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British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

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Title: British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

Author: J. L. Morison


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRITISH SUPREMACY & CANADIAN SELF-GOVERNMENT, 1839-1854 ***




Produced by Al Haines









[Frontispiece: Lord Elgin]





British Supremacy

&

Canadian Self-Government

1839-1854



By

J. L. Morison, M.A., D.Litt.


Professor of Colonial History in Queen's University, Kingston, Canada

Late Lecturer on English Literature in the University of Glasgow




Toronto

S. B. Gundy

_Publisher in Canada for Humphrey Milford_

1919




  GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
    BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.




To

M. T.




{vi}

PREFACE

The essay which follows had been printed, and was on the point of being
published, when the outbreak of war involved my venture in the general
devastation from which we are only now emerging.  More than four years
of military service lie between me and the studies of which this book
is the summary.  It was written under one dispensation; it is being
published under another.  My first impulse, therefore, was to ask
whether the change which has rendered so much of the old world obsolete
had not invalidated also the conclusions here arrived at.  But
reflection has simply confirmed me in the desire to complete the
arrangements for publication.  Self-government is the keynote of the
essay, and it is unlikely that self-government will cease to be the
central principle of sane politics either in the British Empire or in
the world outside.  I watched a Canadian division coming out of the
last great battle in France, battered and reduced in numbers, but with
all {viii} its splendid energy and confidence untouched.  The presence
of the Canadians there, their incomparable spirit and resolution, the
sacrifices they had just been making, with unflinching generosity, for
the Empire, seemed only the last consequences of the political struggle
for autonomy described in the pages which follow.  They would have been
impossible had the views of all the old imperialists from Wellington to
Disraeli prevailed.

The material on which this volume is based falls into three groups.
First in importance are the state papers and general correspondence of
the period, contained in the Canadian Archives at Ottawa.  In addition
to the correspondence, ordinary and confidential, between the
Secretaries of State for the Colonies, and the Governors-General, from
1839 to 1867, I read two very notable collections, designated in the
foot-notes the Bagot Correspondence and the Elgin-Grey Correspondence.
In the former are contained not only Bagot's private correspondence
with Lord Stanley, but also letters from Bagot's British friends and
Canadian political advisers.  These constitute the most important
evidence which exists for Bagot's year of office.  In the same way, the
private correspondence, carried on between Earl Grey and the Earl of
Elgin from {ix} 1847 to 1852, takes precedence of all other Canadian
material of that period; and is, indeed, the most enlightening series
of documents in existence on mid-Victorian Colonial policy.

The second group is composed of pamphlets and early newspapers, more
especially the admirable collection of pre-confederation pamphlets in
the Archives at Ottawa, and the Bell and Morris collections at Queen's
University.  Kingston.  I cannot pretend to have mastered all the
material supplied by the newspapers of the period; but I have attempted
to work through such representative journals as the _Toronto Globe_,
the _Montreal Witness_, and the Kingston papers published while
Kingston was capital of the united Provinces.  I consulted certain
others, French and English, on definite points of political interest,
such as the reappearance of Papineau in politics in 1847.

The _Canadiana_ of Queen's University Library gave me my third group of
documents: and the facts from books were confirmed or modified by
information gathered, chiefly in Kingston, from persons whose memories
of the period under discussion were still fresh and interesting.

As the work proceeded, certain impressions were {x} very definitely
created in my mind.  It seemed clear, in the first place, that no
statesman, whose experience was limited by unbroken residence in
Europe, quite understood the elements which, between 1839 and 1867,
constituted the Home Rule problem in Canada.  More especially on
fundamental points concerning Canadian opinion, and the general temper
of the populace, even the best men in England seemed singularly
ignorant.  A second impression was that, while the colony remained
throughout essentially loyal, and while the political leaders in Canada
displayed really great qualities of statesmanship at critical moments,
the general development of Canadian political life was seriously
delayed by the crudities and rudeness of provincial politicians.
British ignorance was not the only obstacle in the way.

The last impression was that the relations between Britain and Canada
depended then, as now, not on constitutional forms, or commercial
bargains, or armed protection, but on racial solidarity, and community
in social and moral ideals.  It was this solidarity, far more than
conscious statesmanship, which held Canada and Britain together.  These
impressions I have tried to analyse and elucidate in the chapters which
follow.

{xi}

I have to thank the Dominion Archivist, Dr. A. G. Doughty, for many
kindnesses, and more especially for permitting me to read the
Elgin-Grey Correspondence.  To my friends, Mr. K. K. M. Leys, of
University College, Oxford, Dr. Adam Shortt, Ottawa, and Professor W.
D. Taylor, of Queen's University, Kingston, I am indebted for advice
and information.  Mr. James MacLehose and Dr. George Neilson made the
final stages of printing easy by their generous assistance.  The
opinions which I express are my own, occasionally in spite of my
friends' remonstrances.

J. L. MORISON.

INNELLAN, ARGYLLSHIRE,
  _May_, 1919.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                          PAGE

    I. INTRODUCTORY  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1
   II. THE CANADIAN COMMUNITY  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    8
  III. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD SYDENHAM  . . . . . . . . . .   70
   IV. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: SIR CHARLES BAGOT  . . . . . . . .  126
    V. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD METCALFE  . . . . . . . . . .  158
   VI. THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD ELGIN . . . . . . . . . . . .  187
  VII. BRITISH OPINION AND CANADIAN AUTONOMY . . . . . . . . . .  230
 VIII. THE CONSEQUENCES OF CANADIAN AUTONOMY . . . . . . . . . .  293
       INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  347




{1}

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

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

The problem was no new one in 1839.  Indeed it was coeval with the
existence of the empire, and sprang from the very nature of colonial
government.  Beneath the actual facts of the great {2} American
revolution--reaching far beyond quarrels over stamp duties, or the
differentiation between internal and external taxation, or even the
rights of man--was the fundamental difficulty of empire, the need to
reconcile colonial independence with imperial unity.  It was the
perception of this difficulty which made Burke so much the greatest
political thinker of his time.  As he wrote in the most illuminating of
his letters, "I am, and ever have been, deeply sensible of the
difficulty of reconciling the strong presiding power, that is so useful
towards the conservation of a vast, disconnected, infinitely
diversified empire, with that liberty and safety of the provinces,
which they must enjoy (in opinion and practice, at least), or they will
not be provinces at all.  I know, and have long felt, the difficulty of
reconciling the unwieldy haughtiness of a great ruling nation,
habituated to command, pampered by enormous wealth, and confident from
a long course of prosperity and victory, to the high spirit of free
dependencies, animated with the first glow and activity of juvenile
heat, and assuming to themselves as their birthright, some part of that
very pride which oppresses them."[1]

{3}

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

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

After the loss of the American colonies, the government in England
contrived for a time to evade the problems and responsibilities of
colonial empire.  The colonies which remained to England were limited
in extent and population; and such difficulties as existed were faced,
not so much by the government in London, as beyond the seas by
statesmen with local knowledge, like Dorchester.  At the same time, the
consequences of the French Revolution and the great wars drew to
themselves the attention of all active minds.  Under these
circumstances imperial policy lost much of its prestige, and imperial
problems either vanished or were evaded.  It was a period of "crown
colony" administration.[2]  The connexion, as it was called, was
maintained through oligarchic {5} institutions, strictly controlled
from Westminster; local officials were selected from little groups of
semi-aristocrats, more English than the home government itself; and the
only policy which recommended itself to a nation, which still lacked
both information and imagination, was to try no rash constitutional
experiments, and to conciliate colonial opinion by economic favours and
low taxation.

Yet the old contradiction between British ascendancy and colonial
autonomy could not for long be ignored; and as in the early nineteenth
century a new colonial empire arose, greater and more diversified than
the old, the problem once more recurred, this time in Canada.  It is
not the purpose of this book to discuss the earlier stages of the
Canadian struggle.  The rebellions under Mackenzie in the West and
Papineau in the East were abnormal and pathological episodes, in
considering which the attention is easily diverted from the essential
questions to exciting side issues and personal facts.  In any case,
that chapter in Canadian history has received adequate attention.[3]
But after Colborne's firmness had repressed the {6} armed risings, and
Durham's imperious dictatorship had introduced some kind of order,
there followed in Canada a period of high constitutional importance, in
which the old issue was frankly faced, both in England and in Canada,
almost in the very terms that Burke had used.  It is not too much to
say that the fifteen years of Canadian history which begin with the
publication, in 1839, of _Durham's Report_, are the most important in
the history of the modern British empire; and that in them was made the
experiment on the success of which depended the future of that empire.

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

{7}

The phrase, responsible government, appears everywhere in the writings
and speeches of those days with a wearisome iteration.  Yet the
discussion which hinged on that phrase was of primary importance.  The
British government must either discover the kind of self-government
required in the greater dependencies, the _modus vivendi_ to be
established between the local and the central governments, and the seat
of actual responsibility, or cease to be imperial.  Under four
governors-general[4] the argument proceeded, and it was not until 1854
that Elgin, in his departure from Canada, was able to assure the
British government that the question had been for the time settled.

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



[1] Burke, _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol_.

[2] Sir C. P. Lucas, _Introduction to Lord Durham's Report_, p. 266.

[3] Its latest statement may be found in Sir C. P. Lucas's admirable
edition of _Lord Durham's Report_, Oxford, 1912.

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




{8}

CHAPTER II.

THE CANADIAN COMMUNITY.

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

Canadian society, in 1839 and long afterwards, was dominated by the
physical characteristics of the seven hundred miles of country which
stretched from Quebec to the shores of Lake Huron, with {9} its long
water-front and timid expansion, north and south; its forests
stubbornly resisting the axes of the settlers; its severe extremities
of heat and cold; the innumerable inconveniences inflicted by its
uncultivated wastes on those who first invaded it; and the imperfect
lines of land communication which multiplied all distances in Canada at
least four-fold.  It was perhaps this sense of distance, and difficulty
of locomotion, which first impressed the settler and the visitor.  To
begin with, the colony was, for practical purposes, more than a month's
distance from the centre of government.  Steam was gradually making its
way, and the record passage by sailing ship, from Quebec to Portsmouth,
had occupied only eighteen days and a half,[1] but sails were still the
ordinary means of propulsion, and the average length of voyage of 237
vessels arriving at Quebec in 1840 was well over forty days.[2]  To the
immigrant, however, the voyage across the Atlantic was the least of his
troubles; for the internal communications of Canada left much to be
desired.  The assistance {10} of railway transportation might be
entirely ignored,--as late as 1847 only twenty-two miles of railway
lines had been laid and worked.[3]  There was, of course, during the
open season, the wonderful passage by river and lake into the heart of
the continent; although the long winter months broke into the
regularity of the traffic by water, and the St. Lawrence rapids added
to the traveller's difficulties and expenses.  Even the magic of a
governor-general's wand could not dispel the inconveniences of this
simplest of Canadian routes.  "I arrived here on Thursday week,"
grumbled Poulett Thomson, writing from Toronto in 1839.  "The journey
was bad enough; a portage to Lachine; then the steamboat to the
Cascades, twenty-four miles further; then road again (if road it can be
called) for sixteen miles; then steam to Cornwall forty miles; then
road, twelve miles; then, by a change of steamers on to Lake Ontario to
Kingston, and thence here.  I slept one night on the road, and two on
board the steamers.  Such, as I have described it, is the boasted
navigation of the St. Lawrence!"[4]  For military purposes there was
the alternative route, up the Ottawa to Bytown, {11} and thence by the
Rideau military canal to Kingston and the Lakes.  On land, progress was
much more complicated, for even the main road along the river and lake
front was in shamefully bad condition, more especially when autumn
passed into winter, or when spring once more loosened up the roads.
There is a quite unanimous chorus of condemnation from all--British,
Americans, and Canadians.  One lively traveller in 1840 protested that
on his way from Montreal, he was compelled to walk at the carriage side
for hours, ankle-deep in mud, with the reins in his hands, and that,
with infinite fatigue to both man and beast, he accomplished sixty
miles in two days--a wonderful performance.[5]  In the very heart of
the rebellion, W. L. Mackenzie seems to have found the roads fighting
against him, for he speaks of the march along Yonge Street as over
"thirty or forty miles of the worst roads in the world"; and attributes
part of the disheartening of his men to what one may term
mud-weariness.[6]  Local tradition still remembers with a sense of
wonder that Sydenham, eager to return to his work in Lower Canada, once
travelled by sleigh {12} the 360 miles from Toronto to Montreal in
thirty-six hours.

Off the main routes, roads degenerated into corduroy roads, and these
into tracks, and even "blazed trails "; while, as for bridges, cases
were known where the want of them had kept settlers who were living
within three miles of a principal town, from communicating with it for
days at a time.[7]  And, as the roads grew rougher, Canadian conditions
seemed to the stranger to assert themselves more and more offensively,
animate and inanimate nature thrusting man back on the bare elements of
things.  The early descriptions of the colony are crowded with pictures
of wretched immigrants, mosquito-bitten, or, in winter, half dead with
cold, struggling through mud and swamp, to find the land whither they
had come to evade the miseries of civilization, confronting them with
the squalor and pains of nature.  Far into the Victorian era Canada,
whether French or British, was a dislocated community, with settlements
set apart from each other as much by mud, swamp, and wood-land, as by
distance.  Her population, more particularly in the west, was engaged
not with political ideals, but in an incessant struggle {13} with the
forests; and the little jobs, which enabled the infant community to
build a bridge or repair a road at the public expense, must naturally
have seemed to the electors more important items of a political
programme than responsible government or abolition of the clergy
reserves.  No doubt, in the older towns and cities, the efforts of the
earlier settlers had gained for their sons leisure and a chance of
culture; yet even in Toronto, the wild lands were but a few miles
distant, and, as Richardson saw it, London was "literally a city of
stumps, many of the houses being still surrounded by them."

Straggling along these 700 miles, although here and there concentrated
into centres like Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, Kingston, and
Toronto, was a population numbering well over a million, which from its
internal divisions, its differences in origin and disposition, and its
relation to the British government, constituted the central problem at
the time in British colonial politics.  The French population formed,
naturally, the chief difficulty.  Thanks to the terms of the surrender
in 1763, and the policy of Dorchester, a unit which called itself _la
nation Canadienne_ had been formed, _nationalité_ had become a force in
Lower {14} Canada, imperfectly appreciated even by the leaders of the
progressive movement in England and Western Canada.  In the Eastern
townships, and in Quebec and Montreal, flourishing and highly organized
British societies existed.  The Rebellion had found sturdy opponents in
the British militia from the townships, and the constitutional
societies of Quebec and Montreal expressed, in innumerable resolutions
and addresses, the British point of view.  But Lower Canada was for
practical purposes a French unit, Roman Catholic in religion, and, in
structure, semifeudal.  In the cities, the national self-consciousness
of the French was most conspicuously present; and leaders like
Papineau, La Fontaine, and Cartier proved the reality of French culture
and political skill.  Below the higher classes, Durham and Metcalfe
noticed that in Lower Canada the facilities given by the church for
higher education produced a class of smaller professional men, from
whose number the ordinary politicians and agitators were drawn.  To the
church they owed their entrance into the world of ideas; but apparently
they were little more loyal to the clergy than they were to Britain.
"I am led to believe," wrote Metcalfe in 1845, "that the influence of
the clergy is not predominant, {15} among the French-Canadian people,
and that the avocat, the notary, and the doctor, generally disposed to
be political demagogues, and most of them hostile to the British
government, are the parties who exercise the greatest influence.
Whatever power the clergy might have acting along with these
demagogues, it would, I fear, be slight when exercised in opposition to
them."[8]

These active, critical, political groups were not, however,
representative of French Canada.  So long as their racial pride
remained unhurt, the French community was profoundly conservative.  It
was noticed that the rebels of 1837 and 1838 had received no support
from the Catholic priesthood; and in a country where the reverence for
that ancient form of Christianity was, in spite of Metcalfe's opinion
to the contrary, profound, it was unlikely that any anti-religious
political movement could make much permanent headway.  Devoted to their
religion, and controlled more especially in education by their
priests,[9] the _habitants_ formed the peculiar people of the American
continent.  Education flourished not at all among {16} the rank and
file.  Arthur Buller found the majority of those whom he met either not
able to write, or able to write little more than their names.[10]  The
women, he said, were the active, bustling portion of the _habitants_,
thanks to the admirable and yet inexpensive training to be had in the
nunneries.  As for the men, they farmed and lived as their fathers had
done before them.  They cleared their land, or tilled it where it had
been cleared, and thought little of improvement or change.  M'Taggart,
whose work on the Rideau Canal, made him an expert in Canadian labour,
much preferred French Canadians to the Irish as labourers, and thought
them "kind, tender-hearted, very social, no way very ambitious, nor
industrious, rarely speculative."[11]  To the Canadian commonwealth,
the French population furnished a few really admirable statesmen; a
dominant and loyal church; some groups of professional men,
disappointed and discontented sons of humble parents, too proud to sink
to the level of their uninstructed youth, and without the opportunity
of rising higher; and a great mass of men who hewed wood and drew
water, not for a master, but for themselves, {17} submissive to the
church, and well-disposed, but ignorant, and at the mercy of any clever
demagogue who might raise the cry of nationalism.  Still, when
nationality remained unchallenged, the French-Canadians were at least
what, till recently, they remained, the most purely conservative
element in Canada.

The second element, in point of stability and importance, in the
Canadian population was that of the United Empire Loyalists, the
remnants of a former British supremacy in the United States.  They had
proved their steadfastness and courage by their refusal to accept the
rules of the new republic; and their arrival in Canada gave that
country an aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon origin to counterbalance that of
the seigneurs on the Lower St. Lawrence.  The men had in many cases
been trained to arms in the revolutionary war, and they served a second
and perhaps a harder apprenticeship in the Canadian forests.  They had
formed the centre of resistance to American attacks in the war of 1812.
Their sons and grandsons had once more exhibited the hereditary loyalty
of the group, in resisting the rebels of 1837-38; and Metcalfe, who was
their best friend among the governors of the United Provinces, justly
{18} looked on them as the most conspicuous examples of devotion to
connection with the British Empire, and loyal subjection to the
Crown.[12]  Robinsons, Cartwrights, Ryersons, and a score of other
well-known families, proved, generation after generation, by their
sustained public capacity, how considerably the struggle for existence,
operating on sound human material, may raise the average of talent and
energy.  The tendency of the Loyalists to conservatism was, under the
circumstances, only natural.  Their possession, for a time, of all the
places in Upper Canada which were worth holding, was the consequence of
their priority in tenure, and of their conspicuous pre-eminence in
political ingenuity.  Critics of a later date forgot, and still forget,
in their wholesale indictment of the Family Compact, that the Loyalist
group called by that name had earned their places by genuine ability.
If, like other aristocracies, they found it hard to mark the precise
moment for retirement before the rise of democracy, their excuse must
be found in their consciousness of high public spirit and their
hereditary talents for administration.

