, and the lawyer's part in all these objects, were discussed
with prophetic eloquence.

{12}

But even the most eloquent of valedictories is not a very marketable
commodity.  It was necessary to get rapidly to work to earn a living.
Full of high hopes, he joined with two of his classmates in October
1864 to organize the firm of Laurier, Archambault and Desaulniers.  The
partners hung out their shingle in Montreal.  But clients were slow in
coming, for the city was honeycombed with established offices.  The
young partners found difficulty in tiding over the waiting time, and so
in the following April the firm was dissolved and Wilfrid Laurier
became a partner of Médéric Lanctot, one of the most brilliant and
impetuous writers and speakers of a time when brilliancy and passion
seem to have been scattered with lavish hand, a man of amazing energy
and resource, but fated by his unbalanced judgment utterly to wreck his
own career.  Lanctot was too busy at this time with the political
campaign he was carrying on in the press and on the platform against
Cartier's Confederation policy to look after his clients, and the
office work fell mainly to his junior partner.  It was a curiously
assorted partnership: Lanctot with his headlong and reckless passion,
Laurier with his cool, discriminating moderation: but it lasted a year.
{13} During this time Mr Laurier was in but not of the group of eager
spirits who made Lanctot's office their headquarters.  His moderate
temperament and his ill-health kept him from joining in the revels of
some and the political dissipations of others.  'I seem to see Laurier
as he was at that time,' wrote his close friend, L. O. David, 'ill,
sad, his air grave, indifferent to all the turmoil raised around him;
he passed through the midst of it like a shadow and seemed to say to
us, "Brother, we all must die."'[1]

[Illustration: SIR ANTOINE AIMÉ DORION From a photograph]

In fact, Mr Laurier's health was the source of very serious concern.
Lung trouble had developed, with violent hemorrhages, threatening a
speedy end to his career unless a change came.  Just at this time the
chief of his party and his most respected friend, Antoine Dorion,
suggested that he should go to the new settlement of Arthabaskaville in
the Eastern Townships, to practise law and to edit _Le Défricheur_,
hitherto published at L'Avenir and controlled by Dorion's younger
brother Eric, who had recently died.  Largely in the hope that the
country life would restore his health, he agreed, and late in 1866 left
Montreal for the backwoods village.

{14}

The founder of _Le Défricheur_, Eric Dorion, nicknamed _L'Enfant
Terrible_ for his energy and fearlessness, was not the least able or
least attractive member of a remarkable family.  He had been one of the
original members of the _Rouge_ party and, as editor of _L'Avenir_, a
vehement exponent of the principles of that party, but had later
sobered down, determined to devote himself to constructive work.  He
had taken an active part in a colonization campaign and had both
preached and practised improved farming methods.  He had founded the
village of L'Avenir in Durham township, had built a church for the
settlers there to show that his quarrel was with ecclesiastical
pretensions, not with religion, and for a dozen years had proved a
sound and stimulating influence in the growing settlement.

When Mr Laurier decided to open his law office in Arthabaskaville, the
seat of the newly formed judicial district of Arthabaska, he moved _Le
Défricheur_ to the same village.  Lack of capital and poor health
hampered his newspaper activities, and, as will be seen later, the
journal incurred the displeasure of the religious authorities of the
district.  Its light lasted barely six months and then flickered {15}
out.  This left the young lawyer free to devote himself to his
practice, which grew rapidly from the beginning, for the district was
fast filling up with settlers.  The court went on circuit to Danville
and Drummondville and Inverness, and soon, both at home and in these
neighbouring towns, no lawyer was more popular or more successful.  The
neighbouring counties contained many Scottish, Irish, and English
settlers, who were soon enrolled in the ranks of the young advocate's
staunch supporters.  The tilting in the court, the preparation of
briefs, the endeavour to straighten out tangles in the affairs of
helpless clients, all the interests of a lawyer deeply absorbed in his
profession, made these early years among the happiest of his career.
Arthabaska was, even then, no mean centre of intellectual and artistic
life, and a close and congenial circle of friends more than made up for
the lost attractions of the metropolis.

But neither work nor social intercourse filled all the young lawyer's
nights and days.  It was in this period that he laid the foundation of
his wide knowledge of the history and the literature of Canada and of
the two countries from which Canada has sprung.  Bossuet and Molière,
Hugo and Racine, Burke {16} and Sheridan, Macaulay and Bright,
Shakespeare and Burns, all were equally devoured.  Perhaps because of
his grandfather's association with the Pangman seigneury (the property
of the fur trader Peter Pangman), his interest was early turned to the
great fur trade of Canada, and he delved deep into its records.  The
life and words of Lincoln provided another study of perpetual interest.
Though Montreal was intensely Southern in sympathy during the Civil
War, Mr Laurier, from his days as a student, had been strongly
attracted by the rugged personality of the Union leader, and had
pierced below caricature and calumny to the tender strength, the
magnanimous patience, of the man.  A large niche in his growing library
was therefore devoted to memoirs of Lincoln and his period.

Congenial work, loyal friends, the company of the great spirits of the
past--these were much, but not all.  The crowning happiness came with
his marriage, May 13, 1868, to Miss Zoë Lafontaine of Montreal.  To
both, the marriage brought ideal companionship and fulfilment.  To the
husband especially it brought a watchfulness that at last conquered the
illness that had threatened, a devotion which never flagged--for Lady
Laurier is still {17} to-day much more a 'Laurierite' than is Sir
Wilfrid--and a stimulus that never permitted contentment with second
best.

The years of preparation were nearly over.  The call to wider service
was soon to come.  The new Dominion, and not least Quebec, faced many
difficult political problems.  Aiding in their solution, the young
lawyer in the quiet village of Arthabaska was to find full scope for
all the strength of brain and all the poise and balance of temper which
the years had brought him.



[1] _Mes Contemporains_, p. 85.




{18}

CHAPTER II

POLITICS IN THE SIXTIES

Parties in flux--Church and state--The war on the Institute--Le
Défricheur


The year 1841, when Wilfrid Laurier was born, was the year of the Union
of Upper and Lower Canada as a single province.  There followed, as he
came to manhood, a time of intense political activity, of bitter party
and personal rivalry, of constant shift in the lines of political
groups and parties.  The stage was being set and many of the players
were being trained for the greater drama which was to open with
Confederation.

Canadian political parties had originally been formed on the plain
issue whether or not the majority of the people were to be allowed to
rule.  In Upper Canada the governing party, known as the 'Family
Compact,' composed chiefly of representatives of the Crown and men who
had inherited position or caste from their Loyalist fathers, had been
attacked by a motley and shifting opposition, sober Whig and fiery
Radical, newcomers from Britain or from the States, and {19}
native-born, united mainly by their common antagonism to clique rule.
In Lower Canada the same contest, on account of the monopoly of
administration held by the English-speaking minority, dubbed
'Bureaucrats' or the 'Chateau Clique,' had taken on the aspect of a
racial struggle.

When at last self-government in essentials had been won, the old
dividing lines began to melt away.  All but a small knot of Tory
irreconcilables now agreed that the majority must rule, and that this
would neither smash the Empire nor make an end of order and justice in
the province itself.  But who were to unite to form that majority, and
what was to be their platform?  In the Reform party there had been many
men of essentially conservative mind, men such as John Redmond before
the winning of Irish Home Rule, who on one point had been forced into
hostility to an order of society with which, on other points, they were
in almost complete sympathy.  Particularly in Quebec, as John A.
Macdonald was quick to see, there were many such, quite ready to rally
to authority now that opportunity was open to all.  Other factors
hastened the breakdown of the old groupings.  Economic interests came
to the fore.  In the {20} discussion of canal and railway projects,
banking and currency, trade and tariffs, new personal, class, or
sectional interests arose.  Once, too, that the machinery of
responsible government had been installed, differences in political
aptitude, in tactics and ideals, developed, and personal rivalries
sharpened.

As a result of this unsettling and readjustment, a new party developed
in the early fifties, composed of the moderate sections of both the
older parties, and calling itself Liberal-Conservative.  It took over
the policy of the Reformers, on self-government, on the clergy
reserves, on seigneurial tenure.  The old Tory party dwindled and its
platform disappeared.  Yet a strong Opposition is essential to the
proper working of the British system of parliamentary government; if it
did not exist, it would have to be created.  No artificial effort,
however, was now needed to produce it.  A Liberalism or a
Liberal-Conservatism which stood still as time marched by soon ceased
to be true Liberalism; and new groups sprang up, eager to press forward
at a swifter pace.

In Canada West the 'Clear Grit' party, founded by Radicals such as John
Rolph, Peter Perry, and William M'Dougall, and later {21} under the
leadership of George Brown, declared war to the knife on all forms of
special privilege.  Denominational privilege, whether the claim of
Anglicans to clergy reserves, or of Roman Catholics to separate schools
in Canada West and to ecclesiastical supremacy above the civil law in
Canada East; class privilege, like the claim of the seigneurs to feudal
dues and powers; sectional privilege, such as it was asserted Canada
East enjoyed in having half the members in the Union parliament though
her population had ceased to be anything like half--all these Brown
attacked with tremendous energy, if not always with fairness and
judgment.

In Canada East the _Rouges_ carried on a similar but far more hopeless
fight.  The brilliant group of young men who formed the nucleus of this
party, Dorion, Doutre, Daoust, Papin, Fournier, Laberge, Letellier,
Laflamme, Geoffrion, found a stimulus in the struggle which democratic
Europe was waging in 1848, and a leader in Papineau.  The great
agitator had come back from exile in Paris to find a country that knew
not Joseph, to find former lieutenants who now thought they could lead,
and a province where the majority had wearied of the old cries of New
France and were {22} suspicious of the new doctrines of Old France.  He
threw himself into violent but futile opposition to LaFontaine and
rallied these fiery young crusaders about him.  In _L'Avenir_, and
later in _Le Pays_, they tilted against real and imaginary ogres, and
the hustings of Quebec rang with their eloquence.  Their demands were
most sweeping and heterogeneous.  They called for a vigorous policy of
colonization and of instruction and experiment in agriculture; for
simplification of judicial procedure and the forms of government; for
the election, on the American plan, of administrative as well as
legislative authorities; for annual parliaments; for increased powers
of local government; for universal suffrage; for the abolition of
clergy reserves, seigneurial tenure, and church tithes; and for the
repeal of the Union.  They joined the disgruntled Tories of their
province in demanding, for very different reasons, annexation to the
United States.  Many of these demands have been approved, some have
been disapproved, by time.  Right or wrong, they were too advanced for
their day and place.  The country as a whole wanted, and doubtless
needed, a period of noncontentious politics, of recuperation after long
agitation, of constructive {23} administration, and this the
Liberal-Conservative majority was for the time better able to give,
even though corruption was soon to vitiate its powers for good.

The alliance of the _Rouges_ with the 'Clear Grits,' who were ever
denouncing French Canada's 'special privileges,' was a great source of
weakness to them in their own province.  It was, however, the hostility
of a section of the Catholic hierarchy which was most effective in
keeping these agitators long in a powerless minority.  In the early
days of the party this hostility was not unwarranted.  Many of the
young crusaders had definitely left the fold of the Church to criticize
it from without, to demand the abolition of the Pope's temporal power
in Europe and of the Church's tithing privileges in Canada, and to
express heterodox doubts on matters of doctrine.  This period soon
passed, and the radical leaders confined themselves to demanding
freedom of thought and expression and political activity; but the
conflict went on.  Almost inevitably the conflict was waged in both the
political and the religious field.  Where the chief question at issue
was the relation of church and state, it was difficult to keep politics
out of religion or religion out of politics.  It was {24} to be one of
the signal services of Wilfrid Laurier, in his speech on Political
Liberalism, to make clear the dividing line.

The conflict in Canada was in large part an echo of European struggles.
In the past Canada had taken little notice of world-movements.  The
Reform agitation in Upper Canada had been, indeed, influenced by the
struggle for parliamentary reform in Great Britain; but the
French-speaking half of Canada, carefully sheltered in the quiet St
Lawrence valley, a bit of seventeenth-century Normandy and Brittany
preserved to the nineteenth, had known little and cared less for the
storms without.  But now questions were raised which were
world-questions, and in the endeavour to adjust satisfactorily the
relations of church and state both ultramontanes and liberals became
involved in the quarrels which were rending France and Italy, and
Canada felt the influence of the European stream of thought or passion.
When in 1868 five hundred young Canadians, enrolled as Papal Zouaves,
sailed from Quebec to Rome, to support with their bayonets the
tottering temporal power of the Pope, it was made clear that the moving
forces of Europe had taken firm hold on the mind and heart of Quebec.

{25}

In Old France there had been much strife of Pope and King.  The Pope
had claimed authority over the Church in France, and the right to
intervene in all state matters which touched morals or religion.  King
after king had sought to build up a national or Gallican Church, with
the king at its head, controlled by its own bishops or by royal or
parliamentary authority.  Then had come the Revolution, making war on
all privilege, overturning at once king and noble and prelate who had
proved faithless to their high tasks.  But in the nineteenth century,
after the storm had spent itself, the Church, purified of internal
enemies, had risen to her former position.

Within the Church itself widely different views were urged as to the
attitude to be taken towards the new world that was rising on the ruins
of the old order, towards the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and
other ideas of '89.  One wing called for relentless hostility, for an
alliance of altar and throne to set up authority once more on its
pedestal and to oppose at once the anarchy of democratic rule and the
scepticism of free-thought.  This ultramontane attitude--this looking
'beyond the mountains' to a supreme authority in Rome to give stability
in a shifting {26} world--found able and aggressive exponents.  De
Maistre denied the right of individual judgment in politics any more
than in religion, insisting on the divine source of kingly power and
the duty of the Pope to oversee the exercise of this power.  Lamennais
brought De Maistre's opinions into practical politics, and insisted
with burning eloquence on the need for the submission of all mankind to
the Pope, the 'living tradition of mankind,' through whom alone
individual reason receives the truth.  Veuillot continued the crusade
with unpitying logic and unquenchable zeal.  In this era the disputes
turned most significantly on control of press and school, for, as the
revolution progressed, it gave the masses political power and made
control of the means of shaping popular opinion as important as control
of feudal fiefs or episcopal allegiance had been in earlier days.
Opposed to this school stood men like Montalembert, Lacordaire, and
Bishop Dupanloup--men who clung to the old Gallican liberties, or who
wished to make peace with liberalism, to set up a Catholic liberalism,
frankly accepting the new order, the right of the people to rule
themselves, and seeking to show that by liberty of thought and
discussion the true interests of {27} the Church would be advanced and
its power be broadest based.  Now one wing, now the other won, but in
the main the current flowed strongly towards ultramontanism.  Pius IX,
liberal in sympathies up to 1848, completely reversed his position
after that date.  In the Syllabus which he issued in 1864 he gave no
quarter to modern tendencies.  The doctrines that 'every man is free to
embrace the religion which his reason assures him to be true,' that 'in
certain Catholic countries immigrant non-Catholics should have the free
exercise of their religion,' and that 'the Roman Pontiff can and ought
to be reconciled with progress, liberalism, and modern civism,' he
explicitly condemned as false and heretical.

In Canada these successive conflicts had found many echoes.  During the
French régime Gallican principles of the power of the king over the
Church had been frequently asserted; governor or intendant had, in a
few notable instances, endeavoured to bridle the Church authorities.
When the English came, the Church lost its place as the state church,
but it consolidated its power, and soon was freer from intervention
than it had been under the Most Christian King of France.  During the
French Revolution Canada was kept {28} isolated from contact with
France, but after the Restoration, with ultramontanism in the
ascendant, intercourse was favoured; and the most thoroughgoing
principles of clerical supremacy, with the most militant methods of
controversy, found lodgment here.  In both private and public life,
among clergy as well as laity, each of the opposing tendencies was
stoutly championed.

When Wilfrid Laurier went to Montreal in 1861, the leaders of the
Liberal or _Rouge_ party had sobered down from the fiery radicalism of
their youth, and were content to leave the authorities of the Church
alone.  But leading authorities of the Church remained suspicious of
that party.  Bishop Bourget of Montreal, one of the most pious and
energetic of ecclesiastics, firm to the point of obstinacy, seemed
determined to crush it out.  And though many eminent churchmen held out
for a broader and more tolerant policy, the ultramontanes, by reason of
their crusading zeal, steadily gained the ascendancy.

The issues raised in Quebec were manifold.  Among them were the right
of private judgment, the authority of canon law in the province, civil
or ecclesiastical control over marriage, clerical immunity from the
{29} jurisdiction of civil courts, and the degree of intervention which
was permissible to the clergy in elections.

The first question, that of the right of private judgment, concerned
the future leader of Canadian Liberalism and became acute in connection
with the _Institut Canadien_ of Montreal.  This was a literary and
scientific society, founded in 1844 by some members of the same group
who later organized the _Rouge_ party.  It supplied the want of a
public library and reading-room in Montreal, and a hundred branches
sprang up throughout the province.  The _Institut_ soon fell under the
suspicion of a section of the clergy.  It was declared by Bishop
Bourget that immoral or heretical books which had been put on the
_Index_ were contained in the library.  Rival societies were founded
under the auspices of the Church and many of the members of the
_Institut_ were induced to secede.

Nevertheless young Laurier joined the _Institut_ shortly after coming
to Montreal.  In 1863 he was one of a committee of four who endeavoured
in vain to induce Bishop Bourget to specify what books were under the
ban, and in 1865 and 1866 he was a vice-president of the society.  Like
his associates, he was {30} placed in a difficult position by the
bishop's unyielding attitude, for he did not wish to quarrel with his
Church.  So far as he was concerned, however, his removal to
Arthabaskaville in 1866 ended the episode.

The remaining members of the _Institut_ struggled on until 1868, when
they published a _Year-Book_ containing an address by Mr L. A.
Dessaules, president of the _Institut_, commending toleration.[1]  A
nice question of interpretation followed.  Mr Dessaules asserted that
he meant to urge personal toleration and good-will.  Bishop Bourget
contended that the address meant dogmatic toleration or indifference,
the attitude that one creed was as good as another.  In spite of an
appeal to Rome by Joseph Doutre the work was placed on the _Index_, and
the announcement followed that members who persisted in adhering to the
_Institut_ would be refused the sacraments of the Church.  After this
blow the _Institut_ {31} dwindled away and in time disappeared entirely.

