Oscar D. Skelton......................................................................................................................................1

PREFACE ................................................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER I. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS.............................................................................................1

CHAPTER II. THE FIGHT FOR SELFGOVERNMENT ..................................................................15

CHAPTER III. THE UNION ERA ........................................................................................................25

CHAPTER IV. THE DAYS OF TRIAL ................................................................................................39

CHAPTER V. THE YEARS OF FULFILMENT.................................................................................53

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ................................................................................................................73

The history of Canada since the close of the French regime falls into three clearly marked half centuries. The

first fifty years after the Peace of Paris determined that Canada was to maintain a separate existence under the

British flag and was not to become a fourteenth colony or be merged with the United States. The second fifty

years brought the winning of selfgovernment and the achievement of Confederation. The third fifty years

witnessed the expansion of the Dominion from sea to sea and the endeavor to make the unity of the political

map a living realitythe endeavor to weld the farflung provinces into one country, to give Canada a

distinctive place in the Empire and in the world, and eventually in the alliance of peoples banded together in

The author has found it expedient in this narrative to depart from the usual method of these Chronicles and

arrange the matter in chronological rather than in biographical or topical divisions. The first period of fifty

years is accordingly covered in one chapter, the second in two chapters, and the third in two chapters.

Authorities and a list of publications for a more extended study will be found in the Bibliographical Note.

Scarcely more than half a century has passed since the Dominion of Canada, in its present form, came into

existence. But thrice that period has elapsed since the fateful day when Montcalm and Wolfe laid down their

lives in battle on the Plains of Abraham, and the lands which now comprise the Dominion finally passed from

The Peace of Paris, which brought the Seven Years' War to a close in 1763, marked the termination of the

empire of France in the New World. Over the continent of North America, after that peacee, only two flags

floated, the red and yellow banner of Spain and the Union Jack of Great Britain. Of these the Union Jack held

sway over by far the larger domainover the vague territories about Hudson Bay, over the great valley of

the St. Lawrence, and over all the lands lying east of the Mississippi, save only New Orleans. To whom it

would fall to develop this vast claim, what mighty empires would be carved out of the wilderness, where the

boundary lines would run between the nations yet to be, were secrets the future held. Yet in retrospect it is

now clear that in solving these questions the Peace of Paris played no inconsiderable part. By removing from

the American colonies the menace of French aggression from the north it relieved them of a sense of

dependence on the mother country and so made possible the birth of a new nation in the United States. At the

same time, in the northern half of the continent, it made possible that other experiment in democracy, in the

union of diverse races, in international neighborliness, and in the reconciliation of empire with liberty, which

Canada presents to the whole world, and especially to her elder sister in freedom.

In 1763 the territories which later were to make up the Dominion of Canada were divided roughly into three

parts. These parts had little or nothing in common. They shared together neither traditions of suffering or

glory nor ties of blood or trade. Acadia, or Nova Scotia, by the Atlantic, was an old French colony, now

British for over a generation. Canada, or Quebec, on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, with seventy

thousand French habitants and a few hundred English camp followers, had just passed under the British flag.

West and north lay the vaguely outlined domains of the Hudson's Bay Company, where the red man and the

The old colony of Acadia, save only the island outliers, Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, now ceded by

the Peace of Paris, had been in British hands since 1713. It was not, however, until 1749 that any concerted

effort had been made at a settlement of this region. The menace from the mighty fortress which the French

were rebuilding at that time at Louisbourg, in Cape Breton, and the hostility of the restless Acadians or old

French settlers on the mainland, had compelled action and the British Government departed from its usual

policy of laissez faire in matters of emigration. Twentyfive hundred English settlers were brought out to

found and hold the town and fort of Halifax. Nearly as many Germans were planted in Lunenburg, where

their descendants flourish to this day. Then the hapless Acadians were driven into exile and into the room

they left, New Englanders of strictest Puritan ancestry came, on their own initiative, and built up new

communities like those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Other waves of voluntary

immigration followedUlster Presbyterians, driven out by the attempt of England to crush the Irish woolen

manufacture, and, still later, Highlanders, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian, who soon made Gaelic the

prevailing tongue of the easternmost counties. By 1767 the colony of Nova Scotia, which then included all

Acadia, north and east of Maine, had a prosperous population of some seven thousand Americans, two

thousand Irish, two thousand Germans, barely a thousand English, and well over a thousand surviving

Acadian French. In short, this northernmost of the Atlantic colonies appeared to be fast on the way to become

a part of New England. It was chiefly New Englanders who had peopled it, and it was with New England that

for many a year its whole social and commercial intercourse was carried on. It was no accident that Nova

With the future sister province of Canada, or Quebec, which lay along the St. Lawrence as far as the Great

Lakes, Acadia or Nova Scotia had much less in common than with New England. Hundreds of miles of

unbroken forest wilderness lay between the two colonies, and the sea lanes ran between the St. Lawrence, the

Bay of Fundy, or Halifax and Havre or Plymouth, and not between Quebec and Halifax. Even the French

settlers came of different stocks. The Acadians were chiefly men of La Rochelle and the Loire, while the

Canadians came, for the most part, from the coast provinces stretching from Normandy and Picardy to Poitou

The situation in Canada proper presented the British authorities with a problem new in their imperial

experience. Hitherto, save for Acadia and New Netherland, where the settlers were few in numbers and, even

in New Netherland, closely akin to the conquerors in race, religion, and speech, no colony containing men of

European stocks had been acquired by conquest. Canada held some sixty or seventy thousand settlers, French

and Catholic almost to a man. Despite the inefficiency of French colonial methods the plantation had taken

firm root. The colony had developed a strength, a social structure, and an individuality all its own. Along the

St. Lawrence and the Richelieu the settlements lay close and compact; the habitants' whitewashed cottages

lined the river banks only a few arpents apart. The social cohesion of the colony was equally marked. Alike in

government, in religion, and in industry, it was a land where authority was strong. Governor and intendant,

feudal seigneur, bishop and Jesuit superior, ruled each in his own sphere and provided a rigid mold and

framework for the growth of the colony. There were, it is true, limits to the reach of the arm of authority.

Beyond Montreal stretched a vast wilderness merging at some uncertain point into the other wilderness that

was Louisiana. Along the waterways which threaded this great No Man's Land the coureursdebois roamed

with little heed to law or license, glad to escape from the paternal strictness that irked youth on the lower St.

Lawrence. But the liberty of these rovers of the forest was not liberty after the English pattern; the

coureurdebois was of an entirely different type from the pioneers of British stock who were even then

pushing their way through the gaps in the Alleghanies and making homes in the backwoods. Priest and

seigneur, habitant and coureurdebois were one and all difficult to fit into accepted English ways. Clearly

The present western provinces of the Dominion were still the haunt of Indian and buffalo. FrenchCanadian

explorers and fur traders, it is true, had penetrated to the Rockies a few years before the Conquest, and had

built forts on Lake Winnipeg, on the Assiniboine and Red rivers, and at half a dozen portages on the

Saskatchewan. But the "Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay" had not yet

ventured inland, still content to carry on its trade with the Indians from its forts along the shores of that great

sea. On the Pacific the Russians had coasted as far south as Mount Saint Elias, but no white man, so far as is

Two immediate problems were bequeathed to the British Government by the Treaty of Paris: what was to be

done with the unsettled lands between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi; and how were the seventy

thousand French subjects in the valley of the St. Lawrence to be dealt with? The first difficulty was not

solved. It was merely postponed. The whole back country of the English colonies was proclaimed an Indian

reserve where the King's white subjects might trade but might not acquire land. This policy was not devised

in order to set bounds to the expansion of the older colonies; that was an afterthought. The policy had its root

in an honest desire to protect the Indians from the frauds of unscrupulous traders and from the encroachments

of settlers on their hunting grounds. The need of a conciliatory, if firm, policy in regard to the great interior

was made evident by the Pontiac rising in 1763, the aftermath of the defeat of the French, who had done all

How to deal with Canada was a more thorny problem. The colony had not been sought by its conquerors for

itself. It was counted of little worth. The verdict of its late possessors, as recorded in Voltaire's light farewell

to "a few arpents of snow," might be discounted as an instance of sour grapes; but the estimate of its new

possessors was evidently little higher, since they debated long and dubiously whether in the peace settlement

they should retain Canada or the little sugar island of Guadeloupe, a mere pin point on the map. Canada had

been conquered not for the good it might bring but for the harm it was doing as a base for French attack upon

the English colonies"the wasps" nest must be smoked out." But once it had been taken, it had to be dealt

The policy first adopted was a simple one, natural enough for eighteenthcentury Englishmen. They decided

to make Canada* over in the image of the old colonies, to turn the "new subjects," as they were called, in

good time into Englishmen and Protestants. A generation or two would suffice, in the phrase of Francis

Masereshimself a descendant of a Huguenot refugee but now wholly an Englishmanfor "melting down

the French nation into the English in point of language, affections, religion, and laws." Immigration was to be

encouraged from Britain and from the other American colonies, which, in the view of the Lords of Trade,

were already overstocked and in danger of being forced by the scarcity or monopoly of land to take up

manufactures which would compete with English wares. And since it would greatly contribute to speedy

settlement, so the Royal Proclamation of 1763 declared, that the King's subjects should be informed of his

paternal care for the security of their liberties and properties, it was promised that, as soon as circumstances

would permit, a General Assembly would be summoned, as in the older colonies. The laws of England, civil

and criminal, as near as might be, were to prevail. The Roman Catholic subjects were to be free to profess

their own religion, "so far as the laws of Great Britain permit," but they were to be shown a better way. To

the first Governor instructions were issued "that all possible Encouragement shall be given to the erecting

Protestant Schools in the said Districts, Townships and Precincts, by settling and appointing and allotting

proper Quantities of Land for that Purpose and also for a Glebe and Maintenance for a Protestant minister and

Protestant schoolmasters." Thus in the fullness of time, like Acadia, but without any Evangelise of Grand Pre,

without any drastic policy of expulsion, impossible with seventy thousand people scattered over a wide area,

* The Royal Proclamation of 1763 set the bounds of the new colony. They were surprisingly narrow, a mere

strip along both sides of the St. Lawrence from a short distance beyond the Ottawa on the west, to the end of

the Gasps peninsula on the east. The land to the northeast was put under the jurisdiction of the Governor of

Newfoundland, and the Great Lakes region was included in the territory reserved for the Indians.

It is questionable whether this policy could ever have achieved success even if it had been followed for

generations without rest or turning. But it was not destined to be given a long trial. From the very beginning

the men on the spot, the soldier Governors of Canada, urged an entirely contrary policy on the Home

Government, and the pressure of events soon brought His Majesty's Ministers to concur.

As the first civil Governor of Canada, the British authorities chose General Murray, one of Wolfe's ablest

lieutenants, who since 1760 had served as military Governor of the Quebec district. He was to be aided in his

task by a council composed of the Lieutenant Governors of Montreal and Three Rivers, the Chief Justice, the

head of the customs, and eight citizens to be named by the Governor from "the most considerable of the

The new Governor was a blunt, soldierly man, upright and just according to his lights, but deeply influenced

by his military and aristocratic leanings. Statesmen thousands of miles away might plan to encourage English

settlers and English political ways and to put down all that was French. To the man on the spot English

settlers meant "the four hundred and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders" who had come in the wake of the

army from New England and New York, with no proper respect for their betters, and vulgarly and annoyingly

insistent upon what they claimed to be their rights. The French might be alien in speech and creed, but at least

the seigneurs and the higher clergy were gentlemen, with a due respect for authority, the King's and their

own, and the habitants were docile, the best of soldier stuff. "Little, very little," Murray wrote in 1764 to the

Lords of Trade, "will content the New Subjects, but nothing will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading

here, but the expulsion of the Canadians, who are perhaps the bravest and best race upon the Globe, a Race,

who cou'd they be indulged with a few priviledges wch the Laws of England deny to Roman Catholicks at

home, wou'd soon get the better of every National Antipathy to their Conquerors and become the most

* This quotation and those following in this chapter are from official documents most conveniently

assembled in Shorn and Doughty, "Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 17591791",

and Doughty and McArthur, "Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 17911818".

Certainly there was much in the immediate situation to justify Murray's attitude. It was preposterous to set up

a legislature in which only the four hundred Protestants might sit and from which the seventy thousand

Catholics would be barred. It would have been difficult in any case to change suddenly the system of laws

governing the most intimate transactions of everyday life. But when, as happened, the Administration was

entrusted in large part to newly created justices of the peace, men with "little French and less honour," "to

whom it is only possible to speak with guineas in one's hand," the change became flatly impossible. Such an

alteration, if still insisted upon, must come more slowly than the impatient traders in Montreal and Quebec

The British Government, however, was not yet ready to abandon its policy. The Quebec traders petitioned for

Murray's recall, alleging that the measures required to encourage settlement had not been adopted, that the

Governor was encouraging factions by his partiality to the French, that he treated the traders with "a Rage

and Rudeness of Language and Demeanor" anda fair thrust in return for his reference to them as "the most

immoral collection of men I ever knew"as "discountenancing the Protestant Religion by almost a Total

Neglect of Attendance upon the Service of the Church." When the London business correspondents of the

traders backed up this petition, the Government gave heed. In 1766 Murray was recalled to England and,

though he was acquitted of the charges against him, he did not return to his post in Canada.

The triumph of the English merchants was short. They had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. General

Guy Carleton, Murray's successor and brother officer under Wolfe, was an even abler man, and he was still

less in sympathy with democracy of the New England pattern. Moreover, a new factor had come in to

reenforce the soldier's instinctive preference for gentlemen over shopkeepers. The first rumblings of the

American Revolution had reached Quebec. It was no time, in Carleton's view, to set up another sucking

republic. Rather, he believed, the utmost should be made of the opportunity Canada afforded as a barrier

against the advance of democracy, a curb upon colonial insolence. The need of cultivating the new subjects

was the greater, Carleton contended, because the plan of settlement by Englishmen gave no sign of

succeeding: "barring a Catastrophe shocking to think of, this Country must, to the end of Time, be peopled by

To bind the Canadians firmly to England, Carleton proposed to work chiefly through their old leaders, the

seigneurs and the clergy. He would restore to the people their old system of laws, both civil and criminal. He

would confirm the seigneurs in their feudal dues and fines, which the habitants were growing slack in paying

now that the old penalties were not enforced, and he would give them honors and emoluments such as they

had before enjoyed as officers in regular or militia regiments. The Roman Catholic clergy were already, in

fact, confirmed in their right to tithe and toll; and, without objection from the Governor, Bishop Briand,

elected by the chapter in Quebec and consecrated in Paris, once more assumed control over the flock.

Carleton's proposals did not pass unquestioned. His own chief legal adviser, Francis Maseres, was a sturdy

adherent of the older policy, though he agreed that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an Assembly and

suggested some wellconsidered compromise between the old laws and the new. The Advocate General of

England, James Marriott, urged the same course. The policy of 1768, he contended eleven years later, had

already succeeded in great measure. The assimilation of government had been effected; an assimilation of

manners would follow. The excessive military spirit of the inhabitants had begun to dwindle, as England's

interest required. The back settlements of New York and Canada were fast being joined. Two or three

thousand men of British stock, many of them men of substance, had gone to the new colony; warehouses and

foundries were being built; and many of the principal seigneuries had passed into English hands. All that was

needed, he concluded, was persistence along the old path. The same view was of course strenuously urged by

the English merchants in the colony, who continued to demand, down to the very eve of the Revolution, an

Carleton carried the day. His advice, tendered at close range during four years' absentee residence in London,

from 1770 to 1774, fell in with the mood of Lord North's Government. The measure in which the new policy

was embodied, the famous Quebec Act of 1774, was essentially a part of the ministerial programme for

strengthening British power to cope with the resistance then rising to rebellious heights in the old colonies.