Politically and socially one may include among the Loyalists the
half-pay officers, from both {19} navy and army, whom the great peace
after Waterloo sent to Canada, as to the other colonies; and certain
men of good family, Talbots or Stricklands, who held fast by English
conservative tradition, played, where they could, the English gentleman
abroad, and incidentally exhibited no mean amount of public spirit.
Conspicuous among these was Colonel Talbot, who had come to Upper
Canada with Simcoe in 1793, and became there an erratic but energetic
instrument of empire.  "For sixteen years," says Mrs. Jameson, writing
with a pardonably feminine thrill after a visit to the great man, "he
saw scarce a human being, except a few boors and blacks employed in
clearing and logging his land; he himself assumed the blanket coat and
axe, slept upon the bare earth, cooked three meals a day for twenty
woodsmen, cleaned his own boots, washed his own linen, milked his cows,
churned the butter, and made and baked the bread."[13]  Yet, as
Strickland confesses, in his _Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West_, there
were few Talbots.  "Many high-spirited gentlemen," he says, "were
tempted by the grants of land bestowed on them by the government, which
made actual settlement one of the conditions of {20} the grant.  It
followed, as a matter of course, that the majority of these persons
were physically disqualified for such an undertaking, a fact which many
deserted farms in the rear townships of the county in which I reside
painfully indicate."[14]

French Canadians and United Empire Loyalists constituted the stable
factors in Canadian public life; but the process of immigration, which
the years of rebellion checked only for a time, had by 1840 prepared
another element, and that the most incalculable and disturbing both
socially and politically.  Indeed the real problem of Canadian public
life lay simply in the influence of the humbler class of immigrants on
existing administration and opinion.  It was natural for the other
settlers and the governing class to regard the larger part of the new
population as beneath the political level.  The very circumstances of
the emigrating process carried with them a suggestion of degradation.
Durham had embodied in his _Report_ the more flagrant examples of the
horrors of emigration;[15] but a later review, written in 1841, proves
that many of the worst features of the old system still continued.
There were still the privations, the {21} filth and the diseases of
this northern "middle passage," the epidemics and disorders inflicted
on the Canadian community as ship-load after ship-load of poor wretches
passed ashore at Quebec.  On land their sorrows were renewed, for many
of them were paupers, and there was still no organized effort to
introduce the labourer to those who required his labour.  More than one
half of the 12,000 who, according to the report of 1841, passed in that
year through Bytown locks, were considered objects of charity.  Many of
them were common labourers with families, men who had little but their
physical strength as capital for the new venture; and cholera, typhus,
or smallpox had in many cases reduced even that to the vanishing point.
More especially among the Irish settlers, who, in these years and
later, fled in dismay from the distresses of Ireland, the misery
continued long after the first struggle.  M'Taggart, who had his
prejudices, but who had unusually good opportunities for observation,
thought that a tenth of the poorer Irish settlers died during their
first two years in the country.  He found them clumsy at their work,
accustomed to the spade and shovel, not to the axe, and maiming
themselves most fearfully, or even killing themselves, in their {22}
experiments in clearing the ground.[16]  Of all who came, the
immigration agents thought the Lowland Scots and the Ulster Irishmen
the best, and while the poorer class of settler lagged behind in the
cities of Lower Canada, these others generally pushed on to find a hard
earned living among the British settlers in the Upper Province.  Some
of them found their way to the United States.  Others, faced with the
intolerable delays of the land administration, took the risk of
"squatting," that is, settling on wild land without securing a right to
it--often to find themselves dislodged by a legal owner at the moment
when their possession _de facto_ seemed established.  The majority
settled as small farmers in the more frequented districts, or became
shop-keepers and artisans in the towns.  Politically their position was
curious.  The Reform Act of 1832 had extended the British franchise,
but the majority had still no votes; and the immigrants belonged to the
unenfranchised classes.  The Irish had the additional disability of
being reckoned disloyal, followers of the great Irish demagogue, and
disorderly persons until proved otherwise.[17] To government servants
and {23} the older settlers alike, it seemed perilous to the community
to share political power with them.  Yet they were British citizens;
many of them at once became active members of the community through
their standing as freeholders; the democratic influence of the United
States told everywhere on their behalf; and even where hard work left
little time for political discussion, the fact that local needs might
be assisted by political discussion, and the stout individualism bred
by the life of struggle in village, town, and country, forced the new
settlers to interest themselves in politics.  Many of the new arrivals
had some pretensions to education--more especially those from Scotland.
Indeed it is worthy of note that from the Scottish stream of
immigration there came not only the earlier agitators, Gourlay and
Mackenzie, but, at a later date, George Brown, the first great
political journalist in Canada, Alexander Mackenzie and Oliver Mowat,
future leaders of Canadian liberalism, and John A. Macdonald, whose
imperialism never lacked a tincture of traditional Scottish caution.
The new immigrants were unlikely to challenge the social supremacy of
the old aristocracy, but they formed so large an accession to the
population that they could not {24} long remain without political
power.  They must either be granted the rights of numerical majority or
be exasperated into destructive agitation.

It is not altogether easy to describe the community or chain of
communities created out of these diverse elements.  Distance, climatic
difficulties, and racial misunderstandings weakened the sense of unity
in the colony; and the chief centres of population were still too young
and unformed to present to the visitor the characteristics of a
finished civilization.

Everywhere, but more especially in the west, the town population showed
remarkable increases.  Montreal, which had, in 1790, an estimated
population of 18,000, had almost trebled that number by 1844; in the
same interval, Quebec increased from 14,000 to nearly 36,000.  In the
Upper Province, immigration and natural increase produced an even more
remarkable expansion.  In the twenty-two years between 1824 and 1846,
Toronto grew from a village of 1,600 inhabitants to be a flourishing
provincial capital of 21,000.  In the census of 1848, the population of
Hamilton was returned as 9,889; that of Kingston as 8,416; Bytown, the
future capital, had 6,275 inhabitants; while a score of villages such
as London, Belleville, {25} Brockville, and Cobourg had populations
varying from one to four thousand.[18]

Social graces and conveniences had, however, hardly kept pace with the
increase in numbers.  The French region was, for better or worse,
homogeneous, and Quebec formed a social centre of some distinction,
wherein the critical M'Taggart noted less vanity and conceit than was
to be met with in the country.[19]  But further west, British observers
were usually something less than laudatory.  The municipal franchise in
the cities of Lower Canada, being confined to the possessors of real
estate, shut out from civic management the more enterprising trading
classes, with the natural result that mismanagement and inefficiency
everywhere prevailed.  In Quebec there was no public lighting, the
community bought unwholesome water from carters who took it from the
St. Lawrence, and the gaol--a grim but useful test of the civilization
of the place--not merely afforded direct communication between the
prisoners and the street, but was so ill ordered that, according to a
clerical authority, "they who happily are {26} pronounced innocent by
law may consider it a providential deliverance if they escape in the
meantime the effects of evil communication and example."[20]  While
Montreal had a better water supply, it remained practically in darkness
during the winter nights, through the lapsing in 1836 of its earlier
municipal organization.[21]  Strangers were said to find the provincial
self-importance of its inhabitants irritating.  At the other extreme of
the province, Mrs. Jameson found fault with the citizens of Toronto for
their social conventionalism.  "I did not expect to find here," she
wrote, "in the new capital of a new country, with the boundless forests
within half a mile of us on almost every side, concentrated as it were,
the worst evils of our old and most artificial social system at home,
with none of its _agrémens_, and none of its advantages.  Toronto is
like a fourth or fifth rate provincial town with the pretensions of a
capital city."[22]

Everywhere, if contemporary prints of the cities may be taken as
evidence, the military element was very prominent, and the tone was
distinctly English.  The leaders of society looked {27} to London for
their fashions, and men like John Beverley Robinson moved naturally, if
a little stiffly, in the best English circles when they crossed to
England.  It was, indeed, a straining after a social standard not quite
within the reach of the ambitious provincial, which produced the
conventionalism and dullness, noticed by British visitors in Canadian
towns.

In the smaller towns or villages where pretensions were fewer, and
society accepted itself for that which it really was, there was much
rude plenty and happiness.  An Ayrshire settler writing in 1845, after
an orthodox confession that Canada, like Scotland, "groaned under the
curse of the Almighty," described his town, Cobourg, as a place where
wages were higher and prices lower than at home.  "A carpenter," he
writes, "asks 6s. sterling for a day's work (without board), mason 8s.,
men working by the day at labourer's work 2s. and board, 4s. a day in
harvest.  Hired men by the month, 10 and 11 dollars in summer, and 7
and 8 in winter, and board.  Women, 3 and 4 dollars per month, not much
higher than at home.  Provisions are cheaper here than at home.  Wheat,
4s. per bushel; oats 1s. 3d. and 1s. 6d per bushel; potatoes, 1s. 6d.;
beef and pork, 3d. and 4d. per {28} lb.; butter, 6d. per lb.; cheese,
6d.; tobacco, 1s. per lb.; whisky, 1s. 6d. per gallon; apples, 1s. 6d.
per bushel; tea from 2s. 6d. to 4s., and sugar, 6d. per lb....  A man
by honest industry here may live comfortably and support himself
decently--I can, I know--and save something too.  We live much better
here than at home."[23]

More especially in the smaller towns, the externals must have presented
a steady and dull monotony--the jail and court-house, three or four
churches, a varying number of mean-looking stores including a liberal
proportion of taverns, and the irregular rows of private houses.

If lack of efficient public spirit, and social monotony, marked the
towns, the settlers in the bush were hardly likely to show a vigorous
communal spirit.  They had their common life, building, clearing,
harvesting in local "bees," primitive assemblies in which work,
drinking, and recreation welded the primitive community together, and
the "grog-boss" became for a time the centre of society.[24]  But the
average day of the farmer was solitary, and, except where politics
meant {29} bridges, roads, and material gifts, his outlook was limited
by the physical strain of his daily life, and work and sleep followed
too closely on each other's track to leave time for other things.
M'Taggart has a quaint picture of a squatter, which must have been
typical of much within the colony in 1839.  He found the settler, Peter
Armstrong, "in a snug little cabin, with a wife, two children, some
good sleek grey cats, and a very respectable-looking dog.  He had but
few wants, his health was aye good; there was spring water plenty just
aside him, and enough to make a good fire in winter, while with what he
caught, shot, gathered and grew in the yard, he lived well enough."
His relation to the state, secular and ecclesiastical, is best gauged
by his admission that when it came to marriage, he and his
wife--Scottish like himself--"just took ane anither's word on't."[25]
Crime, on the whole, considering the elements out of which the
community had been formed, was surprisingly little in evidence.[26]  In
certain regions it had a natural fertility.  Wherever the white trader
met the Indian, or rival {30} fur-traders strove in competition, the
contact between the vices of the two communities bred disorder, and
Canadian trading success was too often marked by the indiscriminate
ruin of the Indians through drink and disease.[27]  At Bytown, where
the lumberers gathered to vary their labours in the bush with
dissipation, the community "was under the control of a very dangerous
class of roughs, who drank, gambled, and fought continually, and were
the terror of all well-disposed citizens."[28]  Drunkenness seems to
have been a very prevalent vice, probably because whisky was so cheaply
produced; and where self-restraint was weak, and vast numbers of the
poorest classes from Britain formed the basis of society, drunkenness
was accompanied by bestial violence, or even death, in sudden and
dreadful forms.[29]  But it was the verdict of a Scottish clergyman,
who played his part in pioneer work round Perth, that "considering the
mixture of worthless persons, which our population formerly contained,
it was astonishing how few crimes had been committed."

{31}

Three powerful influences helped to shape the young Canadian community
and to give it some appearance of unity--education, religion, and
politics.  It now becomes necessary to examine these factors in
Canadian existence in the years prior to, and immediately after, the
visit of Durham to the colony.  In religion and education, however, our
analysis must concern Upper and British Canada rather than the French
region.  In the latter the existence and dominance of the Catholic
church greatly simplified matters.  Thanks to the eighteenth century
agreements with the French, Roman Catholicism had been established on
very favourable terms in Lower Canada, and dominated that region to the
exclusion of practically all other forms of religious life.  As has
already been shown, the church controlled not only religion but
education.  If the women of the Lower Province were better educated
than the men, it was because the convent schools provided adequately
for female education.  If higher education was furnished in
superabundance, again the church was the prime agent, as it was also in
the comparative neglect of the rank and file; and comment was made by
Durham's commissioners on the fact that the priesthood resented
anything which weakened {32} its control over the schools.  This
Catholic domination had a very notable influence in politics, for,
after the first outbursts of nationality were over, the Catholic laity
in politics proved themselves a steadily conservative force.  La
Fontaine, the first great French leader who knew how to co-operate with
the British Canadians, was only by accident a progressive, and escaped
from politics when the growth of Upper Canada radicalism began to draw
him into dangerous religious questions.[30]  But in the Upper Province,
education and religion did not show this stationary and consistent
character, and played no little part in preparing for and accentuating
the political agitation.

Education had a history rather of good intentions than of brilliant
achievement.  At different times in the earlier nineteenth century,
schemes for district grammar schools and general common schools were
prepared, and sums of money, unhappily not in increasing amounts, were
voted for educational purposes.  But, apart from the doubtful
enthusiasm of the legislators, the education {33} of the British
settlers was hampered by an absence of suitable teachers, and the
difficulty of letting children, who were often the only farm assistants
at hand, attend school for any length of time.  According to good
evidence, half of the true school population never saw the schools, and
the other half could give only seven months in the year to their
training.[31]

In most country districts, the settlers had to trust to luck both for
teachers and for schoolhouses, and beginnings which promised better
things too often ended in blank failure.  There is both humour and
romance in these early struggles after education.  In Ekfried, by the
Thames, in Western Canada, there had been no school, till the arrival
of an honest Scot, Robert Campbell, and the backwardness of the season
in 1842, gave the settlement a schoolmaster, and the new settler some
ready money.  "I get a dollar and a half, a quarter per scholar," he
wrote to his friends in Scotland, "and seeing that the wheat did
little, I am glad I did engage, for we got plenty of provisions."[32]
In Perth, a more ambitious start {34} met with a tragic end.  The
Scottish clergyman, appointed to the district by government, opened a
school at the request of the inhabitants.  All went well, and a
generous government provided fifty pounds by way of annual stipend;
until a licentiate of the Anglican Church arrived.  By virtue of the
standing of his church, the newcomer took precedence of the Scottish
minister and displaced him as educational leader.  But, says the Scot,
with an irony, unchristian but excusable, "the school under the
direction of my clerical successor, soon after died of a consumption,
and the school-house has been for sometime empty."[33]

The main difficulty in education was to provide an adequate supply of
competent teachers.  Complaints against those who offered their
services were almost universal.  According to a Niagara witness, not
more than one out of ten teachers in the district was competent to
instruct his pupils even in the humblest learning,[34] and the
commissioners who reported to the government of Upper Canada in 1839
both confirmed these {35} complaints, and described the root of the
offence when they said, "In this country, the wages of the working
classes are so high, that few undertake the office of schoolmaster,
except those who are unable to do anything else; and hence the
important duties of education are often entrusted to incompetent and
improper persons.  The income of the schoolmaster should, at least, be
equal to that of a common labourer."[35]  In so precarious a position,
it was unfortunate that sectarian and local feeling should have
provoked a controversy at the capital of the western district.  Much as
the education of the province owed to John Strachan, he did infinite
harm by involving the foundation of a great central school, Upper
Canada College, and of the provincial university, in a bitter religious
discussion.  It was not until the public capacity and unsectarian
enthusiasm of Egerton Ryerson were enlisted in the service of
provincial education, that Upper Canada emerged from her period of
failure and struggle.

Apart from provincial and governmental efforts, there were many
voluntary experiments, of which Strachan's famous school at Cornwall,
was perhaps the most notable.  After all, the colonists were {36}
Britons, many of them trained in the Scottish system of national
democratic education, and wherever the struggle for existence slackened
down, they turned to plan a Canadian system as like as possible to that
which they had left.  Kingston was notably enterprising in this
respect.  Not only were there schools for the more prosperous classes,
but attempts were made to provide cheap education for the poor, at
first supported by the voluntary contributions of ladies, and then by a
committee representative of the best Anglican and Presbyterian
sentiment.  Three of these schools were successfully conducted at very
small charges, and, in certain cases, the poorest received education
free.[36]  In higher education the period of union in Canada exhibited
great activity.  The generous provision made for a King's College in
Toronto had been for a long time stultified by the ill-timed sectarian
spirit of the Bishop of Toronto; but a more reasonable temper prevailed
after the Rebellion, and the second governor-general of the united
provinces, Sir Charles Bagot, spent much of his short time of service
in securing professors and seeing the provincial university
launched.[37] {37} At the same time, the two other Canadian colleges of
note, M'Gill University and Queen's College, came into active
existence.  In October, 1839, after many years of delay, Montreal saw
the corner-stone of the first English and Protestant College in Lower
Canada laid,[38] and in the winter of 1841-2, Dr. Liddell sailed from
Scotland to begin the history of struggle and gallant effort which has
characterized Queen's College, Kingston, from first to last.  It is
perhaps the most interesting detail of early university education in
Canada, that the Presbyterian College started in a frame house, with
two professors, one representing Arts and one Theology, and with some
twenty students, very few of whom, however, were "fitted to be
matriculated."[39]

It is well to remember, in face of beginnings so irregular, and even
squalid, that deficiencies in Canadian college education had been made
good by the English and Scottish universities, and that Canadian higher
education was from the outset assisted by the genuine culture and
learning of the British colleges; for the main sources of university
inspiration in British North America {38} were Oxford and Cambridge,
Glasgow and Edinburgh.[40]

There were, of course, other less formal modes of education.  When once
political agitation commenced, the press contributed not a little to
the education of the nation, and must indeed be counted one of the
chief agencies of information, if not of culture.  Everywhere, from
Quebec to Hamilton, enterprising politicians made their influence felt
through newspapers.  The period prior to the Rebellion had seen
Mackenzie working through his _Colonial Advocate_; and the cause of
responsible government soon found saner and abler exponents in Francis
Hincks and George Brown.  At every important centre, one, two, or even
more news-sheets, not without merit, were maintained; and the secular
press was reinforced by such educational enterprise as the Dougalls
attempted in the _Montreal Witness_, or by church papers like the
Methodist _Christian Guardian_.[41] {39} Nothing, perhaps, is more
characteristic of this phase of Canadian intellectual growth than the
earlier volumes of the _Witness_, which played a part in Canada similar
to that of the Chambers' publications in Scotland.  The note struck was
deeply sober and moral; the appeal was made to the working and middle
classes who in Canada as in Scotland were coming into possession of
their heritage; and if the intellectual level attained was never very
high, an honest attempt was being made to educate the shop-keepers and
farmers of Canada into wholesome national ideals.

Little literary activity seems to have existed outside of politics and
the newspapers.  For a time cheap reprints from America assisted
Britons in Canada with their forbidden fruits, but government at last
intervened.  It is a curious fact that this perfectly just and natural
prohibition had a most unfortunate effect in checking the reading
habits of the colony.[42]  In the larger towns there {40} were
circulating libraries, and presumably immigrants occasionally brought
books with them; but newspaper advertisements suggest that school
books, and the like, formed almost the only stock-in-trade of the
book-shop; and the mercurial Major Richardson, after agitating the
chief book-sellers in Canada on behalf of one of his literary ventures,
found that his total sales amounted to barely thirty copies, and even
an auction sale at Kingston discovered only one purchaser, who limited
his offer to sevenpence halfpenny.  In speaking, then, of the Canadian
political community in 1839, one cannot say, as Burke did of the
Americans in 1775, that they were a highly educated or book-reading
people.  Their politicians, progressive and conservative alike, might
have shortened, simplified, and civilized certain stages in their
political agitations, had they been able more fully to draw on the
authority of British political experience; and their provincialism
would not have thrust itself so disagreeably on the modern student, had
Locke, Rousseau, Burke, and the greater leaders in modern political
science, been household names in early Victorian Canada.

As with other young communities, the church and religion had their part
to play in the shaping {41} of modern Canada.  And yet it would be
impossible to attribute to any of the Canadian churches an influence so
decisive as that which religion exercised through Presbyterianism in
the creation of the Scottish democracy, or through Independency in
moulding the New England character.  For while the question of a
religious establishment proved one of the most exciting issues in
politics, influences more truly religious suffered a natural
degradation and diminution through their over-close association with
secular affairs.