Meanwhile Mr Laurier's weekly newspaper at Arthabaskaville, _Le
Défricheur_, had come under the ban of Bishop Laflèche of Three Rivers,
in whose diocese the little village lay.  Subscribers refused to take
their copies from the postmaster, or quietly called at the office to
announce that, in spite of their personal sympathy, they were too much
afraid of the curés--or of their own wives--to continue their
subscriptions.  The editor warmly protested against the arbitrary
action, which threatened at once to throttle his freedom of speech and
to wipe out his saved and borrowed capital.  But the forces arrayed
against him were too strong, and some six months after the first number
under his management appeared, _Le Défricheur_ went the way of many
other Liberal journals in Quebec.  It was not likely that Mr Laurier's
growing law practice would have long permitted him to edit the paper,
but at the moment the blow was none the less felt.



[1] 'Is it not permissible,' Mr Dessaules asked, 'when Protestants and
Catholics are placed side by side in a country, in a city, for them to
join in the pursuit of knowledge? ...  What is toleration?  It is
reciprocal indulgence, sympathy, Christian charity....  It is
fraternity, the spirit, of religion well understood....  It is at
bottom humility, the idea that others are not worthless, that others
are as good as ourselves....  Intolerance is pride; it is the idea that
we are better than others; it is egotism, the idea that we owe others
nothing.'




{32}

CHAPTER III

FIRST YEARS IN PARLIAMENT

In the Provincial Legislature--In federal politics--The Mackenzie
government--The Riel question--Protection or free trade--The Catholic
programme--Catholic liberalism--The clergy in politics--Political
liberalism--In the administration


Less than five years had passed after Wilfrid Laurier came to
Arthabaskaville, a boyish, unknown lawyer-editor, when he was chosen by
an overwhelming majority as member for Drummond-Arthabaska in the
provincial legislature.  His firmly based Liberalism, his power as a
speaker, his widespread popularity, had very early marked him out as
the logical candidate of his party.  On many grounds he was prepared to
listen to the urging of his friends.  His interest in politics was only
second, if second it was, to his interest in his profession.  The
ambition to hold a place in parliament was one which appealed to
practically every able young lawyer of his time in Quebec, and, thanks
to the short sessions of the provincial assembly and the nearness of
Arthabaska to Quebec, membership in the legislature would not greatly
interfere with his work at home.  Yet his health was still {33}
precarious, and it was with much hesitation and reluctance that he
finally consented to stand for the county in 1871, at the second
general election since Confederation.  Though ill throughout the
campaign, he was able to make a few speeches, and the loyal support of
his friends did the rest.  His opponent, Edward Hemming, a barrister of
Drummondville, had been the previous member for the riding.  At the
close of the polls--those were still the days of open voting--it was
found that, while the Liberal party in the province was once more badly
defeated, Wilfrid Laurier had won his seat by over one thousand
majority.

When the legislature met at Quebec in November, there was a lively
interest on both sides of the chamber in the young man of thirty who
had scored such a notable victory.  At that time the legislature had an
unusually large number of men of first rank in eloquence and
parliamentary ability, including Cartier, Chapleau, Cauchon, Holton,
and Irvine.  All these except Chapleau were also members of the House
of Commons, since at that time no law forbade dual representation, and
the standards were relatively high.  The Government under Chauveau, the
prime minister, {34} was too firmly entrenched to be shaken by any
assaults from the Opposition leader, Henri Joly de Lotbinière, and his
scanty following.  In the criticism, however, the member for Arthabaska
took a notable part.  He did not speak often, but when he did his
remarks were fresh and constructive.  In the debate on the Address he
scored the Government for its backward educational policy, urged active
steps to check the exodus of French Canadians to the mills of New
England, praised the ideals of British Liberalism, and called for a
truce in racial and religious quarrels.  In a later speech he presented
the keenest constitutional criticism yet made of the system of dual
representation, showing that it tended to bring the provinces too
completely within the orbit of the central power and confuse local with
federal issues.  Three years later, it may be noted, the system was
abolished.

The vigour and yet moderation of these first efforts, so aptly phrased
and so admirably fitted to the peculiar requirements of parliamentary
speaking, the grace and flair of the orator, gave the member for
Arthabaska at a stroke high rank in the party.  He was very soon urged
to seek the wider opportunities of federal politics.  Ottawa, it was
clear, would {35} make much greater demands upon his time than Quebec,
yet his health was now improving.  Accordingly he determined to make
the change, and in the general federal elections of 1874 he was
returned for Drummond-Arthabaska by a majority of two hundred and
thirty-eight.


In 1874 the Liberal Government at Ottawa, under Alexander Mackenzie,
seemed assured of a long term of office.  It had been given an
overwhelming majority in the election just concluded; its leaders were
able and aggressive; and the Opposition was still crushed by the
indignation which followed on the exposure of the Pacific Scandal.

Yet there were many weaknesses in its situation, which time was to make
clear.  The Government's forces were not closely united: the only bond
holding together several of the groups which made up the majority was
that of common opposition to the late administration.  Many stragglers
on the flanks were waylaid and brought back into their old camp by that
arch-strategist, Sir John Macdonald.  The question of leadership was
not fully determined.  In Ontario Edward Blake divided allegiance with
{36} Alexander Mackenzie, and Blake's inability to make up his mind
definitely to serve under Mackenzie greatly weakened the party.  In
Quebec the situation was even more serious.  Dorion was the man whose
constructive ability, admirable temper, and long years of fighting
against heavy odds marked him out as chief, but family and health
considerations determined him to retire to the quieter if not less
heavy labours of the bench.  Fournier soon followed.  Laflamme, in
whose office Laurier had studied, was hardly a man of sufficient
weight.  Holton, leader of the small group of English Liberals in
Quebec, was also in very poor health.  To fill the gap Mackenzie
summoned Joseph Cauchon, a former Conservative who had left his party
on the Pacific Scandal; a man of great ability, active in the campaign
for Confederation, but weakened by an unfortunate record of corruption
in earlier days, a record which his Liberal opponents of those days had
painted in startling and unforgettable colours.

======================================================================

[Illustration:  PRIME MINISTERS OF CANADA, 1867-1915

  1.  ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, 1873-78
  2.  SIR JOHN ABBOTT, 1891-92
  3.  SIR JOHN THOMPSON, 1892-94
  4.  SIR WILFRID LAURIER, 1896-1911
  5.  SIR JOHN MACDONALD, 1867-73, 1878-91
  6.  SIR MACKENZIE BOWELL, 1894-96
  7.  SIR CHARLES TUPPER, 1896
  8.  SIR ROBERT BORDEN, 1911-]

======================================================================

These difficulties were, however, not insuperable; and doubtless the
party would have drilled into working cohesion under definitely
acknowledged leaders, had it not been for two more serious sources of
{37} weakness.  The first of these was the commercial depression which
fell upon Canada, in common with the rest of the world, in 1873, and
made it possible for an Opposition, itself most courageous in promises,
to hold the Government responsible for all the country's ills.  The
other was Mr Mackenzie's high-minded but mistaken idea of his duty.
Somewhat lacking in imagination though he was, Alexander Mackenzie had
in him the stuff out of which party leaders are made.  He was a man of
vigour and ability, a hard-hitting debater, a thoroughgoing democrat,
and he had a well-earned reputation for downright frankness and
unswerving honesty which could easily have rallied the country's trust
and affection.  But while prime minister he gave to the details of
departmental administration the care and thought and time which should
have gone in part to his other duties as leader in constructive policy
and chieftain of the party.  He failed to keep in touch with public
opinion, and so was caught unawares.

In spite of these drawbacks the Mackenzie administration left a notable
record.  It passed the law which introduced voting by ballot and
required all elections, in a general contest, to be held on one day.
It brought {38} forth the Scott Act, which proved a useful if not a
final measure of temperance reform.  It established the Royal Military
College and the Supreme Court of Canada.  It pushed the Pacific Railway
forward steadily, if somewhat slowly, as a government work.  Had the
stars been favourable, the Government might well have thought itself
secure on its record of legislative progress and administrative
efficiency.

The questions which roused most debate both in parliament and in the
country were the Riel Amnesty, the National Policy, and, in Quebec, the
perennial issue of the relations of church and state.  These may be
noted in turn, particularly in so far as Mr Laurier took part in the
discussions.

For nearly twenty years the Riel question in its various phases
bedevilled Canadian politics and set race against race and province
against province.  Had it been only the resistance offered by the Red
River settlers to Canadian authority which was in question in the
seventies, time would soon have brought understanding and
forgetfulness.  That the half-breed settlers had just grievances, that
the Canadian authorities bungled badly their first experiment in
national expansion, all {39} would have admitted.  But the shooting in
cold blood of Thomas Scott, an Orangeman of Ontario, by the order of
Louis Riel, lit fires of passion that would not easily die.  And
politicians fanned the flames for party ends.  Neither party was
guiltless.  At the outset in Ontario the Liberals played to the Orange
gallery, while in Quebec they appealed to French prejudices.  Sir John
Macdonald could attack Blake for frightening Riel out of the country
and beyond the reach of justice, by offers of reward for his arrest, at
the very time that Macdonald himself was paying Riel out of the secret
service funds to keep away from Canada.

During the Mackenzie administration the question twice gave rise to
full-dress debates.  Early in 1874 Mackenzie Bowell moved that Riel,
who had been elected a member for Provencher, should be expelled from
the House; Holton moved an amendment that action be deferred until the
committee, then inquiring into the whole matter, reported; while
Mousseau demanded immediate and unconditional amnesty.  In the debate
that followed Mr Laurier made his first parliamentary speech in
English.  He supported Holton's amendment, while making it clear {40}
that in his view of the evidence the country had been pledged to
amnesty by the action of the former Government.  It was a forceful and
well-reasoned argument, in both its felicitous phrasing and its
moderate tone an appropriate introduction to the parliamentary career
which was just beginning.  Again in 1875, when Mr Mackenzie moved that
full amnesty be given to all concerned in the rebellion save Riel,
Lepine, and O'Donoghue, and that the former two be pardoned, subject to
five years' banishment, Mr Laurier defended this reasonable compromise
against both the Quebec extremists who demanded immediate pardon and
the Ontario opponents of any clemency whatever.

Protection was an even more fertile topic of debate in these and
following years.  It was only recently that it had become a party
issue.  Both parties had hitherto been content with the compromise of
'tariff for revenue, with incidental protection,' though in the ranks
of both were advocates of out-and-out protection.  In Ontario the
Canada First movement, which looked to Blake as its leader, had strong
protectionist leanings, and in Quebec the _Parti National_, under which
name the _Rouges_ had been reorganized and made {41} ultra-respectable,
were of the same tendency.  But Mackenzie was a staunch free-trader,
while the Liberals from the maritime provinces were opposed to any
increase in the tariff on the many things they consumed but did not
produce.  Accordingly, after much hesitation, the Liberals in 1876
declined to raise the tariff beyond the existing average of seventeen
and a half per cent.  At once the Conservatives, who, it was alleged,
had been prepared to advocate freer trade, came out for protection.  On
this question Laurier was more in agreement with Blake than with
Mackenzie.  In early years he had been influenced by Papineau's crusade
for protection, and believed that in the existing crisis an increase in
the tariff to twenty per cent would aid the revenue and would avert a
demand for more extreme duties.  Time proved, however, that the
appetites of protectionists could not so easily be appeased; and all
wings of the party presently found themselves in harmony, in resisting
the proposals to set up extremely high barriers.

But it was on the vexed question of the relations of church and state,
and particularly of the Catholic hierarchy and the Liberal party in
Quebec, that Mr Laurier gave the most distinctive service.  This
question had become {42} more acute than ever.  In 1870 the
ultramontane element in the Roman Catholic Church had won a sweeping
victory by inducing a majority of the Vatican Council to promulgate the
doctrine of Papal Infallibility.  There followed a wave of ultramontane
activity throughout the world, and not least in Quebec.  Bishop
Bourget's hands were strengthened by Bishop Laflèche of Three Rivers,
and by other prelates and priests of perhaps less relentless temper;
while a cohort of journalists, in _Le Nouveau Monde, La Vérité, Le
Journal de Trois Rivières_, and other papers, devoted themselves
whole-heartedly to the ultramontane cause.  On the other hand,
Archbishop Baillargeon of Quebec and his successor, Archbishop
Taschereau, the priests of the Quebec Seminary and of Laval University,
and the Sulpicians at Montreal, were disposed to live at peace.  They
would all have denied sympathy either with Gallicanism or with Catholic
Liberalism, but they were men of tolerance and breadth of sympathy,
very doubtful whether such militant activity would advance the
permanent interests of their Church.

There broke out a violent struggle between the two political parties in
1871, with the issue {43} of the _Catholic Programme_.  This famous
document was a manifesto prepared by a group of editors and lawyers,
who, in their own words, 'belonged heart and soul to the ultramontane
school'--Trudel, Desjardins, M'Leod, Renault, Beausoleil, and
others--and was drawn up by A. B. Routhier, then a lawyer in
Kamouraska.  It sought to lay down a policy to govern all good
Catholics in the coming elections.  The doctrine of the separation of
church and state, the document declared, was impious and absurd.  On
the contrary, the authorities of the state, and the electors who chose
them, must act in perfect accord with the teachings of the Church, and
endeavour to safeguard its interests by making such changes in the laws
as the bishops might demand.  To secure this end the Conservative party
must be supported.  When two Conservatives or two Liberals were
running, the one who accepted the _Programme_ was to be elected; where
a Conservative and a Liberal were opposed, the former would be
supported; if it happened that a Conservative who opposed the
_Programme_ was running against a Liberal who accepted it, 'the
situation would be more delicate'--and Catholics should not vote at all.

{44}

This frank declaration of war on the Liberal party, this attempt to
throw the solid Catholic vote to the Conservatives, at once aroused
violent controversy.  Bishops Bourget and Laflèche announced that they
approved the manifesto in every point, while Archbishop Taschereau and
the bishops of St Hyacinthe and Rimouski declared that it had not their
authorization.

The Liberal party was sorely pressed.  In the emergency some of its
moderate members determined to throw off the incubus of their
anti-clerical traditions by reorganizing and renaming the party.  So in
1871 Louis Jetté and other leading Quebec Liberals undertook to secure
a fresh start by organizing the _Parti National_, and the result of the
following elections gave some ground for hope.  'This evolution of the
Liberal party,' declared Bishop Laflèche later in a memorial to the
Cardinals of the Sacred Congregation, 'had the success expected from
it; it made a number of dupes not only among our good Catholics but
even in the ranks of the clergy, who had hitherto been united against
the Liberal party....  It is from this development that there dates the
division in the ranks of the clergy on the question of politics.'

{45}

But this prudent step did not avert the wrath of the now dominant
ultramontane section.  In 1873 a brief pastoral was issued by all the
bishops condemning Catholic Liberalism in vague but sweeping terms.
Two years later another joint pastoral, that of September 22, 1875,
went into the whole question elaborately.  Catholic Liberalism, that
subtle serpent, was again denounced.  The right of the clergy to
intervene in politics was again upheld, whether in neutral matters in
which they, like all other citizens, should have a voice, or in matters
affecting faith or morals or the interests of the Church.  In the
latter case the clergy should declare with authority that to vote in
this or that way is a sin, exposing the offender to the penalties of
the Church.  In a letter issued a year later Archbishop Taschereau
modified these pretensions, but the assault went on.  Regarding the
identity of the Catholic Liberals in question both pastorals were
silent, but not silent were many of the clergy who interpreted them to
their flocks.  The cap fitted the Liberal party and its chiefs, they
averred, and good Catholics must govern themselves accordingly.

This determined attempt of a section of the {46} clergy to use the
influence they possessed as spiritual guides to crush one political
party aroused the most moderate sections of the Liberals to
counter-attacks.  The election law of Canada, copied from that of
England, forbade the use of undue influence in elections, and undue
influence had been said to include use by ecclesiastics of their powers
to excite superstitious fears or pious hopes.  Baron Fitzgerald had
declared in the Mayo case in Ireland, in 1857, that the priest must not
use threats of punishment here or hereafter, must not threaten to
withhold the sacraments or denounce voting for any particular candidate
as a sin.  The Liberals of Quebec had no desire to deny the priest the
same rights as other citizens enjoyed, of taking part in the discussion
of any political question whatever, and using all the powers of
persuasion to secure this end.  But, they insisted, for a priest to
threaten eternal punishment was as much a case of undue influence as
for an employer to threaten to dismiss a workman if he would not vote
for a certain candidate, and as just a ground for voiding an election.
The matter was pressed to a decision in appeals against candidates
returned in two federal by-elections, in Chambly and Charlevoix, and
{47} in one provincial election, in Bonaventure.  In these instances
the proof of open partisanship and open use of ecclesiastical pressure
was overwhelming.  'The candidate who spoke last Sunday,' declared one
priest in Chambly, 'called himself a moderate Liberal.  As Catholics
you cannot vote for him; you cannot vote for a Liberal, nor for a
moderate Liberal, for moderate is only another term for liar.'  'The
Church has condemned Liberalism, and to vote against the direction of
the bishops would be sin,' declared another.  'The sky of heaven is
_bleu_, the fire of hell is _rouge_,' another more pointedly urged.  'I
was afraid,' one witness testified, 'that if I voted for Tremblay I
should be damned.'  In defence it was urged that, in the first place,
the civil courts had no authority over ecclesiastics, at least for acts
done in their spiritual capacity, and, in the second place, that the
Church had a right to defend its interests against attack, and that in
using to this end all the powers at its disposal it was employing no
undue influence.  Judge Routhier, the author of the _Catholic
Programme_, upheld these contentions in the first trial of the
Charlevoix case, but the Supreme Court, in judgments delivered by Mr
Justice Taschereau, brother of {48} the Archbishop, and by Mr Justice
Ritchie, denied the existence of any clerical immunity from civil
jurisdiction, and found that the threats which had been made from the
pulpit constituted undue influence of the clearest kind.  Accordingly
they voided the election.  Their action met with violent protests from
some of the bishops, who, when Judge Casault in the Bonaventure case
followed this precedent, sought, but in vain, to have him removed by
the Sacred Congregation from his chair in the law faculty of Laval.
But in spite of protests the lesson had been learned, and the sturdy
fight of the Liberals of Quebec for the most elementary rights of a
free people had its effect.