Though not, as was long believed, designed in retaliation for the Boston disturbances, it is clear that its

framers had Massachusetts in mind when deciding on their policy for Quebec. The main purpose of the Act,

the motive which turned the scale against the old Anglicizing policy, was to attach the leaders of

FrenchCanadian opinion firmly to the British Crown, and thus not only to prevent Canada itself from

becoming infected with democratic contagion or turning in a crisis toward France, but to ensure, if the worst

came to the worst, a military base in that northland whose terrors had in old days kept the seaboard colonies

circumspectly loyal. Ministers in London had been driven by events to accept Carleton's paradox, that to

make Quebec British, it must be prevented from becoming English. If in later years the solidarity and

aloofness of the FrenchCanadian people were sometimes to prove inconvenient to British interests, it was

always to be remembered that this situation was due in great part to the deliberate action of Great Britain in

strengthening FrenchCanadian institutions as a means of advancing what she considered her own interests in

America. "The views of the British Government in respect to the political uses to which it means to make

Canada subservient," Marriott had truly declared, "must direct the spirit of any code of laws."

The Quebec Act multiplied the area of the colony sevenfold by the restoration of all Labrador on the east and

the region west as far as the Ohio and the Mississippi and north to the Hudson's Bay Company's territory. It

restored the old French civil law but continued the milder English criminal law already in operation. It gave

to the Roman Catholic inhabitants the free exercise of their religion, subject to a modified oath of allegiance,

and confirmed the clergy in their right "to hold, receive and enjoy their accustomed dues and rights, with

respect to such persons only as shall confess the said religion." The promised elective Assembly was not

granted, but a Council appointed by the Crown received a measure of legislative power.

On his return to Canada in September, 1774, Carleton reported that the Canadians had "testified the strongest

marks of Joy and Gratitude and Fidelity to their King and to His Government for the late Arrangements made

at Home in their Favor." The "most respectable part of the English," he continued, urged peaceful acceptance

of the new order. Evidently, however, the respectable members of society were few, as the great body of the

English settlers joined in a petition for the repeal of the Act on the ground that it deprived them of the

incalculable benefits of habeas corpus and trial by jury. The Montreal merchants, whether, as Carleton

commented, they "were of a more turbulent Turn, or that they caught the Fire from some Colonists settled

among them," were particularly outspoken in the town meetings they held. In the older colonies the

opposition was still more emphatic. An Act which hemmed them in to the seacoast, established on the

American continent a Church they feared and hated, and continued an autocratic political system, appeared to

many to be the undoing of the work of Pitt and Wolfe and the revival on the banks of the St. Lawrence and

Then came the clash at Lexington, and the War of American Independence had begun. The causes, the

course, and the ending of that great civil war have been treated elsewhere in this series.* Here it is necessary

* See "The Eve of the Revolution" and "Washington and His Comrades in Arms" (in "The Chronicles of

Early in 1775 the Continental Congress undertook the conquest of Canada, or, as it was more diplomatically

phrased, the relief of its inhabitants from British tyranny. Richard Montgomery led an expedition over the old

route by Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, along which French and Indian raiding parties used to pass years

before, and Benedict Arnold made a daring and difficult march up the Kennebec and down the Chaudiere to

Quebec. Montreal fell to Montgomery; and Carleton himself escaped capture only by the audacity of some

FrenchCanadian voyageurs, who, under cover of darkness, rowed his whaleboat or paddled it with their

hands silently past the American sentinels on the shore. Once down the river and in Quebec, Carleton threw

himself with vigor and skill into the defense of his capital. His generalship and the natural strength of the

position proved more than a match for Montgomery and Arnold. Montgomery was killed and Arnold

wounded in a vain attempt to carry the city by storm on the last night of 1775. At Montreal a delegation from

Congress, composed of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, accompanied

by Carroll's brother, a Jesuit priest and a future archbishop, failed to achievemore by diplomacy than their

generals had done by the sword. The Canadians seemed, content enough to wear the British yoke. In the

spring, when a British fleet arrived with reenforcements, the American troops retired in haste and, before the

Declaration of Independence had been proclaimed, Canada was free from the last of its ten thousand

The expedition had put Carleton's policy to the test. On the whole it stood the strain. The seigneurs had

rallied to the Government which had restored their rights, and the clergy had called on the people to stand fast

by the King. So far all went as Carleton had hoped: "The Noblesse, Clergy, and greater part of the

Bourgeoisie," he wrote, "have given Government every Assistance in their Power." But the habitants refused

to follow their appointed leaders with the old docility, and some even mobbed the seigneurs who tried to

enroll them. Ten years of freedom had worked a democratic change in them, and they were much less

enthusiastic than their betters about the restoration of seigneurial privileges. Carleton, like many another, had

held as public opinion what were merely the opinions of those whom he met at dinner. "These people had

been governed with too loose a rein for many years," he now wrote to Burgoyne, "and had imbibed too much

of the American Spirit of Licentiousness and Independence administered by a numerous and turbulent

Faction here, to be suddenly restored to a proper and desirable Subordination." A few of the habitants joined

his forces; fewer joined the invaders or sold them suppliestill they grew suspicious of paper

"Continentals." But the majority held passively aloof. Even when France joined the warring colonies and

Admiral d'Estaing appealed to the Canadians to rise, they did not heed; though it is difficult to say what the

result would have been if Washington had agreed to Lafayette's plan of a joint French and American invasion

Nova Scotia also held aloof, in spite of the fact that many of the men who had come from New England and

from Ulster were eager to join the colonies to the south. In Nova Scotia democracy was a less hardy plant

than in Massachusetts. The town and township institutions, which had been the nurseries of resistance in New

England, had not been allowed to take root there. The circumstances of the founding of Halifax had given

ripe to a greater tendency, which lasted long, to lean upon the mother country. The Maine wilderness made

intercourse between Nova Scotia and New England difficult by land, and the British fleet was in control of

the sea until near the close of the war. Nova Scotia stood by Great Britain, and was reserved to become part

That nation was to owe its separate existence to the success of the American Revolution. But for that event,

coming when it did, the struggling colonies of Quebec and Nova Scotia would in time have become merged

with the colonies to the youth and would have followed them, whether they remained within the British

Empire or not. Thus it was due to the quarrel between the thirteen colonies and the motherland that Canada

did not become merely a fourteenth colony or state. Nor was this the only bearing of the Revolution on

Canada's destiny. Thanks to the coming of the Loyalists, those exiles of the Revolution who settled in Canada

in large numbers, Canada was after all to be dominantly a land of English speech and of English sympathies.

By one of the many paradoxes which mark the history of Canada, the very success of the plan which aimed to

save British power by confirming FrenchCanadian nationality and the loyalty of the French led in the end to

making a large part of Canada English. The Revolution meant also that for many a year those in authority in

England and in Canada itself were to stand in fear of the principles and institutions which had led the old

colonies to rebellion and separation, and were to try to build up in Canada buttresses against the advance of

The British statesmen who helped to frame the Peace of 1783 were men with broad and generous views as to

the future of the seceding colonies and their relations with the mother country. It was perhaps inevitable that

they should have given less thought to the future of the colonies in America which remained under the British

flag. Few men could realize at the moment that out of these scattered fragments a new nation and a second

empire would arise. Not only were the seceding colonies given a share in the fishing grounds of

Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, which was unfortunately to prove a constant source of friction, but the

boundary line was drawn with no thought of the need of broad and easy communication between Nova Scotia

and Canada, much less between Canada and the far West. Vague definitions of the boundaries, naturally

incident to the prevailing lack of geographical knowledge of the vast continent, held further seeds of trouble.

These contentions, however, were far in the future. At the moment another defect of the treaty proved to be

Canada's gain. The failure of Lord Shelburne's Ministry to insist upon effective safeguards for the fair

treatment of those who had taken the King's side in the old colonies, condemned as it was not only by North

and the Tories but by Fox and Sheridan and Burke, led to that Loyalist migration which changed the racial

The Treaty of 1783 provided that Congress would "earnestly recommend" to the various States that the

Loyalists be granted amnesty and restitution. This pious resolution proved not worth the paper on which it

was written. In State after State the property of the Loyalists was withheld or confiscated anew. Yet this

ungenerous treatment of the defeated by the victors is not hard to understand. The struggle had been waged

with all the bitterness of civil war. The smallness of the field of combat had intensified personal illwill. Both

sides had practiced cruelties in guerrilla warfare; but the Patriots forgot Marion's raids, Simsbury mines, and

the drumhead hangings, and remembered only Hessian brutalities, Indian scalpings, Tarleton's harryings, and

the infamous prison ships of New York. The war had been a long one. The tide of battle had ebbed and

flowed. A district that was Patriot one year was frequently Loyalist the next. These circumstances engendered

At least a third, if not a half, of the people of the old colonies had been opposed to revolution. New York was

strongly Loyalist, with Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the Carolinas closely following. In the end some fifty or

sixty thousand Loyalists abandoned their homes or suffered expulsion rather than submit to the new order.

They counted in their ranks many of the men who had held first place in their old communities, men of

wealth, of education, and of standing, as well as thousands who had nothing to give but their fidelity to the

old order. Many, especially of the welltodo, went to England; a few found refuge in the West Indies; but

the great majority, over fifty thousand in all, sought new homes in the northern wilderness. Over thirty

thousand, including many of the most influential of the whole number (with about three thousand negro

slaves, afterwards freed and deported to Sierra Leone) were carried by ship to Nova Scotia. They found

homes chiefly in that part of the province which in 1784 became New Brunswick. Others, trekking overland

or sailing around by the Gulf and up the River, settled in the upper valley of the St. Lawrenceon Lake St.

Though these pioneers were generously aided by the British Government with grants of land and supplies,

their hardships and disappointments during the first years in the wilderness were such as would have daunted

any but brave and desperate men and women whom fate had winnowed. Yet all but a few, who drifted back

to their old homes, held out; and the foundations of two more provinces of the future DominionNew

Brunswick and Upper Canadawere thus broadly and soundly laid by the men whom future generations

honored as "United Empire Loyalists." Through all the later years, their sacrifices and sufferings, their ideals

and prejudices, were to make a deep impress on the development of the nation which they helped to found

and were to influence its relations with the country which they had left and with the mother country which

Once the first tasks of hewing and hauling and planting were done, the new settlers called for the organization

of local governments. They were quite as determined as their late foes to have a voice in their own governing,

In the provinces by the sea a measure of selfgovernment was at once established. New Brunswick received,

without question, a constitution on the Nova Scotia model, with a Lieutenant Governor, an Executive Council

appointed to advise him, which served also as the upper house of the legislature, and an elective Assembly.

Of the twentysix members of the first Assembly, twentythree were Loyalists. With a population so much at

one, and with the tasks of road making and school building and tax collecting insistent and absorbing, no

party strife divided the province for many years. In Nova Scotia, too, the Loyalists were in the majority.

There, however, the earlier settlers soon joined with some of the newcomers to form an opposition. The

island of St. John, renamed Prince Edward Island in 1798, had been made a separate Government and had

received an Assembly in 1773. Its one absorbing question was the tenure of land. On a single day in 1767 the

British authorities had granted the whole island by lottery to army and navy officers and country gentlemen,

on condition of the payment of small quitrents. The quitrents were rarely paid, and the tenants of the absentee

landlords kept up an agitation for reform which was unceasing but which was not to be successful for a

hundred years. In all three Maritime Provinces political and party controversy was little known for a

It was more difficult to decide what form of government should be set up in Canada, now that tens of

thousands of Englishspeaking settiers dwelt beside the old Canadians. Carleton, now Lord Dorchester, had

returned as Governor in 1786, after eight years' absence. He was still averse to granting an Assembly so long

as the French subjects were in the majority: they did not want it, he insisted, and could not use it. But the

Loyalist settlers, not to be put off, joined with the English merchants of Montreal and Quebec in demanding

an Assembly and relief from the old French laws. Carleton himself was compelled to admit the force of the

conclusion of William Grenville, Secretary of State for the Home Department, then in control of the remnants

of the colonial empire, and son of that George Grenville who, as Prime Minister, had introduced the

American Stamp Act of 1765: "I am persuaded that it is a point of true Policy to make these Concessions at a

time when they may be received as a matter of favour, and when it is in Our own power to regulate and direct

the manner of applying them, rather than to wait till they shall be extorted from us by a necessity which shall

neither leave us any discretion in the form nor any merit in the substance of what We give." Accordingly, in

1791, the British Parliament passed the Constitutional Act dividing Canada into two provinces separated by

the Ottawa River, Lower or Frenchspeaking Canada and Upper or Englishspeaking Canada, and granting

Thus far the tide of democracy had risen, but thus far only. Few in high places had learned the full lesson of

the American Revolution. The majority believed that the old colonies had been lost because they had not

been kept under a sufficiently tight rein; that democracy had been allowed too great headway; that the

remaining colonies, therefore, should be brought under stricter administrative control; and that care should be

taken to build up forces to counteract the democracy which grew so rank and swift in frontier soil. This

conservative tendency was strengthened by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.* The rulers of

England had witnessed two revolutions, and the lesson they drew from both was that it was best to smother

* It will be remembered that in the debate on the Constitutional Act the conflicting views of Burke and Fox

on the French Revolution led to the dramatic break in their lifelong friendship.