Once again the situation in Lower Canada was simplified by the
conditions prevailing among the French Canadians.  For Lower Canada was
whole-heartedly Catholic, and the Canadian branch of the Roman Church
had its eulogy pronounced in no uncertain fashion by the Earl of
Durham, who, after praising its tolerant spirit, summed up the services
of the priesthood in these terms: "The Catholic priesthood of this
Province have, to a remarkable degree, conciliated the good-will of
persons of all creeds; and I know of no parochial clergy in the world,
whose practice of all the Christian virtues, and zealous discharge of
their clerical duties, is more universally admired, and has been
productive of more beneficial consequences.  {42} Possessed of incomes
sufficient, and even large, according to the notions entertained in the
country, and enjoying the advantage of education, they have lived on
terms of equality and kindness with the humblest and least instructed
inhabitants of the rural districts.  Intimately acquainted with the
wants and characters of their neighbours, they have been the promoters
and dispensers of charity, and the effectual guardians of the morals of
the people; and in the general absence of any permanent institutions of
civil government, the Catholic Church has presented almost the only
semblance of stability and organization, and furnished the only
effectual support for civilization and order.  The Catholic clergy of
Lower Canada are entitled to this expression of my esteem, not only
because it is founded on truth, but because a grateful recognition of
their eminent services, in resisting the arts of the disaffected, is
especially due to them from one who has administered the government of
the Province in these troubled times."[43]

Upper Canada and the British community presented a somewhat different
picture.  Certain Roman Catholic elements among the Irish and the
Scottish Highlanders reinforced the ranks of {43} Catholicism, but for
the greater part Anglicanism and Presbyterianism were the
ecclesiastical guides of the settlers.  At first, apart from official
religion, the Church of England appeared in Canada in missionary form,
and about 1820 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had
fifteen missionaries in Lower Canada, and seventeen in Upper Canada.
But under the fostering care of governors like Colborne, and the
organizing genius of Dr. Strachan, Rector, Archdeacon, and latterly
Bishop in Toronto, the Anglican Church in Canada became a
self-dependent unit.  The Bishop of Toronto was able to boast in 1842
that in his western visitation, which lasted from June till October, he
had "consecrated two churches and one burial ground, confirmed 756
persons at twenty-four different stations, and travelled, including his
journeys for the formation of District Branches of the Church Society,
upwards of 2,500 miles."[44]  In cities like Toronto and Kingston it
was on the whole the church of the governing class, and shared in the
culture and public qualities of that class.  Nor was it negligent of
the cure of poorer souls, for Anglicans co-operated with Presbyterians
in the {44} management of the poor schools in Kingston, and in that and
the other more prominent towns of the province, the English parish
church system seems to have been transplanted and worked most
efficiently.  Equal in importance, if not in numbers, Scottish
Presbyterianism claimed its section of the community.  Down to 1822,
there were but six organized congregations in Upper and Lower Canada
connected with the Church of Scotland,[45] but at the first
Presbyterian Synod held in Canada, in 1831, fourteen ministers and five
elders gathered at Kingston to represent the Church;[46] and by 1837
the number of congregations had grown to 37 in Upper Canada, and 14 in
Lower Canada.  Nor were these weak and struggling efforts.  The
Scottish Church at Kingston had in 1841 a membership of 350, and an
average attendance of 800.  Like its Anglican rival, it was simply a
parish church, and its minister, trained in Edinburgh, as the Anglican
cleric came naturally from an English college, visited, preached, and
disciplined according to the rules of Knox and Melville, and
maintained, perhaps more genuinely than either school or {45} newspaper
could, an educational influence on his flock not unworthy of the mother
country.  Here and there the ties, which still remained strong, between
Canadian settlements and the districts in Scotland whence the settlers
were drawn, proved useful aids in church extension.  Lanark, in Upper
Canada, owed its church to the efforts of friends in Lanarkshire, in
Scotland, who collected no less a sum than £290 for the purpose.[47]

But the religious life of Canada was assisted by another less official
force, the Methodist Church.  Methodism in its earlier days incurred
the reproach of being rather American than British, and, in one of his
most unjustifiable perversions of the truth, Strachan tried to make the
fact tell against the sect, in his notorious table of ecclesiastical
statistics.  Undoubtedly there was a stronger American element in the
Methodist connection than in either of the other churches; and its
spirit lent itself more readily to American innovations.  Its fervent
methods drew from the ranks of colder churches the more emotional, and
being freer and homelier in its ritual, it appealed very directly to a
rude and half-educated community.  Thus the Methodist preachers made
{46} rapid headway, more especially in regions untouched by the
official churches.

In the representative man of early Canadian Methodism, Egerton Ryerson,
qualities conspicuously British and conservative, appeared.  Through
him Methodism came forward as the supporter of the British connection
in the Metcalfe troubles, as through him it may claim some of the glory
of organizing an adequate system of provincial education.  But, after
all, the noblest work of the sect was done in informal and irregular
fashion.  They were the pioneers and _coureurs du bois_ of the British
province in the religious world.  Perhaps the most genuine tribute paid
to this earlier phase of Methodism was that of John Beverley Robinson,
when his fellow Anglicans blamed him in 1842 for granting a plot of
ground for a Methodist chapel.  "Frequently," he retorted, "in the most
lonely parts of the wilderness, in townships where a clergyman of the
Church of England had never been heard, and probably never seen, I have
found the population assembled in some log building, earnestly engaged
in acts of devotion, and listening to those doctrines and truths which
are inculcated in common by most Christian denominations, but which, if
it had not been for {47} the ministration of dissenting preachers,
would for thirty years have been but little known, if at all, to the
greater part of the inhabitants of the interior of Upper Canada."[48]
Still the Canadian Methodist Church did not occupy so conspicuous a
place in the official public life of Canada, and in Sydenham's
Legislative Council of 1841, out of twenty-four members, eight
represented Anglicanism, eight Presbyterianism, eight Catholicism, and
Methodism had to find lowlier places for its political leaders.[49]

Hitherto religion has been viewed in its social and spiritual aspects.
But Canadian history has, with perhaps over-emphasis, selected one
great controversy as the central point in the religious life of the
province.  It is not my intention to enter here into the wearisome
details of the Clergy Reserve question.  But the fight over the
establishment principle forms an essential factor in the social and
political life of Canada between 1839 and 1854, the year in which it
was finally settled.  It is first necessary to discriminate between
what may be called casual and incidental support to churches in Canada,
and the main Clergy Reserve {48} fund.  When Dr. Black challenged, in
the interests of Presbyterianism, certain monies paid to Anglican
churches in Upper and Lower Canada, he was able to point to direct
assistance given by the Imperial Parliament to the Anglican Church in
Canada.  He was told in answer that these grants were temporarily made
to individuals with whose lives they terminated, and that a pledge had
been given in 1832 that Britain should be relieved of such
expenses.[50]  In a similar fashion, when the district of Perth, in
Upper Canada, was settled by discharged soldiers and emigrants from
Scotland, "Government offered assistance for the support of a minister,
_without respect to religious denomination_," and, as a matter of fact,
the community thus assisted to a clergyman, received, not a minister of
the Church of Scotland, but one ordained by the Secession Church in
Scotland--a curious but laudable example of laxity on the part of
government.[51]

The root and ground of offending lay in the thirty-sixth and following
clauses of the Constitutional Act of 1791, which proposed to support
{49} and maintain a Protestant clergy in the provinces by grants of
land, equal in value to the seventh part of lands granted for other
purposes.  On the face of it, and interpreted by the clauses which
follow, the Act seems to bear out the Anglican contention that the
English Church establishment received an extension to Canada through
the Act, and that no other church was expected to receive a share.  It
is true that the legal decision of 1819, and the views of colonial
secretaries like Glenelg, admitted at least the Scottish Church to a
portion of the benefits.  But for the purposes of the situation in
1839, it is merely necessary to say that a British parliament in 1791,
ignorant of actual colonial conditions, and more especially of the
curious ecclesiastical developments with which the American colonies
had modified the British system before 1776, and probably forgetful of
the claims of the Church of Scotland to parliamentary recognition, had
given Canada the beginnings of an Anglican Church establishment; and
that the Anglicans in Canada, and more especially those led by Dr. John
Strachan, had more than fulfilled the sectarian and monopolist
intentions of the legislators.

Three schools of opinion formed themselves in {50} the intervening
years.  First and foremost came the establishment men, mainly Anglican,
but with a certain Presbyterian following, who claimed to monopolize
the benefits, such as they were, of the Clergy Reserve funds.  Canada
as a British colony was bound to support the one or two state churches
of the mother country; religious inequality was to flourish there as at
home; dissent was to receive the same stigma and disqualification, and
the dominant church or churches were to live, not by the efforts of
their members, but at the expense of all citizens of the state, whether
Anglican, Presbyterian, or Methodist.  This phase of opinion received
its most offensive expression from leaders like the Bishop of Toronto.
To these monopolists, any modification of the Anglican settlement
seemed a "tyrannical and unjust measure," and they adopted an
ecclesiastical arrogance towards their fellow-Christians, which did
much to alienate popular sympathies throughout the province.

At the other extreme was a solid mass of public sentiment which had
little interest in the ecclesiastical theories of the Bishop of
Toronto, and which resented alike attempts to convert the provincial
university into an Anglican college, and the cumbrous and unjust form
of church establishment, {51} the most obvious evidence of which lay in
the undeveloped patches of Clergy Reserve land scattered everywhere
throughout the settlements.  It was the undoubted desire of a majority
in 1840 that the Clergy Reserve system should be ended, the former
reserves sold, and the proceeds applied to educational and general
purposes; a desire which had been registered in the House of Assembly
on fourteen different occasions since 1826.[52]  The case for the
voluntary principle in Canada had many exponents, but these words of
Dr. John Rolph in 1836 express the spirit of the movement in both its
strength and its weakness: "Instead of making a State provision for any
one or more churches; instead of apportioning the Clergy Reserves among
them with a view to promoting Christianity; instead of giving pensions
and salaries to ministers to make them independent of voluntary
contributions from the people, I would studiously avoid that policy,
and leave truth unfettered and unimpeded to make her own conquests....
The professions of law and physic are well represented in this
Assembly, and bear ample testimony to the generosity of the people
towards them.  Will good, pious and evangelical ministers of our holy
religion be likely to {52} fare worse than the physicians of the body,
or the agents for our temporal affairs?  Let gospel ministers, as the
Scriptures say, live by the gospel, and the apostolic maxim that the
workman is worthy of his hire implies the performance of duty rewarded
temporarily by those who impose it.  There is no fear that the
profession will become extinct for want of professors."[53]

Between the extremes, however, there existed a group of moderate
politicians, represented, in the Upper Province by Baldwin, in the
Lower by La Fontaine, and among British statesmen apparently by both
Sydenham and Elgin.  Especially among its Canadian members, this group
felt keenly the desirability of supporting religion, as it struggled
through the difficulties inevitably connected with early colonial life.
But neither Baldwin, who was a devoted Anglican, nor La Fontaine, a
faithful son of his Church, showed any tinge of Strachan's bitterness
as they considered the question; and nothing impressed Canadian opinion
more than did La Fontaine's speech, in a later phase of the Clergy
Reserve troubles, when he solemnly renounced on behalf of his
coreligionists any chance of stealing an advantage while the
Protestants {53} were quarrelling, and when he stated his opinion that
the endowment belonged to the Protestant clergy, and should be shared
equally among them.  It was this school of thought---to anticipate
events by a year or two--which received the sanction of Sydenham's
statesmanship, and that energetic mind never accomplished anything more
notable than when, in the face of a strong secularizing feeling, to the
justification for which he was in no way blind, he repelled the party
of monopoly, and yet retained the endowment for the Protestant churches
of Canada.  "The Clergy Reserves," he wrote in a private letter, "have
been, and are, the great overwhelming grievance--the root of all the
troubles of the province, the cause of the Rebellion--the never-failing
watchword at the hustings--the perpetual source of discord, strife, and
hatred.  Not a man of any party but has told me that the greatest boon
which could be conferred on the country would be that they should be
swept into the Atlantic, and that nobody should get them.  My Bill[54]
has gone through the Assembly by a considerable majority, thirty to
twenty, and I feel confident that I can get it through the {54} Council
without the change of a word.  If it is really carried, it is the
greatest work that ever has been done in this country, and will be of
more solid advantage to it than all the loans and all the troops you
can make or send.  It is worth ten unions, and was ten times more
difficult."[55]

It is a melancholy comment on the ecclesiastical interpretation of
religion that, ten years later, when the firmly expressed desires of
all moderate men had given the Bishop of Toronto a good excuse for
acquiescence in Sydenham's _status quo_, that pugnacious ecclesiastic
still fought to save as much of the monopoly as could be secured.[56]

With the Clergy Reserve dispute, the region of politics has been
reached; and, after all, politics furnished the most powerful influence
in the young Canadian community.  But politics must be taken less in
the constitutional sense, as has been the custom with Canadian writers,
and more in the social and human sense.  It is important also to note
the broad stretches of Canadian existence {55} into which they hardly
intruded.  Political questions found few exponents among the pioneers
as they cleared the forests, or gathered lumber for the British market,
or pushed far to the west and north in pursuit of furs.  Even the
Rebellion, when news of it reached Strickland and his fellow-settlers
in the Peterborough country, came to them less as part of a prolonged
struggle in which they all were taking part, than as an abnormal
incident, to be ended outright by loyal strength.  They hardly seem to
have thought that any liberties of theirs were really endangered.  When
Mackenzie himself complained that instead of entering Toronto with four
or five thousand men, he found himself at the head of a poor two
hundred, he does not seem to have realized that, even had his
fellow-conspirators not mismanaged things, it would still have been
difficult to keep hard-working settlers keyed up to the pitch of
revolutionary and abstract doctrines.[57]  There must have been many
settlers of the temper of the humble Scottish janitor in Queen's
College, Kingston, who wrote, in the midst of the struggle of parties
in 1851: "For my part I never trouble my head about one of them.
Although the polling-house was just across {56} the street, I never
went near it."[58]  In the cities, however, and along the main lines of
communication, the interest must have been keen, and the country
undoubtedly attained its manhood as it struggled towards the solution
of questions like those of the Clergy Reserves, the financing of the
colony, the regulation of trade and immigration, and, above all others,
the definition of responsible government.

Something has already been said of the various political groups in the
colony, for they corresponded roughly to the different strata of
settlement--French, Loyalist, and men of the later immigration.  It is
true, as Sydenham and Elgin pointed out, that the British party names
hardly corresponded to local divisions--and that these divisions were
really too petty to deserve the name of parties.  Yet it would be
foolish to deny the actual existence of the groups, or to refuse to see
in their turbulence and strife the beginning of national
self-consciousness, and the first stage in a notable political
development.

Most conspicuous among the political forces, because the bond of party
union was for them {57} something deeper than opinion, and must be
called racial, was the French-Canadian group, with the whole weight of
_habitant_ support behind it.  From the publication of Lord Durham's
_Report_, through the Sydenham regime, and down till Sir Charles Bagot
surrendered to their claims, the French politicians presented an
unbroken and hostile front to the British community.  Colborne had
repressed their risings at the point of the bayonet; a Whig government
had deprived them temporarily of free institutions; Durham--their
friend after his fashion--had bidden them be absorbed into the greater
British community; Sydenham came to enforce what Durham had suggested;
and, with each new check, their pride had grown more stubborn and their
nationalism more intense.  Bagot, who understood them and whom they
came to trust, may be allowed to describe their characteristics,
through the troubled first years of union: "On Lord Sydenham's
arrival," he wrote to Stanley, "he found the Lower Province deprived of
a constitution, the legislative functions of the government being
administered by a special council, consisting of a small number of
members nominated by the Crown.  A large portion of the people, at
least those of French origin, prostrate under {58} the effects of the
Rebellion, overawed by the power of Great Britain, and excluded from
all share in the government, had resigned themselves to a sullen and
reluctant submission, or to a perverse but passive resistance to the
government.  This temper was not improved by the passing of the Act of
Union.  In this measure, heedless of the generosity of the Imperial
government, in overlooking their recent disaffection, and giving them a
free and popular constitution, ... they apprehended a new instrument of
subjection, and accordingly prepared to resist it.  Lord Sydenham found
them in this disposition, and despairing, from its early
manifestations, of the possibility of overcoming or appeasing it,
before the period at which it would be necessary to put in force the
Act of Union, he determined upon evincing his indifference to it, and
upon taking steps to carry out his views, in spite of the opposition of
the French party....  They have from that time declared and evinced
their hostility to the Union ... and have maintained a consistent,
united, and uncompromising opposition to the government which was
concerned in carrying it into execution."[59]

To describe the French in politics, it has been {59} necessary to
advance a year or two beyond 1839, for the Rebellion had terminated one
phase of their political existence, and the characteristics of the next
phase did not become apparent till the Union Assembly of 1841 and 1842.
It was indeed an abnormal form of the national and racial question
which there presented itself.  French Canada found itself represented
by a party, over twenty in number, the most compact in the House of
Assembly, and with _la nation Canadienne_ solidly behind them.  In La
Fontaine, Viger, Morin and others, it had leaders both skilful and
fully trusted.  Yet the party of the British supremacy quoted Durham
and others in favour of a plan for the absorption of French Canada in
the British element; and the same party could recount, with telling
effect, the past misdeeds, or at least the old suspicions, connected
with the names of the French leaders.  Misunderstood, and yet half
excusably misunderstood; self-governing, and yet deprived of many of
the legitimate consequences and fruits of self-government; without
places or honours, and yet coherent, passionately French, and
competently led, the French party stood across the path of Canadian
peace, menacing, and with a racial rather than a party threat.

