Chapter V: Canada and Ireland (2)

The second and less important recommendation, afterwards embodied in the Act of 1840, was the Union of the two Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. Here Lord Durham, misled unhappily by the Irish precedent, fell into an error. During his visit to Canada he came near to accepting that higher conception of a Federal Union with local Home Rule for each Province, outlined by Roebuck and Mackenzie, and eventually consummated thirty years later. When he came home to London he made a _volte face_, rejecting the Federal idea and accepting its antitype, that Legislative and Administrative Union of the two Provinces which had been rejected by Pitt in 1791. There were, of course, economic arguments for Union apart from the racial factor; but they do not seem to have been decisive with Durham. At the last moment he gave way to a dread of predominant French influence in Lower Canada, similar at bottom to his dread of the unchecked influence of the British minority. While he feared that the latter, if let alone, would inaugurate a reign of terror, he added also: "Never again will the present generation of French-Canadians yield a loyal submission to a British Government." The argument is inconsistent with the whole spirit of the Report, which attributes the friction in both Provinces to bad political institutions. It is probable that Durham was really more influenced by the quite reasonable recognition that the French were relatively backward in civilization and ideas. He sought, therefore, both to disarm them politically and to anglicize them socially, by amalgamating their political system with that of wholly British Upper Canada. His calculation was that in a joint assembly the British would have a small but sufficient majority. The estimated population of Lower Canada was 550,000, of whom 450,000 were French, and 100,000 British and Irish; that of Upper Canada 400,000, all British and Irish. That is to say, that in both Provinces together there was a British and Irish majority of 100,000. The calculation over-estimated the British element, but in the event this mistake proved to be immaterial. Though Durham himself appears to have intended representation to be in strict accordance with population, the Union Act, passed in 1840, allotted an equal number of representatives in the Joint Assembly to each of the old Provinces. The assumption here was that the British Members from Upper Canada would unite with those of old Lower Canada to vote down the French, just as the Ulster Protestants voted with English members to vote down the Irish majority.

In practice the Union, after lasting twenty-six years, eventually broke down. Durham's fear of French disloyalty proved to be as groundless as his ideal of complete anglicization was futile. It was neither necessary, sensible, nor possible to extinguish French sentiment, and human nature triumphed over this half-hearted effort to apply in dilution the medicine of Fitzgibbonism to the Colonies. Little harm was done, because the introduction of responsible government, far transcending the Union in importance, worked irresistibly for good. Parties did not run wholly on racial lines, but racialism was encouraged by the equal representation of the two Provinces in the Assembly, in spite of the greater growth of population in the Upper Province. The system was unhealthy, and at last produced a state of deadlock, in which two exactly equal parties were balanced, and a stable Government impossible. When that point was reached, men began to observe the strong and supple Constitution of the adjacent United States, and to recognize that a politically feeble Canada was courting an absorption from that quarter which all Canadians disliked. The Legislative Union was dissolved by the mutual consent of the Provinces with the approval of the Mother Country, and in 1867, under the British North America Act, the Federal Union was formed which exists in such strength and stability to-day. Fear of French disloyalty or tyranny was a night-mare of the past, even with the British minority in Lower Canada. It was realized that French national sentiment was perfectly consistent with racial harmony under the British flag. Upper Canada became Ontario, Lower Canada Quebec. Each Province reserved a local autonomy for itself, and each at the same moment voluntarily surrendered certain high powers to a supreme centralized Government, in which both had confidence. Such a political system is capable of indefinite expansion. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined the Federation at the outset, Prince Edward Island and British Columbia a little later, and were followed in turn by the successively developed Provinces which now form the united and powerful Dominion of Canada.