======================================================================

[Illustration: GOVERNORS-GENERAL OF THE DOMINION

  1.  VISCOUNT MONCK, 1867-68
  2.  LORD LISGAR, 1868-72
  3.  EARL OF DUFFERIN, 1872-78
  4.  MARQUIS OF LORNE, 1878-83
  5.  MARQUIS OF LANSDOWN, 1882-88
  6.  LORD STANLEY, 1888-93
  7.  EARL OF ABERDEEN, 1893-98
  8.  EARL OF MINTO, 1898-1904
  9.  EARL GREY, 1904-11
 10.  DUKE OF CONNAUGHT, 1911-]

======================================================================

It was when matters were at this acute stage that Wilfrid Laurier came
forward to do for his province and his country a service which could be
accomplished only by a man of rarely balanced judgment, of firm grasp
of essential principles, of wide reading and familiarity with the
political ideals of other lands, and, above all, of matchless courage.
Rarely, if ever, has there been delivered in Canada a speech of such
momentous importance, or one so firmly based on the first principles
with which Canadian statesmen too rarely concern {49} themselves, as
that which he addressed to _Le Club Canadien_, a group of young
Liberals, in Quebec City in June 1877.

The subject of the address was Political Liberalism.  The speaker
cleared away many misunderstandings.  Liberalism did not mean Catholic
Liberalism; it had nothing to do with opinions on religion.  Nor did it
mean Liberalism of the type still prevalent on the continent of Europe,
revolutionary, semi-socialist, openly anti-clerical; the type which had
been given brief currency by the young men of twenty who thirty years
before had lent the Liberal party an undeserved reputation for
anti-clericalism.  No, the Liberals of Canada found their models and
their inspiration in the Liberalism of England, in the men who had
fought the battles of orderly freedom and responsible self-government
against privilege and selfish interest.  As to the Church, no true
Liberal wished to deny its officers the right which every citizen
enjoyed of taking a part in his country's politics; they had opposed,
and would continue to oppose, every attempt of politicians in clerical
garb to crush freedom of speech by spiritual terrorism.  The right of
ecclesiastical interference in politics ceased where it encroached upon
{50} the elector's independence.  Any attempt to found a Catholic party
was not only a crime against the country but was bound to injure the
Church itself; it would lead inevitably to the formation of a
Protestant party among the majority.  On individual freedom alone could
a sound national political system be built up, just as on colonial
freedom alone had it been possible to build up a lasting imperial
system.

The speech was received with enthusiasm throughout the country.  Its
renunciation at once of anti-clericalism and of ultramontanism, its
moderation and its fearlessness, rallied Liberalism to its true
standard and marked out clearly the lines within which party and priest
alike should act in the interests of church and of country.  It was a
master-stroke both for freedom and for harmony.

We are to-day sometimes prone to overlook the services of those who in
England or in Canada fought for us the battles of political freedom.
We tend to forget the services of the political leaders of the thirties
and forties who won freedom from class and racial domination, the
services of the leaders of the sixties and seventies who won freedom of
thought and speech against heavy odds.  It has taken a European war to
make us realize {51} how precious are those liberties, how many great
peoples are still without them, and the height of our debt of gratitude
alike to those who won them for us in the past, and to those who
preserve them for us in the present.


A few months after this historic address Wilfrid Laurier entered the
Mackenzie Cabinet as minister of Inland Revenue.  He had been thought
eligible for ministerial rank ever since his first entry into the
House, and might have had a portfolio in 1876 had it not been that he
objected to serve along with Cauchon.  The appointment of Cauchon as
lieutenant-governor of Manitoba now having cleared the way, Mr Laurier
accepted the office and appealed to his constituents for re-election.
The tide of opinion had latterly been running strong against the
Government, but the great personal popularity of the new minister was
deemed an assurance of victory.  The Conservatives, however, threw
themselves strenuously into the fight, and, much to their own surprise,
won the seat by a majority of twenty-nine.  The result was due in part
to the over-confidence and inactivity of the Liberals, but on the whole
it was the handwriting on the wall--a token of the prevailing {52}
sentiment against the Government which was shortly to sweep all before
it.  Another seat was speedily found for the new minister, in Quebec
East, and he entered upon a brief year's tenure of office.  Though
under no illusion as to the failing strength of the Government in the
country, he loyally did his best both in the administration of his
department and in the campaigning for the party until the _débâcle_
came in 1878.




{53}

CHAPTER IV

IN OPPOSITION, 1878-1887

The party leadership--Tariff and railway--Dominion and province--The
second Riel rebellion


In the general election of September 1878 the Liberal party suffered
not merely defeat but utter and overwhelming rout, as unexpected and
disastrous as a tropical earthquake.  Only five years before, Mackenzie
had been swept into power on a wave of moral indignation.  The
Conservative leaders had appeared hopelessly discredited, and the rank
and file dispirited.  Now a wave of economic despair swept the Liberals
out of power.  Their majority of two to one in 1873 was reversed by a
Conservative majority of over two to one in 1878.  The defeat was not
local: every province except New Brunswick went against Mackenzie.
Edward Blake, Richard Cartwright, Alfred G. Jones, and other stalwarts
lost their seats, and though Sir John Macdonald suffered the same fate
in Kingston, and though seats were soon found for the fallen leaders,
the blow greatly damaged the prestige of the Liberal party.

{54}

Mackenzie was stunned.  To the last he had been confident of victory.
In spite of the warnings of Charlton, Cartwright, Laurier, and others,
he had underestimated the impression which the campaign for protection,
with its lavish promises of work and prosperity for all, made even in
old Liberal strongholds.  He could not believe that the people of
Canada would take up the heresies and fallacies which the people of
Great Britain had discarded a generation earlier.  He would not believe
that they were prepared to send back to power men found guilty of
corruption only five years before.  For these illusions he paid the
penalty, in bitter regrets, in loss of touch with the party, in broken
health, and at last, in April 1880, in resignation of the leadership.
Alexander Mackenzie had deserved well of Canada and of his party; but,
apparently, both wanted more than the dauntless courage and the
unyielding and stainless honour which were all he had to give them.

There was only one possible successor.  Edward Blake had for many years
been the choice of a large section of the party in Ontario, and he now
became leader by unanimous vote.  The new chief was a man of great
intellectual capacity, of constructive {55} vision, of untiring
thoroughness and industry.  He stood easily at the head of the bar in
Canada.  His short term of office as prime minister of Ontario had
given proof of political sagacity and administrative power.  He, if any
one, it seemed, could retrieve the shattered fortunes of the Liberal
party.

Mr Laurier's position as first lieutenant for Quebec was now
unquestioned.  It was not a wholly enviable post.  The Liberal
representation from Quebec had fallen to twenty.  There were few able
men in the ranks.  The Dorions were gone.  Soon to go too were Holton
and Huntington, the English leaders who formed the connecting link
between the Liberals of Ontario and the French-speaking Liberals of
Quebec.  In the Eastern Townships John Henry Pope, that shrewdest and
most pugnacious of Conservative politicians, was perfecting the
organization which later made him the uncrowned king of several
counties.  True, Sir George Cartier, who for nearly forty years had
dominated Quebec politics, was gone, but Langevin, his successor in the
Conservative party, though not a strong man himself, had the clergy
behind him; and Chapleau, who entered federal politics in 1882, brought
a fiery eloquence to his party's aid.  It was {56} clear that the young
Liberal leader would have no easy task in winning his province.

Yet he was not content with provincial aims.  Each year saw him more
widely recognized as a man not of Quebec merely but of all Canada.  The
issues which arose in these trying years were such as to test to the
utmost men's power to rise above local and sectional prejudices and see
Canada's interest steadily and see it whole.  Mr Laurier did not speak
often in these early years, but when he did speak it was with
increasing power and recognition.  And in the councils of his party the
soundness of his judgment became more fully appreciated as each of the
great issues of the eighties developed.

The chief of these issues were: the Tariff, the Pacific Railway,
Provincial Rights, and the troubles which arose out of the second Riel
Rebellion.  These may now be summarily reviewed.


Victorious on the issue of protection, the Government more than lived
up to its promises in the first tariffs framed.  'Tell us how much
protection you want,' Sir John Macdonald had promised the
manufacturers, 'and we shall give you what you need.'  And whether it
{57} was cotton or sugar or furniture, needs and wants were judged to
lie not far apart.  Purely revenue duties on goods that continued to
come in freely, purely protective duties on goods which were
practically shut out, and duties which served both ends in some degree,
all were advanced.

The Liberals, _ex officio_, that is, being out of office, opposed these
increases one and all.  Neither Blake nor Laurier, however, was an
out-and-out free-trader like Mackenzie.  Mackenzie had received his
point of view from his British upbringing; his colleagues had been
brought up on a continent where protection ruled.  Blake, after a
session or two, seemed content to accept the country's verdict and
criticized chiefly the details of the N.P., as the National Policy of
Protection to Native Industries was affectionately called by its
supporters.  Laurier, while admitting that in theory it was possible to
aid infant industries by tariff pap, criticized the indiscriminate and
excessive rates of the new tariff, and the unfair burden it imposed
upon the poorer citizens by its high specific rates on cheap goods.
But in 1880, after a night of seven years, prosperity dawned in
America.  The revival of business in the United States {58} proved as
contagious in Canada as had been its slackening in the early seventies.
The Canadian people gave the credit for the improvement in health to
the well-advertised patent medicine they had taken just before the
change set in; and for some years all criticisms of the N.P. were fated
to fall on deaf ears.

Then came the contract for the building of the Canadian Pacific
Railway, and the tariff question was shelved.  Both parties were
committed to build the road to the coast.  Both had wavered between
public and private construction.  But the Macdonald Government had now
decided upon pushing the road through with all speed, regardless as to
whether current revenues sufficed to build it, while the Opposition
advocated a policy of gradual construction within the country's means,
concurrent with a close and steady settlement of the western plains.
The Government's first plan of building the road out of the proceeds of
the sale of a hundred million acres of prairie lands proved a flat
failure.  Then in 1880 a contract for its construction and operation
was made with the famous Canadian Pacific Syndicate, in which the
leading figures were a group of Canadians who {59} had just reaped a
fortune out of the reconstruction of a bankrupt Minnesota
railway--George Stephen, Richard B. Angus, James J. Hill, and in the
background, Donald A. Smith.[1]

Under Blake's leadership instant and determined attack was made upon
the bargain, in parliament, in the press, and on the platform.  Blake
himself moved against it a resolution of over a hundred clauses, which,
as usual, exhausted the subject and left little for his lieutenants to
say.  Mr Laurier particularly criticized the large land-grant and the
exemption from taxation.  Had the policy of gradual construction been
adopted, he contended, it would not have been necessary to take a leap
in the dark and give the syndicate the power of a monopoly in the
western country: 'there might have been fewer millionaires in this
country, but there would have been many more happy and contented homes.'

The Government was, however, committed, and a party majority ratified
the contract.  After events justified both the policy of the Government
and, to some extent, the criticism of the Opposition.  Great national
interests were at stake.  Nothing short of an {60} all-Canadian railway
could bind together the far-flung Dominion.  But the building of this
railway, and still more its operation, would be a task to daunt all but
the most fearless, and to those who undertook it generous terms were a
necessity.  In their clear understanding and courageous grasp of the
facts, and in their persistent support of the company through all the
dark days until the railway was completed, Macdonald and Tupper and
Pope deserved well of their country.  Yet it is equally clear now that
in many points the criticism of the Opposition was well founded.  The
land-grant was of least value when most needed--in the early years.
The freedom of the company to select land where they pleased gave them
a mortgage on the West and power to deter possible rival roads.  The
exemption from taxation of the company's lands for twenty years after
the issue of the patents, and of its capital stock and equipment for
ever, threw unfair burdens upon the straggling settlers.  Still more
threatening to national unity was the monopoly clause, guaranteeing the
company for twenty years against the chartering, either by the Dominion
or by any province afterwards established, of any road enabling United
States railways to tap western traffic.

{61}

The issue was decided, as to any immediate effects, by the success of
the Conservatives in the general elections of 1882.  The country wanted
the road, and as usual was not disposed to read too closely the fine
print in the contract.  But the matter did not end there.  Each party
had been led by attack and counterattack to take a stronger stand of
defence or opposition than was reasonable.  For another ten years the
Canadian Pacific Railway remained, if not an issue in politics, itself
an active participant in politics.  And its great weight thrown against
the Liberal party turned the scales more than once.


In every federal state the adjustment of the powers of the central and
of the local authorities gives occasion for much friction and
difference of opinion.  In Canada this adjustment, though never-ending,
perhaps reached its climax in the eighties, when question after
question as to the rights of the provinces came up for discussion.

We are apt to forget how recent a development the modern federal state
is.  Save for certain Latin-American countries, nominally federal, the
Dominion of Canada is the third oldest of such states; the United
States and {62} Switzerland alone are of longer standing.  The
Austro-Hungarian Empire and the North German Federation were formed in
the same fateful year, 1867.  There were, therefore, few models before
the framers of the constitution of Canada, and the marvel is that they
planned so wisely and so enduringly.

In determining what powers should be assigned to the Dominion and what
to the provinces, the Fathers of Confederation were led, by the
object-lesson which the Civil War in the United States afforded, to
give the central government more authority.  To the Dominion they
assigned several fields of legislation which in the Republic fell to
the respective states; and the Dominion was made residuary legatee of
powers not specified.  The central government, too, was given a right
of veto over all provincial laws and empowered to appoint the
lieutenant-governors of the provinces.  Had Sir John Macdonald had his
way, centralization would have gone much further, for he would have
abolished the provincial governments entirely and set up a single
parliament for the whole country.  Fortunately Cartier and Brown
prevented that unwieldy experiment from being tried.

Experience has shown that the central {63} government should have full
authority to deal with foreign affairs so far as they can be
differentiated, and should have a wide measure of control over commerce
and industry, which more and more are nation-wide in scope.  But, this
secured, it has been found equally essential that the provinces should
be given wide power and responsibility.  Fortunately Canada has only
nine provinces, as against forty-eight states in the United States, so
that authority is less divided here than in the Republic.  In a country
covering half a continent, with great diversity of climate and
resources and industrial development, centralization of all power would
mean the neglect of local needs and the disregard of local differences.
Particularly where, as in Canada, thirty per cent of the people differ
in race and language and creed from the majority, and are concentrated
mainly in a single province, the need for local autonomy as the surest
means of harmony is abundantly clear.

It was in Quebec that the first issue as to provincial rights arose.
The Mackenzie Government in 1876 had appointed Luc Letellier de St
Just, one of their most steadfast supporters, lieutenant-governor of
that province.  It was not long before political and {64} personal
antagonism strained to the breaking point the relations between the
Liberal Letellier and his Conservative ministers at Quebec.  The
neglect of the premier, M. de Boucherville, to consult Letellier before
introducing some railway legislation proved the last straw, and in
March 1878 Boucherville was dismissed and Henri Joly de Lotbinière was
called upon to form a Cabinet.  This sudden rupture raised a storm of
protest in Quebec, of which the echoes soon reached Ottawa.  Sir John
Macdonald, then leader of the Opposition, moved a vote of censure upon
Letellier, which was defeated on a party vote.  A year later, after the
change of government at Ottawa, a Quebec ministerialist again moved in
the House of Commons the resolution of censure.

======================================================================

[Illustration: VICE-REGAL CONSORTS

   1.  LADY MONCK
   2.  LADY LISGAR
   3.  LADY DUFFERIN
   4.  THE PRINCESS LOUISE
   5.  LADY LANSDOWNE
   6.  LADY STANLEY
   7.  LADY ABERDEEN
   8.  LADY MINTO
   9.  LADY GREY
  10.  THE DUCHESS OF CONNAUGHT]

======================================================================

The Liberal leaders at Ottawa were inclined to agree that Letellier had
been too sensitive about his dignity as governor, and Sir John
Macdonald on his part would have preferred to let the matter rest,
since the elections in the province had upheld Joly, had not his Quebec
supporters demanded their pound of flesh.  But the constitutional issue
was clear, and on this the Liberals rested their case.  It was for the
people of Quebec, they contended, to {65} decide whether or not the
lieutenant-governor had violated their liberties.  If the
lieutenant-governor could find ministers with a legislative majority
behind them to uphold his action, there was nothing more to be said:
the doctrine of ministerial responsibility covered all his acts.  And
this support he had found; for the Joly Government, on appealing to the
people, had turned a minority of twenty into a majority of one.  'The
people of the province of Quebec,' declared Mr Laurier in the Commons,
'who alone are interested in this question, have decided that in their
opinion, whether that be right or wrong, the act of Mr Letellier was
just and constitutional....  You say No.  What are you here for if you
say No?  If your policy had been supported by the people of Quebec, you
would not now be seeking vengeance at the hands of this House.'  But
logic was in vain.  The vote of censure carried, and Macdonald
recommended to the governor-general, the Marquis of Lorne, that
Letellier should be dismissed.  Here again a nice question of
responsibility arose.  First the question had been whether the
lieutenant-governor was to be guided by provincial ministers or by the
federal government which appointed him.  Now the problem {66} was
whether the governor-general should be guided by his advisers in
Canada, or by the British Government which had appointed him.  With the
assent of the Canadian Cabinet the question was referred to the
Colonial Office.  Mackenzie's protest against this colonial-minded
appeal was in vain, but the upshot proved satisfactory to him.  The
colonial secretary replied that the lieutenant-governor was undoubtedly
responsible to the governor-general for any act, and that equally
undoubtedly the governor-general must act upon the advice, in this as
in other matters, of his responsible ministers.  The governor-general
suggested reconsideration, but the Macdonald Cabinet was obdurate and
Letellier was dismissed.  Fortunately the precedent thus set has not
been followed.  The principle is now established that a
lieutenant-governor may be dismissed only when he cannot find
provincial ministers willing and able to support him.

The later constitutional issues were chiefly disputes between the
Dominion and the province of Ontario.  They were not merely differences
of opinion on abstract constitutional points.  They were in large part
struggles for power and patronage between two very shrewd practical
politicians, Sir John {67} Macdonald and his one-time law-student at
Kingston, Oliver Mowat, for many years premier of Ontario.

First came a struggle as to the western boundary of Ontario.  The
dividing line between the old province of Canada and the territories
purchased from the Hudson's Bay Company had never been determined
After ten years of negotiations a commission, consisting of one
representative of the Dominion and one of Ontario together with the
British ambassador at Washington, gave a unanimous award in 1878, an
award which the Dominion refused to carry into effect.  Other provinces
were involved.  The Dominion had presented Manitoba with much of the
territory in dispute, and the conflict as to jurisdiction between that
province and Ontario nearly led to bloodshed; while Quebec was stirred
up to protest against the enlargement of Ontario, which would make
Ontario, it was said, the preponderant power in the Dominion.  Mr
Laurier inveighed against what he termed the dishonourable course of
the Dominion Government.  When negotiating with the Hudson's Bay
Company for its lands, it had contended that the old province of Canada
extended far west and north, but now it took {68} precisely the
opposite stand.  As for Quebec's interest, he continued: 'I do not fear
the appeal that will be made against me in my own province.  This award
is binding on both parties and should be carried out in good faith.
The consideration that the great province of Ontario may be made
greater, I altogether lay aside as unfair, unfriendly, and unjust.'
The Government, however, persisted in rejecting the award, and forced
an appeal to the Privy Council, only to have Ontario's claim fully
substantiated, and the total area of the province confirmed as more
than double what Sir John Macdonald would have allowed it.