For this reason the measure of representative government that had been granted each of the remaining British

colonies in North America was carefully hedged about. The whole executive power remained in the hands of

the Governor or his nominees. No one yet conceived it possible that the Assembly should control the

Executive Council. The elective Assembly was compelled to share even the lawmaking power with an upper

house, the Legislative Council. Not only were the members of this upper house appointed by the Crown for

life, but the King was empowered to bestow hereditary titles upon them with a view to making the Council in

the fullness of time a copy of the House of Lords. A blow was struck even at that traditional prerogative of

the popular house, the control of the purse. Carleton had urged that in every township a sixth of the land

should be reserved to enable His Majesty "to reward such of His provincial Servants as may merit the Royal

favour" and "to create and strengthen an Aristocracy, of which the best use may be made on this Continent,

where all Governments are feeble and the general condition of things tends to a wild Democracy." Grenville

saw further possibilities in this suggestion. It would give the Crown a revenue which would make it

independent of the Assembly, "a measure, which, if it had been adopted when the Old Colonies were first

settled, would have retained them to this hour in obedience and Loyalty." Nor was this all. From the same

source an endowment might be obtained for a state church which would be a bulwark of order and

conservatism. The Constitutional Act accordingly provided for setting aside lands equal in value to

oneseventh of all lands granted from time to time, for the support of a Protestant clergy. The Executive

Council received power to set up rectories in every parish, to endow them liberally, and to name as rectors

ministers of the Church of England. Further, the Executive Council was instructed to retain an equal amount

of land as crown reserves, distributed judiciously in blocks between the grants made to settlers. Were any

radical tendencies to survive these attentions, the veto power of the British Government could be counted on

For a time the installment of selfgovernment thus granted satisfied the people. The pioneer years left little

leisure for political discussion, nor were there at first any general issues about which men might differ. The

Government was carrying on acceptably the essential tasks of surveying, land granting, and road building;

and each member of the Assembly played his own hand and was chiefly concerned in obtaining for his

constituents the roads and bridges, they needed so badly. The Englishspeaking settlers of Upper Canada

were too widely scattered, and the Frenchspeaking citizens of Lower Canada were too ignorant of

Much turned in these early years upon the personality of the Governor. In several instances, the choice of

rulers for the new provinces proved fortunate. This was particularly so in the case of John Graves Simcoe,

Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada from 1792 to 1799. He was a good soldier and a just and vigorous

administrator, particularly wise in setting his regulars to work building roads such as Yonge Street and

Dundas Street, which to this day are great provincial arteries of travel. Yet there were many sources of

weakness in the scheme of governmentdivided authority, absenteeism, personal unfitness. When

Dorchester was reappointed in 1786, he had been made Governor in Chief of all British North America. From

the beginning, however, the Lieutenant Governors of the various provinces asserted independent authority,

and in a few years the Governor General became in fact merely the Governor of the most populous province,

In Upper Canada, as in New Brunswick, the population was at first much at one. In time, however, discordant

elements appeared. Religious, or at least denominational, differences began to cause friction. The great

majority of the early settlers in Upper Canada belonged to the Church of England, whose adherents in the

older colonies had nearly all taken the Loyalist side. Of the Ulster Presbyterians and New England

Congregationalists who formed the backbone of the Revolution, few came to Canada. The growth of the

Methodists and Baptists in the United States after the Revolution, however, made its mark on the neighboring

country. The first Methodist class meetings in Upper Canada, held in the United Empire Loyalist settlement

on the Bay of Quinte in 1791, were organized by itinerant preachers from the United States; and in the

western part of the province pioneer Baptist evangelists from the same country reached the scattered settlers

Nor was it in religion alone that diversity grew. Simcoe had set up a generous land policy which brought in

many "late Loyalists," American settlers whose devotion to monarchical principles would not always bear

close inquiry. The fantastic experiment of planting in the heart of the woods of Upper Canada a group of

French nobles driven out by the Revolution left no trace; but Mennonites, Quakers, and Scottish Highlanders

contributed diverse and permanent factors to the life of the province. Colonel Thomas Talbot of Malahide, "a

fierce little Irishman who hated Scotchmen and women, turned teetotallers out of his house, and built the only

good road in the province," made the beginnings of settlement midway on Lake Erie. A shrewd

Massachusetts merchant, Philemon Wright, with his comrades, their families, servants, horses, oxen, and

10,000 pounds, sledded from Boston to Montreal in the winter of 1800, and thence a hundred miles beyond,

to found the town of Hull and establish a great lumbering industry in the Ottawa Valley.

These differences of origin and ways of thought had not yet been reflected in political life. Party strife in

Upper Canada began with a factional fight which took place in 180507 between a group of Irish

officeholders and a Scotch clique who held the reins of government. Weekes, an IrishAmerican barrister,

Thorpe, a puisne judge, Wyatt, the surveyor general, and Willcocks, a United Irishman who had become

sheriff of one of the four Upper Canada districts, began to question the right to rule of "the Scotch pedlars" or

"the Shopkeeper Aristocracy," as Thorpe called those merchants who, for the lack of other leaders, had

developed an influence with the governors or ruled in their frequent absence. But the insurgents were backed

by only a small minority in the Assembly, and when the four leaders disappeared from the stage,* this curtain

raiser to the serious political drama which was to follow came quickly to its end.

* Weekes was slain in a duel. Wyatt and Thorpe were suspended by the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis

Gore, only to win redress later in England. Willcocks was dismissed from office and fell fighting on the

In Lower Canada the clash was more serious. The French Canadians, who had not asked for representative

government, eventually grasped its possibilities and found leaders other than those ordained for them. In the

first Assembly there were many seigneurs and aristocrats who bore names notable for six generations back

Taschereau, Duchesnay, Lotbiniere, Rouville, Salaberry. But they soon found their surroundings uncongenial

or failed to be reelected. Writing in 1810 to Lord Liverpool, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the

Governor, Sir James Craig, with a fine patrician scorn thus pictures the Assembly of his day.

"It really, my Lord, appears to me an absurdity, that the Interests of certainly not an unimportant Colony,

involving in them those also of no inconsiderable portion of the Commercial concerns of the British Empire,

should be in the hands of six petty shopkeepers, a Blacksmith, a Miller, and 15 ignorant peasants who form

part of our present House; a Doctor or Apothecary, twelve Canadian Avocats and Notaries, and four so far

respectable people that at least they do not keep shops, together with ten English members compleat the List:

there is not one person coming under the description of a Canadian Gentleman among them."

"A Governor cannot obtain among them even that sort of influence that might arise from personal

intercourse. I can have none with Blacksmiths, Millers, and Shopkeepers; even the Avocats and Notaries who

compose so considerable a portion of the House, are, generally speaking, such as I can nowhere meet, except

during the actual sitting of Parliament, when I have a day of the week expressly appropriated to the receiving

Leadership under these conditions fell to the "unprincipled Demagogues," halfeducated lawyers, men "with

But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and shopkeepers, nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but

as an Englishman on guard against Frenchmen that Craig found himself at odds with his Assembly. For

nearly twenty years in this period England was at death grips with France, end to hate and despise all

Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and congenial duty of all true Britons. Craig and those who counseled

him were firmly convinced that the new subjects were French at heart. Of the 250,000 inhabitants of Lower

Canada, he declared, "about 20,000 or 25,000 may be English or Americans, the rest are French. I use the

term designedly, my Lord, because I mean to say that they are in Language, in religion, in manner and in

attachment completely French." That there was still some affection for old France, stirred by war and French

victories, there is no question, but that the Canadians wished to return to French allegiance was untrue, even

though Craig reported that such was "the general opinion of all ranks with whom it is possible to converse on

the subject." The French Revolution had created a great gulf between Old France and New France. The

clergy did their utmost to bar all intercourse with the land where deism and revolution held sway, and when

the Roman Catholic Church and the British Government combined for years on a single object, it was little

wonder they succeeded. Nelson's victory at Trafalgar was celebrated by a Te Deum in the Roman Catholic

Cathedral at Quebec. In fact, as Craig elsewhere noted, the habitants were becoming rather a new and distinct

nationality, a nation canadienne. They ceased to be French; they declined to become English; and sheltered

* "It cannot be sufficiently inculcated ON THE PART OF GOVERNMENT that the Quebec Act is a Sacred

Charter, granted by the King in Parliament to the Canadians as a Security for their Religion, Laws, and

Property." Governor Sir Frederick Haldimand to Lord George Germaine, Oct. 25, 1780.

The governors were not alone in this hostility to the mass of the people. There had grown up in the colony a

little clique of officeholders, of whom Jonathan Sewell, the Loyalist Attorney General, and later Chief

Justice, was the chief, full of racial and class prejudice, and in some cases greedy for personal gain. Sewell

declared it "indispensably necessary to overwhelm and sink the Canadian population by English Protestants,"

and was even ready to run the risk of bringing in Americans to effect this end. Of the nonofficial English,

some were strongly opposed to the pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; but others, and especially the

merchants, with their organ the Quebec "Mercury", were loud in their denunciations of the French who were

unprogressive and who as landowners were incidentally trying to throw the burden of taxation chiefly on the

The first open sign of the racial division which was to bedevil the life of the province came in 1806 when, in

order to meet the attacks of the Anglicizing party, the newspaper "Le Canadien" was established at Quebec.

Its motto was significant: "Notre langue, nos institutions, et nos lois." Craig and his counselors took up the

challenge. In 1808 he dismissed five militia officers, because of their connection with the irritating journal,

and in 1810 he went so far as to suppress it and to throw into prison four of those responsible for its

management. The Assembly, which was proving hard to control, was twice dissolved in three years.

Naturally the Governor's arbitrary course only stiffened resistance; and passions were rising fast and high

when illness led to his recall and the shadow of a common danger from the south, the imminence of war with

While the foundations of the eastern provinces of Canada were being laid, the wildernesses which one day

were to become the western provinces were just rising above the horizon of discovery. In the plains and

prairies between the Great Lakes and the Rockies, fur traders warred for the privilege of exchanging with the

Indians bad whiskey for good furs. Scottish traders from Montreal, following in the footsteps of La

Verendrye and Niverville, pushed far into the northern wilds.* In 1788 the leading traders joined forces in

organizing the NorthWest Company. Their great canoes, manned by FrenchCanadian voyageurs,

penetrated the network of waters from the Ottawa to the Saskatchewan, and poured wealth into the pockets of

the lordly partners in Montreal. Their rivalry wakened the sleepy Hudson's Bay Company, which was now

* It is interesting to note the dominant share taken in the trade and exploration of the North and West by men

of Highland Scotch and French extraction. For an account of La Verendrye see "The Conquest of New

France" and for the Scotch fur traders of Montreal see "Adventurers of Oregon" (in "The Chronicles of

On the Pacific coast rivalry was still keener. The sea otter and the seal were a lure to the men of many

nations. Canada took its part in this rivalry. In 1792, when the Russians were pressing down from their

Alaskan posts, when the Spaniards, claiming the Pacific for their own, were exploring the mouth of the

Fraser, when Captain Robert Gray of Boston was sailing up the mighty Columbia, and Captain Vancouver

was charting the northern coasts for the British Government, a young NorthWest Company factor,

Alexander Mackenzie, in his lonely post on Lake Athabaska, was planning to cross the wilderness of

mountains to the coast. With a fellow trader, Mackay, and six Canadian voyageurs, he pushed up the Peace

and the Parsnip, passed by way of the Fraser and the Blackwater to the Bella Coola, and thence to the Pacific,

the first white man to cross the northern continent. Paddling for life through swirling rapids on rivers which

rushed madly through sheer rockbound canyons, swimming for shore when rock or sand bar had wrecked

the precious bark canoe, struggling over heartbreaking portages, clinging to the sides of precipices,

contending against hostile Indians and fearstricken followers, and at last winning through, Mackenzie

summed up what will ever remain one of the great achievements of exploration in the simple record, painted

in vermilion on a rock in Burke Channel: Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twentysecond of

July, one thousand seven hundred and ninetythree. The first bond had been woven in the union of East and

West. Between the eastern provinces a stronger link was soon to be forged. The War of 1812 gave the

scattered British colonies in America for the first time a living sense of unity that transcended all differences,

The War of 1812 was no quarrel of Canada's. It was merely an incident in the struggle between England and

Napoleon. At desperate grips, both contestants used whatever weapons lay ready to their hands. Sea power

was England's weapon, and in her claim to forbid all neutral traffic with her enemies and to exercise the

galling right of search, she pressed it far. France trampled still more ruthlessly on American and neutral

rights; but, with memories of 1776 still fresh, the dominant party in the United States was disposed to forgive

England had struck at France, regardless of how the blow might injure neutrals. Now the United States sought

to strike at England through the colonies, regardless of their lack of any responsibility for English policy. The

"war hawks" of the South and West called loudly for the speedy invasion and capture of Canada as a means

of punishing England. In so far as the British North American colonies were but possessions of Great Britain,

overseas plantations, the course of the United States could be justified. But potentially these colonies were

more than mere possessions. They were a nation in the making, with a right to their own development; they

were not simply a pawn in the game of Britain and the United States. Quite aside from the original rights or

wrongs of the war, the invasion of Canada was from this standpoint an act of aggression. "Agrarian cupidity,

not maritime right, wages this war," insisted John Randolph of Roanoke, the chief opponent of the "war

hawks" in Congress. "Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign Relations came into the House, we

have heard but one wordlike the whippoorwill, but one eternal monotonous toneCanada, Canada,

At the outset there appeared no question that the conquest of Canada could be, as Jefferson forecast, other

than "a mere matter of marching." Eustis, the Secretary of War, prophesied that "we can take Canada without

soldiers." Clay insisted that the Canadas were "as much under our command as the Ocean is under Great

Britain's." The provinces had barely half a million people, twothirds of them allied by ties of blood to

Britain's chief enemy, to set against the eight millions of the Republic. There were fewer than ten thousand

regular troops in all the colonies, half of them down by the sea, far away from the danger zone, and less than

fifteen hundred west of Montreal. Little help could come from England, herself at war with Napoleon, the

But there was another side. The United States was not a unit in the war; New England was apathetic or hostile

to the war throughout, and as late as 1814 twothirds of the army of Canada were eating beef supplied by

Vermont and New York contractors. Weak as was the militia of the Canadas, it was stiffened by English and

Canadian regulars, hardened by frontier experience, and led for the most part by trained and able men,

whereas an inefficient system and political interference greatly weakened the military force of the fighting

States., Above all, the Canadians were fighting for their homes. To them the war was a matter of life and

death; to the United States it was at best a struggle to assert commercial rights or national prestige.

The course and fortunes of the war call for only the briefest notice. In the first year the American plans for

invading Upper Canada came to grief through the surrender of Hull at Detroit to Isaac Brock and the defeat at

Queenston Heights of the American army under Van Rensselaer. The campaign ended with not a foot of

Canadian soil in the invaders' hands, and with Michigan lost, but Brock, Canada's brilliant leader, had fallen

at Queenston, and at sea the British had tasted unwonted defeat. In single actions one American frigate after

another proved too much for its British opponent. It was a rude shock to the Mistress of the Seas.

The second year's campaign was more checkered. In the West the Americans gained the command of the

Great Lakes by rapid building and good sailing, and with it followed the command of all the western

peninsula of Upper Canada. The British General Procter was disastrously defeated at Moraviantown, and his

ally, the Shawanoe chief Tecumseh, one of the half dozen great men of his race, was killed. York, later

known as Toronto, the capital of the province, was captured, and its public buildings were burned and looted.