{60}

In the Upper Province, the party in possession, the so-called Family
Compact group, posed as the only friends of Britain.  They had never
possessed more than an accidental majority in the Lower House, and,
since Durham's rule, it seemed likely that their old supremacy in the
Executive and Legislative Councils had come to an end.  Yet as their
power receded, their language became the more peremptory, and their
contempt for other groups the more bitter.  One of the most respectable
of the group, J. S. Cartwright, frankly confessed that he thought his
fellow-colonists unfit for any extension of self-government "in a
country where almost universal suffrage prevails, where the great mass
of the people are uneducated, and where there is but little of that
salutary influence which hereditary rank and great wealth exercise in
Great Britain."[60]  Their position had an apparent but unreal
strength, because they knew that the older type of Colonial official,
the entire British Conservative party, and the Church of England, at
home and abroad, supported them.  As late as July, 1839, Arthur, the
representative of the Crown in Upper Canada, could write thus to his
government concerning more than half the {61} population under his
authority: "There is a considerable section of persons who are disloyal
to the core; reform is on their lips, but separation is in their
hearts.  These people having for the last two or three years made a
'responsible government' their watch-word, are now extravagantly elated
because the Earl of Durham has recommended that measure.  They regard
it as an unerring means to get rid of all British connection, while the
Earl of Durham, on the contrary, has recommended it as a measure for
cementing the existing bond of union with the mother country."[61]

Their programme was precise and consistent.  The influence of a too
democratic franchise was to be modified by a Conservative upper house,
and an executive council, chosen not in accordance with popular wishes,
but from the class--their own--which had so long been dominant in the
executive.  The British connection depended, in their view, on the
permanent alliance between their group and whatsoever representative
the British crown might send to Canada.  French Canadian feeling they
were prepared to repress as a thing rebellious and un-English, and the
{62} friends of the French in Upper Canada they regarded very much as a
South African might the Englishman who should be prepared to strengthen
his political position by an alliance with the native peoples; although
events were to prove that, when other elements of self-interest
dictated a different course, they were not unwilling to co-operate in
the interests of disorder with the French.  In ecclesiastical affairs,
they supported the establishment of an Anglican Church in Canada, and
insulted religion never found more eloquent defenders than did the
Clergy Reserve establishment at the hands of Sir Allan MacNab, the
Conservative leader, and his allies.  But events and their own factious
excesses had broken their power.  They had allowed nothing for the
possibilities of political education, in a land where the poorest had
infinite chances of gaining independence.  They scorned democracy at a
time when nothing else in politics had a stable future; and the country
naturally distrusted constitutional logicians whose conclusions
invariably landed them in the sole possession of emoluments and place.
Sydenham's quick eye foresaw the coming rout, and it was his opinion,
before the Assembly of 1841 came to make matters certain, that moderate
men would overturn the {63} sway of old Toryism, and that the wild
heads under MacNab would stultify themselves by their foolish
conduct.[62]

In Upper Canada, the Conservative and Family Compact group had to face
a vigorous Reforming opposition.  It is well, however, after 1838, to
discriminate between any remnants of the old Mackenzie school, and the
men under whom Canada was to secure unrestricted self-government.  The
truth is that the situation up to 1837 had been too abnormal to permit
the constitutional radicals to show themselves in their true character.
Mackenzie himself, in the rather abject letter with which he sought
reinstatement in 1848, admitted the falsity of his old position: "Had I
seen things in 1837 as I do in 1848, I would have shuddered at the very
idea of revolt, no matter what our wrongs might have been.  I ought, as
a Scotsman, to have stood by the government in America to the last;
exerted any energy I possessed to make it better, more just, more
perfect; left it for a time, if too oppressive, but never tried, as I
did, to put it down."[63]  Mackenzie's ideal, discovered {64} by him
too late to be very useful, was actually that of the Reforming
Loyalists who refused to indulge in treason in 1837, but who determined
to secure their ends by peaceful persuasion.  Their leader in public
affairs was Robert Baldwin, whose career and opinions may be more fitly
considered at a later point, and Francis Hincks expounded their views
in his paper _The Examiner_.  They were devoted adherents of the
Responsible Government school; that is, they desired to have provincial
cabinets, not simply chosen so that they might not conflict with public
opinion, but imposed upon the governor by public opinion through its
representatives in the House of Assembly.  They had for years protested
against the Clergy Reserves monopoly, and although Baldwin seems always
to have favoured the retention of some form of assistance to religion,
the ordinary reformer was vehement for absolute secularization.
Sydenham when he came, refused to admit that the British party names
were anything but misnomers in Canada; and yet Hincks was not singular
among the reformers when he said that he had been in favour of all the
measures advocated by the British progressives--Catholic Emancipation,
the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Abolition of {65} Slavery,
and Parliamentary Reform.[64]  Their relation to the French was
curious.  Unlike the French, they were usually strong advocates of a
union of the two provinces, and they sympathized neither with
Papineau's doctrinaire republicanism, nor with the sullen negative
hatred of things British which then possessed so many minds in Lower
Canada.  But grievances still unredressed created a fellow-feeling with
the French, and from 1839 until 1842 the gradual formation of an
Anglo-French reforming _bloc_, under Baldwin and La Fontaine, was one
of the most notable developments in Canadian political life.

After the Union, as before it, the political life of Canada was
characterized by a readiness to resort to violence, and a lack of
political good manners, which contrasted painfully with the eloquent
phrases and professions of the orators on either side.  The earliest
impression which the first governor-general of the Union received of
politics in his province was one of disorder and mismanagement.  "You
can form no idea of the manner in which a Colonial Parliament transacts
its business," Poulett Thomson wrote from Toronto, in 1839.  "When they
came to their own affairs, {66} and, above all, to the money matters,
there was a scene of confusion and riot of which no one in England can
have any idea.  Every man proposes a vote for his own job, and bills
are introduced without notice, and carried through all their stages in
a quarter of an hour."[65]  The first efforts in the struggle for
responsible government were rendered needlessly irritating by the
absence of that spirit of courteous moderation which usually
characterizes the proceedings of the Imperial Parliament.  The
relations between the governor and his ministers, at the best
difficult, were made impossible for a man like Metcalfe by the
ill-mannered disdain with which, as all the citizens of his capital
knew, the cabinet spoke of their official head; and in debate the
personal element played far too prominent a part.  In all the early
Union assemblies, too, the house betrayed its inexperience by passing
rapidly from serious constitutional questions to petty jobs and
quarrels, and as rapidly back again to first principles.  There was a
general failure to see the risk run by too frequent discussions on
fundamentals, and much of the bitterness of party strife would have
been avoided if the rival parties could have prosecuted their {67}
adverse operations by slower and more scientific approaches.

The warmth of feeling and the disorder exhibited in the councils of
state and the assembly, met with a ready response in the country.  It
is only fair to say that many of the gravest disturbances were caused
by recent immigrants, more especially by the Irish labourers on the
canals in the neighbourhood of Montreal.[66]  But the whole community
must share in the discredit.  The days had not yet ceased when
political bills called on adherents of one or other party to assemble
"with music and good shillelaghs";[67] and indeed the decade from 1840
to 1850 was distinctly one of political rioting.  The election of 1841
was disgraced, more especially in Lower Canada, by very violent strife.
In 1843 an Act was deemed necessary "to provide for the calling and
orderly holding of public meetings in this province and for the better
preservation of the public peace thereat."[68]  In the Montreal
election of April, 1844, Metcalfe accused both his former
inspector-general and the reform candidate of using inflammatory and
reckless language, and {68} certainly both then and in November
disgraceful riots made the elections no true register of public
sentiment.  At the very end of the decade, the riots caused by the
passing of the "Rebellion Losses" Act, organized, it must be
remembered, by the so-called loyal party, endangered the life of a
governor-general, and made Montreal no longer possible as the seat of
government.  One may perhaps over-estimate the importance of these
details; for, after all, the communal life of Canada was yet in its
extreme youth, and in England itself there were still remnants of the
old eighteenth century disorders, with hints of the newer
revolutionism.  Their importance is rather that they complicated the
task of adjusting imperial standards to suit Canadian self-government,
and introduced unnecessary errors into the conduct of affairs by the
provincial statesmen.

It was obvious then that the United Provinces of Canada had, in 1839,
still some distance to travel before their social, religious, and
political organization could be regarded as satisfactory.  Individually
and collectively poor, the citizens of Canada required direct aid from
the resources of the mother country.  Material improvements in roads
and canals, the introduction of steam, {69} the organization of labour,
were immediately necessary.  Education in all its stages must receive
encouragement and recognition.  Religion must be freed from the
encumbrance of a vexatious controversy.  Municipal institutions and
local government had still to be introduced to teach the people the
elements of self-government; and a broader system of colonial
legislation and administration substituted for the discredited rule of
assemblies and councils at Toronto and Quebec.  There was racial hate
to be quenched; and petty party jealousies to be transmuted into more
useful political energy.  A nation was at its birth.  The problem was
whether in Great Britain there were minds acute and imaginative enough
to see the actual dangers; generous enough not to be dissuaded from
trying to avert them by any rudeness on the part of those who were
being assisted; prophetic enough to recognize that Anglo-Saxon
communities, whether at home or across the seas, will always claim the
right to govern themselves, and that to such self-government none but
the community actually affected may set a limit.



[1] Robinson, _Life of Sir John Beverley Robinson_, Bart., pp. 75-6.

[2] _Report of the Agent for Emigration_, Toronto, January, 1841.  "The
passage extended to seven complete weeks," writes a Scottish settler,
Robert Campbell, in 1840, "and to tell the truth we were weary enough
of it."  MS. letter, _penes me_.

[3] _Conditions and Prospects of Canada in 1854_, London, 1855.

[4] Poulett Scrope, _Life of Lord Sydenham_, pp. 141-2.

[5] Richardson, _Eight Years in Canada_, p. 117.

[6] See an interesting letter of January, 1838 in Christie, _History of
Lower Canada_, v. 109.

[7] _Lord Durham's Report_, Appendix B. (ed. by Lucas), iii. p. 84.

[8] Kaye, _Papers and Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe_, p. 453.
Metcalfe undoubtedly overestimates the influence of these men, as
compared with the church, over the habitant class.

[9] _Lord Durham's Report_ (ed. by Lucas), Appendix D, iii. p. 284.

[10] _Ibid_. p. 267.

[11] M'Taggart, _Three Years in Canada_, i. p. 249.

[12] Kaye, _op. cit._ p. 407.

[13] Mrs. Jameson, _States and Rambles in Canada_, vol. ii. p. 189.

[14] Strickland, _Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West_, vol. i. p. 135.

[15] _Lord Durham's Report_, ii. pp. 242-59.

[16] M'Taggart, ii. pp. 242-5.

[17] See a despatch of Lord Metcalfe on the effect of Irish agitation
on the tranquillity of Canada, Kaye, _op. cit._ pp. 432-4.

[18] Censuses of Canada (1665-1871), vol. iv.; _Appendix to the First
Report of the Board of Registration and Statistics_ (1849); _A
Statement of the Population of Canada_ (1848).

[19] M'Taggart, _op. cit._ i. p. 35.

[20] _Lord Durham's Report_, Appendix A.  Sir Charles Lucas has not
included this appendix in his edition.

[21] _Ibid._ (ed. Lucas), iii. p. 220.

[22] Mrs. Jameson, _Studies and Rambles in Canada_, i. p. 98.

[23] _A Long-treasured Letter_, from _Matthew Fowlds and Other Fenwick
Worthies_, Kilmarnock, 1910, pp. 205-11.

[24] Strickland, _Twenty Seven Years in Canada West_, i. p. 35.

[25] M'Taggart, _op. cit._ i. p. 201.

[26] This statement I modify below in dealing with the violence which
disfigured political life in Canada at this time.

[27] _Passim _in descriptions of the Canadian Indians, and the
North-West.

[28] _Lord Durham's Report_, ii. p. 125 n.

[29] See local news in the early volumes of _The Montreal Witness_.


[30] I have accepted Durham's, rather than Metcalfe's estimate of the
influence of the Roman Catholic church in Canada.  The latter may be
found in a despatch to Stanley, entitled by Kaye, "State of Parties in
1845" (Kaye, _op. cit._ p. 449).

[31] Hodgins, _Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada_, iii.
p. 298.

[32] MS. letter, 5 December, 1842.

[33] Bell, _Hints to Emigrants_, p. 125.

[34] Hodgins, _Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada_, iii.
p. 266.

[35] _Ibid._ p. 249.

[36] _Memorials of the Rev. John Machar_, D.D., p. 62.

[37] Bagot Correspondence, in the Canadian Archives, _passim_.

[38] _Montreal Gazette_, 8 October, 1839.

[39] _Memorials of the Rev. John Machar_, p. 77.

[40] A strong, probably exaggerated, opinion exists among the older
members of the Canadian community that, while information and
specialization have grown, culture has retreated from the standards set
for it by the former school of English and Scottish college instructors.

[41] "The amount of postage paid by newspapers would be a fair
indication of their circulation....  The postage on the _Christian
Guardian_ was £228, which exceeded by £6 the aggregate postage on the
following newspapers: _Colonial Advocate_, £57; _The Courier_, £45;
_Watchman_, £24; _Brockville Recorder_, £16; _Brockville Gazette_, £6;
_Niagara Gleaner_, £17; _Hamilton Free Press_, £11; _Kingston Herald_,
£11; _Kingston Chronicle_, £10; _Perth Examiner_, £10; _Patriot_, £6;
_St. Catherine's Journal_, £6; _York Observer_, £3."--Egerton Ryerson,
_Story of My Life_, p. 144.

[42] _The Montreal Witness_, December, 1845.  "We do not mean to
criticize those prohibitory regulations, but, however good their
motives, the effect has been to girdle the tree of knowledge in Canada,
by shutting out the people from the only available supplies of books."

[43] _Lord Durham's Report_, ii. p. 138.

[44] Strachan, _A Journal of Visitation to the Western Portion of his
Diocese_ (1842).  Third edition, London, 1846.

[45] _Memorial of the Rev. E. Black, D.D., to the Secretary of State
for the Colonies_.

[46] _Memorials of the Rev. J. Machar, D.D._, p. 38.

[47] Bell, _Hints to Emigrants_, p. 86.

[48] Robinson, _Life of Sir J. B. Robinson_, p. 179.

[49] Dent, _The Last Forty Years_, i. p. 109.

[50] Sir G. Grey to the Rev. E. Black, 25 March, 1837, in
_Correspondence relating to the Churches of England and Scotland in
Canada_ (15 April, 1840).

[51] Bell, _Hints to Emigrants_, p. 101.

[52] Lord Sydenham to Lord John Russell, 22 January, 1840.

[53] Quoted from Dent, _The Last Forty Years_, ii. p. 192.

[54] That is, his bill for dividing the Reserves in certain proportions
among the churches.

[55] Poulett Scrope, _Life of Lord Sydenham_, pp. 160-1.

[56] See the Elgin-Grey Correspondence (Canadian Archives) for the year
1850.

[57] Christie, _History of Lower Canada_, v. pp. 113-14.

[58] _Faithful unto Death, a Memorial of John Anderson, late Janitor of
Queen's College_, p. 26.

[59] Sir Charles Bagot to Lord Stanley, 26 September, 1842.

[60] Bagot Correspondence: Cartwright to Bagot, 16 May, 1842.

[61] Arthur to Normanby, 2 July, 1839.

[62] Lord Sydenham to Lord John Russell, 23 February, 1841.

[63] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: W. L. Mackenzie to Major Campbell, 14
February, 1848.

[64] Hincks, _Reminiscences_, p. 15.

[65] Poulett Scrope, _Life of Lord Sydenham_, p. 165.

[66] See, for example, a despatch--Metcalfe to Stanley, 24 June,
1843--descriptive of troubles on the Beauharnois Canal.

[67] A bill of 1833, _penes me_.

[68] Metcalfe to Stanley, 23 December, 1843.




{70}

CHAPTER III.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD SYDENHAM.

Between 1839 and 1854, four governors-general exercised authority over
Canada, the Right Honourable Charles Poulett Thomson, later Lord
Sydenham, Sir Charles Bagot, Charles, Lord Metcalfe, and the Earl of
Elgin.[1]  Their statesmanship, their errors, the accidents which
modified their policies, and the influence of their decisions and
despatches on British cabinets, constitute on the whole the most
important factor in the creation of the modern Canadian theory of
government.  In consequence, their conduct with reference to colonial
autonomy and all the questions therewith connected, demands the most
careful and detailed treatment.

When Lord John Russell, then leader of the House of Commons, and
Secretary of State for the {71} Colonies, selected a new
governor-general of Canada to complete the work begun by Durham, he
entrusted to him an elaborate system of government, most of it
experimental and as yet untried.  He was to superintend the completion
of that Union between Upper and Lower Canada, which Durham had so
strenuously advocated; and the Union was to be the centre of a general
administrative reconstruction.  The programme outlined in Russell's
instructions proposed "a legislative union of the two provinces, a just
regard to the claims of either province in adjusting the terms of that
union, the maintenance of the three Estates of the Provincial
Legislature, the settlement of a permanent Civil List for securing the
independence of the judges, and, to the executive government, that
freedom of action which is necessary for the public good, and the
establishment of a system of local government by representative bodies,
freely elected in the various cities and rural districts."[2]  In
attaining these ends, all of them obviously to the advantage of the
colony, the Colonial Secretary desired to consult, and, as far as
possible, to defer to Canadian public opinion.[3]

{72}

Nevertheless, Lord John Russell had no sooner entered upon his
administrative reforms, than he found himself face to face with a
fundamental constitutional difficulty.  He proposed to play the part of
a reformer in Canada; but the majority of reformers in that province
added to his programme the demand for executive councils, not merely
sympathetic to popular claims, but responsible to the representatives
of the people in a Canadian Parliament.  Now according to all the
traditions of imperial government a demand so far-reaching involved the
disruption of the empire, and ended the connection between Canada and
England.  To this general objection the British minister added a
subtler point in constitutional law.  To yield to colonial reforming
ideas would be to contradict the existing conventions of the
constitution.  "The power for which a minister is responsible in
England," he wrote to his new governor, "is not his own power, but the
power of the crown, of which he is for the time the organ.  It is
obvious that the executive councillor of a colony is in a situation
totally different....  Can the colonial council be the advisers of the
crown of England?  Evidently not, for the crown has other advisers for
the same functions, and with {73} superior authority.  It may happen,
therefore, that the governor receives, at one and the same time,
instructions from the Queen and advice from his executive council
totally at variance with each other.  If he is to obey his instructions
from England, the parallel of constitutional responsibility entirely
fails; if, on the other hand, he is to follow the advice of his
council, he is no longer a subordinate officer, but an independent
sovereign."[4]  The governor-general, then, was in no way to concede to
the Canadian assembly a responsibility and power which resided only in
the British ministry.

At the same time large concessions, in spirit if not in letter, helped
to modify the rigour of this constitutional doctrine.  "I have not
drawn any specific line," Russell wrote at the end of the despatch
already quoted, "beyond which the power of the governor on the one
hand, and the privileges of the assembly on the other, ought not to
extend....  The governor must only oppose the wishes of the assembly
when the honour of the crown, or the interests of the empire, are
deeply concerned; and the assembly must be ready to modify {74} some of
its measures for the sake of harmony, and from a reverent attachment to
the authority of Great Britain."

Two days later, an even more important modification than was contained
in this exhortation to charity and opportunism was proposed.  It had
been the chief grievance in both provinces that the executive positions
in Canada had been filled with men who held them as permanencies, and
in spite of the clamour of public opinion against them.  Popular
representative rights had been more than counterbalanced by entire
executive irresponsibility.  A despatch, nominally of general
application to British colonies, but, under the circumstances, of
special importance to the United Provinces of Canada, changed the
status of colonial executive offices: "You will understand, and will
cause it to be generally known, that hereafter the tenure of colonial
offices held during her Majesty's pleasure, will not be regarded as
equivalent to a tenure during good behaviour, but that not only such
officers will be called upon to retire from the public service as often
as any sufficient motives of public policy may suggest the expediency
of that measure, but that a change in the person of the governor will
be considered as a sufficient reason for any {75} alterations which his
successor may deem it expedient to make in the list of public
functionaries, subject of course to the future confirmation of the
Sovereign.  These remarks do not apply to judicial offices, nor are
they meant to apply to places which are altogether ministerial and
which do not devolve upon the holders of them duties in the right
discharge of which the character and policy of the government are
directly involved.  They are intended to apply rather to the heads of
departments, than to persons serving as clerks or in similar capacities
under them; neither do they extend to officers in the service of the
Lords Commissioners of the Treasury.  The functionaries who will be
chiefly, though not exclusively, affected by them are the Colonial
Secretary, the Treasurer or Receiver-General, the Surveyor-General, the
Attorney and Solicitor-General, the Sheriff or Provost Marshal, and
other officers who, under different designations from these, are
entrusted with the same or similar duties.  To this list must also be
added the Members of the Council, especially in those colonies in which
the Executive and Legislative Councils are distinct bodies."[5]

{76}

The importance of this general circular of October 16th is that, at a
time when the Colonial Secretary was exhorting the new governor-general
to part with none of his prerogatives, and in a colony where public
opinion was importuning with some persistence for a more popular
executive, one of the best excuses for withholding from the people
their desires was removed.  The representative of the crown in
consequence found himself with a new and not altogether comfortable
opportunity for exercising his freedom of choice.