The next issue put to the test the power of the Dominion to veto
provincial laws.  It was, in form, merely a dispute between two
lumbermen, M'Laren and Caldwell, as to whether the one higher up on the
stream could use, upon paying tolls, timber-slides built by the other
lower down.  But, as Edward Blake declared in 1886, this was 'of all
the controversies between the Dominion and the provinces, by far the
most important from the constitutional point of view, for it involved
the principle which must regulate the use by the Dominion Government of
the power of disallowing provincial legislation.'  When in 1881 a court
of {69} justice in Ontario held that the lumberman on the lower reaches
could prevent the one higher up from floating down his logs, Mowat had
an act passed providing that all persons possessed, and were thereby
declared always to have possessed, the right denied by this judgment.
This measure was at once disallowed by the Dominion Government.  Then
the Privy Council upheld the contention of the Ontario Government as to
what the law had been even before the act was passed; and, when in 1884
the provincial legislature again passed the same act, the Dominion
conceded the point.  Thereafter the veto power has been used only when
Dominion or Imperial interests were concerned, or when a statute was
claimed to be beyond the power of the province to pass.  The wisdom or
justice of measures affecting only the local interests of the citizens
of a province has been left to the judgment of its own people to
determine.

The regulation of the liquor traffic provided the next battle-ground.
In 1876 Ontario had passed the Crooks Act, which took the power of
granting licences from the municipalities and gave it to provincial
commissioners.  Two years later the Dominion parliament passed the
Scott Act, giving counties power to {70} prohibit the sale of liquor
within their limits.  The constitutionality of this act was upheld in
1882 in the Russell case, and Sir John Macdonald concluded that if the
Dominion had power to pass the Scott Act, the province had not the
power to pass the Crooks Act.  'If I carry the country,' he declared at
a public meeting in 1882, 'as I will do, I will tell Mr Mowat, that
little tyrant who has attempted to control public opinion by getting
hold of every office from that of a Division Court bailiff to a
tavern-keeper, that I will get a bill passed at Ottawa returning to the
municipalities the power taken from them by the Licence Act.'  At the
next session the M'Carthy Act was passed, providing, not for municipal
control, but for control by federal commissioners.  Here again the
highest courts held in 1883 and 1884 that the Ontario measure was
within the power of the province, but that the M'Carthy Act was beyond
that of the Dominion.  Once more 'the little tyrant' had scored!

The Dominion Franchise Act of 1885 was the last important measure which
need be noted in this connection.  By the British North America Act the
Dominion was to adopt the provincial franchise lists for its elections
{71} until parliament should order otherwise.  Sir John Macdonald
decided, after eighteen years' use of the provincial lists and six
half-hearted attempts to change this situation, that the Dominion
should set up its own standard, in order both to secure uniformity and
to preserve the property qualifications which Ontario and the other
provinces were throwing overboard.  The Opposition contended that this
was an attack upon provincial rights.  The argument was weak; there
could be no doubt of the constitutional power of the Dominion in this
matter.  Better founded were the attacks of the Opposition upon
specific clauses of the measure, such as the proposal to enfranchise
Indians living upon government reserves and under government control,
and the proposal to put the revision of the lists in the hands of
partisan revising barristers rather than of judges.  The
'Conservatives' proposed, but did not press the point, to give single
women the franchise, and the 'Liberals' opposed it.  After months of
obstruction the proposal to enfranchise the western Indians was
dropped,[2] an appeal to {72} judges was provided for the revision of
the lists, and the income and property standards were reduced.
Inconsistently, in some provinces a variation from the general
standards was permitted.  The Franchise Act of 1885 remained in force
until after the coming of the Liberals to power in 1896, when it was
repealed without regret on either side.


Suddenly the scene shifted, and, instead of the dry and bloodless court
battles of constitutional lawyers, the fire and passion of armed
rebellion and bitter racial feud held the Canadian stage.  The
rebellion itself was an {73} affair of but a few brief weeks, but the
fires lighted on the Saskatchewan swept through the whole Dominion, and
for years the smoke of Duck Lake and Batoche disturbed the public life
of Canada.

Long years before the Great West was more than a name to any but a
handful in older Canada, hardy French voyageurs and Scottish
adventurers had pushed their canoes or driven their Red River carts to
the foot of the Rockies and beyond.  They had mated with Indian women,
and when in 1870 the Dominion came into possession of the great hunting
preserve of the Hudson's Bay Company, many of their half-breed children
dwelt on the plains.  The coming of the railway, the flocking in of
settlers, and the rapid dwindling of the vast herds of buffalo which
had provided the chief support of the half-breeds, made their nomadic
life no longer possible.  The economic difficulties of making the
needed readjustment, of settling down to quiet farm activities, were
heightened by the political difficulties due to the setting up of the
new Dominion authority.  Then it was on the banks of the Red River that
these half-breeds, known as Métis, had risen under the firebrand Riel
in armed revolt against the incoming régime.  Now, in 1885, {74} it was
on the North and South Saskatchewan.  There numerous groups of the
Métis had made their settlements.  And when the Canadian authorities
came in to survey the land, to build railways, and to organize
government, these people sought to have their rights and privileges
accorded them.  In Manitoba, after the insurrection of 1870, the dual
claims of the old half-breed settlers had been recognized.  As part
Indian, they had been given scrip for 160 acres each, to extinguish the
Indian title to the land, and as part white men, they were each allowed
to homestead 160 acres like any other settler.  The Métis in the
North-West Territories now asked for the same privileges.  They wanted
also to have their holdings left as they were, long narrow strips of
land facing the river front, like the settlements on the St Lawrence,
with the houses sociably near in one long village street, rather than
to have their land cut up into rectangular, isolated farms under the
survey system which the Canadian Government had borrowed from the
United States.

The requests were reasonable.  Perhaps a narrow logic could have shown
inconsistency in the demand to be considered both white and Indian at
once, but the Manitoba Act had {75} set a precedent.  Only a few
thousand acres were at stake, in a boundless land where the Government
stood ready to set aside a hundred million acres for a railway.  The
expediency of winning the goodwill of the half-breeds was apparent to
Canadians on the spot, especially now that the Indians, over whom the
Métis had great influence, were also becoming restless because of the
disappearance of the buffalo and the swarming in of settlers.

Yet the situation was never adequately faced.  The Mackenzie
Government, in 1877, on the petition of a hundred and fifty Scottish
half-breeds at Prince Albert, agreed, where settlement had been
effected on the narrow frontage system, to conform the surveys in
harmony with this plan, and the Scottish holdings were so confirmed.
Two years later the Macdonald Government passed an act authorizing the
giving of scrip to the half-breeds of the North-West on the same terms
as it had been given to those in Manitoba.  So far so good.  Then came
year upon year of neglect, of clerkly procrastination, and of
half-concessions.  The French half-breeds passed resolution after
resolution, sent to Ottawa petition after petition and delegation after
delegation, but in vain.  The Government {76} forgot the act which it
had itself passed in 1879.  Nor were the half-breeds themselves the
only petitioners.  Time and again Father André and other missionaries
urged their claims.  Some of the Government's own land agents on the
spot urged them.  Charles Mair of Prince Albert, one of the first of
Ontario's settlers in the West, appeared at Ottawa four times before
the outbreak, to try to waken the Government to the seriousness of the
situation.[3]  The North-West Council sent strong memorials backing the
requests of the Métis.  And still, though some of the grievances were
redressed, in piecemeal fashion, no attempt was made to grapple
adequately with the difficult questions presented by the meeting {77}
of two stages of civilization, to understand the disputes, the real
wrongs, the baseless fears.  When in 1883 Blake in the House of Commons
called for papers, none were brought down for two years; when in 1884
Cameron called for a committee of investigation, the reply was that
there was nothing to investigate.

What was the cause of this neglect?  At bottom, the Government's
ignorance of the West.  There was not in the Cabinet a man who knew its
conditions and needs.  The Métis were two thousand miles away, and they
had no votes, for the North-West Territories were not then represented
at Ottawa.  For five years Sir John Macdonald himself had acted as
minister of the Interior.  In taking over the cares of a busy
department, added to the office of prime minister, he made the mistake
that Mackenzie had made.  But while Mackenzie put in ten to fourteen
hours a day at departmental routine, at the expense of his duties as
leader, Macdonald did his work as leader at the expense of his
department.  'Old To-Morrow' solved many a problem wisely by leaving it
to time to solve, but some problems proved the more serious for every
year's delay.  Late in 1883 Sir John gave up {78} the portfolio, but
his successor, Sir David Macpherson, effected little change.  Late in
1885 Thomas White, an energetic and sympathetic administrator, became
minister, but the mischief was then already done.

In its defence the Government urged that no half-breed had actually
been dispossessed of his river-front claim, and that many who were
demanding scrip had already received land in Manitoba.  It contended
further that the agitation of the half-breeds was fanned by white
settlers in Prince Albert, eager to speculate in scrip, and hinted
darkly at mysterious forces and personages in the background, in Canada
and elsewhere.  No attempt was made, however, to prove the truth of
these latter charges or to bring the guilty to justice.  Doubtless the
grievances were not so great as to justify rebellion; the less excuse,
then, for not curing what was curable.  Doubtless, also, this was not
the first time nor the last that a government lacked energy or vision,
and had it not been for the other factor in the situation, Louis Riel,
no heavy penalty might have followed.  But unfortunately, luck or
Nemesis, the other factor was very much to the fore.

Wearied of unending delay, the Métis looked {79} again to Riel, then
living in exile in Montana.  He was the one half-breed with any measure
of book-education and knowledge of the vague world beyond the Lakes.
Early in the summer of 1884 James Isbester, Gabriel Dumont, Moise
Ouellette, and Michel Dumas trudged seven hundred miles to Montana, and
laid their case before him.  He needed little urging.  The call
appealed strongly to his erratic ambition.  His term of banishment had
expired, and he hastened to the Saskatchewan to organize the Métis.
Still the Government did not stir, though it knew the reckless daring
of Riel and the influence he wielded.  Riel at once set to work to fan
the discontent into flame.  Though the English-speaking half-breeds
drew back, he soon gained remarkable ascendancy over his
French-speaking compatriots.  He preached a new religion, with himself
as prophet, threatened to dethrone the Pope, and denounced the local
priests who resisted his campaign.  He held meeting after meeting, drew
up an extravagant Bill of Rights, and endeavoured to enlist the support
of the Indian tribes.  Still all the Government did was to send, in
January 1885, a commission to take the census of the half-breeds,
preparatory to settling their claims.  Yet, {80} speaking in the House
of Commons, on March 26, 1885, Sir John Macdonald made it clear that
the half-breeds could not get both Indian scrip and white man's
homestead.  On the very day that this refusal was reiterated the first
shot had been fired at Duck Lake, where a superior force of insurgents
under Riel and Dumont routed a party of Mounted Police and volunteers,
killing twelve, and seized the supplies in the government post.  Open
rebellion had come for a second time.

Now at last the Government acted with energy.  On the 6th of April, ten
days after Duck Lake, instructions were telegraphed from Ottawa to give
the half-breeds the scrip they had sought, and to allow occupants to
acquire title by possession.  At the same time troops were hastily
mobilized and speeded west over the broken stretches of the Canadian
Pacific Railway.  The young volunteers faced danger and hardship like
veterans.  In spite of the skilful tactics of Riel's lieutenant,
Gabriel Dumont, a born general, the volunteers soon crushed the
half-breeds and prevented the much more serious danger of an Indian
uprising from going far.

Once the back of the revolt was broken, the storm broke out in Eastern
Canada.  In one {81} way the rebellion had made for national unity.
Nova Scotia and Ontario and the West had thrilled in common suspense
and common endeavour.  But this gain was much more than offset by the
bitter antagonism which developed between Ontario and Quebec, an
antagonism which for a time threatened to wreck the Dominion.  The two
provinces saw different sides of the shield.  Ontario saw the murderer
of Thomas Scott--an Ontario man and an Orangeman--a second time
stirring up revolt, and cried for summary punishment.  Quebec saw the
grievances which had stirred the men of French blood to rebel.  Riel
was tried in Regina in September, and found guilty of treason, with a
recommendation to mercy.  The Queen's Bench of Manitoba confirmed the
verdict, and the Government, in spite of many protests, refused to
grant a pardon or to commute the sentence to imprisonment.  On the 16th
of November 1885 Riel's chequered existence ended on the scaffold at
Regina.

Now the storm raged with renewed fury.  The Liberal party all held the
Government responsible for the outbreak, but were not a unit in
condemning the execution of Riel.  By clever tactics the Government
took advantage of this divergence.  Early in the session {82} of 1886 a
Quebec Conservative, Auguste Philippe Landry, moved a resolution
condemning the execution.  The Liberals had intended to shift the
discussion to the record of the Government, but before they could
propose an amendment, the minister of Public Works, Hector Langevin,
moved the previous question, thus barring any further motion.  Forced
to vote on Landry's resolution, most of the Ontario Liberals, including
Mackenzie and Cartwright, sided with the Government; Blake and Laurier
took the other side.

The crisis brought Wilfrid Laurier to the front.  Hitherto he had been
considered, especially in Ontario, as a man of brilliant promise, but
not yet of the stature of veterans like Blake and Mackenzie and
Cartwright.  But now an occasion had come which summoned all his latent
powers, and henceforth his place in the first rank was unquestioned.
It was an issue peculiarly fitted to bring out his deepest feelings,
his passion for liberty and straightforward justice, his keen
realization of the need of harmony between French and English, a
harmony that must be rooted in sympathy and understanding.  He had
faced a hostile Quebec, and was to face it again, in defence of the
rights of the English-speaking {83} provinces.  Now he faced a hostile
Ontario, and told Toronto exactly what he told Montreal.  In the great
meeting of protest which was held in the Champ de Mars in Montreal on
the Sunday after Riel's execution, Mr Laurier took a leading part, and
a year later he spoke before a great audience in Toronto and pressed
home the case against the Government--that 'the half-breeds were denied
for long years right and justice, rights which were admitted as soon as
they were asked by bullets.'

But it was in the House of Commons that he rose to the full height of
the theme and of his powers.  Seconding Blake's indictment of the
Government in July 1885, and replying to Sir John Macdonald, he
analysed mercilessly the long record of neglect.  Then, replying to the
contention that the grievances were petty and that Riel alone was to
blame, he made a pointed contrast:


Few men have there been anywhere who have wielded greater sway over
their fellow countrymen than did Mr Papineau at a certain time in the
history of Lower Canada, and no man ever lived who had been more
profusely endowed by nature to be the idol of a nation.  A man of
commanding presence, of majestic countenance, of impassioned eloquence,
of {84} unblemished character, of pure, disinterested patriotism, for
years he held over the hearts of his fellow countrymen almost unbounded
sway, and even to this day the mention of his name will arouse
throughout the length and breadth of Lower Canada a thrill of
enthusiasm in the breasts of all, men or women, old or young.  What was
the secret of that great power he held at one time?  Was it simply his
eloquence, his commanding intellect, his pure patriotism?  No doubt
they all contributed, but the main cause of his authority over his
fellow countrymen was this, that at that time his fellow countrymen
were an oppressed race, and he was the champion of their cause.  But
when the day of relief came, the influence of Mr Papineau, however
great it might have been and however great it still remained, ceased to
be paramount.  When eventually the Union Act was carried, Papineau
violently assailed it, showed all its defects, deficiencies and
dangers, and yet he could not rouse his followers and the people to
agitate for the repeal of that Act.  What was the reason?  The
conditions were no more the same.  Imperfect as was the Union Act, it
still gave a measure of freedom and justice to the people, and men who
once at the mere sound of Mr Papineau's voice would have gladly courted
death on battle-field or scaffold, then stood silent and irresponsive,
though he asked from them nothing more than a constitutional agitation
for a repeal of the Union Act.  Conditions were no more the same.
Tyranny and oppression had made rebels of the people of Lower Canada,
while justice and freedom made {85} them the true and loyal subjects
which they have been ever since.  And now to tell us that Louis Riel,
simply by his influence, could bring those men from peace to war, to
tell us that they had no grievances, to tell us that they were brought
into a state of rebellion either through pure malice or through
imbecile adherence to an adventurer, is an insult to the intelligence
of the people at large, and an unjust aspersion on the people of the
Saskatchewan.


When the debate on the Landry motion came on in the following session,
Laurier and Blake again shared the honours, along with the new minister
of Justice, John S. D. Thompson, who spoke forcefully for the
Government.  Mr Laurier's speech on this occasion was perhaps the
greatest of his career, and made a profound impression.  He was called
upon to speak unexpectedly, late at night, through the tactics of the
Government in not putting up a speaker.  Two dull speeches had nearly
emptied the House.  No one rose to follow, and the speaker had asked
whether the question should be put, when Mr Laurier rose.  The House
filled quickly, and for two hours he held it breathless, so that not a
sound but the orator's ringing voice and the ticking of the clock could
be heard in the chamber.  When he sat down, the opinion of {86} the
House was unanimous that this was one of the rare occasions of a
parliamentary lifetime.  Thomas White generously voiced the feeling of
the Government benches when he declared: 'I think it is a matter of
common pride to us that any man in Canada can make, on the floor of
parliament, such a speech as we listened to last night.'  Edward Blake
declared the speech was 'the crowning proof of French domination.  My
honourable friend, not content with having for a long time in his own
tongue borne away the palm of parliamentary eloquence, has invaded
ours, and in that field has pronounced a speech, which, in my humble
judgment, merits this compliment, because it is the truth, that it was
the finest parliamentary speech ever pronounced in the parliament of
Canada since Confederation.'