Turn back to Ireland and weigh well the analogy. _Mutatis mutandis_, almost every paragraph of the Durham Report applied with greater force to the Ireland of his day. The ascendancy of a caste and creed minority in Upper Canada; of a race minority in Lower Canada; "the conflict of races, not of principles"; the consequent obliteration of natural political divisions, and the substitution of unnatural and vindictive antagonisms demoralizing both sides to every quarrel; the universal disgust with and distrust of the British Government, though for reasons diametrically opposite; the hopelessness of true reforms; the perpetuation of abuses; the stagnation of trade and agriculture; the re-emigration to America, and the abuses of a Church Establishment with endowments from sources by right public--all these phenomena and many others had their counterpart in Ireland. Some have disappeared. The Church is disestablished. The land question is on the way to settlement. The old ascendancy is mitigated. But many of the political, and all the psychological, features of the situation which Durham described do, alas! exist to-day in Ireland. Ireland, like the Canada of 1838, is a land of bewildering paradox. There is a similarly unwholesome arrest of free political life, the same unnatural division of parties, the same suppression of moderate opinion, and the same inevitable maintenance of a Home Rule agitation, harmful in itself, because it retards the country and accentuates for the time being the very divisions it seeks to cure, but absolutely necessary for the final salvation of Ireland. Durham, in the case of Canada, saw the truth, and swept into the limbo of discredited bogies the old figments of the coercionists. In a singularly noble and profound passage (p. 229), revealing the ethical basis on which his philosophy rested, he declared that even if the political freedom of the Colony were to lead in the distant future to her separation from the Empire, she nevertheless had an indefeasible moral right to the blessings of freedom; but he prophesied correctly that the connection with the Empire "would only become more durable and advantageous by having more of equality, of freedom, and of local administration."

If only Irish and British Unionists would realize that these words came from a profound knowledge of human nature in the mass, and are applicable to Irishmen in Ireland just as much as to Irish, British, French, and Dutch in the Colonies!

The tenacity of the old superstition is extraordinary, and we can see it in the case of Canada. It remains a wonder to this day how responsible government was ever introduced. There can be no question that the Act of 1840 only secured a smooth passage because, in providing for the Union of the French and British Provinces, it represented a superficial analogy to that Union of Britain and Ireland which had paralyzed Irish aspirations. Durham himself had actually quoted both the Irish and Scotch Unions as successful expedients for "compelling the obedience of a refractory population," and thus arrived at the outstanding and solitary defect of his otherwise noble scheme. And O'Connell, in a debate upon the Report on June 3, 1839, opposed the Canadian Union for Irish reasons, and in language which after-experience proved to be perfectly correct. Happily, as we have seen, the defect was small and curable, because the analogy with Ireland, where there was no responsible, but, on the contrary, a separate and wholly irresponsible Executive Government, and whose interests were upheld by only 100 Members in a House of 670, was exceedingly remote. On responsible government itself the Canadian Act of 1840 was entirely silent. We may thank Providence for the fact. Durham's cardinal proposals had received unbridled vituperation as sentimental rubbish where they were not treasonable poison, the whole controversy taking precisely the same form as in 1886 and 1893 over Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills for Ireland. The _Quarterly Review_ spoke of "this rank and infectious Report," though it is fair to say that Peel and Wellington did not join in such wild language. Five months after the issue of Lord Durham's Report, Lord John Russell, in the debate of June 3, was denying, with the approval of all but the Radicals, the possibility of responsible government as emphatically as ever. Durham seems to have partially converted him in the summer, for in introducing the Act itself in 1840 he cautiously committed himself to the plan of instructing the Canadian Governor to include in his Executive Council, or Cabinet, men expressly chosen because they possessed the confidence of the Assembly. But the Act as it stood, ignoring this vital change, was impeccably Conservative, and on that account went through. In some points it seemed, without good reason, to be even reactionary, and was regarded in that light with displeasure by the Radicals, with satisfaction by Whigs and Tories. While confirming the control of revenue by the Assembly, in return for a fixed civil list, it took away from the Assembly, and vested in the Executive, the power of recommending money votes, and it also retained the Legislative Council or Upper Chamber as a nominated, not as an elective, body. Provided that the Executive had the confidence of the representative Assembly or Lower House, the first point was perfectly sound, and the second was not vital; but there was no security for the condition precedent other than Russell's vague outline of subsequent policy. While the supreme power of the King, acting with or without the Governor, was reaffirmed in the most vigorous terms, there was not a word in the Act about the composition of the Executive Council or its relation to the Assembly.