It fell to Charles Poulett Thomson, President of the Board of Trade in
the Whig ministry, to carry out the Union of the two Canadian
provinces, and to administer them in accordance with this doctrine of
modified autonomy.  The choice of the government seemed both wise and
foolish.  Poulett Thomson had had an admirable training for the work.
In a colony where trade and commerce were almost everything, he brought
not Durham's aristocratic detachment but a real knowledge of commerce,
since his was a great mercantile family.  In Parliament, he had become
a specialist in the financial and economic issues, which had already
displaced the diplomatic or purely political questions of the last
generation.  {77} His speeches on the revision of taxes, the corn laws,
and British foreign trade, proved that, in a utilitarian age, he knew
the science of utilities and had freed himself from bureaucratic red
tape.  His parliamentary career too had taught him the secret of the
management of assemblies, and Canada would under him be spared the
friction which the rigid attitude of soldiers, trained in the school of
Wellington, had been causing throughout the British colonies for many
years.

There were, however, many who doubted whether the man had a character
and will powerful enough to dominate the turbulent forces of Canadian
politics.  Physically he was far from strong, and almost the first
comment made by Canadians on him was that their new governor-general
came to them a valetudinarian.  There seemed to be other and more
serious elements of weakness.  Charles Greville spoke of him with just
a tinge of good-natured contempt as "very good humoured, pleasing and
intelligent, but the greatest coxcomb I ever saw, and the vainest dog,
though his vanity is not offensive or arrogant";[6] and a writer in the
_Colonial Gazette_, whose words reached Canada {78} almost on the day
when the new governor arrived, warned Canadians of the imbecility of
character which the world attributed to him.  "While therefore," the
article continues, "we repeat our full conviction that Mr. Thomson is
gone to Canada with the opinions and objects which we have here
enumerated, let it be distinctly understood that we have little hope of
seeing them realised, except through the united and steadfast
determination of the Colonists to make use of him as an instrument for
accomplishing their own ends."[7]  With such an introduction one of the
most strongly marked personalities ever concerned with government in
Canada entered on his work.

Strange as it may seem in face of these disparaging comments, the new
governor-general had already determined to make the assertion of his
authority the fundamental thing in his policy, although with him
authority always wore the velvet glove over the iron hand.  In Lower
Canada the suspension of the constitution had already placed
dictatorial powers in his hand; but, even in the Upper Province, he
seemed to have expected that diplomacy would have to be supported by
authority to compel it to come into {79} the Union; and he had no
intention of leaving the supremacy over all British North America,
which had been conferred on him by his title, to lie unused.  The two
strenuous years in which he remade Canada fall into natural
divisions--the brief episode in Lower Canada of the first month after
his arrival; his negotiations with Upper Canada, from November, 1839,
to February, 1840; the interregnum of 1840 which preceded the actual
proclamation of Union, during which he returned to Montreal, visited
the Maritime Provinces, and toured through the Upper Province; and the
decisive months, from February till September 19th, 1841, from which in
some sort modern Canada took its beginnings.

The first month of his governorship, in which he settled the fate of
French Canada, is of greater importance than appears on the surface.
The problem of governing Canada was difficult, not simply because
Britons in Canada demanded self-government, but because self-government
must be shared with French-Canadians.  That section of the community,
distinct as it was in traditions and political methods, might bring
ruin on the Colony either by asserting a supremacy odious to the
Anglo-Saxon elements of the population, or by {80} resenting the
efforts of the British to assimilate or dominate them.  When Poulett
Thomson landed, on October 19th, 1839, at Quebec, he was brought at
once face to face with the relation between French nationalism and the
constitutional resettlement of Canada.

Durham had had no doubt about the true solution.  It was to confer free
institutions on the colony, and to trust to the natural energy and
increase of the Anglo-Saxon element to swamp French _nationalité_.  "I
have little doubt," he said, "that the French, when once placed, by the
legitimate course of events and the working of natural causes, in a
minority, would abandon their vain hopes of nationality."[8]  It was in
this spirit that his successor endeavoured to govern the French section
in Canada.  Being both rationalist and utilitarian, like others of his
school he minimized the strength of an irrational fact like racial
pride, and, almost from the first he discounted the force of French
opposition, while he let it, consciously or unconsciously, influence
his behaviour towards his French subjects.  "If it were possible," he
wrote in November, 1839, "the best thing for Lower Canada would be a
despotism for ten years {81} more; for, in truth, the people are not
yet fit for the higher class of self-government, scarcely indeed, at
present, for any description of it."[9]  A few months later, his
language had become even stronger:--"I have been back three weeks, and
have set to work in earnest in this province.  It is a bad prospect,
however, and presents a lamentable contrast to Upper Canada.  There
great excitement existed; the people were quarrelling for realities,
for political opinions and with a view to ulterior measures.  Here
there is no such thing as a political opinion.  No man looks to a
practical measure of improvement.  Talk to any one upon education, or
public works, or better laws, let him be English or French, you might
as well talk Greek to him.  Not a man cares for a single practical
measure--the only end, one would suppose, of a better form of
government.  They have only one feeling--a hatred of race."[10]

But at the outset his task was simple.  His powers in Lower Canada, as
he confessed on his first arrival, were of an extraordinary nature; and
indeed it lay with him, and his Special Council, to settle the fate of
the province.  Pushing on {82} from Quebec to Montreal, he lost no time
in calling a meeting of the Special Council, whose members, eighteen in
number, he purposely left unchanged from the regime of his predecessor
On November 13th and 14th, after discussions in which the minority
never exceeded three, that body accepted Union with the Upper Province
in six propositions, affirming the principle of union, agreeing to the
assimilation of the two provincial debts, and declaring it to be their
opinion "that the present temporary legislature should, as soon as
practicable, be succeeded by a permanent legislature, in which the
people of these two provinces may be adequately represented, and their
constitutional rights exercised and maintained."[11]  Before he left
Montreal, he assured the British ministry that the large majority of
those with whom he had spoken, English and French, in the Lower
Province were warm advocates of Union.[12]

Yet here lay his first mis judgment, and one of the most serious he
made.  It was true and obvious that the British inhabitants of Eastern
Canada earnestly desired a union which would promote {83} their racial
interests; true also that a group of Frenchmen took the same point of
view.  But the governor was guilty of a grave political error, when he
ignored the feeling generally prevalent among the French that Union
must be fought.  Colborne's judgment in 1839, that French aversion to
Union was growing less, seems to have been mistaken.[13]  The British
government, more especially in the person of Durham, had not disguised
their intention--the destruction of French nationalism as it had
hitherto existed.  They had taken, and were taking, the risk of
conducting the experiment in the face of a grant of self-government to
the doomed community; and the first governor-general of union and
constitutionalism was now to find that French racial unity, combined
with self-government, was too strong even for his masterful will,
although he had all the weight of Imperial authority behind him.  But,
for the time, Lower Canada had to be left to its council, and the
centre of interest changed to Toronto and Upper Canada.

There, although no racial troubles awaited him, the governor had to
persuade a popular assembly before he could have his way; and there for
the {84} first time he was made aware of the perplexing cross-currents
and side eddies, and confusion of public opinion, which existed
everywhere in Canadian politics.  So doubtful was the main issue that
he debated with himself whether he should venture to meet the Assembly
without a dissolution and election on the definite issue of the Union;
but the need for haste, and his natural inclination to take risks, and
to trust to his powers of management, decided him to face the existing
local parliament.  By the end of November he had arrived at Toronto,
and the Assembly met on December 3rd.  Two plain but difficult tasks
lay before him: to persuade both houses of Parliament to accept his
scheme of Union, and to arrange, on some moderate basis, the whole
Clergy Reserve question.  To complicate these practical duties, the
speculative problem of responsible government, long keenly canvassed in
Toronto, and the peculiar conditions and methods of local politics, lay
as dangerous obstacles in his path.  The manners and methods of the
politicians of Upper Canada drew him even in his despatches into vivid
criticism.  After a month's observation, he sent Russell a long and
very able description of the prevailing disorders.  In spite of a
general loyalty the people {85} had been fretted into vexations and
petty divisions, and for the most part felt deep-rooted animosity
towards the executive authorities.  Indeed, apart from the party bias
of the government, its inefficiency and uncertainty had destroyed all
public confidence in it.  Under the executive government, the authority
of the legislative council had been exercised by a very few
individuals, representing a mere clique in the capital, frequently
opposed both to the government and to the Assembly, and considered by
the people hostile to their interests.  In the lower chamber, the loss
of public influence by the ministry had introduced absolute legislative
chaos, and even the control over expenditure, and the examination of
accounts, were of the loosest and most irregular character.[14]  In a
private letter he allowed himself a freedom of expression which renders
his description the _locus classicus_ for political conditions before
the Union:--"The state of things here is far worse than I had expected.
The country is split into factions animated with the most deadly hatred
to each other.  The people have got into the way of talking so much of
_separation_, {86} that they begin to believe in it.  The
Constitutional party is as bad or worse than the other, in spite of all
their professions of loyalty.  The finances are more deranged than we
believed even in England.  The deficit, £75,000 a year, more than equal
to the income.  All public works suspended.  Emigration going on fast
_from_ the province.  Every man's property worth only half what it was.
When I look to the state of government, and to the departmental
administration of the province, instead of being surprised at the
condition in which I find it, I am only astonished it has been endured
so long.  I know that, much as I dislike Yankee institutions and rule,
I would not have fought against them, which thousands of these poor
fellows, whom the Compact call rebels, did, if it were only to keep up
such a Government as they got....  Then the Assembly is such a House!
Split into half a dozen parties.  The Government having _none--and no
one man_ to depend on!  Think of a house in which half the members hold
places, yet in which the Government does not command a single vote; in
which the place-men generally vote against the Executive; and where
there is no one to defend the Government when attacked, or {87} to
state the opinion and views of the Governor."[15]

With the eye of a political strategist, Poulett Thomson prepared his
alternative system, a curious kind of despotism, based, however, simply
on his own powers of influencing opinion in the House.  It was plain to
him that the previous governments had wantonly neglected public
opinion.[16]  It was also plain that the populace had regarded these
governments as consisting not of the governor with his ministers under
him, but of the Family Compact clique in place of the governor.[17]
The system which he proposed to substitute expressed very fully his
working theory.  Responsible government in the sweeping sense of that
term employed by the reforming party he resisted, holding that, whether
against his ministers, or the electors, he must be personally
responsible for all his administrative acts.  At the same time he
assured parliament that "he had received her Majesty's commands to
administer the government of these provinces in accordance with the
well-understood wishes and interests of the people, and to pay to their
feelings, {88} as expressed through their representatives, the
deference that is justly due to them."[18]  To secure this end, he
called public attention to the despatch from Russell, definitely
announcing the change of tenure of all save judicial and purely
ministerial places, thereby making it clear that no man would be
retained in office longer than he seemed acceptable to the governor and
the community.  Then he set to work to build up, out of moderate men
drawn from all groups, a party of compromise and good sense to support
him and his ministry; and finally, he claimed for himself the central
authority without any modifying conditions.  Concerning the ultimate
seat of that authority he never hesitated.  Whatever power he had came
from the Home Ministry as representing the Crown, and to them alone he
acknowledged responsibility.  For the rest, he had to carry on the
Queen's government; that is, to govern Canada so that peace and
prosperity might remain unshaken; and as a first condition he had to
defer to the wishes of the people.  But it cannot be too strongly
re-asserted that he refused to surrender one iota of his
responsibility, and that the ideal which he set for himself was a
combination of governor and prime-minister.  The efficiency {89} of his
system was to depend on the honestly benevolent intentions which the
governor-general cherished towards the people, and on the fidelity of
both the ministry and the parliamentary majority established and
secured through belief in those intentions.

The new system met with an astounding success.  The scheme of Union was
laid before both Houses.  On the thirteenth of December the Council,
which had hitherto been the chief obstacle, approved of the scheme by
fourteen votes to eight, the minority consisting of Toronto 'die-hards'
with the Bishop, recalcitrant as usual, at their head.  Ten days later,
the governor-general was able to assure Russell that the Lower House
had, after some strenuous debates and divisions, assented also; the
only change from his own outline being an amendment that "such part of
the civil list as did not relate to the salaries of the judges, and the
governor, and the administration of justice, which are made permanent,
should be granted for the lifetime of the Queen, or for a period of not
less than ten years."[19]  On one point, not without its influence in
embittering opinion among the French, {90} Parliament and Governor were
agreed, that while the debates in the Union parliament might be
conducted in either English or French, in the publication of all
records of the Legislature the English language only should be
adopted.[20]

Swept on by this great initial success, Poulett Thomson determined if
possible to settle the Clergy Reserve trouble out of hand.  As has been
shown above, this ecclesiastical difficulty affected the whole life of
the community; and its settlement would mean peace, such as Upper
Canada had not known for a generation.  The pacificator, however, had
to face two groups of irreconcilables, the Bishop of Toronto with his
extremist following, and the secularizing party resolute to have done
with any form of subsidy to religion.  As he himself confessed, he had
little hope of succeeding in the Assembly, but he trusted to his new
popularity, then at its spring tide, and he won.  Before the end of
January the question had been settled on a compromise, by a majority of
28 to 20 in the Assembly, and of 14 to 4 in the Council.  It was even
more satisfactory to know that out of 22 members of Assembly who were
communicants of the Church of England, only 8 {91} voted in favour of
the _status quo_.  There was but one set-back.  Legal opinion in
England decided that the local assembly had not powers to change the
original act of 1791; and in the Imperial legislation which this check
made necessary, other influences crept in, and the governor-general
bitterly complained that the monstrous proportion allotted to the
Church of England, and the miserable proportion set apart for other
churches, rendered the Act only less an evil than if the question had
been left unsettled.[21]  Still, the settlement retained existing
reserves for religious purposes, ended the creation of fresh reserves,
divided past sales of land between the Churches of England and of
Scotland, and arranged for the distribution of the proceeds of future
sales roughly in proportion to the numbers and importance of all the
churches in Canada.  It was not an ideal arrangement, but quiet men
were anxious to clear the obstacle from the way, and through such men
Poulett Thomson worked his will.  It is the most striking testimony to
the governor's power of management that, as a politician stated in
1846, three-quarters of the people believed the arrangement unjust and
partial, and acquiesced only because their political head desired it.
But {92} the end was not yet, and the uneasy ambition of the Bishop of
Toronto was in a few years to bring on his head just retribution for
the strife his policy continued to create.  Nothing now remained but to
close this, the last parliament of Upper Canada under the old regime,
and the governor, who never suffered from lack of self-appreciative
optimism, wrote home in triumph: "Never was such unanimity.  When the
speaker read my speech in the Commons, after the prorogation, they gave
me three cheers, in which even the ultras joined."[22]  It was perhaps
the last remnant of this pardonable exultation which swept him over the
360 miles between Toronto and Montreal in thirty-six hours, breaking
all records for long-distance sleighing in the province.

The primary duty of the governor had now been accomplished, for he had
persuaded both local governments to accept an Imperial Act of Union,
and it might seem natural to pass over the intervening months, until
Union had been officially proclaimed, and the first Union parliament
had been elected and had met.  But the _interregnum_ from February,
1840, to February, 1841, must not be ignored.  In these twelve short
months he turned {93} once again to the problem of Lower Canada,
hurried on a short visit to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to settle
constitutional difficulties there, returned in a kind of triumphal
procession through the English-speaking district of Lower Canada known
as the Eastern Townships,[23] and spent the autumn in a tour through
the Western part of the newly united colony.  It was only fitting that
a grateful Queen and Ministry should bestow on him a peerage;
henceforward he must appear as Baron Sydenham of Sydenham and Toronto.

But apart from these mere physical activities, he was preparing for the
culmination of his work in the new parliament.  It must be remembered
not only that he distrusted the intelligence and initiative of colonial
ministers too much to dream of giving place to them, but that his
theory of his own position--the benevolent despot, secured in his
supremacy through popular management--forced on him an elaborate
programme of useful administration.  He must face the new Parliament
with a good record, and definite promises.  The failure of the home
ministry to include the local government clauses, which formed a
fundamental {94} part of the Union Bill, made such efforts even more
necessary than before.  It had been plain to Durham and Charles Buller,
as well as to Sydenham, that, if an Act of Union were to pass, it could
only be made operative by joining to it an entirely new system of local
government.  Accordingly, when opposition forced Russell to omit the
essential clauses from his Act of Union, Sydenham penned one of his
most vigorous despatches in reply.  "Owing to this (rejection), duties
the most unfit to be discharged by the general legislature are thrown
upon it; powers equally dangerous to the subject and to the Crown are
assumed by the Assembly.  The people receive no training in those
habits of self-government which are indispensable to enable them
rightly to exercise the power of choosing representatives in
parliament.  No field is open for the gratification of ambition in a
narrow circle, and no opportunity given for testing the talents or
integrity of those who are candidates for popular favour.  The people
acquire no habits of self-dependence for the attainment of their own
local objects.  Whatever uneasiness they may feel--whatever little
improvement in their respective neighbourhoods may appear to be
neglected, afford grounds for complaint against the executive.  All
{95} is charged upon the Government, and a host of discontented spirits
are ever ready to excite these feelings.  On the other hand, whilst the
Government is thus brought directly in contact with the people, it has
neither any officer in its own confidence, in the different parts of
these extended provinces, from whom it can seek information, nor is
there any recognized body, enjoying the public confidence, with whom it
can communicate, either to determine what are the real wants and wishes
of the locality, or through whom it may afford explanation."[24]

Nothing could be done to remedy the evil in Upper Canada, until the new
parliament had met, but the temporary dictatorship still remained in
French Canada, and at once Sydenham set to work to create all that he
wanted there, recognizing shrewdly that what had been granted in the
Lower Province to the French must prove a powerful argument for a
similar grant to Upper Canada, when the time should come for action.
About the same time, he established by ordinance a popular system of
registry offices, to simplify the difficulties introduced into land
transfers by the French law--"all {96} the old French law of before the
Revolution, _Hypothèques tacites et occultes_, Dowers' and Minors'
rights, _Actes par devant notaires_, and all the horrible processes by
which the unsuspecting are sure to be deluded, and the most wary are
often taken in."[25]

Curiously enough, although his love of good government drove him to
amend conditions among the French, Sydenham's relations with that
people seem to have grown steadily worse.  He had made advances to the
foremost French politician, La Fontaine, offering him the
solicitor-generalship of Lower Canada; but La Fontaine, who never had
any enthusiasm for British Whig statesmanship,[26] regarded the offer
as a bribe to draw him away from his countrymen and their national
ideal, and declined it, thereby increasing the tension.  Thus, as the
time for the election drew near, the French were still further
hardening their hearts against the governor-general of United Canada,
and Sydenham, his patience now exhausted, could but exclaim in baffled
anger, "As for the French, nothing but time will do anything with them.
They hate British rule--British connection--improvements of {97} all
kinds, whether in their laws or their roads; so they will sulk, and
will try, that is, their leaders, to do all the mischief they can."[27]

Meantime he had prepared two other politic strokes before he called
Parliament: the regulation of immigration, and a project for raising a
British loan in aid of Canadian public works.  Immigration, more
especially now that the current had set once more towards Canada, was
one of the essential facts in the life of the colony; and yet the evils
attendant on it were still as obvious as the gains.  Most of the
defects so vividly portrayed by Durham and his commissioners still
persisted--unsuitable immigrants, over-crowded ships, disease which
spread from ship to land and overcrowded the local hospitals, wretched
and poverty-stricken masses lingering impotently at Quebec, and a
straggling line of westbound settlers, who obtained work and land with
difficulty and after many sorrows.[28]  Sydenham had none of Gibbon
Wakefield's doctrinaire enthusiasm on the subject; and, as he said, the
inducements, to parishes and landlords to send out their surplus
population were already {98} sufficiently strong.  But much could and
must be done by way of remedy.  It was his plan to regulate more
strictly the conditions on board emigrant ships, and to humanize the
process of travelling.  Government agents must safeguard the rights of
ignorant settlers; relief, medical and otherwise, should be in
readiness for the destitute and afflicted when they arrived; sales of
land were to be simplified and made easier; and a system of public
works might enable the local authorities to solve two problems at one
time, by giving the poorer settler steady employment, and by completing
the great tasks, only half performed in days when money and labour
alike were wanting.[29]  The final achievement of these objects
Sydenham reserved until he should meet parliament, but he had laid his
plans, and had primed the home authorities with facts long before that
date.