But in the East fortune was kinder to the Canadians. The American plan of invasion called for an attack on

Montreal from two directions; General Wilkinson was to sail and march down the St. Lawrence from

Sackett's Harbor with some eight thousand men, while General Hampton, with four thousand, was to take the

historic route by Lake Champlain. Halfway down the St. Lawrence Wilkinson came to grief. Eighteen

hundred men whom he landed to drive off a force of a thousand hampering his rear were decisively defeated

at Chrystler's Farm. Wilkinson pushed on for a few days, but when word came that Hampton had also met

disaster he withdrew into winter quarters. Hampton had found Colonel de Salaberry, with less than sixteen

hundred troops, nearly all French Canadians, making a stand on the banks of the Chateauguay, thirtyfive

miles south of Montreal. He divided his force in order to take the Canadians in front and rear, only to be

outmaneuvered and outfought in one of the most brilliant actions of the war and forced to retire. In the

closing months of the year the Americans, compelled to withdraw from Fort George on the Niagara, burned

the adjoining town of Newark and turned its women and children into the December snow. Drummond, who

had succeeded Brock, gained control of both sides of the Niagara and retaliated in kind by laying waste the

frontier villages from Lewiston to Buffalo. The year closed with Amherstburg on the Detroit the only

Canadian post in American hands. On the sea the capture of the Chesapeake by the Shannon salved the pride

The last year of the war was also a year of varying fortunes. In the far West a small body of Canadians and

Indians captured Prairie du Chien, on the Mississippi, while Michilimackinac, which a force chiefly

composed of FrenchCanadian voyageurs and Indians had captured in the first months of war, defied a strong

assault. In Upper Canada the Americans raided the western peninsula from Detroit but made their chief attack

on the Niagara frontier. Though they scored no permanent success, they fought well and with a fair measure

of fortune. The generals with whom they had been encumbered at the outset of the war, Revolutionary relics

or political favorites, had now nearly all been replaced by abler menScott, Brown, Exertand their troops

were better trained and better equipped. In July the British forces on the Niagara were decisively beaten at

Chippawa. Three weeks later was fought the bloodiest battle on Canadian soil, at Lundy's Lane, either side's

victory at the moment but soon followed by the retirement of the invading force. The British had now

outbuilt their opponents on Lake Ontario; and, though American ships controlled Lake Erie to the end, the

Ontario flotilla aided Drummond, Brock's able successor, in forcing the withdrawal of Exert forces from the

whole peninsula in November. Farther east a third attempt to capture Montreal had been defeated in the

spring, after Wilkinson with four thousand men had failed to drive five hundred regulars and militia from the

Until this closing year Britain had been unable, in face of the more vital danger from Napoleon, to send any

but trifling reenforcements to what she considered a minor theater of the war. Now, with Napoleon in Elba,

she was free to take more vigorous action. Her navy had already swept the daring little fleet of American

frigates and American merchant marine from the seas. Now it maintained a close blockade of all the coast

and, with troops from Halifax, captured and held the Maine coast north of the Penobscot. Large forces of

Wellington's hardy veterans crossed the ocean, sixteen thousand to Canada, four thousand to aid in harrying

the Atlantic coast, and later nine thousand to seize the mouth of the Mississippi. Yet, strangely, these hosts

fared worse, because of hard fortune and poor leadership, than the handful of militia and regulars who had

borne the brunt of the war in the first two years. Under Ross they captured Washington and burned the

official buildings; but under Prevost they failed at Plattsburg; and under Pakenham, in January, 1815, they

Before the lastnamed fight occurred, peace had been made. Both sides were weary of the war, which had

now, by the seeming end of the struggle between England and Napoleon in which it was an incident, lost

whatever it formerly had of reason. Though Napoleon was still in Elba, Europe was far from being at rest,

and the British Ministers, backed by Wellington's advice, were keen to end the war. They showed their

contempt for the issues at stake by sending to the peace conference at Ghent three commissioners as

incompetent as ever represented a great power, Gambier, Goulburn, and Adams. To face these the United

States had sent John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, Henry Clay, James Bayard, and Jonathan Russell, as

able and astute a group of players for great stakes as ever gathered round a table. In these circumstances the

British representatives were lucky to secure peace on the basis of the status quo ante. Canada had hoped that

sufficient of the unsettled Maine wilderness would be retained to link up New Brunswick with the inland

colony of Quebec, but this proposal was soon abandoned. In the treaty not one of the ostensible causes of the

The war had the effect of unifying Canadian feeling. Once more it had been determined that Canada was not

to lose her identity in the nation to the south. In Upper Canada, especially in the west, there were many recent

American settlers who sympathized openly with their kinsmen, but of these some departed, some were jailed,

and others had a change of heart. Lower Canada was a unit against the invader, arid FrenchCanadian troops

on every occasion covered themselves with glory. To the Canadians, as the smaller people, and as the people

whose country had been the chief battle ground, the war in later years naturally bulked larger than to their

neighbors. It left behind it unfortunate legacies of hostility to the United States and, among the governing

classes, of deeprooted opposition to its democratic institutions. But it left also memories precious for a

young peoplethe memory of Brock and Macdonell and De Salaberry, of Laura Secord and her daring

tramp through the woods to warn of American attacks, of Stony Creek and Lundy's Lane, Chrystler's Farm

and Chateauguay, the memory of sacrifice, of endurance, and of courage that did not count the odds.

Nor were the evil legacies to last for all time. Three years after peace had been made the statesmen of the

United States and of Great Britain had the uncommon sense to take a great step toward banishing war

between the neighbor peoples. The RushBagot Convention, limiting the naval armament on the Great Lakes

to three vessels not exceeding one hundred tons each, and armed only with one eighteenpounder, though not

always observed in the letter, proved the beginning of a sane relationship which has lasted for a century. Had

not this agreement nipped naval rivalry in the bud, fleets and forts might have lined the shores and increased

the strain of policy and the likelihood of conflict. The New World was already preparing to sound its message

The history of British North America in the quarter of a century that followed the War of 1812 is in the main

the homely tale of pioneer life. Slowly little clearings in the vast forest were widened and won to order and

abundance; slowly community was linked to community; and out of the growing intercourse there developed

the complex of ways and habits and interests that make up the everyday life of a people.

All the provinces called for settlers, and they did not call in vain. For a time northern New England continued

to overflow into the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, the rolling lands south of the St. Lawrence which

had been left untouched by riverbound seigneur and habitant. Into Upper Canada, as well, many individual

immigrants came from the south, some of the best the Republic had to give, merchants and manufacturers

with little capital but much shrewd enterprise, but also some it could best spare, fugitives from justice and

keepers of the taverns that adorned every four corners. Yet slowly this inflow slackened. After the war the

Canadian authorities sought to avoid republican contagion and moreover the West of the United States itself

But if fewer came in across the border, many more sailed from across the seas. Not again until the twentieth

century were the northern provinces to receive so large a share of British emigrants as came across in the

twenties and thirties. Swarms were preparing to leave the overcrowded British hives. Corn laws and poor

laws and famine, powerdriven looms that starved the cottage weaver, peace that threw an army on a

crowded and callous labor market, landlords who rackrented the Connaughtman's last potato or cleared

Highland glens of folks to make way for sheep, rulers who persisted in denying the masses any voice in their

own governmentall these combined to drive men forth in tens of thousands. Australia was still a land of

convict settlements and did not attract free men. To most the United States was the land of promise. Yet,

thanks to state aid, private philanthropy, landlords' urging and cheap fares on the ships that came to St. John

and Quebec for timber, Canada and the provinces by the sea received a notable share. In the quarter of a

century following the peace with Napoleon, British North America received more British emigrants than the

United States and the Australian colonies together, though many were merely birds of passage.

The country west of the Great Lakes did not share in this flood of settlement, except for one tragic interlude.

Lord Selkirk, a Scotchman of large sympathy and vision, convinced that emigration was the cure for the

hopeless misery he saw around him, acquired a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company, and sought

to plant colonies in a vast estate granted from its domains. Between 1811 and 1815 he sent out to Hudson

Bay, and thence to the Red River, two or three hundred crofters from the Highlands and the Orkneys. A little

later these were joined by some Swiss soldiers of fortune who had fought for Canada in the War of 1812. But

Selkirk had reckoned without the partners of the NorthWest Company of Montreal, who were not prepared

to permit mere herders and tillers to disturb the Indians and the game. The Nor'Westers attacked the helpless

colonists and massacred a score of them. Selkirk retorted in kind, leading out an armed band which seized the

Nor'Westers' chief post at Fort William. The war was then transferred to the courts, with heartbreaking

delays and endless expense. At last Selkirk died broken in spirit, and most of his colonists drifted to Canada

or across the border. But a handful held on, and for fifty years their little settlement on the Red River

Once arrived in Canada, the settler soon found that he had no primrose path before him. Canada remained for

many years a land of struggling pioneers, who had little truck or trade with the world out of sight of their log

shacks. The habitant on the seigneuries of Lower Canada continued to farm as his grandfather had farmed,

finding his holding sufficient for his modest needs, even though divided into ever narrower ribbons as le bon

Dieu sent more and yet more sons to share the heritage. The Englishspeaking settler, equipped with ax and

sickle and flail, with spinning wheel and iron kettle, lived a life almost equally primitive and selfcontained.

He and his good wife grew the wheat, the corn, and the potatoes, made the soap and the candles, the maple

sugar and the "yarbs," the deerskin shoes and the homespuncloth that met their needs. They had little to buy

and little to sell. In spite of the preference which Great Britain gave Canadian grain, in return for the

preference exacted on British manufactured goods, practically no wheat was exported until the close of this

period. The barrels of potash and pearl ash leached out from the ashes of the splendid hardwood trees which

he burned as enemies were the chief source of ready money for the backwoods settler. The one substantial

export of the colonies came, not from the farmer's clearing, but from the forest. Great rafts of square pine

timber were floated down the Ottawa or the St. John every spring to be loaded for England. The lumberjack

lent picturesqueness to the landscape and the vocabulary and circulated ready money, but his industry did

little directly to advance permanent settlement or the wise use of Canadian resources.

The selfcontained life of each community and each farm pointed to the lack of good means of transport.

New Brunswick and the Canadas were fortunate in the possession of great lake and river systems, but these

were available only in summer and were often impeded by falls and rapids. On these waters the Indian bark

canoe had given way to the French bateau, a squarerigged flat bottomed boat, and after the war the bateau

Canadians took their full share in developing steamship transportation. In 1809, two years after Fulton's

success on the Hudson, John Molson built and ran a steamer between Montreal and Quebec. The first vessel

to cross the Atlantic wholly under steam, the Royal William, was built in Quebec and sailed from that port in

1833. Following and rivaling American enterprise, sidewheelers, marvels of speed and luxury for the day,

were put on the lakes in the thirties. Canals were built, the Lachine in 182125, the Welland around Niagara

Falls in 182429, and the Rideau, as a military undertaking, in 182632, all in response to the stimulus given

by De Witt Clinton, who had begun the "Erie Ditch" in 1817. On land, road making made slower progress.

The blazed trail gave way to the corduroy road, and the pack horse to the oxcart or the stage. Upper Canada

had the honor of inventing, in 1835, the plank road, which for some years thereafter became the fashion

through the forested States to the south. But at best neither roads nor vehicles were fitted for carrying large

Money and banks were as necessary to develop intercourse as roads and canals. Until after the War of 1812,

when army gold and army bills ran freely, money was rare and barter served pioneer needs. For many years

after the war a jumble of English sovereigns and shillings, of Spanish dollars, French crowns, and American

silver, made up the currency in use, circulating sometimes by weight and sometimes by tale, at rates that were

constantly shifting. The position of the colonies as a link between Great Britain and the United States, was

curiously illustrated in the currency system. The motley jumble of coins in use were rated in Halifax

currency, a mere money of account or bookkeeping standard, with no actual coins to correspond, adapted to

both English and United States currency systems. The unit was the pound, divided into shillings and pence as

in England, but the pound was made equal to four dollars in American money; it took 1 pound 4s. 4d. in

Halifax currency to make 1 pound sterling. Still more curious was the influence of American banking.

Montreal merchants in 1808 took up the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and after several vain attempts founded

the Bank of Montreal in 1817, with those features of government charter, branch banks, and restrictions as to

the proportion of debts to capital and the holding of real property which had marked Hamilton's plan. But

while Canadian banks, one after another, were founded on the same model and throughout adhered to an

assetsecured currency basis, Hamilton's own country abandoned his ideas, usually for the worse.

In the social life of the cities the influence of the official classes and, in Halifax and Quebec, of the British

redcoats stationed there was all pervading. In the country the pioneers took what diversions a hard life

permitted. There were "bees" and "frolics," ranging from strenuous barn raisings, with heavy drinking and

fighting, to mild apple parings or quilt patchings. There were the visits of the Yankee peddler with his

"notions," his welcome pack, and his gossip. Churches grew, thanks in part to grants of government land or

old endowments or gifts from missionary societies overseas, but more to the zeal of lay preachers and circuit

riders. Schools fared worse. In Lower Canada there was an excellent system of classical schools for the

priests and professional classes, and there were numerous convents which taught the girls, but the habitants

were for the most part quite untouched by book learning. In Upper Canada grammar schools and academies

were founded with commendable promptness, and a common school system was established in 1816, but

grants were niggardly and compulsion was lacking. Even at the close of the thirties only one child in seven

was in school, and he was, as often as not, committed to the tender mercies of some brokendown pensioner

or some ancient tippler who could barely sign his mark. There was but little administrative control by the

provincial authorities. The textbooks in use came largely from the United States and glorified that land and

all its ways in the best FourthofJuly manner, to the scandal of the loyal elect. The press was represented by

Against this background there developed during the period 181541 a tense constitutional struggle which was

to exert a profound influence on the making of the nation. The stage on which the drama was enacted was a

small one, and the actors were little known to the world of their day, but the drama had an interest of its own

In one aspect the struggle for selfgovernment in British North America was simply a local manifestation of

a worldwide movement which found more notable expression in other lands. After a troubled dawn,

democracy was coming to its own. In England the black reaction which had identified all proposals for

reform with treasonable sympathy for bloodstained France was giving way, and the middle classes were

about to triumph in the great franchise reform of 1832. In the United States, after a generation of

conservatism, Jacksonian democracy was to sweep all before it. These developments paralleled and in some

measure influenced the movement of events in the British North American provinces. But this movement had

a color of its own. The growth of self government in an independent country was one thing; in a colony

owing allegiance to a supreme Parliament overseas, it was quite another. The task of the provincesnot

solved in this period, it is true, but squarely facedwas to reconcile democracy and empire.

The people of the Canadas in 1791, and of the provinces by the sea a little earlier, had been given the right to

elect one house of the legislature. More than this instalment of selfgovernment the authorities were not

prepared to grant. The people, or rather the property holders among them, might be entrusted to vote taxes

and appropriations, to present grievances, and to take a share in legislation. They could not, however, be

permitted to control the Government, because, to state an obvious fact, they could not govern themselves as

well as their betters could rule them. Besides, if the people of a colony did govern themselves, what would

become of the rights and interests of the mother country? What would become of the Empire itself?

What was the use and object of the Empire? In brief, according to the theory and practice then in force, the

end of empire was the profit which comes from trade; the means was the political subordination of the

colonies to prevent interference with this profit; and the debit entry set against this profit was the cost of the

diplomacy, the armaments, and the wars required to hold the overseas possessions against other powers. The

policy was still that which had been set forth in the preamble of the Navigation Act of 1663, ensuring the

mother country the sole right to sell European wares in its colonies: "the maintaining a greater

correspondence and kindness between them [the subjects at home and those in the plantations] and keeping

them in a firmer dependence upon it [the mother country], and rendering them yet more beneficial and

advantageous unto it in the further Imployment and Encrease of English Shipping and Seamen, and vent of

English Woollen and other Manufactures and Commodities rendering the Navigation to and from the same

more safe and cheape, and makeing this Kingdom a Staple not only of the Commodities of those Plantations

but also of the Commodities of other countries and places for the supplying of them, and it being the usage of

other Nations to keep their [plantation] Trade to themselves." Adam Smith had raised a doubt as to the

wisdom of the end. The American Revolution had raised a doubt as to the wisdom of the means. Yet, with

significant changes, the old colonial system lasted for full two generations after 1776.