In Canada much the same misconceptions prevailed, and promoted the acceptance of the Act by the supporters of the old ascendancies. The question of the Union and the question of responsible government, both raised by Lord Durham's Report, became inextricably confused, and the various petitions and resolutions of the time reflect this confusion. The French opposed the Union and supported responsible government on the same grounds, and in almost identical terms, as the Irish opposed, and still oppose, their Union with Great Britain, and ask for responsible government in Ireland. Moderate Britishers supported both proposals, but the extremists of the old ascendancy bitterly denounced the whole theory of responsible government, Union or no Union. Their views are ably and incisively set forth by a Committee of the old Legislative Council of Upper Canada, that is, by the members of the "family compact," in a protest signed and transmitted to London, where it was quoted with approval by Lord John Russell. It may be found, together with other petitions of the time, in the "Canadian Constitutional Development" of Messrs. Grant and Egerton. With a few unessential changes and modifications, the whole document might be signed to-day by a Committee of Ulster Unionists, and I heartily wish that every Ulsterman would read it in a spirit of reason and generosity, and observe how every line of it was falsified by history, before he declares that the situation of Ulster is peculiar, and sets his hand or gives his adhesion to a similar document. The signatories, who, it must be remembered, were a small ruling minority of the colonists, whose power was artificially sustained by the British Governor, claim that they alone, in glorifying and in battling for "colonial dependence," are the true Imperialists. They hold dear the "unity of the Empire." Responsible government within their own Colony would lead to the "overthrowal" of that Empire, and the reduction of Britain to a "second-rate Power." A colonial Cabinet is absurd; the local and sectional interests are too strong; the British Government must remain as "umpire" to keep the parties from flying at one another's throats. The majority, who are themselves a prey to divisions (and one thinks of Nationalist splits), are seeking only for illegitimate power; the minority are for "justice and protection, and impartial government." Yet in the same breath we are told that all is happy and peaceable as it is. Why subject the Colony to the dissensions of party? Why foster a spirit of undying enmity among a people disposed to dwell together in harmony? The signatories argue from the history of Ireland and Scotland, "which never had responsible government, yet government became impracticable the moment it approached to equal rights." Hence a Union, because "government must be conducted with a view to some supreme ruling power, which is not practicable with several independent Legislatures." Finally, Loyalists and Imperialists as they are, they are not going to stand an attempt to "force independence" on them. They will take the matter into their own hands, and, if necessary, call in the United States to "replace the British influence needlessly overthrown."

I do not quote this sort of thing in order to add any tinge of bitterness to present controversies. The signatories lived to see their errors and to be ashamed of what they wrote. They, like the Irish Unionist leaders of to-day, were able and sincere men, unconscious, we may assume, that their pessimism about the tendencies of their fellow-citizens was really due to the defective institutions which they themselves were upholding, and to the forcible suppression of the finer attributes of human nature; unconscious, we may also assume, of identifying loyalty with privilege, and "the supreme ruling power" with their own ruling power; unconscious that what they called "Imperial Unity" was in reality on the verge of producing Imperial disruption; and wholly unconscious, certainly, of the ghastly irony of their analogy drawn from the brutally misgoverned, job-ridden, tithe-ridden, rack-rented Ireland of their day, living, for no fault of its own, under a condition of intermittent martial law, and hurrying at that moment towards the agony of the famine years. Less severe in degree, analogous abuses perpetuated in their own interest existed in their own Colony, and were only abolished under the new regime which they attacked with such vehemence before it came, and which, because it transformed and elevated their own character and that of their fellow-citizens, while drawing them closer to the old country, they afterwards learned to regard with pride and thankfulness.

As an effective contrast to the mistaken views of the Upper Canadian statesmen, the reader cannot do better than study the letters of Joseph Howe, the brilliant Nova Scotia "agitator," to Lord John Russell, in answer to that statesman's speech of June 3, 1839, when he argued against responsible government, and quoted the Upper Canadian manifesto as his text. These letters make a wonderful piece of sustained and humorous satire, of which every word was true and every word applicable to Ireland. Howe's portrait, for example, of the average Colonial Governor applies line for line to the average Chief Secretary, coming at an hour's notice to a country he has never seen, and knows nothing of, vested with absolute powers of patronage, and often pledged to carry out a policy in direct conflict with the wishes of the vast majority of the people whose interests he is supposed to guard.

The Act of 1840 went through, but it had little to do with the regeneration and reconciliation of Canada. Poulett Thompson, the first Governor, peremptorily declined to admit the principle of Ministerial responsibility. Some good reforms were, indeed, made in the early years, but the Act was on the verge of breaking down when Lord Elgin, Durham's son-in-law, came to Canada as Governor-General in 1847. After many party changes and combinations, French influence was temporarily in the ascendant, and in 1849 a Bill was on the stocks for compensating French as well as British subjects for losses in the rebellion of 1837. Elgin, following the advice of his Ministers, of whom Baldwin was one, Lafontaine another, gave the Royal Assent to the Bill. The British, with the old cry of "loyalism," and with Orangemen in the van, rioted, mobbed the Governor, and burnt down the Parliament House at Montreal. Elgin, expostulating with Lord John Russell, who was as pessimistic as ever, and threatened with recall, stuck to his guns under fierce obloquy, and the principle of responsible government was definitely established. It was applied at about the same period to the other British Provinces of North America, with the ulterior results I have described, and in a few years to Australia.