In the same way he had foreseen the need of Canada for Imperial
assistance, both in her public works, and in her finance.  Assistance
in the former of these matters was peculiarly important.  Colonists,
more especially in the Upper Province, had undertaken the development
of Canadian natural resources, but poverty had called a halt {99}
before the development was complete, or, by preventing necessary
additions and improvements, had rendered useless what had already been
done.  Conspicuous among such imperfect works were the canals; and
Sydenham realized the strange dilemma into which provincial enterprise
seemed doomed to run.  The province, he told Russell, was sinking under
the weight of engagements which it could only meet by fresh outlay,
whilst that outlay the condition of its credit preventing it from
making.[30]  He was therefore prepared to come before the United
Parliament with a proposal, backed by the British Ministry, for a great
loan of £1,500,000 to be negotiated by the home government, and to be
utilized, partly in redeeming the credit of the province, and partly in
completing its public works.  "It will therefore be absolutely
necessary that Her Majesty's government should enable the governor of
the province of Canada to afford this relief when the Union is
completed, and the financial statement takes place; and I know of no
better means than those originally proposed--of guaranteeing a loan
which would remove a considerable charge arising from the high rate of
interest payable by the province on the debt already contracted, or
{100} which it would have to pay for raising fresh loans which may be
required hereafter for great local improvements."[31]

There remained now the last and greatest of Sydenham's labours before
his stewardship could be honourably accounted for and surrendered, the
summoning, meeting, and managing, of a parliament representative of
that Canada, English and French, which he had restored and irritated.
His reputation must depend the more on this political adventure,
because he had already determined that 1841 should be his last year in
Canada--he would not stay, he said, though they made him Duke of Canada
and Prince of Regiopolis.  And indeed the Parliament of 1841, in all
its circumstances, still remains one of the salient points in modern
Canadian history.

The Union came into force on the tenth of February, but long before
that time all the diverse political interests in Canada had organized
themselves for the fray.  Sydenham himself naturally occupied the
foremost place.  He was acting now, not merely as governor-general, but
as the prime minister of a new cabinet, and as a party manager, {101}
whose main duty it was to secure parliamentary support for his men and
his measures by the maintenance of a sound central group.  By the
beginning of the year he thought he had evidence for believing that, in
Upper Canada, a great majority of the members would be men who had at
heart the welfare of the province, and the British connection, and who
desired to make the Act of Union operate to the advantage of the
country.[32]  But even in Upper Canada there were doubtful elements.
The Family Compact men, few as they might be in number, were unlikely
to leave their enemy, the governor-general, in peace; nor were all the
Reformers prepared to acquiesce in Sydenham's very restrained and
limited interpretation of responsible government.  Late in 1840, and
early in 1841, the Upper Canadian progressives had organized their
strength; and additional significance was given to their action by
their communications with Lower Canada.[33]  There, indeed, was the
crux of the experiment.  The French Canadians, already organized in
sullen opposition, had just received what they counted a fresh insult.
But Sydenham may be allowed to {102} explain his own action.  "There
were," he wrote to Russell in March, 1841, "attached to the cities,
both of Montreal and Quebec, very extensive suburbs, inhabited
generally by a poor population, unconnected with the mercantile
interests to which these cities owe their importance.  Had these cities
been brought within the electoral limits, the number of their
population would have enabled them to return one, if not both, of the
members for each city.  But such a result would have been directly at
variance with the grounds on which increased representation was given
by Parliament to these cities.  On referring to the discussions which
took place in both houses when the Union Bill was before them, I find
that members on all sides laid great stress on the necessity of
securing ample representation to the mercantile interests of Canada....
Feeling myself, therefore, bound in duty to carry out the views of the
British parliament in this matter, _I was compelled in fixing the
limits of Quebec and Montreal to transfer to the county a large portion
of the suburbs of each_."[34]  Whatever Sydenham's intentions may have
been, the actual result of his action was to secure for his party four
seats in the very heart of the enemy's country; {103} and the French
Canadians, naturally embittered, resented the governor's action as a
piece of gerrymandering, which had practically disfranchised many
French voters.  Already, in 1840, under the active leadership of
Neilson of Quebec, a British supporter of French claims, an anti-union
movement had been started.[35]  In July of the same year La Fontaine
visited Toronto, to canvass, said scandal, for the speaker's chair in
the united assembly; and in any case he was able to assure his
compatriots that they had sympathizers among the British in the West.
The Tory paper in Sydenham's new capital, Kingston, in a review and
forecast of the situation, settled on this Anglo-French co-operation as
one of the serious possibilities of the future;[36] and Sydenham as he
watched developments in the Lower Province, found himself growing
unwontedly pessimistic.  "In Lower Canada," he wrote, "the elections
will be bad.  The French Canadians have forgotten nothing and learnt
nothing by the Rebellion, and the suspension of the constitution, and
are more unfit for representative government {104} than they were in
1791.  In most of the French counties, members, actuated by the old
spirit of the Assembly, and without any principle except that of
inveterate hostility to British rule and British connection, will be
returned without a possibility of opposition."[37]

The elections began on the 8th of March, and the date on which
parliament was to meet was postponed, first from April 8th to May 26th,
and then, in consequence of the continued lateness of the season,[38]
from May 26th to June 14th.  The result of the elections, known early
in April, gave matter for serious thought to many, Sydenham himself not
excluded.  Absolute precision is difficult, but Sydenham's biographer
has tabulated the groups as follows:

  Government Members - - - -  24
  French Members - - - - - -  20
  Moderate Reformers - - - -  20
  Ultra Reformers  - - - - -   5
  Compact Party  - - - - - -   7
  Doubtful - - - - - - - - -   6
  Special Return - - - - - -   1
  Double Return  - - - - - -   1
                              --
                              84[39]

{105}

In the confusion of groups, Sydenham still trusted to the centre--a
party almost precisely similar to that which in 1867 was called
Liberal-Conservative.  This centre he hoped to create out of moderate
Conservatives who had enlarged their earlier views, and moderate
Reformers who anxiously desired to see Sydenham's proposed improvements
carried out.[40]  A shrewd observer, himself a member, and
appreciatively critical of Sydenham's work, counted at least five
parties in the new parliament.  Three of these groups came from Upper
Canada--the Conservatives under Sir Allan MacNab; the Ministerialists,
that is the Reformers and moderate Conservatives, under the
Attorney-General Draper, and the Secretary Harrison, and the
ultra-reformers who looked to Robert Baldwin for guidance.  From Lower
Canada came the French nationalists, with some British supporters,
under Morin, Neilson, and Aylwin, and the defenders of the Union
policy, chiefly British, but with a few conservative French allies.
"The division lists of the session 1841," writes the same observer,
"cannot fail to strike anyone acquainted with the state of parties, as
extraordinary.  Mr. Baldwin on several occasions voted with
considerable {106} majorities in opposition to the Government, while as
frequently he was in insignificant minorities.  There was a decided
tendency towards a coalition with the Reformers of French origin, on
the part of Sir Allan MacNab and the Upper Canada Conservatives.  The
Ministerial strength lay in the support which it received from the
British party of Lower Canada, and from the majority of the Upper
Canada Reformers."[41]  Well might Sydenham speak of the delusive
nature of the party nicknames borrowed by his legislators from England.

Whatever were the characteristic faults of the parliament in 1841,
sloth was not one of them.  All through the summer it worked with
feverish energy.  Writing to his brother at the end of August, Sydenham
boasted--"The five great works I aimed at have been got through--the
establishment of a board of works with ample powers; the admission of
aliens; a new system of county courts; the regulation of the public
lands ceded by the Crown under the Union Act; and lastly the District
Council Bill.  I think you will admit this to be pretty good work for
one session, especially when superadded to half a dozen minor measures,
as well {107} as the fact of having set up a government, brought
together two sets of people, who hated each other cordially, and
silenced all the threatened attacks upon the Union, which were expected
to be so formidable....  What do you think of this, you miserable
people in England, who spend two years upon a single measure?"[42]

But the chief significance of the session lies in the persistent
warfare waged between Sydenham and the advocates of a more extended
system of autonomy.  The result, as will be shewn, was indecisive, but,
under the circumstances a drawn battle was equivalent to defeat for the
governor-general.

Sydenham had never before flung himself so completely into the fight.
"I actually breathe, eat, drink, and sleep nothing but government and
politics," was his own description of life in Kingston.  He had
accomplished with little resistance from others all that his opening
speech had promised.  His ministry owned him as their actively
directing head.  His power of managing individuals in spite of
themselves passed into a jest.  Playing with men's vanity, tampering
with their interests, their passions and their prejudices, placing
himself in a position of familiarity with those from whom {108} he
might at once obtain assistance and information--such, according to an
eccentric writer of the day, were the secrets of Sydenham's
success.[43]  Few men ever played the part of benevolent despot more
admirably, and his achievements were the more creditable because he
could count on no allegiance except that which he induced by his
persuasive arts, and by the proofs he had given of a sincere desire to
promote Canadian prosperity.

Nevertheless, throughout the summer months, there occurred a series of
sharp encounters with a half-organized party of reform; and the end of
the session, while it saw Sydenham successful, saw also his adversaries
as eager as ever, and much more learned than they had been in the ways
of political opposition and agitation.  The opposition leaders massed
their whole strength on one fundamental point--the claim to possess as
fully as their fellow-citizens in Great Britain did, the cabinet and
party system of government.  In other words, if any group, or coalition
of groups, should succeed in establishing an ascendency in the popular
assembly, that ascendency must receive acknowledgment by the creation
of a cabinet, and the appointment of {109} a prime minister, approved
by the parliamentary majority and responsible to them; and Sydenham's
ingenious device of an eclectic ministry responsible to him alone was
denounced as unconstitutional.  The first encounter came, two days
before the session started, and Robert Baldwin of Toronto was the
leader of the revolt.  In February, 1840, Sydenham had invited Robert
Baldwin to be his Solicitor-General in the Upper Province.  Baldwin,
although his powers were not those of a politician of the first rank,
was perhaps the soundest constitutionalist in Western Canada.  He had
been from the first a reformer, but he had never encouraged the wild
ideas of the rebels of 1837.  Sir F. B. Head had called him to his
councils in 1836, as a man "highly respected for his moral character,
moderate in his politics and possessing the esteem and confidence of
all parties,"[44] and only Head's impracticability had driven him from
public service.  There is not a letter or official note from his pen,
which does not bear the stamp of unusual conscientiousness, and a very
earnest desire to serve his country.  So little was he a self-seeker,
that he earned the lasting ill-will of his eldest son by passing a bill
abolishing primogeniture, and thus {110} ending any hopes that existed
of founding a great colonial family.  The Earl of Elgin, who saw much
of him after 1847, regarded him not merely as a great public servant,
but as one who was worth "two regiments to the British connection," and
perhaps the most truly conservative statesman in the province.[45]  In
his quiet, determined way, he had made up his mind that responsible
government, in the sense condemned by both Sydenham and Russell, must
be secured for Canada, and Sydenham's benevolent plans did not disguise
from him the insidious attempt to limit what he counted the legitimate
constitutional liberty of the colony.  It cannot justly be objected
that his acceptance of office misled the governor-general, either in
1840 or in 1841.  "I distinctly avow," he wrote publicly in 1840,
"that, in accepting office, I consider myself to have given a public
pledge that I have a reasonably well-grounded confidence that the
government of my country is to be carried on in accordance with the
principles of Responsible Government which I have ever held....  I have
not come into office by means of any coalition with the
Attorney-General,[46] or with any others now in {111} the public
service, but have done so under the governor-general, and expressly
from my confidence in him."[47]  In the same way, when Sydenham chose
him for the Solicitor-Generalship of Upper Canada in the Union
Ministry, Baldwin, who had no belief in Sydenham's cabinet of all the
talents, wrote bluntly to say that he "had an entire want of political
confidence in all of his colleagues except Mr. Dunn, Mr. Harrison, and
Mr. Daly."[48]  In view of his later action, his critics charged him
with error in thus accepting an office which placed him in an
impossible position; but Baldwin's ready answer was: "The head of the
government, the heads of departments in both provinces, and the country
itself, were in a position almost anomalous.  That of the head of the
government was one of great difficulty and embarrassment.  While he
(Baldwin) felt bound to protect himself against misapprehensions as to
his views and opinions, he also felt bound to avoid, as far as
possible, throwing any difficulties in the way of the governor-general.
At the time he was called to a seat in the Executive Council, he was
already one of those public servants, the political character {112}
newly applied to whose office made it necessary for them to hold seats
in that Council.  Had he, on being called to take that seat, refused to
accept it, he must of course have left office altogether, or have been
open to the imputation of objecting to an arrangement for the conduct
of public affairs which had always met with his most decided
approbation."[49]  At worst, the Solicitor-General can only be blamed
for letting his abnormally sensitive conscience lead him into political
casuistry, the logic of which might not appear so cogent to the
governor as to himself, when the crisis should come.  How sensitive
that conscience was, may be gathered from the fact that his acceptance
of office in 1841 was accompanied with an avowal of want of confidence,
made openly to those colleagues with whom he disagreed.  It was further
illustrated when he made a difficulty with Sydenham over taking the
Oath of Supremacy, which, in a country, many of whose inhabitants were
Roman Catholics protected in their religion by treaty rights, declared
that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath or
ought to have any jurisdiction, {113} power, superiority, pre-eminence
of authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm."[50]

The crisis came, as Baldwin expected it to come, when parliament met.
Already, as has been seen, the French Canadians had organized their
forces and formed the most compact group in the Assembly, while the
little band of determined reformers from Upper Canada made up in
decision and principle what they lacked in numbers.  Hincks, who was
one of the latter group, says that, before parliament met, the two
sections consulted together concerning the government, and although La
Fontaine had lost his election through a display of physical force on
the other side, Baldwin was able to lead the combined groups into
action.  On June 12th, he wrote to Sydenham stating that the United
Reform Party represented the political views of the vast majority of
Canadians, that four ministers--Sullivan, Ogden, Draper, and Day--were
hostile to popular sympathies and ideals, and that he thought the
accession of Lower Canada Reformers absolutely essential to a sound
popular administration.  It was a perfectly consistent, if somewhat
unhappily executed, attempt to secure {114} the absolute responsibility
of the Executive Council to the representatives of the people; and a
week later, in the Assembly, when no longer in office, he defended his
action.  He believed that when the election had determined of what
materials the House of Assembly was to be composed, it then became his
duty to inform the head of the government that the administration did
not possess the confidence of the House of Assembly, and to tender to
the representative of his sovereign the resignation of the office which
he held, having first, as he was bound to do, offered his advice to his
Excellency that the administration of the country should be
reconstructed.[51]

It was the directest possible challenge to Sydenham's system.
Baldwin's claim was that, once the representatives of the people had
made known the people's will, it was the duty of the ministry to
reflect that will in their programme and actions, or to resign.  As for
the governor-general, he must obviously adjust whatever theories he
might have, to a situation where colonial ministers were content to
hold office only where they had the confidence of the people.

The action of the governor-general was {115} characteristically
summary.  His answer to Baldwin reproved him for a "proposal in the
highest degree unconstitutional, as dictating to the crown who are the
particular individuals whom it should include in the ministry";
intimated the extreme displeasure of his Excellency, and assumed the
letter to be equivalent to resignation.[52]  To the home government he
spoke of the episode with anger and some contempt: "Acting upon some
principle of conduct which I can reconcile neither with honour nor
common sense, he strove to bring about this union (between Upper and
Lower Canadian reformers), and at last, having as he thought effected
it, coolly proposed to me, on the day before Parliament was to meet, to
break up the Government altogether, dismiss several of his colleagues,
and replace them by men whom I believe he had not known for 24
hours--but who are most of them thoroughly well known in Lower Canada
as the principal opponents of any measure for the improvement of the
province."[53]

The crisis once passed, Sydenham hoped, and not without justification,
that Baldwin would carry few supporters over to the opposition, and
{116} that the Assembly would settle quietly down to enact the measures
so bountifully set out in the opening speech.  The first day of
Assembly saw the party of responsible government make a smothered
effort to state their views in the debate on the election of a speaker.
On June 18th, an elaborate debate, nominally on the address, really on
the fundamental point, found the attorney-general stating the case for
the government, and Baldwin and Hincks pushing the logic of responsible
government to its natural conclusion.  Baldwin once more grappled with
the problem of the responsibility of the members of council, and the
advice they should offer to the governor-general.  He admitted freely
that unless the representative of the sovereign should acquiesce in the
measures so recommended, there would be no means by which that advice
could be made practically useful; but this consideration did not for a
moment relieve a member of the council from the fulfilment of an
imperative duty.  If his advice were accepted, well and good; if not,
his course would be to tender his resignation.[54]

{117}

The government came triumphantly out of the ordeal, and all amendments,
whether affecting the Union, or responsible government, were defeated
by majorities, usually of two to one.  "I have got the large majority
of the House ready to support me upon any question that can arise,"
Sydenham wrote at the end of June; "and, what is better, thoroughly
convinced that their constituents, so far as the whole of Upper Canada
and the British part of Lower Canada are concerned, will never forgive
them if they do not."[55]

But the enemy was not so easily routed.  There had been much violence
at the recent elections; and, among others, La Fontaine had a most just
complaint to make, for disorder, and, as he thought, government
trickery had ousted him from a safe seat at Terrebonne.  Unfortunately
the protests were lodged too late, and a furious struggle sprang up, as
to whether the legal period should, in the cases under consideration,
be extended, or whether, as the government contended, an inquiry and
amendments affecting only the future should suffice.  It was ominous
for the cause of limited responsibility, that the government had to own
defeat in the Lower House, and saved itself only {118} by the veto of
the Legislative Council.  Nor was that the end.  A mosaic work of
opposition, old Tories, French Canadians, British anti-unionists, and
Upper Canada Reformers, was gradually formed, and at any moment some
chance issue might lure over a few from the centre to wreck the
administration.  Most of the greater measures passed through the ordeal
safely, including a bill reforming the common schools and another
establishing a Board of Works.  The critical moment of the latter part
of the session, however, came with the introduction of a bill to
establish District Councils in Upper Canada, to complete the work
already done in Lower Canada.  The forces in opposition rallied to the
attack, Conservatives because the bill would increase the popular
element in government, Radicals because the fourth clause enacted that
the governor of the province might appoint, under the Great Seal of the
province, fit and proper persons to hold during his pleasure the office
of Warden of the various districts;[56] and, as Sydenham himself
hinted, there were those who regretted the loss to members of Assembly
of a great opportunity for jobbery.  One motion passed by the
chairman's casting vote; {119} and nothing, in the governor-general's
judgment, saved the bill but the circumstance of his having already
established such councils in Lower Canada.[57]

There was one more attack in force before the session ended.  On
September 3rd, Baldwin, seconded by a French Canadian, moved "that the
most important as well as the most undoubted of the political rights of
the people of the province, is that of having a provincial parliament
for the protection of their liberties, for the exercise of a
constitutional influence over the executive departments of the
government, and for legislation upon all matters, which do not on the
ground of absolute necessity constitutionally belong to the
jurisdiction of the Imperial parliament, as the paramount authority of
the Empire."[58]  The issue was stated moderately but quite directly,
and there are critics of Sydenham who hold that his answer--for it was
his voice that spoke--surrendered the whole position.  That answer took
the form of resolutions, moved by the most moderate reformer in the
Assembly, S. B. Harrison:

(i) That the head of the provincial executive {120} government of the
province, being within the limits of his government the representative
of the Sovereign, is not constitutionally responsible to any other than
the authority of the Empire.