In the second British Empire, which rose after the loss of the first in 1783, the means to the old end were

altered. To secure control and to prevent disaffection and democratic folly, the authorities relied not merely

on their own powers but on the cooperation of friendly classes and interests in the colonies themselves. Their

direct control was exercised in many ways. In last reserve there was the supreme authority of King and

Parliament to bind the colonies by treaty and by law and the right to veto any colonial enactment. This was as

before the Revolution. One change lay in the renunciation in 1778 of the intention to use the supreme

legislative power to levy taxes, though the right to control the fiscal system of the colonies in conformity with

imperial policy was still claimed and practised. In fact, far from seeking to secure a direct revenue, the British

Government was more than content to pay part of the piper's fee for the sake of being able to call the tune. "It

is considered by the Well wishers of Government," wrote Milnes, Lieutenant Governor of Lower Canada, in

1800, "as a fortunate Circumstance that the Revenue is not at present equal to the Expenditure." A further

change came in the minute control exercised by the Colonial Office, or rather by the permanent clerks who,

in Charles Buller's phrase, were really "Mr. Mother Country." The Governor was the local agent of the

Colonial Office. He acted on its instructions and was responsible to it, and to it alone, for the exercise of the

But all these powers, it was believed, would fail in their purpose if democracy were allowed to grow

unchecked in the colonies themselves. It was an essential part of the colonial policy of the time to build up

conservative social forces among the people and to give a controlling voice in the local administration to a

nominated and official class. It has been seen that the statesmen of 1791 looked to a nominated executive and

legislative council, an hereditary aristocracy, and an established church, to keep the colony in hand. British

legislation fostered and supported a ruling class in the colonies, and in turn this class was to support British

connection and British control. How this policy, half avowed and half unconscious, worked out in each of the

In Upper Canada party struggles did not take shape until well after the War of 1812. At the founding of the

colony the people had been very much of one temper and one condition. In time, however, divergences

appeared and gradually hardened into political divisions. A governing class, or rather clique, was the first to

become differentiated. Its emergence was slower than in New Brunswick, for instance, since Upper Canada

had received few of the Loyalists who were distinguished by social position or political experience. In time a

group was formed by the accident of occupation, early settlement, residence in the little town of York, the

capital after 1794, the holding of office, or by some advantage in wealth or education or capacity which in

time became cumulative. The group came to be known as the Family Compact. There had been, in fact, no

intermarriage among its members beyond what was natural in a small and isolated community, but the phrase

had a certain appositeness. They were closely linked by loyalty to Church and King, by enmity to republics

and republicans, by the memory of the sacrifice and peril they or their fathers had shared, and by the

conviction that the province owed them the best living it could bestow. This living they succeeded in

collecting. "The bench, the magistracy, the high officials of the established church, and a great part of the

legal profession," declared Lord Durham in 1839, "are filled by the adherents of this party; by grant or

purchase they have acquired nearly the whole of the waste lands of the province; they are all powerful in the

chartered banks, and till lately shared among themselves almost exclusively all offices of trust and profit."

Fortunately the last absurdity of creating Dukes of Toronto and Barons of Niagara Falls was never carried

through, or rather was postponed a full century; but this touch was scarcely needed to give the clique its

cachet. The tenyear governorship of Sir Peregrine Maitland (181828), a most punctilious person, gave the

The great majority of the group, men of the Scott and Boulton, Sherwood and Hagerman and Allan MacNab

types, had nothing but their prejudices to distinguish them, but two of their number were of outstanding

capacity. John Beverley Robinson, Attorney General from 1819 to 1829 and thereafter for over thirty years

Chief Justice, was a true aristocrat, distrustful of the rabble, but as honest and highminded as he was able,

seeking his country's gain, as he saw it, not his own. A more rugged and domineering character, equally

certain of his right to rule and less squeamish about the means, was John Strachan, afterwards Bishop of

Toronto. Educated a Presbyterian, he had come to Canada from Aberdeen as a dominie but had remained as

an Anglican clergyman in a capacity promising more advancement. His abounding vigor and persistence soon

made him the dominant force in the Church, and with a convert's zeal he labored to give it exclusive place

and power. The opposition to the Family Compact was of a more motley hue, as is the way with oppositions.

Opposition became potential when new settlers poured into the province from the United States or overseas,

marked out from their Loyalist forerunners not merely by differences of political background and experience

but by differences in religion. The Church of England had been dominant among the Loyalists; but the

newcomers were chiefly Methodist and Presbyterian. Opposition became actual with the rise of concrete and

acute grievances and with the appearance of leaders who voiced the growing discontent.

The political exclusiveness of the Family Compact did not rouse resentment half as deep as did. their

religious, or at least denominational, pretensions. The refusal of the Compact to permit Methodist ministers to

perform the marriage ceremony was not soon forgotten. There were scores of settlements where no

clergyman of the Established Church of England or of Scotland resided, and marriages here had been of

necessity performed by other ministers. A bill passed the Assembly in 1824 legalizing such marriages in the

past and giving the required authority for the future; and when it was rejected by the Legislative Council,

resentment flamed high. An attempt of Strachan to indict the loyalty of practically all but the Anglican clergy

intensified this feeling; and the critics went on to call in question the claims of his Church to establishment

The land question was the most serious that faced the province. The administration of those in power was

condemned on three distinct counts. The granting of land to individuals had been lavish; it had been lax; and

it had been marked by gross favoritism. By 1824, when the population was only 150,000, some 11,000,000

acres had been granted; ninety years later, when the population was 2,700,000, the total amount of improved

land was only 13,000,000 acres. Moreover the attempt to use vast areas of the Crown Lands to endow solely

the Anglican Church roused bitter jealousies. Yet even these grievances paled in actual hardship beside the

results of holding the vast waste areas unimproved. What with Crown Reserves, Clergy Reserves, grants to

those who had served the state, and holdings picked up by speculators from soldiers or poorer Loyalists for a

few pounds or a few gallons of whisky, millions of acres were held untenanted and unimproved, waiting for a

rise in value as a consequence of the toil of settlers on neighboring farms. Not onetenth of the lands granted

were occupied by the persons to whom they had been assigned. The province had given away almost all its

vast heritage, and more than ninetenths of it was still in wilderness. These speculative holdings made

immensely more difficult every common neighborhood task. At best the machinery and the money for

building roads, bridges, and schools were scanty, but with these unimproved reserves thrust in between the

scattered shacks, the task was disheartening. "The reserve of twosevenths of the land for the Crown and

clergy," declared the township of Sandwich in 1817, "must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a

A further source of discontent developed in the disabilities affecting recent American settlers. A court

decision in 1824 held that no one who had resided in the United States after 1783 could possess or transmit

British citizenship, with which went the right to inherit real estate. This decision bore heavily upon thousands

of "late Loyalists" and more recent incomers. Under the instructions of the Colonial Office, a remedial bill

was introduced in the Legislative Council in 1827, but it was a grudging, halfway measure which the

Assembly refused to accept. After several sessions of quarreling, the Assembly had its way; but in the

The leaders of the movement of resistance which now began to gather force included all sorts and conditions

of men. The fiercest and most aggressive were two Scotchmen, Robert Gourlay and William Lyon

Mackenzie. Gourlay, one of those restless and indispensable cranks who make the world turn round, active,

obstinate, imprudent, uncompromisingly devoted to the common good as he saw it, came to Canada in 1817

on settlement and colonization bent. Innocent inquiries which he sent broadcast as to the condition of the

province gave the settlers an opportunity for voicing their pentup discontent, and soon Gourlay was

launched upon the sea of politics. Mackenzie, who came to Canada three years later, was a born agitator,

fearless, untiring, a good hater, master of avitriolic vocabulary, and absolutely unpurchasable. He found his

vein in weekly journalism, and for nearly forty years was the stormy petrel of Canadian politics. From

England there came, among others, Dr. John Rolph, shrewd and politic, and Captain John Matthews, a

halfpay artillery officer. Peter Perry, downright and rugged and of a homely eloquence, represented the

Loyalists of the Bay of Quinte, which was the center of Canadian Methodism. Among the newer comers from

the United States, the foremost were Barnabas Bidwell, who had been Attorney General of Massachusetts but

had fled to Canada in 1810 when accused of misappropriating public money, and his son, Marshall Spring

Bidwell, one of the ablest and most singleminded men who ever entered Canadian public life. From Ireland

came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the

younger Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or selfseeking.

How were these men to bring about the reform which they desired? Their first aim was obviously to secure a

majority in the Assembly, and by the election of 1828 they attained this first object. But the limits of the

power of the Assembly they soon discovered. Without definite leadership, with no control over the

Administration, and with even legislative power divided, it could effect little. It was in part disappointment at

the failure of the Assembly that accounted for the defeat of the Reformers in 1830, though four years later

this verdict was again reversed. Clearly the form of government itself should be changed. But in what way?

Here a divergence in the ranks of the Reformers became marked. One party, looking upon the United States

as the utmost achievement in democracy, proposed to follow its example in making the upper house elective

and thus to give the people control of both branches of the Legislature. Another group, of whom Robert

Baldwin was the chief, saw that this change would not suffice. In the States the Executive was also elected by

the people. Here, where the Governor would doubtless continue to be appointed. by the Crown, some other

means must be found to give the people full control. Baldwin found it in the British Cabinet system, which

gave real power to ministers having the confidence of a majority in Parliament. The Governor would remain,

but he would be only a figurehead, a constitutional monarch acting, like the King, only on the advice of his

constitutional advisers. Responsible government was Baldwin's one and absorbing idea, and his persistence

led to its ultimate adoption, along with a proposal for an elective Council, in the Reform party's programme

in 1834. Delay in affecting this reform, Baldwin told the Governor a year later, was "the great and all

absorbing grievance before which all others sank into insignificance." The remedy could be applied "without

in the least entrenching upon the just and necessary prerogatives of the Crown, which I consider, when

administered by the Lieutenant. Governor through the medium of a provincial ministry responsible to the

provincial parliament, to be an essential part of the constitution of the province." In brief, Baldwin insisted

that Simcoe's rhetorical outburst in 1791, when he declared that Upper Canada was "a perfect Image and

Transcript of the British Government and Constitution," should be made effective in practice.

The course of the conflict between the Compact and the Reformers cannot be followed in detail. It had

elements of tragedy, as when Gourlay was hounded into prison, where he was broken in health and shattered

in mind, and then exiled from the province for criticism of the Government which was certainly no more

severe than now appears every day in Opposition newspapers. The conflict had elements of the ludicrous, too,

as when Captain Matthews was ordered by his military superiors to return to England because in the

unrestrained festivities of New Year's Eve he had called on a strolling troupe to play Yankee Doodle and had

shouted to the company, "Hats off"; or when Governor Maitland overturned fourteen feet of the Brock

Monument to remove a copy of Mackenzie's journal, the "Colonial Advocate", which had inadvertently been

The weapons of the Reformers were the platform, the press, and investigations and reports by parliamentary

committees. The Compact hit back in its own way. Every critic was denounced as a traitor. Offending editors

were put in the pillory. Mackenzie was five times expelled from the House, only to be returned five times by

his stubborn supporters. Matters were at a deadlock, and it became clear either that the British Parliament,

which alone could amend the Constitution, must intervene or else that the Reformers would be driven to

desperate paths. But before matters came to this pass, an acute crisis had arisen in Lower Canada which had

In Lower Canada, the conflict which had been smoldering before the war had since then burst into flame. The

issues of this conflict were more clearcut than in any of the other provinces. A coherent opposition had

formed earlier, and from beginning to end it dominated the Assembly. The governing forces were outwardly

much the same as in Upper Canadaa Lieutenant Governor responsible to the Colonial Office, an Executive

Council appointed by the Crown but coming to have the independent power of a wellentrenched

bureaucracy, and a Legislative Council nominated by the Crown and, until nearly the end of the period,

composed chiefly of the same men who served in the Executive. The little clique in control had much less

popular backing than the Family Compact of Upper Canada and were of lower caliber. Robert Christie, an

Englishspeaking member of the Assembly, who may be counted an unprejudiced witness since he was four

times expelled by the majority in that house, refers to the real rulers of the province as "a few rapacious,

overbearing, and irresponsible officials, without stake or other connexion in the country than their interests."

At their head stood Jonathan Sewell, a Massachusetts Loyalist who had come to Lower Canada by way of

New Brunswick in 1789, and who for over forty years as Attorney General, Chief Justice, or member of

The opposition to the bureaucrats at first included both English and French elements, but the English

minority were pulled in contrary ways. Their antecedents were not such as to lead them to accept meekly

either the political or the social pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; the American settlers in the Eastern

Townships, and the Scotch and American merchants who were building up Quebec and Montreal, had called

for selfgovernment, not government from above. Yet their racial and religious prejudices were strong and

made them unwilling to accept in place of the bureaucrats the dominance of an unprogressive habitant

majority. The first leader of the opposition which developed in the Assembly after the War of 1812 was

James Stuart, the son of the leading Anglican clergyman of his day, but he soon fell away and became a

mainstay of the bureaucracy. His brother Andrew, however, kept up for many years longer a more

disinterested fight. Another Scot, John Neilson, editor of the Quebec "Gazette", was until 1833 foremost

among the assailants of the bureaucracy. But steadily, as the extreme nationalist claims of the

Frenchspeaking majority provoked reprisals and as the conviction grew upon the minority that they would

never be anything but a minority,* most of them accepted clique rule as a lesser evil than "rule by priest and

* The natural increase of the FrenchCanadian race under British rule is one of the most extraordinary

phenomena in social history. The following figures illustrate the rate of that increase: the number was 16,417

in 1706; 69,810 in 1765; 479,288 in 1825; 697,084 in 1844. The population of Canada East or Lower Canada

in 1844 was made up as follows: French Canadians, 524,244; English Canadians. 85,660; English, 11,895;

Irish, 43,982; Scotch, 13,393; Americans, 11,946; born in other countries, 1329; place of birth not specified,

In the reform movement in Upper Canada there were a multiplicity of leaders and a constant shifting of

groups. In Lower Canada, after the defection of James Stuart in 1817, there was only one leader, Louis

Joseph Papineau. For twenty years Papineau was the uncrowned king of the province. His commanding

figure, his powers of oratory, outstanding in a race of orators, his fascinating manners, gave him an easy

mastery over his people. Prudence did not hamper his flights; compromise was a word not found in his

His father, Joseph Papineau, though of humble birth, had risen high in the life of the province. He had won

distinction in his profession as a notary, as a speaker in the Assembly, and as a soldier in the defense of

Quebec against the American invaders of 1775. In 1804 he had purchased the seigneury of La Petite Nation,

far up the Ottawa. Louis Joseph Papineau followed in his father's footsteps. Born in 1786, he served loyally

and bravely in the War of 1812. In the same year he entered the Assembly and made his place at a single

stroke. Barely three years after his election, he was chosen Speaker, and with a brief break he held that post

Papineau did not soon or lightly begin his crusade against the Government. For the first five years of his

Speakership, he confined himself to the routine duties of his office. As late as 1820 he pronounced a glowing

eulogy on the Constitution which Great Britain had granted the province. In that year he tested the extent of

the privileges so granted by joining in the attempt of the Assembly to assert its full control of the purse; but it

was not until the project of uniting the two Canadas had made clear beyond dispute the hostility of the

There was much to be said for a reunion of the two Canadas. The St. Lawrence bound them together, though

Acts of Parliament had severed them. Upper Canada, as an inland province, restricted in its trade with its

neighbor to the south, was dependent upon Lower Canada for access to the outer world. Its share of the duties

collected at the Lower Canada ports until 1817 had been only oneeighth, afterwards increased to onefifth.