The great year, then, was 1847, the year of the Irish famine, and the year before the pitiful rebellion of Smith O'Brien, surrendering in the historic cabbage-garden. Our thoughts go back sixty-four years to 1783, when the American War of Independence ended; when, as a result of that war, British Canada and Australia were founded, and when, at the crisis--premature, alas!--of Ireland's fortunes, the Volunteers in vain demanded the Reform which might have saved their country. Look into historical details, read contemporary debates, and watch the contrast. Within five years of responsible government Canada solved all the great questions which had been convulsing society for so long, and turned her liberated energies towards economic development. In Ireland the abuses of ages lingered to a point which seems incredible. The Church was not disestablished, amid outcries of imminent ruin and threats of a Protestant rebellion, till 1869, when Canada had already become a Federated Dominion. The Irish land question, dating from the seventeenth century, was not seriously tackled until 1881, not drastically and on the right lines till 1903. Education languishes at the present day. Canada started an excellent system of municipal and local government in the forties. In Ireland, while the minority, in Greville's words, were "bellowing spoliation and revolution," an Act was passed in 1840 with the utmost difficulty, removing an infinitesimal part of the gross abuses of municipal government under the ascendancy system, and it was not till 1898 that the people at large are admitted to a full share in county and town government. Even this step inverted the natural order of things, for the new authorities are hampered in their work by the incessant political agitation for the Home Rule which should have preceded their establishment, as it preceded it in Great Britain and Canada. Home Rule, the tried specific, was resisted, as those who read the debates of 1886 and 1893 will recognize, on the same grounds as Canadian Home Rule, in the same spirit, and often in terms absolutely identical.

Was it because Ireland, unlike Canada, was "so near"? Let us reflect. Did Durham advocate Canadian Home Rule because Canada was "so far"? On the contrary, it was a superficial inference, drawn not merely from Ireland, but from Scotland, and since proved to be false both in Canada and South Africa, that made him shrink from the full application of a philosophy which was already far in advance of the political thought and morality of his day. Is it to be conceived that if he had lived to see the Canadian Federation, the domestic and Imperial results of South African Home Rule, and the consequences of seventy more years of coercive government in Ireland, he would still have regarded the United Kingdom in the light of a successful expedient for "compelling the obedience of refractory populations"? In truth, Durham, like ninety-nine out of a hundred Englishmen of his day, knew nothing of Ireland, not even that her political system differed, as it still differs, _toto coelo_ from that of Scotland, and came into being under circumstances which had not the smallest analogy in Scotland. So far as his knowledge went, he was a student of human nature as affected by political institutions. Wakefield, who advised him, was a doctrinaire theorist who put his preconceived principles into highly successful practice both in Australia and Canada. They said: "Your coercive system degrades and estranges your own fellow-citizens. Change it, and you will make them friendly, manly, and prosperous." They were right, and one reflects once more on the terrible significance of Mr. Chamberlain's admission in 1893, that "if Ireland had been a thousand miles away, she would have what Canada had had for fifty years."

FOOTNOTES:

[20] "The Irishman in Canada" (N.F. Davin), a book to which the author is indebted for much information of the same character.

[21] "William Pitt and the National Revival."

[22] Canadian Archives, 1905; "History of Prince Edward Island," D. Campbell; "History of Canada," C.D.G. Roberts. In 1875, after a long period of agitation and discontent, the Land Purchase Act was passed, and the Dominion Government asked Mr. Hugh Childers to adjudicate on the land-sale expressly on the ground that he had been associated with the Irish Land Act of 1870 ("Life of Mr. Childers," by Lieut.-Col. Spencer Childers, vol. i., p. 232).

[23] Canadian Archives, 1900. Note B. Emigration (1831-1834). Irish immigrants in 1829, 9,614; in 1830, 18,300; in 1831, 34,155; in 1832, 28,024; in 1833, 12,013; in 1834, 19,206: about double the immigration of English and Scottish together in the same period.

[24] "Self-government in Canada," F. Bradshaw, p. 96 _et seq_.

[25] "Durham Report," p. 130.

[26] Hansard, January 23.

[27] "Self-government in Canada," F. Bradshaw, p. 17.

[28] "Letters of Queen Victoria," vol. i., November 22, 1838.