(ii) That the representative of the Sovereign, for the proper conduct
and efficient disposal of public business, is necessarily obliged to
make use of the advice and assistance of subordinate officers in the
administration of his government.

(iii) That in order to preserve the harmony between the different
branches of the Provincial Parliament which is essential to the happy
conduct of public affairs, the principal of such subordinate officers,
advisers of the representative of the Sovereign, and constituting as
such the provincial administration under him ... ought always to be men
possessed of the public confidence of the people, thus affording a
guarantee that the well-understood wishes and interests of the people,
which our gracious Sovereign has declared shall be the rule of the
Provincial Government, will on all occasions be faithfully represented
and advocated.

(iv) That the house has the constitutional right of holding such
advisers politically responsible for every act of the Provincial
Government of a local {121} character sanctioned by such government
while such advisers continue in office."[59]

Of Sydenham's own doctrine of colonial government the outlines are
unmistakeable.  A governor-general existed, responsible for his actions
solely to the imperial authority.  Under that government the people had
full liberty to elect their representatives, through whom their desires
could be made known.  It was the duty of the governor-general to
consult, on every possible detail, the popular will.  Sydenham
therefore held it essential that the governor-general in Canada should
be one trained in the Imperial Parliament to interpret and to guide
popular expression of opinion; and he believed that in such
parliamentary diplomacy the governor-general would have to make many
minor surrenders.  But he never recoiled from a position, which was
also that of Durham, that, as the proclamation of Union asserted, the
grant of local autonomy was subject to certain limitations, and that
these limitations no action of the Provincial Legislature could affect.
Nor did he admit that his own responsibility to the Crown could be
modified by the existence of a responsibility on the {122} part of his
ministers to the Canadian people.  Moreover, his own imperious temper
and sense of superior enlightenment made him act in the very spirit of
his doctrine with a resolution which few imperial servants of his time
could have surpassed.  It may be then that the final resolutions, and
especially the last of them, were marked by a gentler mode of
expression than before, but they were actually a reaffirmation of
Sydenham's early views, and were quite consistent with the initial
despatch of the colonial secretary.

The end was now near.  Sydenham had already applied for and received
permission, first to leave Canada, should his health require that step,
and then, to resign.  He had delayed to act on this permission, until
he should see the end of the session, and the accomplishment of his
ambitions.  But, on September 4th, a fall from horseback inflicted
injuries which grew more complicated through his generally enfeebled
condition, and he died on Sunday, September 19th.  On the preceding
day, one of the most useful and notable sessions in the history of the
Canadian Parliament came to an end.

Both by his errors, and by his acts of statesmanship, Sydenham
contributed more than any other {123} man, except Elgin, to establish
that autonomy in Canada which his theories rejected.  Before
self-government could flourish in the colony, there must be some solid
material progress, and two years of incessant legislation and
administrative innovation, all of it suggested by Sydenham, had turned
the tide of Canadian fortunes.  It was necessary, too, that some larger
field than a trivial provincial assembly with its local jobs should be
provided for the new adventure in self-government; and Sydenham not
only engineered a difficult Act of Union past all preliminary
obstacles, but, of his own initiative, gave Canada the local
institutions through which alone the country could grow into
disciplined self-dependence.

But even his errors aided Canadian development.  Acting for a
government in whose counsels there was no hesitation, Sydenham
expounded in word and practice a perfectly self-consistent theory of
colonial government.  It was he who, by the virility of his thought and
action, forced those who demanded responsible government to test and
think over again their own position.  The criticism which Elgin passed
on him in 1847 is final: "I never cease to marvel what study of human
nature, or of history, led him to the conclusion {124} that it would be
possible to concede to a pushing and enterprising people, unencumbered
by an aristocracy, and dwelling in the immediate vicinity of the United
States, such constitutional privileges as were conferred on Canada at
the time of Union, and yet restrict in practice their powers of
self-government as he proposed."[60]  Yet he had raised the question,
for both sides, to a higher level, and his adversaries owed something
of their triumph, when it came, to the man who had taught them a more
spacious view of politics.

But it may be urged that he roused the French, insulted them, excluded
them, and almost precipitated a new French rising.  Undoubtedly he was
an enemy to French claims, but, at the time, most of these claims were
inadmissible.  The French had brought the existing system of local
government to a standstill.  Few of those who took part in the
Rebellion had any reasonable or adequate conception of a reformed
constitution.  As a people they had set themselves to obstruct the
statesmen who came to assist them, and to oppose a Union which was
doubtless imperfect as an instrument of government, but which was a
necessary stage in the construction of a {125} better system.  Here
again Sydenham aimed at carrying out a perfectly clear and consistent
programme, the political blending of the French with the British
colonists.  Unfortunately that programme was impossible.  It had been
constructed by men who did not understand the racial problem, and who,
even if they had understood it, would not have accepted the modern
solution.  Yet French nationalism, between 1839 and 1841, had certain
negative lessons still to learn.  As, in Upper Canada, Robert Baldwin
discovered from his opposition to the governor-general the methods and
limits of parliamentary opposition, so La Fontaine, the worthiest
representative of French Canada, began in these years to substitute
constitutional co-operation with the reformers of the West, for the old
sullen negative nationalism which had failed so utterly in 1837, as the
most suitable means for maintaining the rights of his people.



[1] I disregard Cathcart's tenure of office.  For all practical
purposes it was merely that of an acting governor.

[2] Instructions to the Right Hon. C. Poulett Thomson, 7 September,
1839.

[3] _Ibid._

[4] Lord John Russell to the Rt. Hon. C. Poulett Thomson, 14 October,
1839.

[5] Lord John Russell to the Right Hon. C. P. Thomson, 16 October, 1839.

[6] Greville, _A Journal of the Reigns of George IV. and William IV._,
iii. p. 330.

[7] Quoted from _The Kingston Chronicle and Gazette_, 19 October, 1839.

[8] _Lord Durham's Report_ (Lucas), ii. p. 307.

[9] Poulett Scrope, _Life of Lord Sydenham_, p. 148.

[10] Poulett Scrope, p. 168.

[11] _Journals of the Special Council of Lower Canada_, 13 November,
1839.

[12] The Right Hon. C. P. Thomson to Lord John Russell, 18 November,
1839.

[13] Sir John Colborne to Lord Normanby, 19 August, 1839.

[14] The Right Hon. C. P. Thomson to Lord John Russell, 15 December
1839.

[15] Poulett Scrope, pp. 148-9.

[16] The Right Hon. C. P. Thomson to Lord John Russell, 15 December,
1839.

[17] _Ibid._

[18] Poulett Scrope, p. 163.

[19] _Correspondence relative to the Reunion of Upper and Lower Canada_
(23rd March, 1840), p. 20.

[20] _Ibid._ p. 33.

[21] Sydenham to Russell, 13 January, 1841.

[22] Poulett Scrope, p. 164.

[23] Poulett Scrope, p. 183.  "I have done nothing for two days, but
pass under triumphal arches, and receive addresses of thanks and
praise."

[24] Correspondence relative to the Affairs of Canada (1841): The Right
Hon. C. P. Thomson to Lord John Russell, 16 September, 1840.

[25] Poulett Scrope, p. 198.

[26] Baldwin Correspondence: La Fontaine to Baldwin, 26 July, 1845,
"You know that I do not like the Whigs."

[27] Poulett Scrope, p. 181.

[28] See a report from the agent for emigration at Toronto, made to
Sydenham, 6 January, 1841.

[29] Sydenham to Russell, 26 January, 1841.

[30] Sydenham to Russell, 22 February, 1841.

[31] The Right Hon. C. P. Thomson to Lord John Russell, 27 June, 1840.

[32] Sydenham to Russell, 26 February, 1841.

[33] Merritt, _Life of the Hon. W. H. Merritt, M.P._  See under the
years 1840 and 1841.

[34] Sydenham to Russell, 6 March, 1841.  The italics are my own.

[35] Poulett Scrope, p. 205.

[36] _The Kingston Chronicle and Gazette_, 12 February, 1841.  "A
powerful struggle will be made at the next election to secure the
return of representatives, who will coincide with the views of the
French party in the Lower Province."

[37] Sydenham to Russell, 26 February, 1841.

[38] _Ibid._, 1 June, 1841.

[39] Poulett Scrope, p. 217.  As the Canadian portion of the biography
was the work of Sydenham's secretary, Murdoch, it carries with it
considerable authority.  Murdoch was, indeed, one of the most competent
of the men round Sydenham.

[40] Sydenham to Russell, 26 June, 1841.

[41] Hincks, _Lecture on the Political History of Canada_, 1840-1855,
pp. 22-23.

[42] Poulett Scrope, p. 243.

[43] Richardson, in his curious characterization of the man in _Eight
Years in Canada_.

[44] Sir F. B. Head to Lord Glenelg, February, 1836.

[45] The references to Baldwin in the Elgin-Grey Correspondence are,
without exception, most cordial, and usually complimentary.

[46] The Hon. W. H. Draper, a moderate Conservative.

[47] Quoted in Hincks, _Lecture on the Political History of Canada_, p.
19.

[48] _Ibid._ pp. 18-19.

[49] Baldwin's own explanation, furnished to a volume _The Irishman in
Canada_.  He was peculiarly fond of memoranda or declarations, written
in the third person.

[50] Sydenham to Russell, 28 May, 1841.  Sydenham dispensed with the
oath on the advice of his legal officials.

[51] _The Mirror of Parliament_ (published in Kingston), 23 June, 1841.

[52] Sydenham to Baldwin, 13 June, 1841.

[53] _Ibid._, 23 June, 1841.

[54] _The Mirror of Parliament_, reporting Baldwin's speech of 18th
June.  I have chosen to give Baldwin's own language in all its
awkwardness and stiffness.

[55] Poulett Scrope, p. 233.

[56] District Municipal Council Act (1841), Cl. IV.

[57] Sydenham to Russell, 28 August, 1841.

[58] _Journals of the House of Assembly_, 3 September, 1841.

[59] I have used as my chief authority here the reports in _The Quebec
Gazette_, more especially the issue of Friday, 10 September, 1841.

[60] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 26 April, 1847.




{126}

CHAPTER IV.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: SIR CHARLES BAGOT.

Sir Charles Bagot, the second governor-general of United Canada,
contrasted strangely with his predecessor in character and political
methods.  He was a man of the Regency, and of Canning's set.  Since
1814 he had occupied positions of considerable importance in the
diplomatic world, not because of transcendent parts, but because of his
connections.  He had been ambassador at Washington, St. Petersburg, and
the Hague; and in the United States, where, to the end, his friends
remembered him with real affection, he had rendered service permanently
beneficial both to Britain and to America by negotiating the Rush-Bagot
treaty, which established the neutralization of the great lakes.  In
Europe, he had been known to fame mainly as the recipient of George
Canning's rhyming despatch; and for the rest, he allowed the great
minister to make him, as he had made all {127} his other agents, a pawn
in the game where he alone was player.  In his correspondence he stands
out as an old-fashioned, worldly, cultured, and unbusiness-like
diplomatist, worthy perhaps of a satiric but kindly portraiture by
Thackeray--a genuine citizen of Vanity Fair.  Apart from his
correspondence, his friendships, and his American achievements, he
might have passed through life, deserving nothing more than some few
references in memoirs of the earlier nineteenth century.  But by one
freak of fortune he found himself transported to Canada in 1842, and,
by another, he became one of the foremost figures in the history of
Canadian constitutional development.  There have been few better
examples of the curious good-fortune which has attended on the growth
of British greatness than the story of Bagot's short career in Canada.
When a very eminent personage demanded from the existing government
some explanation of their selection of Bagot, Stanley, who was then
Secretary of State for the Colonies, pointed, not to administrative
qualifications, but to his diplomatic services in the United States.
Relations with the American Republic do not here concern us, but it may
be remembered that the situation in 1841 and 1842, just before the
{128} Ashburton Treaty, was full of peril; and Bagot was sent to Canada
as a person not displeasing to the Americans, and a diplomatist of
conciliatory temper.  But his work was to be concerned with domestic,
not international, diplomacy.

Three factors must be carefully studied in the year of political
turmoil which followed: the Imperial government, the Canadian political
community, and the new governor-general.

During this and the following governor-generalship, the predominant
influence at the Colonial Office was Lord Stanley, almost the most
distinguished of the younger statesmen of the day.  Peel's judicial and
scientific mind usually controlled those of his subordinates; but even
Peel found it hard to check the brilliant individualism of his colonial
secretary; and this most interesting of all the great failures in
English politics exercised an influence in Canadian affairs, such as
not even Lord John Russell attempted.  Judged from his colonial
despatches, Stanley seems to have found it very hard to understand that
there could be another side to any question on which he had made up his
mind.  His party had consented to a modification of the old oligarchic
rule in Canada; but they were intent upon limiting the scope of the
{129} change, and upon conducting all their operations in a very
conservative spirit.  Stanley's instructions to Bagot had been drawn up
in no ungenerous fashion.  Bagot was to know no distinctions of
national origin or religious creed, and in so far as it might be
consistent with his duty to his Sovereign, he was to consult the wishes
of the mass of the community.[1]  Their happiness it was his main duty
to secure.  In ecclesiastical matters, Stanley, who had changed his
party rather than consent to weaken the Anglican Church in Ireland, was
willing to acknowledge "that the habits and opinions of the people of
Canada were, in the main, averse from the absolute predominance of any
single church."[2]  But the theory inspiring the instructions was one
which denied to the colonists any but the most partial responsibility
and independence, and which regarded their party divisions as factious
and at times treasonable.  This disbelief in the reality of Canadian
parties was, however, discounted, and yet at the same time rendered
more insulting to the reformers, because the colonial secretary
regarded the fragments of old Family Compact Toryism as still the best
guarantee in Canada for the British connection.  "Although {130} I am
far from wishing to re-establish the old Family Compact of Upper
Canada," he wrote, at a later date, "if you come into difficulties,
that is the class of men to fall back upon, rather than the
ultra-liberal party."[3]  Confidence in political adventurers and the
disaffected French seemed to him a kind of madness.  In addition to
this attitude towards existing parties, Stanley held stiffly to every
constitutional expedient which asserted the supremacy of the Imperial
government.  The Union had, by fixing a Civil List, taken the power of
the purse within certain limits from Canadian hands, and this Civil
List Stanley regarded as quite essential to the maintenance of British
authority.[4]  In fact, any discussion of the subject seemed to him the
"reopening of a chapter which has already led to such serious
consequences, and in the prosecution of which I contemplate seriously
the prospect of the dismemberment of the Empire."[5]  Holding views so
resolute, he could not, like Russell, trust his representative on the
spot; and, from the first, the troubles of the new governor-general
were multiplied by Stanley's {131} determination to make the views of
the Colonial Office prevail in Canada.  "I very much doubt," wrote
Murdoch, Sydenham's former secretary, "how far Lord Stanley is really
alive to the true state of Canada, and to the necessity of governing
through the assembly."[6]

Local influences provide the second factor in the situation.  As has
been seen, the Canadian political community was demanding both
responsible government, and the admission of the French to a share in
office.  Sydenham had exhibited the most wonderful skill in working an
anomalous system of government, and he had found himself on the brink
of failure.  His Council, which Bagot had inherited, "might be said to
represent the Reform or popular party of Upper Canada, and the moderate
Conservatives of both provinces, to the exclusion of the French and the
ultra-conservatives of both provinces,"[7] but the compromise
represented less a popular demand for moderation, than Sydenham's own
individual idea of what a Canadian Council should be.  There had been
uneasiness in adjusting the opinions of individual members; there was a
steady decline in the willingness of the Assembly {132} and the country
to support them; and a determined constitutional opposition found
additional strength through the support of the French party, whom the
governor had alienated not simply as a political division but as a
race.  In a sense, there was no imminent danger, as there had been in
1837, for Sydenham's sound administration had given the country peace
and prosperity.  English money and immigrants were flowing in; the
woods were ringing with the axes of settlers too busy in clearing the
ground to trouble much with politics; the lines of communication were
being improved and transportation simplified; and, thanks to Ashburton,
the war-cloud to the south had vanished over the horizon.  Yet the
politicians held the central position--everything depended on them; and
the crisis for Bagot would arise, first, when he should be called on to
fill certain places in the Executive Council, and then, when Parliament
met.  It is often assumed that public opinion was seriously divided on
the question of the responsibility of the ministry to the Assembly, and
of the extent of the concessions to be made to the French; and that the
opposition to reform was almost equal in the numbers of its supporters
to the progressive party.  But this is to over-estimate the forces of
{133} reaction.  The Family Compact men had fallen on evil days.
Strachan with his church party, and MacNab with his tail of Tory
irreconcilables, had really very little substantial backing; and honest
Tory gentlemen, like J. S. Cartwright, who openly advocated an
aristocratic administration, were unlikely to attract the crowd.  The
work of Sydenham had contributed much to the political education of
Canada; popular opinion was now firmer and more self-consistent, and
that opinion went directly contrary to the views of Stanley and his
supporters.  One may find evidence of this in the views of moderates on
either side.

Harrison, who represented the moderate reforming party in Sydenham's
ministry, held that responsible government, in some form or other, was
essential, and that French nationalism must also receive concessions.
"Looking at the present position of parties," he wrote to Bagot in
July, "it may, I think, be safely laid down that, to obtain a working
majority in the House of Assembly, it is absolutely necessary that the
government should be able to carry with it the bulk of the
French-Canadian members....  There is no disguising the fact that the
French members possess the power of the country; and he who directs
that {134} power, backed by the most efficient means of controlling it,
is in a situation to govern the province best."[8]  It was his opinion
that Bagot should anticipate the coming crisis by calling in Baldwin
and the French, before events forced that step on him.

On the Conservative side, a moderate man like W. H. Draper, the
attorney-general for Upper Canada in Sydenham's ministry, argued in
favour of a policy almost identical.  While his views tended to
oscillate, now to this side, now to that, their general direction was
clear.  He felt that the ideal condition was one of union between the
parties of Western Canada, which would "render the position of the
government safer in its dealings with the French-Canadians."  But no
such union was possible, and Draper, with that honest opportunism which
best expressed his mind and capacity, assured Bagot that action in the
very teeth of his instructions was the only possible course.  "One
thing I do not doubt at all," he wrote in July 1842, "and that is that,
with the present House of Assembly, you cannot get on without the
French, while it is necessary for me at the same time to declare
frankly that I cannot sit at the {135} council-board with Mr.
Baldwin."[9]  In other words, since Draper admitted that the opposition
leaders must receive office, and at the same time declared the
impossibility of his holding office with them, he was consenting to
Cabinet government, not in the restricted form permitted in Lord John
Russell's despatches, but after the regular British fashion.