Blake and Laurier differed in their view of the tactics to be followed
by the Opposition.  Mr Blake wished to throw the chief emphasis upon
the question of Riel's insanity, leaving aside the thorny question of
the division of responsibility.  Mr Laurier wanted to go further.
While equally convinced that Riel was insane, he thought that the main
effort of the Opposition should be to divert attention from Riel's
sorry figure and concentrate it on {87} the question of the
Government's neglect.  Accordingly in this speech Mr Laurier reviewed
once more the conduct of the Government, arraigning it unsparingly for
its common share in the guilt of the rebellion.  He denied that the
people of Quebec were demanding that no French Canadian should be
punished, guilty or not guilty.  As for Riel, who shared with the
Government the responsibility for the blood and sufferings of the
revolt, he urged, with Blake, that it was impossible to consider him
sane and accountable for his actions.  'Sir,' he declared, 'I am not
one of those who look upon Louis Riel as a hero.  Nature had endowed
him with many brilliant qualities, but nature had denied him that
supreme quality without which all other qualities, however brilliant,
are of no avail.  Nature had denied him a well-balanced mind.  At his
worst he was a fit subject for an asylum, at his best he was a
religious and political monomaniac.'  True, some of the Government's
experts had reported that, while insane on religious questions, Riel
was otherwise accountable for his actions, but other experts had held
him insane without qualification.  In any event, the same experts for
the Government had declared that Riel's secretary, an {88} English
half-breed, William Jackson, was insane on religious questions, and
dazed at times, but that 'his actions were not uncontrollable'; yet
Quebec bitterly reflected that one of these men had been acquitted,
sent to an asylum and then allowed to escape, while the other was sent
to the gallows.  'Jackson is free to-day, and Riel is in his grave.'[4]

On wider grounds the Government should have stood for clemency.  Who
was right in the United States after the Civil War--President Johnson,
who wished to try Lee for treason, or General Grant, who insisted that
he be not touched?  Twenty years after, the unity of North and South
proves unmistakably Grant's far-seeing wisdom.  'We cannot make a
nation of this new country by shedding blood,' Mr Laurier concluded.
'Our prisons are full of men, who, despairing of getting justice by
peace, sought it by war, who, despairing of ever being treated like
freemen, {89} took their lives in their hands rather than be treated as
slaves.  They have suffered greatly, they are suffering still, yet
their sacrifice will not be without reward....  They are in durance
to-day, but the rights for which they were fighting have been
acknowledged.  We have not the report of the commission yet, but we
know that more than two thousand claims so long denied have at last
been granted.  And more--still more: we have it in the Speech from the
Throne that at last representation is to be granted to those
Territories.  This side of the House long sought, but sought in vain,
to obtain that measure of justice.  It could not come then, but it came
after the war; it came as the last conquest of that insurrection.  And
again I say that "their country has conquered with their martyrdom,"
and if we look at that one fact alone there was cause sufficient,
independent of all other, to extend mercy to the one who is dead and to
those who live.'

In parliament, for all the eloquence of Laurier and Blake, the
Government had its way.  In the country the controversy raged in more
serious fashion.  In Quebec Honoré Mercier, the brilliant, tempestuous
leader of the Liberals, carried on a violent agitation, {90} and in
January 1887 rode the whirlwind into power.  Wild and bitter words were
many in the contest, and they found more than an answer in Ontario,
where the leading ministerial organ, the _Mail_, declared it better to
'smash Confederation into its original fragments' rather than yield to
French dictation.

[Illustration: HONORÉ MERCIER From a photograph]

The general elections, held in February 1887, proved that in Ontario
the guilt of Riel was more to the fore than the misdeeds of the
Government, and the Conservatives lost only two seats.  On the other
hand, the Liberals gained less in Quebec in the Dominion contest, where
the Riel question was a legitimate issue, than in the provincial
contest, where it properly had no place.  The influence of the Church,
though now transferred to Mercier in provincial politics, remained on
the side of Sir John Macdonald in Dominion politics.  Counting on the
Liberal side the former Conservatives who had deserted the Government,
the returns showed the province about equally divided; but after it was
seen that Sir John was again in power, several of the wanderers
returned to his fold, influenced by his personal ascendancy or by the
loaves and fishes of patronage and office.



[1] See _The Railway Builders_, chap. viii.

[2] Indians in the eastern provinces, however, were given a vote.  This
gave rise to one of the most artful, yet amusingly simple,
electioneering documents on record.  In the Haldimand, Ontario,
election of 1891 the Conservative candidate, Dr W. H. Montague,
afterwards minister of Agriculture, had the following circular
distributed on the Indian Reserve, with the royal coat of arms at the
top:


FOR INDIANS ONLY

To the Indians: The Queen has always loved her dear loyal subjects, the
Indians.  She wants them to be good men and women, and she wants them
to live on the land that they have, and she expects in a little while,
if her great chief John A. gets into government again, to be very kind
to the Indians and to make them very happy.  She wants them to go and
vote and all to vote for Dr Montague, who is the Queen's agent.  He is
their friend, and by voting for him every one of the Indians will please

QUEEN VICTORIA.


Liberal (or rather Conservative) supplies of fire-water effectively
backed up this touching appeal of 'the Queen.'

[3] Mair made his last appeal but one in April 1884.  Finding it
impossible to rouse the Government, he returned to Prince Albert and
brought his family back to Ontario, out of the way of the inevitable
rebellion.  A final visit to Ottawa in December was equally futile.  Of
the April attempt Lieut.-Colonel George T. Denison writes: 'When he
returned to Toronto from Ottawa he told me most positively that there
would be a rebellion, that the officials were absolutely indifferent
and immovable, and I could not help laughing at the picture he gave me
of Sir David Macpherson, a very large, handsome, erect man of six feet
four inches, getting up, leaving his room, and walking away down the
corridor, while Mair, a short stout man, had almost to run alongside of
him, as he made his final appeal to preserve the peace and prevent
bloodshed.'--_Soldiering in Canada_, p. 263.

[4] 'When one considers the mass of testimony pointing to Riel's mental
defect--paranoia--the undoubted history of insanity from boyhood, with
the recurring paroxysms of intense excitement, he wonders that there
could have been the slightest discussion regarding it.'--'A Critical
Study of the Case of Louis Riel,' _Queen's Quarterly_, April-July,
1905, by C. K. Clarke, M.D., Superintendent of Rockwood Asylum (now
Superintendent, Toronto General Hospital).




{91}

CHAPTER V

LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION, 1887-1896

Dark days--Sectional discontent--Railway monopoly--Exodus and stagnation


The outcome of the elections was an intense disappointment to Edward
Blake.  His health, too, was failing, and this increased his
despondency.  He decided to give over to other hands the leadership of
his party.  Early in June 1887, two months after the new parliament
assembled, he definitely and firmly refused to hold the post longer.

Who was to succeed him?  For the moment the leadership was put into
commission, a committee of eight being nominated to tide matters over.
The Ontario Liberals had always been the backbone of the party, and
among them Sir Richard Cartwright and David Mills stood pre-eminent in
experience and ability.  Yet it was neither of these veterans whom Mr
Blake recommended to the party 'caucus' as his successor, but Wilfrid
Laurier; and on the motion of Sir Richard Cartwright, seconded by Mr
Mills, Mr Laurier was unanimously chosen as the new chieftain.

{92}

It was with much difficulty that Mr Laurier was induced to accept the
leadership.  On both personal and political grounds he hesitated.  He
had his share of ambition, but he had never looked for more than
success in his profession and a place in politics below the highest.
It was not that he underestimated the greatness of the honour; on the
contrary, it was his high sense of the responsibilities of the post
that gave him pause.  He was not of strong physique, and he knew that
the work meant ceaseless strain and pressure.  Though his profession
now gave him an ample income, he was not a rich man, and much if not
most of his law practice would have to be abandoned if he became
leader;[1] and parliament had not yet awakened to the need of paying
the leader of the Opposition a salary.

On political grounds he was still more in doubt.  Would Canada, would
the one-time party of George Brown, welcome a leader from the minority?
The fires of sectional passion were still raging.  In Ontario he would
be opposed as a French Canadian and a Catholic, the resolute opponent
of the Government on the Riel question.  And though it might be {93}
urged that the pendulum was swinging toward the Liberals in Quebec,
while in Ontario they were making little ground, the irony of the
situation was such that in Quebec he was regarded with suspicion, if
not with open hostility, by the most powerful and aggressive leaders of
the Church.

Yet the place he had won in parliament and in the party was undeniable.
His colleagues believed that he had the ability to lead them out of the
wilderness, and for their faith he accepted.  At first he insisted that
his acceptance should be tentative, for the session only; but by the
time the session ended the party would not be denied, and his definite
succession to the leadership was announced.


The Canada of 1887, in which Wilfrid Laurier thus came to high and
responsible position, was a Canada very different from the land of
promise familiar to young Canadians of the present generation.  It was
a Canada seething with restlessness and discontent.  The high hopes of
the Fathers of Confederation had turned to ashes.  On every hand men
were saying that federation had failed, that the new nation of their
dream had remained a dream.

{94}

At Confederation men had hoped that the Dominion would take high place
in the Empire and among the nations of the world.  Yet, twenty years
later, Canada remained unappreciated and unknown.  In Great Britain she
was considered a colony which had ceased to fulfil the principal
functions of the traditional colony, and which would probably some day
go the way of all colonies: in the meantime the country was simply
ignored, alike in official and in private circles.  In the United
States, in those quarters where Canada was given a thought at all,
curious misconceptions existed of her subordination to Great Britain,
of her hopelessly Arctic climate, and of her inevitable drift into the
arms of the Republic.  Elsewhere abroad, Canada was an Ultima Thule, a
barren land of ice and snow, about as interesting and important as
Kamchatka and Tierra del Fuego, and other outlying odds and ends of the
earth which one came across in the atlas but never thought of otherwise.

Twenty years earlier glowing pictures had been painted of the new
heights of honour and of usefulness which the new Dominion would afford
its statesmen.  The hard reality was the Canada of gerrymanders and
political {95} trickery, of Red Parlor funds and electoral bribery.
The canker affected not one party alone, as the fall of Mercier was
soon to show.  The whole political life of the country to sank low and
stagnant levels, for it appeared that the people had openly condoned
corruption in high places, and that lavish promises and the 'glad hand'
were a surer road to success than honest and efficient administration.

Sectional discontent prevailed.  That the federation would be smashed
'into its original fragments' seemed not beyond possibility.  We have
seen that a racial and religious feud rent Ontario and Quebec.  Nova
Scotia strained at the leash.  Her people had never forgotten nor
forgiven the way in which they had been forced into Confederation.
'Better terms' had failed to bribe them into fellowship.  A high tariff
restricted their liberty in buying, and the home markets promised in
compensation had not developed.  In the preceding year the provincial
legislature had expressed the prevalent discontent by flatly demanding
the repeal of the union.

Manitoba chafed under a thirty-five per cent tariff on farm implements,
and complained of the retention by the Dominion of the vacant lands in
the province.  And her {96} grievances in respect to transportation
would not down.  The Canadian Pacific Railway had given the much
desired connection with the East and had brought tens of thousands of
settlers to the province, but it had not brought abiding prosperity or
content.  The through rate on wheat from Winnipeg to Montreal was ten
cents a bushel more than from St Paul to New York, an equal distance;
and, from the farm to Liverpool, the Minnesota farmer had fifteen cents
a bushel the advantage of his Manitoba neighbour.  Local rates were
still heavier.  'Coal and lumber and general merchandise cost from two
to four times as much to ship as for equal distances in the eastern
provinces.'[2]

Why not bring in competition?  Because the Dominion Government blocked
the way by its veto power.  In the contract with the Canadian Pacific
Syndicate a clause provided that for twenty years the Dominion would
not authorize a competing road between the company's main line and the
United States border running south or southeast or within fifteen miles
of the boundary; it was provided also that in the formation of any new
provinces to {97} the west such provinces should be required to observe
the same restriction.  It was urged by the railway authorities that
foreign investors had demanded a monopoly as the price of capital, and
that without the assurance of such a monopoly the costly link to the
north of Lake Superior could never have been built.  The terms of the
contract did not bar Manitoba from chartering railways: the Dominion
had indeed no power to forbid it in advance, and it was explicitly
stated by Sir John Macdonald at the time that Manitoba was not
affected.  Yet when Manitoba sought to charter one railway after
another, the Dominion disallowed every act and repeatedly declared that
it would use its veto power to compel Manitoba to trade with the East
and by the Canadian Pacific Railway.  A more effective means of
stirring up ill-feeling between East and West and of discouraging
immigration to the prairies could hardly have been devised.

Against these conditions Manitoba protested as one man.  The Winnipeg
Board of Trade denounced the policy of 'crushing and trampling upon one
hundred thousand struggling pioneers of this prairie province to secure
a purely imaginary financial gain to one soulless corporation.'  Every
Conservative candidate {98} for the House of Commons in the province
pledged himself to vote for a motion of want of confidence if the
Macdonald Government persisted in its course.  The Conservative
administration of the province was overthrown because it did not go
fast or far enough in the fight.  At last, in 1888, Ottawa gave way and
bought off the Canadian Pacific by a guarantee of bonds for new
extensions.  After some further negotiations the Northern Pacific was
brought into Canada; and if this did not work all the miracles of cheap
rates that had been expected, Manitoba at least knew now that her ills
were those which had been imposed by nature and geography and not by
her sister provinces.

It was not only in Manitoba that economic depression prevailed, though
nowhere else were the grievances so concrete and so irritating.
Throughout the Dominion the brief gleam of prosperity which dawned with
the eighties had vanished.  After the completion of the Canadian
Pacific Railway stagnation was everywhere the rule.  Foreign trade,
which had reached a total of $217,000,000 in 1873, was only
$230,000,000 in 1883 and $247,000,000 in 1893; these were, however,
years of falling prices.  Bank discounts, the {99} number of tons of
freight moved, and other records of general business activity showed
creeping progress and sometimes actual falling back.  Homestead entries
had risen to nearly seventy-five hundred in 1882, when the construction
of the Canadian Pacific was bringing on the first western boom, but a
great part of these had been cancelled, and up to the middle nineties
entries averaged fewer than three thousand a year in the whole vast
West.

The movement of population bore the same melancholy witness.  Even the
West, Manitoba and the North-West Territories, grew only from 180,000
in 1881 in 250,000 in 1891, whereas Dakota alone grew from 135,000 to
510,000 in the same period.  The Dominion as a whole increased at less
than half the rate of the United States, and Sir Richard Cartwright had
little difficulty in establishing the alarming fact that in recent
years one out of every four of the native-born of Canada had been
compelled to seek a home in the Republic, and that three out of every
four immigrants to Canada had followed the same well-beaten trail.
There were in 1890 more than one-third as many people of Canadian birth
and descent in the United States as in Canada itself.  Never in the
world's history, save in {100} the case of crowded, famine-stricken,
misgoverned Ireland, had there been such a leakage of the brain and
brawn of any country.

Perhaps no incident reveals more clearly the stagnation and lack of
constructive courage of this period than the break-down of the
negotiations carried on in 1895 for the entrance of Newfoundland, then
still more nearly bankrupt, into Confederation, because of the
unwillingness of the Canadian Government to meet the financial terms
Newfoundland demanded.  For the sake of a difference of fifty thousand
dollars a year the chance to round out the Dominion was let slip,
perhaps never to recur.  Ten years later fifty thousand a year looked
small.  To each generation the defects of its qualities; in one
prudence degenerates into parsimony, in another courage runs wild in
extravagance.



[1] After 1887 he rarely, and after 1892 never, appeared in court.

[2] _Plain Facts regarding the Disallowance of Manitoba Railway
Charters_, by the Winnipeg Board of Trade.




{101}

CHAPTER VI

LOOKING TO WASHINGTON

Canada and the States--The fisheries dispute--Political
union--Commercial union--Unrestricted reciprocity--Jesuits'
estates--Unrestricted reciprocity


For desperate ills, desperate remedies.  It is little wonder that
policies looking to revolutionary change in political or commercial
relations now came to take strong hold on the public mind.  To many it
appeared that the experiment in Canadian nationality had failed.  Why
not, then, frankly admit the failure and seek full political
incorporation with either of the great centres of the English-speaking
people, of whose political prestige and commercial success there was no
question?  Annexation to the United States, Imperial Federation, with a
central parliament in the United Kingdom, each found a small but
earnest company of supporters.  Or, if the mass of the people shrank
from one and held the other an impracticable dream, why not seek the
closest possible commercial tie with either nation?  Thus Commercial
Union, or a _zollverein_ between Canada and the United {102} States,
and Imperial Preferential Trade, or a _zollverein_ between Canada and
the United Kingdom and the other parts of the British Empire, came into
discussion.  What British and American conditions and opinion met these
Canadian movements, and what changes were made in the programmes first
urged, may next be reviewed.  Canadian relations with the United States
will be noted first.

In the decade from 1886 to 1896, when the Venezuela episode opened a
valve for the steam to blow off, the relations between Canada and the
United States were continuously at high tension.  It was an era of
friction and pinpricks, of bluster and retaliation.  The United States
was not in a conciliatory mood.  It was growing in wealth and numbers
and power, in unprecedented ways.  Its people were one and all
intensely proud of their country and satisfied with themselves.  The
muckraker had not yet lifted his voice in the land.  The millionaire
was still an object of pride and emulation, _Exhibit A_ in the display
of American superiority over all creation.  No foreign danger
threatened, no foreign responsibility restrained the provincial
swagger.  In short, the United States was 'feeling its oats.'

{103}

Towards Great Britain it was specially prone to take an aggressive
attitude.  Still fresh was the memory of 1776 and 1812, fed by
text-book rhetoric and thrown into relief by the absence of other foes.
Still rankled the hostility of the official classes of Great Britain
during the Civil War and Tory attacks upon American manners and
American democracy.  Irish-Americans in millions cherished a natural if
sometimes foolishly directed hatred against the country that had
misgoverned Erin and made it lose half its people.  The rejection of
Home Rule by the House of Commons in 1886, confirmed by the results of
the general elections which followed, intensified this feeling.
Canada, the nearest British territory, had to bear much of this
ill-will, though she had no share of responsibility for its creation,
just as she had borne the brunt of invasion in wars which were none of
her making.

There were, however, other sources of trouble for which Canada was more
directly responsible.  She had followed the example of the United
States in setting up a high tariff wall.  Inevitably the adoption of
protection by both countries led to friction.  The spirit of which it
was born and which in turn it {104} nourished, the belief that one
country found its gain in another's loss, made for jealousy, and the
rankling sense on Canada's part that her policy had not succeeded made
the feeling the sorer.