This inequality proved a constant source of friction. The crying necessity of cooperation for the improvement

of the St. Lawrence waterway gave further ground for the contention that only by a reunion of the two

provinces could efficiency be secured. In Upper Canada the Reformers were in favor of this plan, but the

Compact, fearful of any disturbance of their vested interests, tended to oppose it. In Lower Canada the chief

support came from the English element. The governing clique, as the older established body, had no doubt

that they could bring the western section under their sway in case of union. But the main reason for their

advocacy was the desire to swamp the French Canadians by an English majority. Sewell, the chief supporter

of the project, frankly took this ground. The Governor, Lord Dalhousie, and the Colonial Office adopted his

view; and in 1822 an attempt was made to rush a Union Bill through the British Parliament without any

notice to those most concerned. It was blocked for the moment by the opposition of a Whig group led by

Burdett and Mackintosh; and then Papineau and Neilson sailed to London and succeeded in inducing the

Ministry to stay its hand. The danger was averted; but Papineau had become convinced that if his people were

to retain the rights given them by their "Sacred Charter" they would have to fight for them. If they were to

How could this be done? Baldwin's bold and revolutionary policy of making the Executive responsible to the

Assembly did not seem within the range of practical politics. It meant in practice the abandonment of British

control, and this the Colonial Office was not willing to grant. Antoine Panet and other Assembly leaders had

suggested in 1815 that it would be well, "if it were possible, to grant a number of places as Councillors or

other posts of honour and of profit to those who have most influence over the majority in the Assembly, to

hold so long as they maintained this influence," and James Stuart urged the same tentative suggestion a year

later. But even before this the Colonial Office had made clear its position. "His Majesty's Government,"

declared the Colonial Secretary, Lord Bathurst, in 1814, "never can admit so novel inconvenient a Principle

as that of allowing the Governor of a Colony to be divested of his responsibility [to the Colonial Office] for

the acts done during his administration or permit him to shield himself under the advice of any Persons,

Two other courses had the sanction of precedent, one of English, the other of American example. The English

House of Commons had secured its dominant place in the government of the country by its control of the

purse. Why should not the Assembly do likewise? One obvious difficulty lay in the fact that the Assembly

was not the sole authority in raising revenue. The British Parliament had retained the power to levy certain

duties as part of its system of commercial control, and other casual and territorial dues lay in the right of the

Crown. From 1820, therefore, the Assembly's main aim was twofoldto obtain control of these remaining

sources of revenue, and by means of this power to bludgeon the Legislative Council and the Governor into

compliance with its wishes. The Colonial Office made concessions, offering to resign all its taxing powers in

return for a permanent civil list, that is, an assurance that the salaries of the chief officials would not be

questioned annually. The offer was reasonable in itself but, as it would have hampered the full use of the

The other aim of the Patriotes, as the Opposition styled themselves, was to conquer the Legislative Council

by making it elective. Papineau, in spite of his early prejudices, was drawn more and more into sympathy

with the form of democracy worked out in the United States. In fact, he not only looked to it as a model but,

as the thirties wore on, he came to hope that moral, if not physical, support might be found there for his

campaign against the English Government. After 1830 the demand for an elective Legislative Council

The struggle soon reached a deadlock. Governor followed Governor: Lord Dalhousie, Sir James Kempt, Lord

Aylmer, all in turn failed to allay the storm. The Assembly raised its claims each session and fulminated

against all the opposing powers in windy resolutions. Papineau, embittered by continued opposition, carried

away by his own eloquence, and steadied by no responsibility of office, became more implacable in his

demands. Many of his moderate supportersNeilson, Andrew Stuart, Quesnel, Cuvillierfell away, only to

be overwhelmed in the first election at a wave of the great tribune's hand. Business was blocked, supplies

were not voted, and civil servants made shift without salary as best they could.

The British Government awoke, or half awoke, to the seriousness of the situation. In 1835 a Royal

Commission of three, with the new Governor General, Lord Gosford, as chairman, was appointed to make

inquiries and to recommend a policy. Gosford, a genial Irishman, showed himself most conciliatory in both

private intercourse and public discourse. Unfortunately the rash act of the new Lieutenant Governor of Upper

Canada, Sir Francis Bond Head, in publishing the instructions of the Colonial Office, showed that the policy

of Downing Street was the futile one of conciliation without concession. The Assembly once more refused to

grant supplies without redress of grievances. The Commissioners made their report opposing any substantial

change. In March, 1837, Lord John Russell, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Melbourne Ministry, opposed

only by a handful of Radical and Irish members, carried through the British Parliament a series of resolutions

authorizing the Governor to take from the Treasury without the consent of the Assembly the funds needed for

civil administration, offering control of all revenues in return for a permanent civil list, and rejecting

absolutely the demands alike for a responsible Executive and for an elective Council.

British statesmanship was bankrupt. Its final answer to the demands for redress was to stand pat. Papineau,

without seeing what the end would be, held to his course. Younger men, carried away by the passions he had

aroused, pushed on still more recklessly. If reform could not be obtained within the British Empire, it must be

sought by setting up an independent republic on the St. Lawrence or by annexation to the United States.

In Upper Canada, at the same time, matters had come to the verge of rebellion. Sir John Colborne had, just

before retiring as Lieutenant Governor in 1836, added fuel to the flames by creating and endowing some

fortyfour rectories, thus strengthening the grip of the Anglican Church on the province. His successor, Sir

Francis Bond Head, was a man of such rash and unbalanced judgment as to lend support to the tradition that

he was appointed by mistake for his cousin, Edmund Head, who was made Governor of United Canada

twenty years later. He appointed to his Executive Council three Reformers, Baldwin, Rolph, and Dunn, only

to make clear by his refusal to consult them his inability to understand their demand for responsible

government. All the members of the Executive Council thereupon resigned, and the Assembly refused

The weight of executive patronage, the insistence of the Governor that British connection was at stake, the

alarms caused by some injudicious statements of Mackenzie and his Radical ally in England, Joseph Hume,

and the defection of the Methodists, whose leader, Egerton Ryerson, had quarreled with Mackenzie, resulted

in the overwhelming defeat of the Reformers. The sting of defeat, the failure of the Family Compact to carry

out their eleventh hour promises of reform, and the passing of Lord John Russell's reactionary resolutions

convinced a section of the Reform party, in Upper Canada as well as in Lower Canada, that an appeal to force

Toward the end of 1837 armed rebellion broke out in both the Canadas. In both it was merely a flash in the

pan. In Lower Canada there had been latterly much use of the phrases of revolution and some drilling, but

rebellion was neither definitely planned nor carefully organized. The more extreme leaders of the Patriotes

simply drifted into it, and the actual outbreak was a haphazard affair. Alarmed by the sudden and seemingly

concerted departure of Papineau and some of his lieutenants, Nelson, Brown, and O'Callaghan, from

Montreal, the Government gave orders for their arrest. The petty skirmish that followed on November 16,

1837, was the signal for the rallying of armed habitants around impromptu leaders at various points. The

rising was local and spasmodic. The vast body of the habitants stood aloof. The Catholic Church, which

earlier had sympathized with Papineau, had parted from him when he developed radical and republican

views. Now the strong exhortations of the clergy to the faithful counted for much in keeping peace, and in

one view justified the policy of the British Government in seeking to purchase their favor. The Quebec and

Three Rivers districts remained quiet. In the Richelieu and Montreal districts, where disaffection was

strongest, the habitants lacked leadership, discipline, and touch with other groups, and were armed only with

old flintlocks, scythes, or clubs. Here and there a brave and skillful leader, such as Dr. Jean Olivier Chenier,

was thrown up by the evidence opened a way out of the difficult situation. A year later Peel and Webster,

representing the two countries, exchanged formal explanations, and the incident was closed.

In Upper Canada many a rebel sympathizer lay for months in jail, but only two leaders, Lount and Matthews,

both brave men, paid the penalty of death for their failure. In Lower Canada the new Governor General, Lord

Durham, proved more clement, merely banishing to Bermuda eight of the captured leaders. When, a year

later, after Durham's return to England, a second brief rising broke out under Robert Nelson, it was stamped

out in a week, twelve of the ringleaders were executed, and others were deported to Botany Bay.

The rebellion, it seemed, had failed and failed miserably. Most of the leaders of the extreme factions in both

provinces had been discredited, and the moderate men had been driven into the government camp. Yet in one

sense the rising proved successful. It was not the first nor the last time that wild and misguided force brought

reform where sane and moderate tactics met only contempt. If men were willing to die to redress their

wrongs, the most easygoing official could no longer deny that there was a case for inquiry and possibly for

reform. Lord Melbourne's Government had acted at once in sending out to Canada, as Governor General and

High Commissioner with sweeping powers, one of the ablest men in English public life. Lord Durham was an

aristocratic Radical, intensely devoted to political equality and equally convinced of his own personal

superiority. Yet he had vision, firmness, independence, and his very rudeness kept him free from the social

influences which had ensnared many another Governor. Attended by a gorgeous retinue and by some able

working secretaries, including Charles Buller, Carlyle's pupil, he made a rapid survey of Upper and Lower

Canada. Suddenly, after five crowded months, his mission ended. He had left at home active enemies and

lukewarm friends. Lord Brougham, one of his foes, called in question the legality of his edict banishing the

rebel leaders to Bermuda. The Ministers did not back him, as they should have done; and Durham indignantly

Three months later, however, his "Report" appeared and his mission stood vindicated. There are few British

state papers of more fame or more worth than Durham's "Report". It was not, however, the beginning and the

end of wisdom in colonial policy, as has often been declared. Much that Durham advocated was not new, and

much has been condemned by time. His main suggestions were four: to unite the Canadas, to swamp the

French Canadians by such union, to grant a measure of responsible government, and to set up municipal

government. His attitude towards the French Canadians was prejudiced and shortsighted. He was not the first

to recommend responsible government, nor did his approval make it a reality. Yet with all qualifications his

"Report" showed a confidence in the liberating and solving power of selfgovernment which was the

allessential thing for the English Government to see; and his reasoned and powerful advocacy gave an

impetus and a rallying point to the movement which were to prove of the greatest value in the future growth

The struggle for selfgovernment seemed to have ended in deadlock and chaos. Yet under the wreckage new

lines of constructive effort were forming. The rebellion had at least proved that the old order was doomed.

For half a century the attempt had been made to govern the Canadas as separate provinces and with the half

measure of freedom involved in representative government. For the next quarter of a century the experiment

of responsible government together with union of the two provinces was to be given its trial.

The union of the two provinces was the phase of Durham's policy which met fullest acceptance in England. It

was not possible, in the view of the British Ministry, to take away permanently from the people of Lower

Canada the measure of selfgovernment involved in permitting them to choose their representatives in a

House of Assembly. It was equally impossible, they considered, to permit a FrenchCanadian majority ever

again to bring all government to a standstill. The only solution of the problem was to unite the two provinces

and thus swamp the French Canadians by an English majority. Lower Canada, Durham had insisted, must be

made "an English province." Sooner or later the French Canadians must lose their separate nationality; and it

was, he contended, the part of statesmanship to make it sooner. Union, moreover, would make possible a

common financial policy and an energetic development of the resources of both provinces.

This was the first task set Durham's successor, Charles Poulett Thomson, better known as Lord Sydenham.

Like Durham he was a man of outstanding capacity. The British Government had learned at last to send men

of the caliber the emergency demanded. Like Durham he was a wealthy Radical politician, but there the

resemblance ended. Where Durham played the dictator, Sydenham preferred to intrigue and to manage men,

to win them by his adroitness and to convince them by his energy and his business knowledge. He was well

fitted for the transition tasks before him, though too masterful to fill the role of ornamental monarch which

Sydenham reached Canada in October, 1839. With the assistance of James Stuart, now a baronet and Chief

Justice of Lower Canada, he drafted a union measure. In Lower Canada the Assembly had been suspended,

and the Special Council appointed in its stead accepted the bill without serious demur. More difficulty was

found in Upper Canada, where the Family Compact, still entrenched in the Legislative Council, feared the

risk to their own position that union would bring and shrank from the task of assimilating half a million

disaffected French Canadians. But with the support of the Reformers and of the more moderate among the

Family Compact party, Sydenham forced his measure through. A confirming bill passed the British

The Act provided for the union of the two provinces, under a Governor, an appointed Legislative Council,

and an elective Assembly. In the Assembly each section of the new province was to receive equal

representation, though the population of Lower Canada still greatly exceeded that of Upper Canada. The

Assembly was to have full control of all revenues, and in return a permanent civil list was granted. Either

English or French could be used in debate, but all parliamentary journals and papers were to be printed in

* From 1841 to 1867 the whole province was legally known as the "Province of Canada." Yet a measure of

administrative separation between the old sections remained, and the terms "Canada East" and "Canada

West" received official sanction. The older terms, "Lower Canada" and "Upper Canada," lingered on in

In June, 1841, the first Parliament of united Canada met at Kingston, which as the most central point had

been chosen as the new capital. Under Sydenham's shrewd and energetic leadership a business programme of

longdelayed reforms was put through. A large loan, guaranteed by the British Government, made possible

extensive provision for building roads, bridges, and canals around the rapids in the St. Lawrence. Municipal

institutions were set up, and reforms were effected in the provincial administration.

Lord John Russell in England and Sydenham in Canada were anxious to keep the question of responsible

government in the background. For the first busy months they succeeded, but the new Parliament contained

men quite as strong willed as either and of quite other views. Before the first session had begun, Baldwin and

the new FrenchCanadian leader, La Fontaine, had raised the issue and begun a new struggle in which their

singleminded devotion and unflinching courage were to attain a complete success.

Responsible government was in 1841 only a phrase, a watchword. Its full implications became clear only

after many years. It meant three things: cabinet government, selfgovernment, and party government. It

meant that the government of the country should be carried on by a Cabinet or Executive Council, all

members of Parliament, all belonging to the party which had the majority in the Assembly, and under the

leadership of a Prime Minister, the working head of the Government. The nominal head, Governor or King,

could act only on the advice of his ministers, who alone were held responsible to Parliament for the course of

the Government. It meant, further, national selfgovernment. The Governor could not serve two masters. If

he must take the advice of his ministers in Canada, he could not take the possibly conflicting advice of

ministers in London. The people of Canada would be the ultimate court of appeal. And finally, responsible

government meant party government. The cabinet system presupposed a definite and united majority behind

the Government. It was the business of the party system to provide that majority, to insure responsible and

steady action, and at the same time responsible criticism from Her Majesty's loyal Opposition. Baldwin saw

this clearly in 1841, but it took hard fighting throughout the forties to bring all his fellow countrymen to see

Sydenham fought against responsible government but advanced it against his will. The only sense in which

he, like Russell, was prepared to concede such liberty was that the Governor should choose his advisers as far

as possible from men having the confidence of the Assembly. They were to be his advisers only, in fact as

well as form. The Governor was still to govern, was to be Prime Minister and Governor in one. When

Baldwin, who had been given a seat in the Executive Council, demanded in 1841 that this body should be

reconstructed in such a way as to include some FrenchCanadian members and to exclude the Family

Compact men, Sydenham flatly refused. Baldwin then resigned and went into opposition, but Sydenham

unwillingly played into his hand. By choosing his council solely from members of the two Houses, he

established a definite connection between Executive and Assembly and thus gave an opportunity for the

discussion of the administration of policy in the House and for the forming of government and opposition

parties. Before the first session closed, the majority which Sydenham had built up by acting as a party leader

at the very time he was deriding parties as mere factions, crumbled away, and he was forced to accept

resolutions insisting that the Governor's advisers must be men "possessed of the confidence of the

representatives of the people." Fate ended his work at its height. Riding home one September evening, he was

It fell to the Tory Government of Peel to choose Sydenham's successor. They named Sir Charles Bagot,

already distinguished for his career in diplomacy and known for his hand in matters which were to interest

the greater Canada, the RushBagot Convention with the United States and the treaty with Russia which

fixed, only too vaguely, the boundaries of Alaska. He was under strict injunctions from the Colonial

Secretary, Lord Stanley, to continue Sydenham's policy and to make no further concession to the demands for

responsible government or party control. Yet this Tory nominee of a Tory Cabinet, in his brief term of office,

insured a great advance along this very path toward freedom. His easygoing temper predisposed him to play

the part of constitutional monarch rather than of Prime Minister, and in any case he faced a majority in the

The policy of swamping French influence had already proved a failure. Sydenham had given it a full trial. He

had done his best, or his worst, by unscrupulous manipulation, to keep the French Canadians from gaining

their fair quota of the members in the Union Assembly. Those who were elected he ignored. "They have

forgotten nothing and learnt nothing by the Rebellion, " he declared, "and are more unfit for representative

government than they were in 1791." This was far from a true reading of the situation. The French stood

aloof, it is true, a compact and sullen group, angered by the undisguised policy of Anglicization that faced

them and by Sydenham's unscrupulous tactics. But they had learned restraint and had found leaders and allies

of the kind most needed. Papineau's placefor the great tribune was now in exile in Paris, consorting with

the republicans and socialists who were to bring about the Revolution of 1848had been taken by one of his

former lieutenants. Louis Hippolyte La Fontaine still stands out as one of the two or three greatest Canadians

of French descent, a man of massive intellect, of unquestioned integrity, and of firm but moderate temper.