Outside the sphere of party politics moderate opinion took precisely
the same stand.  Murdoch had been Sydenham's right-hand man, and was
still the fairest critic of Canadian politics.  That he distrusted
Stanley's methods is apparent in his letters to Bagot; and it was his
suggestion that the Imperial position should be modified, and that some
concession should be made to French national feeling.  "No half
measures," he told Bagot, "can now be safely resorted to.  After the
Rebellion, the government had the option, either of crushing the French
and anglifying the province, or of pardoning them and making them
friends.  And as the latter policy was adopted, it must be carried out
to its legitimate consequences."[10]

{136}

The situation in Canada during the spring and summer of 1842 stood
thus.  A governor-general, entirely new to the work of domestic
administration, and to the province which had fallen to his lot, faced
a curious dilemma.  The British cabinet, the minister responsible for
the colonies, and all those in Canada who claimed to be the peculiar
friends of the British connection, bade him govern for, but not by the
people, and exclude from office almost all the French-Canadians, on the
ground that they were devotedly French in sympathies.  Another group,
at times aggressive, and very little accustomed to the orthodox methods
of parliamentary opposition, bade him venture and trust; and warned him
that no half measures would satisfy the claims of constitutional
liberty and nationality.

The administration of Bagot occupied a single year, and its more
important episodes were crowded into a few weeks in the autumn of 1842.
Yet there have been few years of equal significance in the history of
Canadian political development.  There were intervals in which Bagot
had time to reveal to Canada his genius for making friends; and the
foundation of a provincial university in Toronto deeply interested one
who had something of {137} Canning's wit and literary inclinations.
But politics usually claimed all his attention.  The Union of the
Provinces, and the Imperial supremacy, had to be defended against their
assailants; the vacant places in the Executive Council had to be
filled, as nearly as was possible in harmony with the wishes of the
community; and whatever the character of that council might be, it
would have to face the test of criticism from an Assembly, which had
already striven not unsuccessfully with Sydenham.  In his attempt to
answer these various problems, Bagot was at his worst in finance.  He
had not the requisite business training, and entirely lacked Sydenham's
knowledge, boldness, and precision.  In the correspondence over the
mode in which the province should dispose of the British loan of
£1,500,000, Stanley's views show a clearness and force, lacking in
those of Bagot; and in the one really unfortunate episode of the year,
his want of financial skill drew on the governor-general's head the
remonstrances of both Stanley and the Treasury authorities.  To escape
financial difficulties in Canada, Bagot had anticipated the loan, by
drawing on British funds for £100,000, and the Treasury did not spare
him.  "He ought," wrote the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "to have {138}
considered those (difficulties) which must arise here from the
presentation of large drafts at the Treasury, for which Parliament had
made no provision; and for which, as Parliament was not sitting, no
regular provision could be made.  The situation to which the Treasury
is reduced is this: either to protest the bills for want of funds, or
to accept the bills, and find within thirty days the means of paying
them."[11]  This incident furnished to Stanley fresh proof, if any were
needed, of Bagot's inexperience.  An anxious and mistrustful temper
appears in all his despatches to Bagot; but, in fact, with little
justification.  He never learned how completely the governor for whom
he trembled was his master in the art of governing a half-autonomous
colony.

As early as March, Bagot had begun to feel that the views of the
Cabinet in Britain were impracticable: and that even the Civil List
might not be so easily defended as Stanley imagined.  "I know well by
what a slender thread the adhesion of the colony will hang whenever we
consent to leave the matter entirely in its own hands....  But the
present supply is not sufficient for its purposes.  We must always be
dependent on the Legislature for provision to meet its excess; and I
cannot but {139} think that the sooner the Legislature succeeds, if
they are to succeed, in carrying the point, the more generous they may
possibly be in the use of their victory."[12]  Bagot was already
defining the policy which was to be peculiarly his own.  He had a
singularly clear eye for facts, even when they contradicted his
preconceived ideas; and, being a man of the world, he saw that
compromise with the opposition was as natural in Canada as in Britain.
But in answer to his despatches, proposing such a compromise, Stanley,
with his dogmatic omniscience, and eloquent certainty, had nothing but
regrets to express, and difficulties to suggest.  England, he thought,
had dealt generously with Canada in the terms of the Act of Union, and
sound statesmanship lay in resolute defence of that measure.  And,
since there always seems to be in such imperialists a sense of
political pathos--the _lacrymae rerum politicarum_--he began to have
pessimistic views of the permanence of the connection: "I am very far
from underrating the value to Great Britain of her extensive and
rapidly improving North American possessions, but I cannot conceal from
myself the fact that they are maintained to her at no light cost, and
at no {140} trifling risk.  To all this she willingly submits, so long
as the bonds of union between herself and her colonies are strengthened
by mutual harmony, good will, and confidence; and it would be indeed
painful to me to contemplate the possibility that embarrassments,
arising from uncalled for and unfounded jealousies on the part of
Canada, might lead the people of England to entertain a doubt how far
the balance of advantages preponderated in favour of the continuance of
the present relations."[13]  The Civil List raised the fundamental
question, but it was a simple issue, and it lay still far in the
future.  The constitution of the ministry, however, and its relation to
the coming parliament, could be neither evaded nor delayed.

Bagot's instructions gave him a certain scope, for he was permitted to
avail himself of the advice and services of the ablest men, without
reference to the distinction of local party.  In making use of this
liberty, Bagot had to consider chiefly the need of finding a majority
in the Lower House--happily he could postpone their meeting till
September.  Of the probable tone of that Assembly the estimates varied,
but Murdoch, who knew the situation as well as any man, calculated that
while {141} the government party would number thirty, the French, with
their British Radical friends, would be thirty-six strong, the old
Conservatives eight, and some ten or so would "wait on providence or
rather on patronage."[14]  In Sydenham's last days, the government
majority, which he had so subtly, and by means so machiavellian, got
together, had vanished.  Reformers, not all of them so scrupulous as
Baldwin, were ready to ruin a government which kept them from a
complete triumph.  Sir Allan MacNab with his old die-hards, fulminating
against all enemies of the British tradition, was still willing to make
an unholy alliance with the French, if only he could checkmate a
governor-general who did not seem to appreciate his past services to
Britain.  And the French themselves, alienated and insulted by
Sydenham, sat gloomily alone, restless over the Union, seemingly on the
threshold of some fresh racial conflict.  Everything was uncertain,
save the coming government defeat.[15]

At the very outset, Bagot had this question of French Canada thrust
upon him.  From the moment of his arrival his council advised the {142}
admission of the French Canadians to a share in power.  He refused, for
Stanley had very carefully instructed him on that subject.  The
Colonial Secretary had spoken of the wisdom of forgetting old
divisions, but he never permitted himself to forget that the French
leaders--La Fontaine, Viger, Girouard--had all been, in some fashion or
other, involved in the troubles of 1837.  He believed that there still
existed in Lower Canada a gloomy, rebellious, French Canadian party,
which no responsible British statesman could afford to recognize.
Sober-minded Canadian statesmen told him that it was useless to attempt
to detach from the party individuals--_les Vendus_ their compatriots
called them.  He answered that he would like to multiply such _Vendus_;
and he hoped for a day when the anglicising of the Lower Province
should have been completed.  It was his intention to break down all
forces tending in the opposite direction.  He was conscious of a
repulsion, equally strong, in his feelings towards Baldwin, and the
Reform party.  Whether it came by French racial hate, or Upper Canadian
republicanism, which was the name he gave to all views of a reforming
colour, the ruin of the Empire would follow hard on concession to
agitation.  In his heart, he trusted only {143} the old Tories, and not
all his disgust at MacNab's interested advances could alter his
conviction that one party alone cared for Britain--the former Family
Compact men.  When he bade Bagot disregard party divisions in his
choice of ministers, he was unconsciously limiting Bagot's choice to a
very little circle, all of them most unmistakably displeasing to the
populace, whose wishes he professed to be willing to consult.  He
claimed to be a man of principle--mistaking the clearness of
doctrinaire ignorance for the certainty of honest knowledge.

Happily the governor-general of Canada was not in this sense a man of
principle.  He observed, took counsel, and began to shape his own
policy.  It is not easy to describe that policy in a sentence, or even
to make it absolutely clear.  He had come out to Canada, forewarned
against Baldwin and the school of constitutionalists associated with
him; and the warning made him reluctant to consent to their ideas.  He
had been advised to draw his councillors from all directions, and his
naturally moderate spirit approved a policy of judicious selection.
But the noteworthy feature in the line of action which he ultimately
followed was that he allowed his diplomatic instincts to overbalance
the advice imposed on him by the British ministry.  {144} In selecting
individuals for his councils, he almost unconsciously followed the
wishes of Baldwin and his party, until, at the end, he found himself in
the hands of resolute advocates of responsible government, and did
nothing to withstand their doctrine.  But this is to anticipate events,
and to simplify what was actually a process involved in some confusion.
He filled two vacant places--one with the most brilliant of reforming
financiers, Francis Hincks, whose merits he saw at once; the other,
after a gentlemanly refusal from Cartwright, with Sherwood, a sound but
comparatively moderate Conservative from Upper Canada.  In an admirable
letter to Stanley at the beginning of the summer, he outlined his
policy.  Stanley, ever fearful of rash experiments, warned him that a
combination of black and white does not necessarily produce grey.  To
this he answered: "My hope is that, circumstanced as I am, I possibly
may be able to do this, that is, to take from all sides the best and
fittest men for the public service....  The attempt to produce such a
grey, whether it succeed or not, must, I think, after all that has
passed, and at this particular crisis in which I find myself here, be
the safest line."[16]  Stanley, then, limited his {145} choice of men,
and in the event of a crisis, was prepared that he should risk a defeat
and the violent imposition of an alien ministry, on the chance that
such a reverse might provoke a loyalist uprising to defend the British
connection.  Baldwin dreamed of a consistently Radical cabinet.
MacNab, with his eyes shut to the consequences, seems to have
considered a leap in the dark--a coalition between his men and the
French Canadians.  Bagot, as opportunist as the Tories, but opportunist
for the sake of peace, and some kind of constitutional progress, laid
aside lofty ideals, and said, as his most faithful advisers also said,
that the future lay with _judicious selection_, no party being barred
except where their conduct should have made recognition of them
impossible to a self-respecting governor.

It is difficult to name all the influences which operated on Bagot's
mind.  He corresponded largely and usefully with Draper, the soundest
of his conservative advisers.  His own innate courtesy led him to end
the social ostracism of the French, and taught him their good
qualities.  Being quick-witted and observant, his political instincts
began almost unconsciously to force a new programme upon him.  Before
August, he had conciliated moderate reforming opinion through Hincks;
he {146} had proved to the French, by legal appointments, which met
with a stiff and forced acquiescence in Stanley, that at least he was
not their enemy.  He had begun to question the certainty of Stanley's
wisdom on the Civil List, and various other subjects.  Then, between
July 28th and September 26th, the date of two sets of despatches,
which, if despatches ever deserve the term, must be called works of
genius, he completed his plan, brought it to the test of practice, and
challenged the home government to acquiesce, or recall him.  With his
ministry constituted as it was in July, he had to face the certainty of
a vote of no confidence as soon as parliament met.  Were he to do
nothing, some unholy alliance of groups would defeat the government.
In that case, his ministers, pledged as they were to constitutionalism
by the resolutions of September, 1841, had warned him beforehand, that
they would resign in a body.  All hold over the French would be lost,
and responsible government, whether he and Stanley willed it or not,
would be established in its most obnoxious form.  To fill the vacant
places, or to reconstruct the ministry, the field of choice was very
small, even if men of every connection were included.  "Out of the 84
members of the House of {147} Assembly," he told Stanley, "not above
30, as far as I can judge, are at all qualified for office, by the
common advantages of intelligence and education, and of these, ten at
least are not in a position to accept it."[17]  In the case of the
French he seemed to have reached an absolute deadlock.  He found offers
to individual Frenchmen useless, for he did not gain the party, and he
ruined the men whom he honoured.  The Assembly was to meet on the 8th
of September, and as that date drew near, the excitement rose.  It was
a crisis with many possibilities both for England and for Canada.

As certainly as Stanley, with all the wisdom of Peel's cabinet behind
him, was wrong, and fatally so, Bagot's conduct between September 10th
and September 14th was precisely right.  In a correspondence with Peel,
just before the crisis, Stanley sought to get his great leader to take
his view.  Even Peel's genius proved incompetent to settle a problem of
local politics, three thousand miles away from the scene of action.
The wisdom of his answer lay, not in its suggestions, which were
useless to Bagot, but in its hint "that much must be left to the
judgment and discretion of those who have to act at a great distance
from the supreme {148} authority."[18]  Stanley himself, from first to
last, was for allowing Bagot to face defeat, although he always thought
it possible that stubborn resistance to what he counted treason would
rally a secure majority to Bagot and the Crown.  Time and again after
assuring Bagot that he and the ministry acquiesced, which, to do them
justice, they did like men, he harked back to the idea of allowing
events to prove that the government was indeed powerless, before it
made a definitive surrender.  Long before Parliament met, the situation
had been discussed in all its bearings; and the only doubt that
remained was concerning which out of three or four foreshadowed
catastrophes would end the existence of the government.  The ministers
themselves had their negative programme ready; for, having consented to
the constitutional resolutions of September, 1841, they forewarned
Bagot that if they were left in a minority, or in a very small
majority, they should feel themselves compelled to resign, and they
added that, if Bagot did not accept their recommendation to admit the
French Canadians, they would insist upon his accepting their
resignation.[19]

{149}

When the Assembly met, events moved very rapidly.  On the opening day,
Neilson brought forward the exciting question of amnesty; and the air
was filled with rumours and schemes, of which the most ominous for
government was the project of coalition between Conservatives and
French Canadians.  The time had come for action--if anything could
really be done.  To understand the boldness of Bagot's tactics, it must
be remembered that they went "in the teeth of an almost universal
feeling at home ... certainly in opposition to Lord Durham's recorded
sentiments, and as certainly to Lord Sydenham's avowed practice"--to
say nothing of Stanley's own wishes.  La Fontaine was definitely
approached on the tenth, and, seemingly, Bagot was not quite prepared
for the greatness of his claims--"four places in the Council, with the
admission of Mr. Baldwin into it."[20]  But he had no alternative, for
on the 12th he received a plain statement from his cabinet that, if he
failed, they were not prepared to carry on the government.[21]  To his
dismay, the surrender, if one may so term it, which he signed next day,
was not accepted, since Baldwin could not {150} countenance the
pensioning of the ministers, Ogden and Davidson, who had been
compulsorily retired, and, although MacNab was at hand with the offer
of sixteen Conservative stalwarts, the plan was useless, and, in view
of MacNab's general conduct at this time, irritating.  When Bagot wrote
that night to Stanley it was as a despairing man, for the attack had
begun at 3 o'clock, Baldwin leading off with an address, as usual
pledging the House to responsible government, and there was every
chance that he would defeat the ministry.  At this point Bagot took the
strange and daring plan of allowing Draper to read his letter to La
Fontaine in the House, that the Lower Canadians might "learn how
abundantly large an offer their leaders have rejected, and the honest
spirit in which that offer was made."[22]  His unconventionality won
the day, by convincing the House that the governor-general was in
earnest.  Successive adjournments staved off the debate on the address;
and by September 16th, terms had been settled.  La Fontaine, Small,
Aylwin, Baldwin, and Girouard if he cared to take office, were to
enter, Draper, Davidson, Ogden and Sherwood passing out.
Unfortunately, since neither Ogden nor Sherwood happened to be {151}
present, Bagot had to accept their resignations on his own initiative,
and without previous consultation with them.  Not even that dexterous
correspondent could quite disguise the awkwardness of his position when
he wrote to tell both men that they had ceased to be his ministers.[23]
So the crisis ended.

The address was carried by fifty-five votes to five, the malcontents
being MacNab, foiled once more in his ambitions; Moffat and Cartwright,
representing inflexible Toryism; Neilson, whose position as a
recognized opponent of the Union tied his hands, and Johnstone, a
disappointed place man.  Peace ruled in the Assembly, and the battle
passed to the province, the newspapers, and most ominous of all for the
governor, to the cabinet and public in Britain.  A storm of abuse,
criticism, and regrets broke over Bagot's devoted head.  The opposition
press in Canada called him "a radical, a puppet, an old woman, an
apostate, a renegade descendant of old Colonel Bagot who fell at Naseby
fighting for his King."[24]  MacNab, in the House, led a bitterly
personal opposition.  At least one {152} cabinet meeting in England was
called specially to consider the incident, and for some months Stanley
tempered assurances that he and the government would support their
representative, with caustic expressions of regret.  The necessity of
the change, he reiterated, had not been fully proven.  The French
members and Baldwin were doubtful characters.  If the worst must be
accepted, and a ministry constructed, containing both Baldwin and the
French, then Bagot had better obtain from the new cabinet some
assurance of "their intention of standing by the provisions of the Act
of Union, including the Civil List, and every other debatable
question."  Then, fearing lest the very citadel of responsibility and
control should be surrendered, he set forth his theory of government in
an elaborate letter which revealed distinct distrust of his
correspondent's power of resistance.  "Your position is different from
that of the Crown in England.  The Crown acts avowedly and exclusively
on the advice of its ministers, and has no political opinions of its
own.  You act in concert with your Executive Council, but the ultimate
decision rests with yourself, and you are recognised, not only as
having an opinion, but as supreme and irresponsible, except to the Home
government, for {153} your acts in your executive capacity.
Practically you are (influenced) by the advice you receive, and by
motives of prudence, in not running counter to the advice of those who
command a majority in the Legislature; but you cannot throw on them the
onus of your actions in the same sense that the Crown can in this
country."[25]

Yet, so far as Canada was concerned, Bagot had reason to feel
satisfied.  Threatened with half a dozen hostile combinations, he had
forestalled them all, and found the Assembly filled with friends, not
enemies.  He had approached a sullen French nation--and thereafter the
French party formed as solid an accession to Canadian political
stability as they had once been dangerous to Imperial peace; and their
union with the moderate reformers in government, while it gave them all
they asked, enabled the governor to exercise a natural restraint on
them, should they again be tempted to nationalist excesses.  He had not
explicitly surrendered to any sweeping doctrine of responsible
government.  There was peace at last.  The Assembly which passed over
thirty acts, reaffirmed the rights of the royal prerogative, and {154}
was dismissed in the most amiable temper with itself, and the
governor-general.

One may discern, however, a curious contradiction between the
superficial consequences of the crisis, as described by Bagot, and the
fundamental changes the beginnings of which he was able to trace in the
months which followed.  On the face of it, Bagot's policy of frank
expediency had saved Stanley and his party from a crushing defeat and a
humiliating surrender to extreme views.  So far, he had assisted the
cause of conservatism.  But the disaster and the humiliation would have
come, not from the grant of responsible government, but from the misuse
of it to which a victory, won against a more resolute governor, might
have tempted Baldwin and La Fontaine, and from the false position in
which the imperial government would have stood, towards the men who had
challenged imperial authority and won.  It is interesting to follow the
process by which Bagot came to see all that lay in his action.
Yielding to Canadian autonomy, he went on to new surrenders.  He had
already warned Stanley that the agitation over the Civil List would
certainly reawaken; to the end he seems to have been considering the
advisability of a complete surrender {155} on that point.  When he
wrote communicating to the minister the Assembly's acknowledgment of
the royal prerogative, in recognizing the right of the Crown to name
the capital, he pointed out that, prerogative or no prerogative, the
possessor of the purse had the final voice.  He rebuked his new
minister, Baldwin, for tacking on question-begging constitutional
phrases to a legal opinion, but he told Stanley, quite frankly, that,
"whether the doctrine of responsible government is openly acknowledged,
or is only tacitly acquiesced in, _vi

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