But the immediate occasion of the most serious difficulty was the
revival of the northeastern fisheries dispute.  The century-long
conflict as to the privileges of American fishermen in Canadian and
Newfoundland waters, under the Treaty of 1783 and the Convention of
1818, had been set at rest during the era of Reciprocity (1854-66) by
opening Canadian fishing-grounds to Americans, practically in return
for free admission of Canadian natural products to the United States.
Then once more, by the Treaty of Washington in 1871, access to the
inshore fisheries was bartered for free admission of fish and fish-oil
plus a money compensation to be determined by a commission.  The
commission met at Halifax in 1877, Sir A. T. Galt representing Canada,
and the award was set at $5,500,000 for the twelve years during which
the treaty was to last.  The United States condemned the award with
much heat, and took occasion to abrogate the clause of the treaty on
the earliest date for which notice could be given, July 1, 1885.  {105}
For that season the fishing privileges were extended, but with the next
year the whole dispute revived.  The Canadian authorities insisted on
restricting American fishermen rigidly to the letter of treaty
privileges as Canada interpreted them.  American fishing vessels were
not only barred from fishing within the three-mile limit but were
forbidden to enter a Canadian port to ship cargoes or for any other
purpose, save for shelter, wood, water, or repairs.  Several American
boats were seized and condemned; and Canadian fishery cruisers
patrolled the coasts, incessantly active.  A storm of genuine if not
informed indignation broke out in the United States.  The action of the
Canadian authorities was denounced as unneighbourly and their
insistence on the letter of ancient treaties as pettifogging; and, with
more justice, it was declared that the Canadian Government used the
fishing privileges as a lever, or rather a club, to force the opening
of the United States markets to all Canadian products.

President Cleveland sought a friendly solution by the appointment of a
joint commission.  Congress, more bellicose, passed unanimously (1887)
a Retaliatory Act, empowering the president, if satisfied that American
vessels {106} were illegally or vexatiously harassed or restricted, to
close the ports and waters of the United States against the vessels and
products of any part of British North America.  The president declined
to fire this blunderbuss, and arranged for the commission on which
Joseph Chamberlain, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, and Sir Charles Tupper
were the British representatives.  The draft treaty which the
commission framed failed to pass the United States Senate, but a _modus
vivendi_ was arranged permitting American vessels port privileges upon
payment of a licence fee.  This, together with more considerate conduct
on both sides, eased the tension.

Once Congress had taken the drastic step of threatening complete
non-intercourse With Canada, a reaction set in, and many Americans
began to consider whether some more pacific and thoroughgoing solution
could not be found.  Two were suggested, political union and commercial
union.

The political union of the two democracies of the continent has always
found advocates.  In the United States many believed it was 'manifest
destiny' that some day the Stars and Stripes should float from Panama
to the Pole.  At times Canadians here and there {107} had echoed this
belief.  It seemed to them better to be annexed at one stroke than to
be annexed piecemeal by exodus, at the rate of fifty or a hundred
thousand Canadians a year.  In St John and Halifax, in Montreal and
Toronto, and on the Detroit border, a few voices now called for this
remedy, which promised to give commercial prosperity and political
security instead of commercial depression and sectional, racial, and
religious strife.  Yet they remained voices crying in the wilderness.
As in 1849, when men of high rank in the Conservative party--notably
three,[1] who are known in history as colleagues of Sir John Macdonald
and one of them as prime minister of Canada--had joined with Quebec
_Rouges_ in prescribing the same remedy for Canada's ills, so now, in
the late eighties, the deep instinct of the overwhelming mass of the
people revolted from a step which meant renouncing the memories of the
past and the hopes of the future.  Imperial and national sentiment both
fought against it.  It was in vain that Goldwin Smith gave his life to
the cause, preaching the example of the union between Scotland and
England.  It {108} was in vain that British statesmen had shown
themselves not averse to the idea.  In 1869, when Senator Sumner
proposed the cession of Canada in settlement of the _Alabama_ claims,
and Hamilton Fish, the American secretary of state, declared to the
British ambassador that 'our claims were too large to be settled
pecuniarily and sounded him about Canada,' the ambassador had replied
that 'England did not wish to keep Canada, but could not part with it
without the consent of the population.'[2]  Wanted or not, the people
of Canada had determined to stay in the Empire; and did stay until
different counsels reigned in London.  Even in cold-blooded and
objective logic, Canada's refusal to merge her destinies with the
Republic could be justified as best for the world, in that it made
possible in North America two experiments in democracy; possible, too,
the transformation of the British Empire into the most remarkable and
hopeful of political combinations.  But it was not such reasoned logic
that prompted Canadians.  They were moved by deeper instincts,
prejudices, passions, hopes, loyalties.  And in face of their
practically solid opposition the solution of the 'Canadian Question'
had to {109} be sought elsewhere than in political union with the
United States.

Commercial union, or a _zollverein_ between Canada and the United
States, involved absolute free trade between the two countries, common
excise rates, a common customs tariff on the seaboard, and the pooling
and dividing according to population of the revenue.  This was not a
new proposal; it had been suggested time and again in both countries,
from its advocacy by Ira Gould of Montreal in 1852 down to its advocacy
by Wharton Barker of Philadelphia--a strong opponent of reciprocity--in
1886.  But now, for the first time, the conjuncture of political and
economic conditions on both sides of the line ensured it serious
attention; and, for the first time, in Erastus Wiman, one of the many
Canadians who had won fortune in the United States, the movement found
an enthusiastic and unflagging leader.  In 1887 Congressman Butterworth
introduced a bill providing for free entrance of all Canadian products
into the United States whenever Canada permitted the free entrance of
all American products, and received a notable measure of support.  In
Ontario, under the leadership of Erastus Wiman and Goldwin Smith and
Valencay {110} Fuller, the latter a leading stock breeder, the movement
won remarkably quick and widespread recognition: in a few months it had
been endorsed by over forty Farmers' Institutes and rejected by only
three.  Much of this success was due to the powerful and persistent
advocacy of leading Toronto and Montreal newspapers.  Needless to say,
the movement met with instant and vigorous opposition from the majority
of the manufacturers and from the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The movement had begun entirely outside the ordinary party lines, but
its strength soon compelled the party leaders to take a stand for or
against it.  Neither party endorsed it, though both went far towards
it.  The Conservatives had long been in favour of a measure of free
trade with the United States.  The National Policy had been adopted
partly in the hope that 'reciprocity in tariffs' would compel the
United States to assent to 'reciprocity in trade,' and many who, like
Goldwin Smith, had voted for protection in 1878, now called upon the
Government to follow its own logic.  But commercial union, with its
discrimination against Great Britain and its joint tariffs made at
Washington, did not appeal to Sir John Macdonald and his {111}
following.  They were, however, prepared to go far.  More than half the
time of the Fisheries Commission of 1887, which sat for three months,
was spent on tariff matters; and Sir Charles Tupper made the most
thoroughgoing offer of free trade with the United States ever made by
any Canadian Government--'an unrestricted offer of reciprocity.'
Congress, however, would not consent to discuss trade under pressure of
fishery threats, and no terms were made.

The Liberal party was equally uncertain as to its policy.  It was much
more strongly in favour of freer trade than its opponents, and being in
opposition, would be more likely to take up a policy opposed to the
_status quo_.  Sir Richard Cartwright in October 1887 came out clearly
in favour of commercial union.  What of the new leader of the party?

Mr Laurier's first public address after his election to the leadership
was given at Somerset, Quebec, in August 1887.  After reviewing the
deplorable discontent which pervaded the Dominion, due mainly to the
Government's policy, he referred to the trade issue.  The restriction
policy practised for a decade had led to a reaction, he declared,
'which has not stopped within moderate {112} bounds; on the contrary,
it has gone to extremes, and at this very hour the great majority of
the farmers of Ontario are clamoring for commercial union with the
United States....  For my part, I am not ready to declare that
commercial union is an acceptable idea.'  The root of the commercial
union movement, he continued, was the desire for reciprocity with the
United States in some form, and to that policy the Liberal party had
always been, and still remained, favourable.

In the following session the Liberal party made clear its position on
the question.  It definitely rejected by a large majority the proposal
for commercial union.  Adopting a suggestion of Mr J. D. Edgar, it
advocated reopening negotiations with Washington to secure full and
unrestricted reciprocity of trade.  Under this policy, if carried to
its full extent, all the products of each country would enter the other
free, but each would continue in control of its own tariff, and the
customhouses along the border would also remain.  Sir Richard
Cartwright opened the debate with a vivid summary of the backward and
distracted condition of Canada, and of the commercial advantages of
free access to the large, wealthy, and convenient market to the south.
{113} He concluded with a strong appeal to Canada to act as a link
between Great Britain and the United States, and thus secure for the
mother country the ally she needed in her dangerous isolation.  Mr
Laurier followed some days later.  He emphasized the need of wider
markets, of a population of consumers that would permit large-scaled
industry to develop, and contended that any manufacturing industries
which deserved to survive would thrive in the larger field.  The same
terms could not be offered England, for England had not a tariff in
which to make reciprocal reductions.  Canada would not always be a
colony; what she wanted, however, was not political independence, but
commercial independence.  The opponents of the proposal had appealed to
the country's fears; he appealed to its courage, and exhorted all to
press onward till the goal should be reached.

In parliament the discussion led to little result.  The Government took
its stand against unrestricted reciprocity, on the ground that it would
kill infant manufacturing industries and lead to political absorption
in the Republic, and the division followed party lines.  Meanwhile in
the country interest slackened, for the time.  In the presidential
{114} campaign of 1888 the Republicans, by a narrow margin, won on a
high-tariff platform, so that reciprocity seemed out of the question.
In Canada itself a new issue had arisen.  Once more race and religion
set Quebec and Ontario in fierce antagonism.


The Jesuits, or members of the Society of Jesus, do not now for the
first time appear in the history of Canada.  In the days of New France
they had been its most intrepid explorers, its most undaunted
missionaries.  'Not a cape was turned, not a river was entered,'
declares Bancroft, 'but a Jesuit led the way.'  With splendid heroism
they suffered for the greater glory of God the unspeakable horrors of
Indian torture and martyrdom.  But in the Old World their abounding
zeal often led them into conflict with the civil authorities, and they
became unpopular, alike in Catholic and in Protestant countries.  So it
happened that 'for the peace of the Church' the Pope suppressed the
Society in 1773, and it remained dormant for forty years.  After the
Conquest of Canada it was decreed that the Jesuits then in the country
should be permitted to remain and die there, but that they must not add
to their {115} numbers, and that their estates should be confiscated to
the Crown.  Lord Amherst, the British commander-in-chief, made an
unsuccessful attempt to have these estates granted to himself; but in
the Crown's possession they remained, and fell to the province of
Quebec at Confederation.  This settlement had never been accepted.  The
bishops contended that the Jesuits' estates should have been returned
to the Church, and the Jesuits, who had come back to Canada in 1842,
asserted their own rights to their ancient lands.  Thus the thorny
question as to what disposition should be made of these lands baffled
the provincial authorities until 1888, when Honoré Mercier, himself a
pupil of the Jesuits, and now a most aggressively faithful son of the
Church, grappled with the problem, and passed an act embodying a
compromise which had been found acceptable by all parties concerned.
The sum of $400,000 was to be paid in satisfaction of all claims, to be
divided among the Jesuits, the Church authorities, and Laval
University, in proportions to be determined by the Pope.  At the same
time $60,000 was voted to Protestant schools to satisfy their demands.

In Quebec the measure was accepted with little discussion.  All the
Protestant members {116} in the legislature voted for it.  But in
Ontario the heather was soon on fire.  It was not merely that the
dispossessed Jesuits, whom some Protestants regarded as the very symbol
and quintessence of clerical intrigue, were thus compensated by the
state, but that the sanction of the Pope had been invoked to give
effect to an act of a British legislature.  The Protestant war-chiefs,
D'Alton M'Carthy, Colonel O'Brien, and John Charlton, took up the
tomahawk, and called on the Dominion Government to disallow the act.
But Sir John Macdonald declined to intervene.  A resolution in the
House of Commons calling for disallowance was defeated by 188 to 13,
the minority being chiefly Conservatives from Ontario.

In opposing the resolution Mr Laurier congratulated the Government on
its tardy conversion from the vicious doctrine of centralization.  The
revolt of its followers from Ontario was the inevitable retribution due
to a party which had pandered to religious prejudices in both
provinces--due to 'that party with a rigid Protestant face turning
towards the west and a devout Catholic face turning towards the east';
and which at the same time had proclaimed the right to disallow any
provincial {117} act.  He did not, however, base his position solely on
the plea of provincial rights.  In itself the legislation was just and
expedient, a reasonable compromise between seriously conflicting
claims.  Nor would he listen to those who called upon the Liberals to
emulate the Liberals of continental Europe in their anti-clerical
campaigns.  He preferred to take tolerant Britain as his model rather
than intolerant France or Germany.  Once more he declared, as he had
declared in Quebec twelve years before, that he was a Liberal of the
English school, not of the French.

Outvoted in parliament, the champions of militant Protestantism found
strong support in the country.  An Equal Rights Association was formed
to resist the danger of Catholic domination which many believed
imminent.  It had less influence in the politics of the Dominion than
in the politics of Ontario, where Oliver Mowat was solemnly accused of
having conspired with Honoré Mercier to raise the Jesuits to power.  It
contained many able and sincere men, yet its influence soon ceased.  By
1894 its place was taken by the Protestant Protective Association, or
P.P.A., a boycotting organization imported from the United States,
which had a deservedly short {118} life.  But, while the fires burned
low in the East, the torch had been passed on to the far West--from
D'Alton M'Carthy to Joseph Martin.  Of the conflagration which ensued
we shall learn in a later chapter.


Men will sometimes pray, or may try to prevent others from praying as
they list; but they must always eat.  The pendulum of public interest
swung back to trade relations with the United States.  Depression still
pervaded farming and manufacturing centres alike, though the
abandonment of the policy of federal coercion had lessened political
discontent.  The return of the Republicans to power in 1888, it has
been seen, appeared to put freer trade relations out of the question.
The M'Kinley tariff of 1890 slammed the door in Canada's face, for in
order to delude the American farmer into believing that protection was
in his interest, this tariff imposed high and often prohibitive duties
on farm products.

Should Canada retaliate, or make still another effort at a reasonable
arrangement with its unneighbourly neighbour?  The possibility of
adjustment was not as remote as might have seemed probable.  After all,
reciprocity is as much a protective as a {119} free-trade doctrine,
since, as usually interpreted, it implies that the reduction in duties
is a detriment to the country making it, only to be balanced by the
greater privilege secured at the expense of the other's home market.
James G. Blaine, secretary of state in President Harrison's Cabinet,
was strongly in favour of reciprocity, particularly with Latin-American
countries.  In the same session which saw the passing of the M'Kinley
Act, the House of Representatives agreed to the Hitt resolution,
providing that whenever it should be certified that Canada was ready to
negotiate for a complete or partial removal of all duties, the
president should appoint three commissioners to meet the Canadian
representatives, and report their findings.

This was the position of affairs when, early in 1891, Sir John
Macdonald suddenly decided to dissolve parliament, in spite of an
explicit promise to the contrary made a short time before.  With the
dissolution came an adroit attempt to cut the ground from under the
feet of the Liberal party.  It was asserted that, on the initiative of
the United States, negotiations had been undertaken to settle all
outstanding disputes, and to renew the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854,
'with the modifications {120} required by the altered circumstances of
both countries and with the extensions deemed by the Commission to be
in the interests of Canada and the United States.'  This announcement
greatly strengthened the Government's position.  Since the United
States had taken the initiative there was likelihood of a successful
outcome.  Many who favoured reciprocity but felt doubtful as to the
political outcome of the more sweeping proposals of the Opposition were
thus led to favour the Government.

The announcement proved too audacious.  Secretary Blaine indignantly
denied that the United States had initiated the negotiations, and Sir
Charles Tupper so admitted after the elections.  Mr Blaine further made
it plain that no treaty confined to natural products would be
entertained.  In the face of this statement the Government executed
another sharp turn, and appealed to anti-American sentiment and
protected interests, denouncing vigorously the Opposition's policy as
sure to lead to ruin, annexation, and--the climax--direct taxation.
Sir John Macdonald issued a skilful address to the electors, and the
cry of 'the old flag, the old man, and the old policy' appealed to
noble feelings and to deplorable prejudice alike.

{121}

In his address to the Canadian people Mr Laurier arraigned the National
Policy for its utter failure to bring the prosperity so lavishly
promised.  Reciprocal freedom of trade with the United States would
give the larger market which had become indispensable.  The commercial
advantages of such a plan were so clear that they were not disputed, it
was attacked entirely on other grounds.  The charge that it would
involve discrimination against Great Britain could not have much weight
in the mouths of men whose object was to prevent the importation of
English manufactures.  If it did involve discrimination, if the
interests of Canada and the motherland clashed, he would stand by his
native land.  But that discrimination was involved he did not admit.
It was not essential to assimilate the Canadian to the American tariff:
'Should the concessions demanded from the people of Canada involve
consequences injurious to their sense of honour or duty, either to
themselves or to the motherland, the people of Canada would not have
reciprocity at such a price.'  Direct taxation might be averted by
retrenchment and revision of custom schedules.  The charge that
unrestricted reciprocity would lead to annexation was an unworthy
appeal to {122} passion and prejudice, and, if it meant anything, meant
that it would 'make the people so prosperous that, not satisfied with a
commercial alliance, they would forthwith vote for political absorption
in the American Republic.'

The Government's appeal to the flag was greatly aided by some letters
and pamphlets of Mr Farrer and Congressman Hitt and other leaders in
the commercial union movement, which were made public and which gave
colour to the cry that unrestricted reciprocity was only a first step
towards annexation.  It was in vain that Oliver Mowat and Alexander
Mackenzie, the latter now soon to pass from the scene, voiced the
deep-lying sentiments of the Liberal party in favour of British
connection, and indignantly denied that it was at stake in the
reciprocity issue.  Sir John Macdonald's last appeal rallied many a
wandering follower on grounds of personal loyalty, the campaign funds
of the party were great beyond precedent, and the railway and
manufacturing and banking interests of the country outweighed and
outmanoeuvred the farmers.  The Government was returned by a majority
of thirty.  In Ontario it had only four seats to the good and had a
minority {123} of the popular vote, while in Quebec the Liberals at
last secured a bare majority.  The other provinces, however, stood by
the party in power, and gave the Government another lease of life for
five years.