With Baldwin he came to form a close and lifelong friendship. The Reformers of Canada West, as Upper

Canada was now called, formed a working alliance with La Fontaine which gave them a sweeping majority in

the Assembly. Bagot bowed to the inevitable and called La Fontaine and Baldwin to his Council. Ill health

made it impossible for him to take much part in the government, and the Council was far on the way to

obtaining the unity and the independence of a true Cabinet when Bagot's death in 1843 brought a new turn in

The British Ministers had seen with growing uneasiness Bagot's concessions. His successor, Sir Charles

Metcalfe, a man of honest and kindly ways but accustomed to governing oriental peoples, determined to

make a stand against the pretensions of the Reformers. In this attitude he was strongly backed both by Stanley

and by his successor, that brilliant young Tory, William Ewart Gladstone. Metcalfe insisted once more that

the Governor must govern. While the members of the Council, as individuals, might give him advice, it was

for him to decide whether or not to take it. The inevitable clash with his Ministers came in the autumn of

1843 over a question of patronage. They resigned, and after months of effort Metcalfe patched up a Ministry

with W. H. Draper as the leading member. In an election in which Metcalfe himself took the platform and in

which once more British connection was said to be at stake, the Ministry obtained a narrow majority. But

opinion soon turned, and when Metcalfe, the third Governor in four years to whom Canada had proved fatal,,

went home to die, he knew that his stand had been in vain. The Ministry, after a precarious life of three years,

went to the country only to be beaten by an overwhelming majority in both East and West. When, in 1848,

Baldwin and La Fontaine were called to office under the new Governor General, Lord Elgin, the fight was

won. Many years were to pass before the full implications of responsible government were worked out, but

henceforth even the straitest Tory conceded the principle. Responsible government had ceased to be a party

Lord Elgin, who was Durham's soninlaw, was a man well able to bear the mantle of his predecessors. Yet

he realized that the day had passed when Governors could govern and was content rather to advise his

advisers, to wield the personal influence that his experience and sagacity warranted. Hitherto the stages in

Canadian history had been recorded by the term of office of the Governors; henceforth it was to be the tenure

of Cabinets which counted. Elgin ceased even to attend the Council, and after his time the Governor became

more and more the constitutional monarch, busied in laying corner stones and listening to tiresome official

addresses. In emergencies, and especially in the gap or interregnum between Ministries, the personality of the

Governor might count, but as a rule this power remained latent. Yet in two turning points in Canadian

history, both of which had to do with the relations of Canada to the United States, Elgin was to play an

important part: the Annexation Movement of 1849 and the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854.

In the struggle for responsible government, loyalty to the British Crown, loyalty of a superior and exclusive

brand, had been the creed and the war cry of the Tory party. Yet in 1849 men saw the hotheads of this group

in Montreal stoning a British Governor General and setting fire to the Parliament Buildings, while a few

months later their elders issued a manifesto urging the annexation of Canada to the United States. Why this

sudden shift? Simply because the old colonial system they had known and supported had come to an end. The

Empire had been taken to mean racial ascendancy and trade profit. Now both the political and the economic

pillars were crumbling, and the Empire appeared to have no further excuse for existence.

In the past British connection had meant to many of the English minority in Lower Canada a means of

redressing the political balance, of retaining power in face of a body of Frenchspeaking citizens

outnumbering them three or four to one. Now that support had been withdrawn. Britain had consented,

unwillingly, to the setting up of responsible government and the calling to office of men who a dozen years

before had been in arms against the Queen or fleeing from the province. This was gall and wormwood to the

English. But when the Ministry introduced, and the Assembly passed, the Rebellion Losses Bill for

compensating those who had suffered destruction of property in the outbreak, and when the terms were so

drawn as to make it possible, its critics charged, that rebels as well as loyalists would be compensated, flesh

and blood could bear no more. The Governor was pelted with rotten eggs when he came down to the House

to sign the bill, and the buildings where Parliament had met since 1844, when the capital had been transferred

The anger felt against the Ministry thus turned against the British Government. The English minority felt like

an advance guard in a hostile country, deserted by the main forces, an Ulster abandoned to Home Ruler and

Sinn Feiner. They turned to the south, to the other great Englishspeaking Protestant people. If the older

branch of the race would not give them protection or a share in dominance, perhaps the younger branch could

and would. As Lord Durham had suggested, they were resolved that "Lower Canada must be ENGLISH, at

But it was not only the political basis of the old colonial system that was rudely shattered. The economic

foundations, too, were passing away, and with them the profits of the Montreal merchants, who formed the

backbone of the annexation movement. It has been seen that under this system Great Britain had aimed at

setting up a selfcontained empire, with a monopoly of the markets of the colonies. Now for her own sake

she was sweeping away the tariff and shipping monopoly which had been built up through more than two

centuries. The logic of Adam Smith, the experiments of Huskisson, the demands of manufacturers for cheap

food and raw materials, the passionate campaigns of Cobden and Bright, and the rains that brought the Irish

famine, at last had their effect. In 1846 Peel himself undertook the repeal of the Corn Laws. To Lower

Canada this was a crushing blow. Until of late the preference given in the British market on colonial goods in

return for the control of colonial trade had been of little value; but in 1848 the duties on Canadian wheat and

flour had been greatly lowered, resulting in a preference over foreign grain reckoned at eighteen cents a

bushel. While in appearance an extension of the old system of preference and protection, in reality this was a

step toward its abandonment. For it was understood that American grain, imported into Canada at a low duty,

whether shipped direct or ground into flour, would be admitted at the same low rates. The Act, by opening a

back door to United States wheat, foreshadowed the triumph of the cheap food agitators in England. But the

merchants, the millers, and the forwarders of Montreal could not believe this. The canal system was rushed

through; large flour mills were built, and heavy investments of capital were made. Then in 1846 came the

announcement that the artificial basis of this brief prosperity had vanished. Lord Elgin summed up the results

in a dispatch in 1849: "Property in most of the Canadian towns, and more especially in the capital, has fallen

fifty per cent in value within the last three years. Threefourths of the commercial men are bankrupt, owing

to free trade. A large proportion of the exportable produce of Canada is obliged to seek a market in the United

States. It pays a duty of twenty per cent on the frontier. How long can such a state of things endure?"

In October, 1849, the leading men of Montreal issued a manifesto demanding annexation to the United States.

A future Prime Minister of Canada, J. J. C. Abbott, four future Cabinet Ministers, John Rose, Luther Holton,

D. L. Macpherson, and A. A. Dorion, and the commercial leaders of Montreal, the Molsons, Redpaths,

Torrances, and Workmans, were among the signers. Besides Dorion, a few French Canadians of the Rouge or

extreme Radical party joined in. The movement found supporters in the Eastern Townships, notably in A. T.

Galt, a financier and railroad builder of distinction, and here and there in Canada West. Yet the great body of

opinion was unmistakably against it. Baldwin and La Fontaine opposed it with unswerving energy, the

Catholic Church in Canada East denounced it, and the rank and file of both parties in Canada West gave it

short shrift. Elgin came out actively in opposition and aided in negotiating the Reciprocity Treaty with the

United States which met the economic need. Montreal found itself isolated, and even there the revival of

trade and the cooling of passions turned men's thoughts into other channels. Soon the movement was but a

memory, chiefly serviceable to political opponents for taunting some signer of the manifesto whenever he

later made parade of his loyalty. It had a more unfortunate effect, however, in leading public opinion in the

United States to the belief for many years that a strong annexationist sentiment existed in Canada. Never

again did annexation receive any notable measure of popular support. A national spirit was slowly gaining

ground, and men were eventually to see that the alternative to looking to London for salvation was not

In the provinces by the sea the struggle for responsible government was won at much the same time as in

Canada. The smaller field within which the contest was waged gave it a bitter personal touch; but racial

hostility did not enter in, and the British Government proved less obdurate than in the western conflicts. In

both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick little oligarchies had become entrenched. The Government was

unprogressive, and fees and salaries were high. The Anglican Church had received privileges galling to other

denominations which surpassed it in numbers. The "powers that were" found a shrewd defender in

Haliburton, who tried to teach his fellow Bluenoses through the homely wit of "Sam Slick" that they should

leave governing to those who had the training, the capacity, and the leisure it required. In Prince Edward

Island the land question still overshadowed all others. Every proposal for its settlement was rejected by the

influence of the absentee landlords in England, and the agitation went wearily on.

In Nova Scotia the outstanding figure in the ranks of reform was Joseph Howe. The son of a Loyalist settler,

Howe early took to his father's work of journalism. At first his sympathies were with the governing powers,

but a controversy with a brother editor, Jotham Blanchard, a New Hampshire man who found radical backing

among the Scots of Pictou, gave him new light and he soon threw his whole powers into the struggle on the

popular side. Howe was a man lavishly gifted, one of the most effective orators America has produced,

fearing no man and no task however great, filled with a vitality, a humor, a broad sympathy for his fellows

that gave him the blind obedience of thousands of followers and the glowing friendship of countless firesides.

There are still old men in Nova Scotia whose proudest memory is that they once held Howe's horse or ran on

Howe took up the fight in earnest in 1835. The western demand for responsible government pointed the way,

and Howe became, with Baldwin, its most trenchant advocate. In spite of the determined opposition of the

sturdy old soldier Governor, Sir Colin Campbell, and of his successor, Lord Falkland, who aped Sydenham

and whom Howe threatened to "hire a black man to horsewhip," the reformers won. In 1848 the first

In New Brunswick the transition to responsible government came gradually and without dramatic incidents or

brilliant figures on either side. Lemuel Wilmot, and later Charles Fisher, led the reform ranks, gradually

securing for the Assembly control of all revenues, abolishing religious inequalities, and effecting some

reform in the Executive Council, until at last in 1855 the crowning demand was tardily conceded.

From the Great Lakes to the Atlantic the political fight was won, and men turned with relief to the tasks

which strife and faction had hindered. Selfgovernment meant progressive government. With organized

Cabinets coordinating and controlling their policy the provinces went ahead much faster than when Governor

and Assembly stood at daggers drawn. The forties and especially the fifties were years of rapid and sound

development in all the provinces, and especially in Canada West. Settlers poured in, the scattered clearings;

widened until one joined the next, and pioneer hardships gave way to substantial, if crude, prosperity.

Education, notably under the vigorous leadership of Egerton Ryerson in Canada West, received more

adequate attention. Banks grew and with them all commercial facilities increased.

The distinctive feature of this period of Canadian development, however, was the growth of canals and

railroads. The forties were the time of canal building and rebuilding all along the lakes and the St. Lawrence

to salt water. Canada spent millions on what were wonderful works for their day, in the hope that the St.

Lawrence would become the channel for the trade of all the growing western States bordering on the Great

Lakes. Scarcely were these waterway improvements completed when it was realized they had been made

largely in vain. The railway had come and was outrivaling the canal. If Canadian ports and channels were

even to hold their own, they must take heed of the enterprise of all the cities along the Atlantic coast of the

United States, which were promoting railroads to the interior in a vigorous rivalry for the trade of the Golden

West. Here was a challenge which must be taken up. The fifties became the first great railway era of Canada.

In 1850 there were only sixtysix miles of railway in all the provinces; ten years later there were over two

thousand. Nearly all the roads were aided by provincial or municipal bonus or guarantee. Chief among the

lines was the Grand Trunk, which ran from the Detroit border to Riviere du Loup on the Gulf of St.

Lawrence, and which, though it halted at that eastern terminus in the magnificent project of connecting with

the railways of the Maritime Provinces, was nevertheless at that time the longest road in the world operating

The railways brought with them a new speculative fever, a more complex financial structure, a business

politics which shaded into open corruption, and a closer touch with the outside world. The general

substitution of steam for sail on the Atlantic during this period aided further in lessening the isolation of what

had been backwoods provinces and in bringing them into closer relation with the rest of the world.

It was in closer relations with the United States that this emergence from isolation chiefly manifested itself.

In the generation that followed the War of 1812 intercourse with the United States was discouraged and was

remarkably insignificant. Official policy and the memories of 1783 and 1812 alike built up a wall along the

southern border. The spirit of Downing Street was shown in the instructions given to Lord Bathurst,

immediately after the close of the war, to leave the territory between Montreal and Lake Champlain in a state

of nature, making no further grants of land and letting the few roads which had been begun fall into decay

thus a barrier of forest wilderness would ward off republican contagion. This Chinese policy of putting up a

wall of separation proved impossible to carry through, but in less extreme ways this attitude of aloofness

The friction aroused by repeated boundary disputes prevented friendly relations between Canada and the

United States. With unconscious irony the framers of the Peace of 1783 had prefaced their long outline of the

boundaries of the United States by expressing their intention "that all disputes which might arise in future on

the subject of the boundaries of the said United States may be prevented." So vague, however, were the terms

of the treaty and so untrustworthy were the maps of the day that ultimately almost every clause in the

As settlement rolled westward one section of the boundary after another came in question. Beginning in the

east, the line between New Brunswick and New England was to be formed by the St. Croix River. There had

been a St. Croix in Champlain's time and a St. Croix was depicted on the maps, but no river known by that

name existed in 1783. The British identified it with the Schoodic, the Americans with the Magaguadavic.

Arbitration in 1798 upheld the British in the contention that the Schoodic was the St. Croix but agreed with

the Americans in the secondary question as to which of the two branches of the Schoodic should be followed.

A similar commission in 1817 settled the dispute as to the islands in Passamaquoddy Bay.