The smoke of battle had not cleared when a remarkable letter from
Edward Blake, the late leader of the Liberal party, was published.  It
was a curiously inconclusive document.  It began with a scathing
indictment of the Conservative policy and its outcome: 'Its real
tendency has been towards disintegration and annexation....  It has
left us with a smaller population, a scanty immigration, and a
North-West empty still; with enormous additions to our public debt and
yearly charge, an extravagant system of expenditure and an unjust
tariff, with restricted markets whether to buy or to sell....  It has
left us with lowered standards of public virtue and a death-like apathy
in public opinion, with racial, religious, and provincial animosities
rather inflamed than soothed....  It has left us with our hands tied,
our future compromised.'  A preference in the English market was out of
the question.  Unrestricted free trade with the United States would
bring prosperity, give men, money, and {124} markets.  Yet it would
involve assimilation of tariffs and thus become identical with
commercial union.  'Political Union,' he added in a cryptic postscript,
'though becoming our probable, is by no means our ideal, or as yet our
inevitable, future.'

Mr Blake had persistently withheld his aid and advice from the leaders
of the party since his resignation.  His action now was resented as a
stab in the back, and the implication that the Liberal policy was
identical with commercial union was stoutly denied.  If, as Mr Laurier
had made clear in his electoral address, negotiations proved that
reciprocal arrangements could not be made except on such terms, they
would not be made at all.  Yet the letter had undoubted force, and
materially aided the Government in the by-elections.

The Government formally carried out its undertaking to open
negotiations with the United States.  Sir Charles Tupper, Sir John
Thompson, and George E. Foster went to Washington and conferred with
Secretary Blaine.  But the negotiators were too far apart to come to
terms, and the proposals were not seriously pressed.  Later, when the
tide of reaction brought the Democrats back to power in 1892, the
Conservatives made no {125} attempt to renew negotiations; and later
still, when the Liberals came to power in Canada, the Republicans were
back in office on a platform of sky-high protection.

Meanwhile, the increase of exports of farm products to Great Britain
promised the larger markets sought, and made admission to the United
States of less pressing importance.  When, in 1893, the Liberal party
met in national convention at Ottawa, limited reciprocity, 'including a
well-considered list of manufactured articles,' was endorsed, but it
was subordinated as part of a general demand for a lower tariff, now
again prominent in the party programme.



[1] Sir Alexander T. Galt, Sir John Rose, and Sir John Abbott.

[2] _Memoir of Sumner_, vol. iv, p. 409.




{126}

CHAPTER VII

AN EMPIRE IN TRANSITION

The secret of empire--The old colonial system--Partner
nations--Achieving self-government--Building up the partnership--The
High Commissioner--New foreign problems--First colonial
conference--Political federation--Inter-imperial
defence--Inter-imperial trade


When Canada's problems seemed too great for her to solve unaided, many
had looked to Washington for relief, in ways which have been reviewed.
Others looked to London.  The relations between Canada and the other
parts of the Empire did not become the central issue in any political
campaign.  Until late in the period now under survey they aroused
little systematic public discussion.  There were few acute episodes to
crystallize the filial sentiment for the motherland which existed in
the country.  Yet throughout these years that readjustment in the
relations between the colonies and the mother country, which is perhaps
the most significant political development of the century, was steadily
proceeding.  Steadily and surely, if for the most part unconsciously,
the transformation of the Empire went on, until in the following period
it became a fact and a problem which none could {127} blink, and the
central theme in public interest and political activity.

The story of this transformation, of how the little isles in the North
Sea ventured and blundered into world-wide empire; of how at first they
endeavoured to rule this vast domain in the approved fashion, for the
power and profit of the motherland; of how this policy was slowly
abandoned because unprofitable and impossible; of how, when this change
took place, most men looked to the ending of a connection which no
longer paid; of how acquired momentum and inherited obligations on the
one side and instinctive loyalty on the other prevented this result; of
how the new lands across the sea grew in numbers and strength and
national spirit and, withal, in the determination to work out a
permanent partnership on the new basis of equality--this is the most
wonderful story political annals have to tell.  The British Empire of
to-day, tested in fire and not found wanting, is the paradox and
miracle of political achievement, full of hope for the future of the
rest of the world.  In shaping the policy which made the continuance
and growth and adjustment of the Empire possible, Canadian statesmen of
both parties played a leading part.  That {128} long story cannot here
be told, but a few of the significant steps must be recalled, to make
clear the development of yesterday and to-day.

In the expansion of Europe over all the five continents and the seven
seas which has marked the past five centuries, the Englishman found a
roomy place in the sun.  By luck or pluck, by trusted honesty or
sublime assurance, and with little aid from his government, he soon
outdistanced Frenchman and Dutchman, Spaniard and Portuguese, in the
area and richness of the regions over which his flag floated and in
which his trading-posts or his settlements were established.  This
empire was ruled, as other colonial domains were ruled, to advance the
power and the profit of the motherland.  The colonies and dependencies
were plantations, estates beyond the seas, to be acquired and guarded
for the gain of the mother country.  They were encouraged by bounty and
preference to grow what the mother country needed, and were compelled
by parliamentary edict to give the mother country a monopoly of their
markets for all she made.  Great Britain never applied these doctrines
with the systematic rigour of the Spaniard of the seventeenth century
or the German of the twentieth, but monopoly of {129} the direct trade
with the colonies, and the political subordination of the colonies to
secure this end, were nevertheless the cardinal doctrines of imperial
policy.

[Illustration: SIR WILFRID LAURIER From a photograph by Topley]

Slowly this old colonial system broke down.  It became impossible to
keep in political subjection millions of men across the seas of the
same vigorous race.  This the American Revolution drove home and the
Canadian insurrections of 1837 again made unmistakable.  In the views
of most men it came to appear unprofitable, even if possible.
Gradually the ideas of Adam Smith and Pitt and Huskisson, of Cobden and
Bright and Peel, took possession of the English mind.  Trade
monopolies, it now was held, hampered more than they helped, even if
costless.  But when maintained at heavy expense, at cost of
fortification and diplomatic struggle and war, they became worse than
useless, a drag on the development of both colony and mother country.
So the fetters which impeded trade and navigation were discarded.

There followed, from the forties onward, a period of drift, of waiting
for the coming separation.  When the trade monopoly which was the
object of empire ceased, most men in Britain reasoned that the end of
the Empire, {130} in so far as it included colonies settled by white
men, could not be far distant.  Yet the end did not come.  Though
Radical politicians and publicists urged 'cutting the last link of
connection'; though Conservative statesmen damned 'the wretched
colonies' as 'millstones about our necks'; though under-secretaries
said farewell to one 'last' governor-general after another and the
London _Times_ bade Canadians 'take up your freedom, your days of
apprenticeship are over'; in spite of all, the colonies lingered within
the fold.  Some dim racial instinct, the force of momentum, or the grip
of inherited obligations, kept them together until gradually the times
changed and the stage was set for another scene.

Alike in the motherland and in the colonies men had stumbled upon the
secret of empire--freedom.  Expecting the end to come soon, the
governing powers in London had ruled with a light rein, consenting to
one colonial demand after another for self-government.  In these years
of salutary neglect the twofold roots of imperial connection had a
chance to grow.  The colonies rose to national consciousness, and yet,
in very truth because of their freedom, and the absence of the {131}
friction a centralizing policy would have entailed, they retained their
affection and their sympathy for the land of their ancestors.  Thus the
way was prepared for the equal partnership which it has been the task
of these later years to work out.

Two lines of development were equally essential.  It was necessary to
secure complete freedom for the colonies, to abolish the old relation
of ascendancy and subordination, and it was necessary to develop new
ties and new instruments of co-operation.  Nowhere in early years do we
find a more nearly adequate recognition of this twofold task than in
the prophetic words of Sir John Macdonald: 'England, instead of looking
upon us as a merely dependent colony, will have in us a friendly
nation, a subordinate but still a powerful people, to stand by her in
North America in peace as in war.  The people of Australia will be such
another subordinate nation....  She will be able to look to the
subordinate nations in alliance with her and owing allegiance to the
same sovereign, who will assist in enabling her to meet again the whole
world in arms as she has done before.'[1]  It was Sir John also who
urged that the new {132} union should be called the 'Kingdom of
Canada,' a name which the British authorities rejected, ostensibly out
of fear of offending the republican sensibilities of the United States.
Had that name been chosen, the equality of the status of Canada would
have been recognized much sooner, for names are themselves arguments
powerful with wayfaring men.  Both in act and in word the Conservative
chieftain oftentimes lapsed from this statesmanlike view into the
prevalent colonialism; but he did much to make his vision a reality,
for it was Macdonald who, with the aid of political friend and
political opponent, laid the foundations upon which the statesmen of
the new generation have built an enduring fabric.

The first task, the assertion of the autonomy of the Dominions, had
been largely achieved.  So far as it concerned domestic affairs,
practically all Canadians accepted the principle for which Liberals had
fought alone in the earlier days.  In the thirties a British colonial
secretary, replying to Howe's demand for responsible government, had
declared that 'to any such demand Her Majesty's Government must oppose
a respectful but at the same time a firm declaration that it is
inconsistent with a {133} due adherence to the essential distinction
between a metropolitan and a colonial government, and it is therefore
inadmissible,' and a Canadian Tory Legislative Council had echoed that
'the adoption of the plan must lead to the overthrow of the great
colonial Empire of England.'  But now, since Elgin's day (1849),
responsible government, self-government in domestic affairs, had been
an unquestioned fact, a part of the heritage of which all Canadians,
irrespective of party, were equally proud.

In foreign affairs, too, some progress had been made.  Foreign affairs
in modern times are largely commercial affairs.  In part such questions
are regulated by laws passed by each country independently, in part by
joint treaty.  Complete autonomy as to the first mode was early
maintained by Galt and Macdonald.  In 1859 Galt affirmed the right to
tax even British goods, 'the right of the Canadian legislature to
adjust the taxation of the people in the way they deemed best, even if
it should unfortunately happen to meet the disapproval of the Imperial
Ministry.'  And twenty years later, in spite of British protests, Sir
John Macdonald went further in his National Policy, and taxed British
goods still {134} higher to encourage production at home.  The tariff
of 1879 was the last nail in the coffin of the old colonial system.
Here was a colony which not only did not grant British manufacturers a
monopoly, but actually sought to exclude from its markets any British
wares it could itself produce.

Self-government in the regulation of foreign commercial affairs, so far
as treaties were essential to effect it, came more slowly, and with
much hesitation and misgiving.

Negative freedom was achieved first.  After 1877 Canada ceased to be
bound by commercial treaties made by the United Kingdom unless it
expressly desired to be included.  As to treaties made before that
date, the restrictions lasted longer.  Most of these treaties bound
Canada to give to the country concerned the same tariff and other
privileges given to any other foreign power, and Canada in return was
given corresponding privileges.  Two went further.  Treaties made in
the sixties with Belgium and Germany--history discovers strange
bedfellows--bound all British colonies to give to these countries the
same tariff privileges granted to Great Britain or to sister colonies.
In 1891 the Canadian parliament sent a unanimous address to {135} Her
Majesty praying for the denunciation of these treaties, but in vain.
It was not until the Laurier administration had forced the issue six
years later that the request was granted.

Positive freedom, a share in the making of treaties affecting Canada,
came still more gradually.  When in 1870 Galt and Huntington pressed
for treaty-making powers, Macdonald opposed, urging the great
advantages of British aid in negotiation.  A year later, however,
Macdonald gave expression to his changed view of the value of that aid.
As one of the five British commissioners who negotiated the Washington
Treaty (1871), he declared that his colleagues had 'only one thing in
their minds--that is, to go home to England with a treaty in their
pockets, settling everything, no matter at what cost to Canada.'  In
1874 George Brown went to Washington as one of the two British
commissioners in the abortive reciprocity negotiations of that year.
In 1879 the Macdonald Government made Galt ambassador at large to
negotiate treaties in Europe, but he was hampered by being compelled to
'filter' his proposals through the various resident British
ambassadors.  When in 1882 Blake moved in the House of {136} Commons a
resolution in favour of direct treaty-making powers, Sir John Macdonald
opposed it as meaning separation and independence, ending his speech
with the declaration, 'A British subject I was born, a British subject
I hope to die.'  Yet action moved faster than the philosophy of action.
In 1883 Sir Charles Tupper signed the protocols of the Cable Conference
in Paris on Canada's behalf; and at Madrid, in 1887 and 1889, the same
doughty statesman represented Canada in the conduct of important
negotiations.  It was in 1891, only nine years after Sir John
Macdonald's reply to Blake foreboding separation and independence, that
the House of Commons and Senate of Canada, praying for the abrogation
of the Belgian and German treaties, unanimously declared that 'the
self-governing colonies are recognized as possessing the right to
define their respective fiscal relations to all foreign nations.'

The first task had been practically achieved; freedom had been won; but
it still remained to rise through freedom to co-operation, to use the
newly won powers to work out a lasting partnership between the free
states of the Empire.  This was the harder task.  There was no
precedent to follow.  Centralized {137} empires there had been;
colonies there had been which had grown into independent states.  But
of an empire which was not an empire, of colonies which had achieved
self-government only to turn to closer union with the parent state, the
world had as yet no instance.

It had not even a model in idea, a theory of how it should be done.
Such a forecast as that already quoted from Sir John Macdonald[2] came
as near as might be, but this long remained a peroration and no more.
No man and no school divined absolutely the present fact and theory of
empire.  It has worked out of the march and pressure of events, aided
by the clash of the oppositions which it has reconciled.

In the eighties and nineties four possible futures for the Dominion
were discussed.  The first was the continuance of the colonial status,
the second Annexation, the third Independence, and the fourth Imperial
Federation.  Colonialism had only inertia in its favour.  Annexation
ran counter both to filial sentiment and to national hopes, but its
discussion served to show the desperate need of change and forced the
advocates of other ideals to set forth their creeds.  Independence
meant {138} the complete severing of the ties which bound Canada to the
rest of the Empire.  Imperial Federation proposed to set up in London a
new authority with representatives from all the white Dominions and
with power to tax and bind.  Each played its needed part.  The
advocates of Imperial Federation did much to prevent a drift towards
Annexation which might otherwise have set in.  The advocates of
Independence expressed the national aspirations which must be satisfied
in any solution that would be enduring.  The resultant of these forces
was of a character none had precisely anticipated.  Empire and
Independence were reconciled.

In this period the two most important steps towards co-operation were
the appointment of a Canadian High Commissioner in London and the
beginning of the Colonial Conferences.

The first step was taken on the initiative of the Macdonald Government
in 1879.  It was found necessary to appoint a Canadian representative
in London both to act as ambassador at large in dealing with European
states, and to serve as a link between the Canadian and British
Governments.  The latter purpose was especially significant.  In the
days of {139} colonial subordination the governor-general had served as
the only needed link.  His duty was to govern the colony in accordance
with the interest and policy of the mother country, and in carrying
that out he was responsible to the British Government.  Now he was
becoming the representative, not of the British Government, but of the
king, who was king of Canada as well as of the United Kingdom, and,
like the king, he governed by the advice of the responsible ministers
in the land where he resided.  This change in the governor-general's
status marked the ending of the old colonial relationship.  The
appointment of a commissioner to represent to one free government the
wishes of another free government was one of the first steps in
building up the new relationship.

The initiative in the second step came from the United Kingdom.  A
change was now apparent in the attitude of many Englishmen upon
imperial questions.  The present value of the colonies, their possible
greater value in the future, and the need of all the help that could be
had from them, were coming to be the leading articles in the creed of
many fervent thinkers.  The Imperial Federation League, founded in
London in 1884, gave {140} vigorous expression to these views; and its
Canadian branch, formed at Montreal in the next year, to be followed by
local branches from sea to sea, exercised a strong influence on the
current of Canadian thought.

The new desire to bind the colonies closer was largely due to the
revival of protection and of imperialism both in the United Kingdom and
in foreign countries.  Alike in trade and in defence, colonial aid was
by many coming to be felt essential.  Abroad, protection was in the
ascendant.  Cobden's prophecy of the world following Britain's example
in free trade had not been fulfilled.  France, Germany,
Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, the United States, were rearing higher
tariffs, threatening to shut out British goods.  Even Canada and
Victoria had done likewise.  Moreover, France and Germany and the
United States were becoming formidable rivals to Britain, as they
turned more and more from farming to manufacturing.  It was little
wonder that a section of English opinion began to sigh for protected
markets, for retaliatory tariffs to force down bars abroad, and for a
revival of the old preference or monopoly in the markets of the
colonies.

Defence, too, assumed a more anxious {141} aspect.  The nations of
Europe were entering on a mad scramble for empire, for colonial
possessions overseas.  Russia pushed steadily westward to the Pacific
and south to the gates of India.  France sought territory in Africa and
in Asia, Germany in Africa and the Pacific, Italy in Africa.
Nationalism had gone to seed in imperialism.  Long prevented by
internal dissensions from competing with England in the acquisition of
territory, the nations of Europe, now that national consolidation had
been largely effected, turned to follow her example.  England could not
logically object to their desire for territory or to their plans for
larger navies.  Her Palmerstons and Disraelis had boasted of the might
of the empire on which the sun never set; her Froudes and Seeleys were
singing the glories of the 'expansion of England'; the man in the
street felt the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon to rule the 'lesser
breeds'; while the American Mahan had made clear the importance of
sea-power and had pointed the means to the end so glorified.  None the
less the rivalry was felt uncomfortable, the more so as these nations
did not follow Britain's free-trade policy in their new possessions,
and sometimes manifested a lack of {142} scruple which boded ill for
future peace.  And so from some quarters in Britain came the demand for
colonial contributions to the Army and Navy, or failing that, for some
form of imperial federation which would set up a central parliament
with power to tax and to control.

In August 1886 an influential deputation from the Imperial Federation
League waited upon the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and asked him to
summon a conference of all the colonies to discuss the idea of setting
up a federal council as a first step towards centralizing authority.
The prime minister expressed his doubt as to the wisdom of discussing
political changes which, if possible, were so only in the distant
future.  Believing, however, that there were other subjects ripe for
discussion, he took the momentous step, and called the first Colonial
Conference.

Every self-governing colony and several crown colonies sent
representatives.  Canada sent Sir Alexander Campbell,
lieutenant-governor of Ontario, and Mr, later Sir Sandford, Fleming,
the apostle of an All-Red Pacific cable.  Lord Salisbury, in opening
the proceedings, referred to the three lines upon which progress might
be made.  The German {143} Empire evidently suggested the ideas which
he and others had in mind.  A political federation, like that of
Germany, to conduct 'all our imperial affairs from one centre,' could
not be created for the present.  But Germany had had two preliminary
forms of union, both of which might be possible, a _zollverein_ or
customs union, not yet practicable, and a _kriegsverein_, or union for
purposes of mutual defence, which was feasible, and was the real and
important business before the Conference.

In the weeks of discussion which followed the Canadian delegates took
little part except upon the question of the cable which was at Sandford
Fleming's heart.  Australia agreed to make a contribution towards the
cost of a British squadron in Australasian waters, and Cape Colony
agreed to provide some local defence at Table Bay.  Sir Alexander
Campbell referred to the agreement of 1865 as still in force, denied
that the naval defence of Canada had proved burdensome to Britain,
talked vaguely of setting up a naval school or training a reserve, and
offered nothing more.  The Conference did not discuss political
federation and touched only lightly on preferential trade.  As the
first of a series, and for its {144} revelation of the obstacles to
proposals for Germanizing the British Empire, it proved more important
than for any positive achievements.

In the stand thus taken the Canadian delegates adequately reflected the
feeling both of the general public and of the leaders of both parties
in Canada at that time, alike as to political defence and trade
relations.

As for political relations, the only proposal for change came from the
Imperial Federationists.  The idea had some notable advocates in
Canada--Grant, Parkin, Denison, M'Carthy and others.  But many of them
advocated it simply because it was the only theory of closer imperial
relations then in the field.  At first it was too hazily pictured to
make clear the extent to which the Canadian and other parliaments would
be subordinated to the proposed new central parliament.  When faced
with a concrete plan, few Canadians were eager to give up control of
their destinies to a parliament in which they would have only one-tenth
of the representation.  The responsible politicians did not at any time
endorse the scheme.  Sir John Macdonald, as a practical man, saw at
once a fatal objection {145} in the sacrifice of Canadian
self-government which it involved.[3]  Some of the members of the
Imperial Federation League urged with plausibility that political
federation would bring the colonies new power in the shape of control
over foreign policy, rather than take old powers away, but Macdonald
much doubted the reality of the control it would give.  Nevertheless
the Imperial Federation League and its branches did useful educational
work.  Owing to differences of opinion among its members it was
dissolved in 1893, but was revived and reorganized two years later as
the British Empire League.

Nor was Canada greatly interested in questions of defence.  In the
sixties and seventies, it is true, the larger colonies had agreed, with
some reluctance, to assume the increasing share of the burdens of
defence made necessary by the increasing control of their own affairs.
{146} Gradually the British troops stationed in Australia, New Zealand,
and Canada (save for a small garrison force at Halifax) had been
withdrawn, and their places taken by local militia.  But as yet it was
understood that the responsibilities of the colonies were secondary and
local.  As a result of long discussion, the British House of Commons in
1862 unanimously resolved that 'colonies exercising the right of
self-government ought to undertake the main responsibility of providing
for their own internal order and security and ought to assist in their
own external defence.'  The duty of the United Kingdom to undertake the
general defence of the Empire was equally understood; the Committee on
Colonial Defence (1860), whose report led to the adoption of this
resolution, agreed that since 'the Imperial Government has the control
of peace and war, it is therefore in honour and duty {147} called upon
to assist the Colonists in providing against the consequences of its
policy,'--a position affirmed by Mr Cardwell's dispatch of June 17,
1865.

Given the fact and theory of political relationship as they existed in
this period, this compromise was the natural result.  Under the old
colonial system the empire was Britain's, governed for its real or
fancied gain, and imperial defence was merely the debit side of
colonial trade monopoly.  The myth that Britain had carried on her wars
and her diplomacy for the sake of the colonies, which therefore owed
her gratitude, had not yet been invented.  True, the day had passed
when Britain derived profit, or believed she derived profit, from the
political control of the white empire, yet the habits of thought begot
by those conditions still persisted.  If profit had vanished, prestige
remained.  The Englishman who regarded the colonies as 'our
possessions' was quite as prepared to foot the bill for the defence of
the Empire which gave him the right to swagger through Europe, as he
was to maintain a country estate which yielded no income other than the
social standing it gave him with his county neighbours.  As yet,
therefore, there was no thought in official {148} quarters that Canada
should take part in oversea wars or assume a share of the burden of
naval preparation.  When an English society proposed in 1895 that
Canada should contribute money to a central navy and share in its
control, Sir Charles Tupper attacked the suggestion as 'an insidious,
mischievous, and senseless proposal.'  He urged that, if Canada were
independent, 'England, instead of being able to reduce her army by a
man or her navy by a ship, would be compelled to increase both, to
maintain her present power and influence.'  He quoted the London
_Times_ to the effect that the maritime defence of the colonies was
only a by-product of that naval supremacy which was vital to England's
very existence as a nation, and cost not a penny extra, for which
reason the control of the fleet must always remain unconditionally in
the hands of the responsible government of the United Kingdom.[4]  Sir
Charles, too, was wont to stress the strategic importance of the
Canadian Pacific Railway as Canada's contribution to the defence of the
Empire.  His arguments had much force, but they were obviously the
product of a time of transition, {149} uneasy answers to the promptings
of the slow-rising spirit of nationhood.

Action, or inaction, corresponded to words.  In 1885, when Britain was
waging war in the Soudan, New South Wales offered to raise and equip a
regiment.  The secretary for war at once spread the news of this offer
through the other colonies.  Sir John Macdonald's only reply was to
offer to sanction the raising of troops in Canada, the whole cost to
fall on Great Britain.  The offer was declined with thanks.  A company
of voyageurs, largely French-Canadian, however, was recruited in
Canada, at Britain's expense, and did good service in the rapids of the
Nile.  Sir John Macdonald did not, of course, proclaim Canada's
neutrality in this war, any more than Hincks and MacNab had done in the
Crimean War, when hired German troops garrisoned Dover and Shorncliffe.
Canada simply took no part in either war.

But, if political federation and inter-imperial defence thus fell on
deaf ears in Canada, the question of trade relations received more
serious attention.  In urging the Pacific cable and a service of fast
steamships on each ocean, Sandford Fleming had hit upon the line along
which progress eventually was to be made.  {150} Tariff preferences,
inter-imperial reciprocity, began to be discussed.  As early as 1879
Sir John Macdonald, on finding in England much dissatisfaction over his
high taxation of British imports, proposed to give British goods a
preference if the United Kingdom would give Canada a preference in
return.  Thus, on the ruins of the old colonial system imposed by the
mother country's edict, would be built a new colonial system based on
free negotiation between equal states.  In view of Britain's rooted
adherence to free trade, nothing, of course, came of the proposal.  Ten
years later there was in England some discussion of protection or 'fair
trade,' and in Canada, during the elections of 1891, the idea of an
imperial _zollverein_ was rhetorically mooted as an alternative to
reciprocity with the United States.  Three years later still (1894) the
second Colonial Conference met at Ottawa, on the invitation of the
Dominion Government.  The object was to arrange treaties of reciprocity
in trade between the various colonies, to serve until such time as the
mother country should renounce her free-trade errors.  There were many
forceful and eloquent speeches, notably one by Mr, now Sir George,
Foster, and a resolution was {151} passed in favour of an Imperial
Customs Union.  But, save for a limited arrangement with New Zealand in
1895, no definite result followed.

The policy of the Liberal Opposition in Canada in respect to
inter-imperial trade may be briefly stated.  Mr Laurier's first speech,
as leader of the party, at Somerset, in 1887, has already been
mentioned.  There he declared that if commercial union with Great
Britain were feasible, he would favour it.  But he had more hope of
commercial union with other British colonies, which had protective
tariffs.  Two years later, speaking at Toronto, he referred to the
obvious difficulties in the way of commercial union with Britain
itself.  'I would favour with all my soul,' he said, 'a more close
commercial alliance of Canada with Great Britain.  But, sir, if there
is any man who believes that any such an alliance between Canada and
Great Britain can be formed upon any other basis than that of free
trade, which prevails in England, that man is a Rip Van Winkle, who has
been sleeping not only for the last seven but for the last forty-four
years.  The British people will not to-day go back upon the policy of
free trade, and Canada is not in a position at the moment, {152} with
the large revenue which she has to collect, to adopt any other tariff
than a revenue tariff at best.'  That free trade among all the British
communities would some day be to their advantage, and that it would
come in time, he stated elsewhere, but added that it could not for many
years be a practical issue.

A notable step forward was taken in 1892.  Hitherto Liberal and
Conservative alike had been considering the trade question chiefly from
the standpoint of the producer, seeking fresh markets by offering in
return concessions in the Canadian tariff.  Now the Liberals, and the
M'Carthy wing of the Conservatives, began to speak of the consumer's
interests.  The reduction of the tariff would be more important as a
relief to the consumer than as a means of buying markets abroad for the
producer.  Instead of waiting for the distant day when Great Britain
should set up a tariff and give Canada reciprocal preference, the
Liberals now pressed for giving an immediate and unconditional
preference on British goods.  A resolution to this effect, moved in the
House of Commons by Mr, now Sir Louis, Davies, was voted down by the
Conservative majority, but it was to bear notable fruit later.



[1] _Confederation Debates_, p. 44.

[2] See p. 131.

[3] 'During the last few years of his life, when asked if he were an
Imperial Federationist, he would reply somewhat after this fashion:
"That depends on what you mean by Imperial Federation.  I am, of
course, in favour of any feasible scheme that will bring about a closer
union between the various portions of the Empire, but I have not yet
seen any plan worked out by which this can be done.  The proposal that
there should be a parliamentary federation of the Empire I regard as
impracticable.  I greatly doubt that England would agree that the
parliament which has sat during so many centuries at Westminster,
should be made subsidiary to a federal legislature.  But, however that
might be, I am quite sure that Canada would never consent to be taxed
by a central body sitting at London, in which she would have
practically no voice; for her proportionate number of members in such
an assembly would amount to little more than an honorary
representation.  That form of Imperial Federation is an idle dream.  So
also, in my judgment, is the proposal to establish a uniform tariff
throughout the Empire.  No colony would ever surrender its right to
control its fiscal policy."'--Pope, _Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald_,
vol. ii, p. 213.

[4] Address on Canada and her Relations with the Mother Country.
Newcastle-on-Tyne, November 21, 1895.




{153}

CHAPTER VIII

THE END OF A RÉGIME

Abbott and Thompson--Tariff reform--Manitoba school question


The strain of a winter campaign proved too great for Sir John
Macdonald's weakened frame.  On June 6, 1891, died the statesman who so
long had guided the destinies of Canada.  All Canada felt the loss.  No
one else voiced the common judgment with such discrimination and
generosity as did the leader of the Opposition.  Speaking in parliament
a few days later, Mr Laurier declared:


Sir John Macdonald now belongs to the ages, and it can be said with
certainty that the career which has just been closed is one of the most
remarkable careers of this century....  I think it can be asserted
that, for the supreme art of governing men, Sir John Macdonald was
gifted as few men in any land or any age were gifted--gifted with the
highest of all qualities, qualities which would have made him famous
wherever exercised, and which would have shone all the more
conspicuously the larger the theatre.  The fact that he could
congregate together elements the most heterogeneous and blend them into
{154} one compact party, and to the end of his life keep them steadily
under his hand, is perhaps altogether unprecedented.  The fact that
during all those years he retained unimpaired not only the confidence
but the devotion, the ardent devotion and affection of his party, is
evidence that besides those higher qualities of statesmanship to which
we were daily witnesses, he was also endowed with those inner, subtle,
undefinable graces of soul which win and keep the hearts of men.

As to his statesmanship, it is written in the history of Canada....
Although my political views compel me to say that in my judgment his
actions were not always the best that could have been taken in the
interests of Canada, although my conscience compels me to say that of
late he has imputed to his opponents motives which I must say in my
heart he has misconceived, yet I am only too glad here to sink these
differences, and to remember only the great services he has performed
for our country--to remember that his actions always displayed great
originality of view, unbounded fertility of resource, a high level of
intellectual conception, and, above all, a far-reaching vision beyond
the event of the day, and still higher, permeating the whole, a broad
patriotism--a devotion to Canada's welfare, Canada's advancement, and
Canada's glory.


Sir John Macdonald had been prime minister of the Dominion for twenty
of its twenty-four years.  In the next five years the Conservative
party had four different leaders {155} and the Dominion four prime
ministers.  The first was Sir John Abbott, who had lived down the
memory of his early views in favour of Annexation and had become 'the
confidential family lawyer of his party.'  A little over a year later,
ill-health compelled him to resign in favour of Sir John Thompson, an
able and honest administrator, who grew in breadth of view with
experience and responsibility.

All Abbott's astuteness and Thompson's rigid uprightness were soon
required to deal with the revelations of rotten politics which
presently claimed the country's attention.  It had long been believed
that the department of Public Works, under Sir Hector Langevin, was a
source of widespread corruption, but it was not until Israel Tarte, a
member of the House of Commons and a _bleu_ of the _bleus_, made
charges to that effect during the session of 1891, that the full
measure of the evil was understood.  In the investigations and trials
which followed it was made clear that huge sums had been extracted from
contractors in the service of the Government and used in wholesale
bribery.  These revelations, as a London newspaper remarked, 'made
Tammany smell sweet.'

But the public indignation at these proofs {156} of the sinister side
of the Government's long hold on power was weakened by similar charges
brought and proved against the Liberal Government of Quebec, under
Honoré Mercier.  The lieutenant-governor summarily dismissed Mercier,
the Church set its face sternly against his ministry, which it had
erstwhile approved, and the people of the province voted him out of
power (1892).  The effect on the public mind of this corruption at
Ottawa and Quebec was an apathy, a lowered standard of political
morality, since it gave point to the common saying that 'one set of
politicians is as bad as another,' by which good men excuse their
unpatriotic indifference to public affairs.

The Conservative party, and the whole Dominion, suffered a further loss
in 1894, when Sir John Thompson died suddenly at Windsor Castle.  Sir
Mackenzie Bowell was chosen as his successor.

Meanwhile the fortunes and the spirit of the Liberal party rose
steadily.  Mr Laurier's position as leader strengthened as each year
gave proof of his steadfast character, his courage, and his political
sagacity.  He gave his time and energy wholly to the work of the party.
During these years he addressed {157} hundreds of meetings in Quebec
and Ontario, and made tours to the maritime provinces and through the
West to the Pacific.

The convention of Liberals from all ends of the Dominion, which met at
Ottawa in 1893, had given fresh vigour to the party.  At that
convention, as has already been noted, emphasis was placed upon the
need of lowering the tariff.  It was urged that the tariff should be
made to rest as lightly as possible upon the necessaries of life, and
that freer trade should be sought with all the world, and particularly
with Great Britain and the United States.

It was about this time, too, that D'Alton M'Carthy, who was mellowing
in religious matters and growing more radical on other issues, voiced a
demand for a reduction of customs burdens and for the adoption of
maximum and minimum schedules, the minimum rates to be given Great
Britain and British colonies and foreign countries which offered
equivalent terms, and the maximum rates to be applied to countries like
the United States which maintained prohibitive tariffs against Canadian
products.  The Patrons of Industry, an organization of farmers which
for a few years had much power {158} in Ontario, also demanded tariff
reform.  Even the Government went a little with public opinion and
lopped away a few 'mouldering branches' in 1894.  Thus the tariff
remained an issue during the last five years of the Conservative régime.


A more burning question, however, was the revival of the old contest
over provincial rights and denominational privileges.  This was the
offspring of the Equal Rights agitation, which had spread to Manitoba.
In August 1889 Joseph Martin, a member of the Manitoba Cabinet,
following D'Alton M'Carthy at a public meeting, announced that his
government would establish a non-sectarian system of education.  A few
months later this was done.

When Manitoba entered Confederation, in 1870, there had been no
state-supported system of education.  Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and
Presbyterians maintained denominational schools, supported by fees and
church grants.  The settlers were about equally divided between
Catholics and Protestants.  The Manitoba Act, Manitoba's constitutional
charter, gave the new province in most respects the same powers as the
older provinces.  The province was given control of {159} education,
subject, first, to the provision that no law should be passed
prejudicially affecting any right or privilege, with respect to
denominational schools, which any class of persons had by law or
practice at the union, and subject, secondly, to an appeal to the
federal authorities from any provincial act or decision affecting the
rights of any minority, Protestant or Catholic.  In 1871 a school
system much like that of Quebec was set up.  Protestant schools and
Catholic schools were established, and each was granted half the
provincial appropriation.  Later, as the Protestant population grew
relatively larger, the amount was divided in proportions corresponding
to the number of pupils in each class of schools.  Now, in 1890, this
system was completely swept away and replaced by a single system of
state-supported schools.  At first it had been the intention to make
them entirely secular, but in the end provision was made for some
non-denominational religious teaching.  Any Catholic who did not wish
to send his children to such a school would be compelled to pay for the
support of a school of his own, besides paying taxes for the general
school system.

The Catholics, first under Archbishop {160} Taché's firm but moderate
guidance, and later under Archbishop Langevin's crusading leadership,
demanded redress.  The provincial authorities would not change their
policy.  It was thought that the constitution provided ample protection
for a religious minority deprived of its rights.  The provision was
three-fold.  First, the Dominion Government might disallow the
offending act.  But the Dominion Government saw fit not to exercise
this right, preferring to leave the matter to the courts, if possible.
Secondly, there was the provision of the Manitoba Act forbidding the
province to take away any rights as to denominational schools possessed
by any class of persons at the union.  Test cases were brought and
elaborately argued in the courts.  The Supreme Court held that the
privilege of paying only for one's own denominational schools existed
at the union, and had been infringed.  The Privy Council reversed this
judgment, holding that Catholics were still free to support schools of
their own, and that this was the only privilege which they had before
possessed.

There was still a third string to the bow--the appeal to the
governor-general in council, the Dominion Government, to pass remedial
{161} legislation.  Here again the Supreme Court and the Privy Council
differed.  The Supreme Court held, but not unanimously, that no right
of federal intervention existed; but the Privy Council maintained, as
the last word in the case, that the Dominion had power to intervene.

This decision put the question squarely before the Bowell Government.
It was a difficult situation.  An administration drawing its chief
strength from Ontario, and headed by a prominent Orangeman, was called
upon by the Catholic authorities to use its powers to compel a
determined province to change its policy or, in default, to pass a
federal law restoring the minority's privileges.  But Bowell and his
colleagues soon made their decision.  Early in 1895 the province was
ordered in uncompromising terms to restore to the minority its former
rights and privileges.  The legislature declined, on the ground that
the old system was inefficient and disruptive, and urged the federal
authorities to investigate school conditions in Manitoba, past and
present, before taking the fatal step of coercion.  But, after a
commission had failed to induce the province to yield, the Bowell
Government announced that at the next parliamentary {162

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