More difficult, because at once more ambiguous in terms and more vitally important, was the determination

of the boundary in the next stage westward from the St. Croix to the St. Lawrence. The British position was a

difficult one to maintain. In the days of the struggle with France, Great Britain had tried to push the bounds of

the New England colonies as far north as might be, making claims that would hem in France to the barest

strip along the south shore of the St. Lawrence. Now that she was heir to the territories and claims of France

and had lost her own old colonies, it was somewhat embarrassing, but for diplomats not impossible, to have

to urge a line as far south as the urgent needs of the provinces for intercommunication demanded. The letter

of the treaty was impossible to interpret with certainty. The phrase, "the Highlands which divide those rivers

that empty themselves into the river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean," meant

according to the American reading a watershed which was a marshy plateau, and according to the British

version a range of hills to the south which involved some keen hairsplitting as to the rivers they divided. The

intentions of the parties to the original treaty were probably much as the Americans contended. From the

standpoint of neighborly adjustment and the relative need for the land in question, a strong case in equity

could be made out for the provinces, which would be cut asunder for all time if a wedge were driven north to

As lumbermen and settlers gathered in the border area, the risk of conflict became acute, culminating in the

Aroostook War in 183839, when the Legislatures of Maine and New Brunswick backed their rival

lumberjacks with reckless jingoism. Diplomacy failed repeatedly to obtain a compromise line. Arbitration

was tried with little better success, as the United States refused to accept the award of the King of the

Netherlands in 1831. The diplomats tried once more, and in 1842 Daniel Webster, the United States Secretary

of State, and Lord Ashburton, the British Commissioner, made a compromise by which some five thousand

miles of the area in dispute were assigned to Great Britain and seven thousand to the United States. The

award was not popular on either side, and the public seized eagerly on stories of concealed "Red Line" maps,

stories of Yankee smartness or of British trickery. Webster, to win the assent of Maine, had exhibited in the

Senate a map found in the French Archives and very damaging to the American claim. Later it appeared that

the British Government also had found a map equally damaging to its own claims. The nice question of ethics

involved, whether a nation should bring forward evidence that would tell against itself, ceased to have more

than an abstract interest when it was demonstrated that neither map could be considered as one which the

* See "The Path, of Empire", by Carl Russell Fish (in "The Chronicles of America").

The boundary from the St. Lawrence westward through the Great Lakes and thence to the Lake of the Woods

had been laid down in the Treaty of 1783 in the usual vague terms, but it was determined in a series of

negotiations from 1794 to 1842 with less friction and heat than the eastern line had caused. From the Lake of

the Woods to the Rockies a new line, the fortyninth parallel, was agreed upon in 1818. Then, as the Pacific

Ocean was neared, the difficulties once more increased. There were no treaties between the two countries to

limit claims beyond the Rockies. Discovery and settlement, and the rights inherited from or admitted by the

Spaniards to the south and by the Russians to the north, were the grounds put forward. British and Canadian

fur traders had been the pioneers in overland discovery, but early in the forties thousands of American settlers

poured into the Columbia Valley and strengthened the practical case for their country. "Fiftyfour forty or

fight"in other words, the calm proposal to claim the whole coast between Mexico and Alaskabecame

the popular cry in the United States; but in face of the firm attitude of Great Britain and impending hostilities

with Mexico, more moderate counsels ruled. Great Britain held out for the Columbia River as the dividing

line, and the United States for the fortyninth parallel throughout. Finally, in 1846, the latter contention was

accepted, with a modification to leave Vancouver Island wholly British territory. A postscript to this

settlement was added in 1872, when the German Emperor as arbitrator approved the American claim to the

With the most troublesome boundary questions out of the way, it became possible to discuss calmly closer

trade relations between the Provinces and the United States. The movement for reciprocal lowering of the

tariffs which hampered trade made rapid headway in the Provinces in the late forties and early fifties. British

North America was passing out of the pioneer, selfsufficient stage, and now had a surplus to export as well

as townbred needs to be supplied by imports. The spread of settlement and the building of canals and

railways brought closer contact with the people to the south. The loss of special privileges in the English

market made the United States market more desired. In official circles reciprocity was sought as a

homeopathic cure for the desire for annexation. William Hamilton Merritt, a Niagara border business man

and the most persistent advocate of closer trade relations, met little difficulty in securing almost unanimous

It was more difficult to win over the United States. There the people showed the usual indifference of a big

and prosperous country to the needs or opportunities of a small and backward neighbor. The division of

power between President and Congress made it difficult to carry any negotiation through to success. Yet

these obstacles were overcome. The depletion of the fisheries along the Atlantic coast of the United States

made it worth while, as I.D. Andrews, a United States consul in New Brunswick, urged persistently, to gain

access to the richer grounds to the north and, if necessary, to offer trade concessions in exchange. At

Washington, the South was in the saddle. Its sympathies were strongly for freer trade, but this alone would

not have counted had not the advocates of reciprocity convinced the Democratic leaders of the bearing of

their policy on the then absorbing issue of slavery. If reciprocity were not arranged, the argument ran,

annexation would be sure to come and that would mean the addition to the Union of a group of freesoil States

which would definitely tilt the balance against slavery for all time. With the ground thus prepared, Lord Elgin

succeeded by adroit and capable diplomacy in winning over the leaders of Congress as well as the Executive

to his proposals. The Reciprocity Treaty was passed by the Senate in August, 1854, and by the Legislatures of

the United Kingdom, Canada, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia in the next few

months, and of Newfoundland in 1855. This treaty provided for free admission into each country of

practically all the products of the farm, forest, mine, and fishery, threw open the Atlantic fisheries, and gave

American vessels the use of the St. Lawrence and Canadian vessels the use of Lake Michigan. The agreement

was to last for ten years and indefinitely thereafter, subject to termination on one year's notice by either party.

To both countries reciprocity brought undoubted good. Trade doubled and trebled. Each country gained by

free access to the nearest sources of supply. The same goods figured largely in the traffic in both directions,

the United States importing grain and flour from Canada and exporting it to the Maritime Provinces. In short

the benefits which had come to the United States from free and unfettered trade throughout half a continent

Yet criticism of the new economic regime was not lacking. The growth of protectionist feeling in both

countries after 1857 brought about incidents and created an atmosphere which were dangerous to the

continuance of close trade relations. In 1858 and 1859 the Canadian Government raised substantially the

duties on manufactured goods in order to meet the bills for its lavish railway policy. This increase hit

American manufacturers and led to loud complaints that the spirit of the Reciprocity Treaty had been

violated. Alexander T. Galt, Canadian Minister of Finance, had no difficulty in showing that the tariff

increases were the only feasible sources of revenue, that the agreement with the United States did not cover

manufactures, and that the United States itself, faced by war demands and no longer controlled by free trade

Southerners, had raised duties still higher. The exports of the United States to the Provinces in the reciprocity

period were greater, contrary to the later traditions, than the imports. On economic grounds the case for the

continuance of the reciprocity agreement was strong, and probably the treaty would have remained in force

indefinitely had not the political passions roused by the Civil War made sanity and neighborliness in trade

When the Civil War broke out, the sympathies of Canadians were overwhelmingly on the side of the North.

The railway and freer trade had been bringing the two peoples closer together, and time was healing old

sores. Slavery was held to be the real issue, and on that issue there were scarcely two opinions in the British

Yet in a few months sympathy had given way to angry and suspicious bickering, and the possibility of

invasion of Canada by the Northern forces was vigorously debated. This sudden shift of opinion and the

danger in which it involved the provinces were both incidents in the quarrel which sprang up between the

United States and Great Britain. In Britain as in Canada, opinion, so far as it found open expression, was at

first not unfriendly to the North. Then came the anger of the North at Great Britain's legitimate and necessary,

though perhaps precipitate, action in acknowledging the South as a belligerent. This action ran counter to the

official Northern theory that the revolt of the Southern States was a local riot, of merely domestic concern,

and was held to foreshadow a recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The angry taunts were

soon returned. The ruling classes in Great Britain made the discovery that the war was a struggle between

chivalrous gentlemen and mercenary counterhoppers and cherished the hope that the failure of the North

would discredit, the world over, the democracy which was making uncomfortable claims in England itself.

The English trading classes resented the shortage of cotton and the high duties which the protectionist North

was imposing. With the defeat of the Union forces at Bull Run the prudent hesitancy of aristocrat and

merchant in expressing their views disappeared. The responsible statesmen of both countries, especially

Lincoln and Lord John Russell, refused to be stampeded, but unfortunately the leading newspapers served

them ill. The "Times", with its constant sneers and its still more irritating patronizing advice, and the New

York "Herald", bragging and blustering in the frank hope of forcing a war with Britain and France which

would reunite South and North and subordinate the slavery issue, did more than any other factors to bring the

In Canada the tendency in some quarters to reflect English opinion, the disappointment in others that the

abolition of slavery was not explicitly pledged by the North, and above all resentment against the threats of

the "Herald" and its followers, soon cooled the early friendliness. The leading Canadian newspaper, for many

years a vigorous opponent of slavery, thus summed up the situation in August, 1861:

"The insolent bravado of the Northern press towards Great Britain and the insulting tone assumed toward

these Provinces have unquestionably produced a marked change in the feelings of our people. When the war

commenced, there was only one feeling, of hearty sympathy with the North, but now it is very different.

People have lost sight of the character of the struggle in the exasperation excited by the injustice and abuse

The Trent affair brought matters to a sobering climax.* When it was settled, resentment lingered, but the

tension was never again so acute. Both Great Britain and in Canada the normal sympathy with the cause of

the Union revived as the war went on. In England the classes continued to be proSouthern in sympathy, but

the masses, in spite of cotton famines, held resolutely to their faith in the cause of freedom. After Lincoln's

emancipation of the slaves, the view of the English middle classes more and more became the view of the

nation. In Canada, proSouthern sentiment was strong in the same classes and particularly in Montreal and

Toronto, where there were to be found many Southern refugees, some of whom made a poor return for

hospitality by endeavoring to use Canada as a base for border raids. Yet in the smaller towns and in the

country sympathy was decidedly on the other side, particularly after the "Herald" had ceased its campaign of

bluster and after Lincoln's proclamation had brought the moral issue again to the fore. The fact that a large

number of Canadians, popularly set at forty thousand, enlisted in the Northern armies, is to be explained in

part by the call of adventure and the lure of high bounties, but it must also be taken to reflect the sympathy of

* See "Abraham Lincoln and the Union", by Nathaniel W. Stephenson (in "The Chronicles of America").

In the United States resentment was slower in passing. While the war was on, prudence forbade any overt act.

When it was over, the bill for the Alabama raids and the taunts of the "Times" came in. Great Britain paid in

the settlement of the Alabama claims.* Canada suffered by the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty at the

first possible date, and by the connivance of the American authorities in the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870.

Yet for Canada the outcome was by no means ill. If the Civil War did not bring forth a new nation in the

South, it helped to make one in the far North. A common danger drew the scattered British Provinces

*See "The Day of the Confederacy", by Nathaniel W. Stephenson; and "The Path of Empire" (in "The

It was not from the United States alone that an impetus came for the closer union of the British Provinces.

The same period and the same events ripened opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of some practical

means of altering a colonial relationship which bad ceased to bring profit but which had not ceased to be a

The British Empire had its beginning in the initiative of private business men, not in any conscious policy of

state. Yet as the Empire grew the teaching of doctrinaires and the example of other colonial powers had

developed a definite policy whereby the plantations overseas were to be made to serve the needs of the nation

at home. The end of empire was commercial profit; the means, the political subordination of the colonies; the

debit entry, the cost of the military and naval and diplomatic services borne by the mother country. But the

course of events had now broken down this theory. Britain, for her own good, had abandoned protection, and

with it fell the system of preference and monopoly in colonial markets. Not only preference had gone but

even equality. The colonies, notably Canada, which was most influenced by the United States, were

perversely using their new found freedom to protect their own manufacturers against all outsiders, Britain

included. When Sheffield cutlers, hard hit by Canada's tariff, protested to the Colonial Secretary and he

echoed their remonstrance, the Canadian Minister of Finance, A. T. Galt, stoutly refused to heed.

"Selfgovernment would be utterly annihilated," Galt replied in 1860, "if the views of the Imperial

Government were to be preferred to those of the people of Canada. It is therefore the duty of the present

government distinctly to affirm the right of the Canadian legislature to adjust the taxation of the people in the

way they deem best even if it should unfortunately happen to meet the disapproval of the Imperial

Ministry." Clearly, if trade advantage were the chief purpose of empire, the Empire had lost its reason for

With the credit entry fading, the debit entry loomed up bigger. Hardly had the Corn Laws been abolished

when Radical critics called on the British Government to withdraw the redcoat garrisons from the colonies:

no profit, no defense. Slowly but steadily this reduction was effected. To fill the gaps, the colonies began to

strengthen their militia forces. In Canada only a beginning had been made in the way of defense when the

Trent episode brought matters to a crisis. If war broke out between the United States and Great Britain,

Canada would be the battlefield. Every Canadian knew it; nothing could be clearer. When the danger of

immediate war had passed, the Parliament of Canada turned to the provision of more adequate defense. A bill

providing for a compulsory levy was defeated in 1862, more on personal and party grounds than on its own

merits, and the Ministry next in office took the other course of increasing the volunteer force and of providing

for officers' training. Compared with any earlier arrangements for defense, the new plans marked a great

advance; but when judged in the light of the possible necessity of repelling American invasion, they were

plainly inadequate. A burst of criticism followed from England; press and politicians joined in denouncing

the blind and supine colonials. Did they not know that invasion by the United States was inevitable? "If the

people of the North fail," declared a noble lord, "they will attack Canada as a compensation for their losses; if

they succeed, they will attack Canada in the drunkenness of victory." If such an invasion came, Britain had

neither the power nor the will, the "Times" declared, to protect Canada without any aid on her part; not the

power, for "our empire is too vast, our population too small, our antagonist too powerful"; not the will, for

"we no longer monopolize the trade of the colonies; we no longer job their patronage." To these amazing

attacks Canadians replied that they knew the United States better than Englishmen did. They were prepared to

take their share in defense, but they could not forget that if war came it would not be by any act of Canada. It

was soon noted that those who most loudly denounced Canada for not arming to the teeth were the Southern

sympathizers. "The 'Times' has done more than its share in creating bad feeling between England and the

United States," declared a Toronto newspaper, "and would have liked to see the Canadians take up the quarrel

which it has raised . . . . We have no idea of Canada being made a victim of the Jefferson Bricks on either

The question of defense fell into the background when the war ended and the armies of the Union went back

to their farms and shops. But the discussion left in the minds of most Englishmen the belief that the

possession of such colonies was a doubtful blessing. Manchester men like Bright, Liberals like Gladstone and

Cornewall Lewis, Conservatives like Lowe and Disraeli, all came to believe that separation was only a

question of time. Yet honor made them hesitate to set the defenseless colonies adrift to be seized by the first

At this juncture the plans for uniting all the colonies in one great federation seemed to open a way out; united,

the colonies could stand alone. Thus Confederation found support in Britain as well as a stimulus from the

United States. This, however, was not enough. Confederation would not have come when it didand that

might have meant it would never have come at allhad not party and sectional deadlock forced Canadian

At first all had gone well with the Union of 1841. It did not take the politicians long to learn how to use the

power that responsible government put into their hands. After Elgin's day the Governor General fell back into

the role of constitutional monarch which cabinet control made easy for him. In the forties, men had spoken of

Sydenham and Bagot, Metcalfe and Elgin; in the fifties, they spoke of Baldwin and La Fontaine, Hincks and

Macdonald and Cartier and Brown, and less and less of the Governors in whose name these men ruled.

Politics then attracted more of the country's ablest men than it does now, and the party leaders included many

who would have made their mark in any parliament in the world. Baldwin and La Fontaine, united to the end,

resigned office in 1851, believing that they had played their part in establishing responsible government and

feeling out of touch with the radical elements of their following who were demanding further change. Their

place was taken in Canada West by Hincks, an adroit tactician and a skilled financier, intent on railway

building and trade development; and in Canada East by Morin, a somewhat colorless lieutenant of La

But these leaders in turn soon gave way to new men; and the political parties gradually fell into a state of

flux. In Canada West there were still a few Tories, survivors of the Family Compact and lastditch defenders

of privilege in Church and State, a growing number of moderate Conservatives, a larger group of moderate

Liberals, and a small but aggressive extreme left wing of "Clear Grits," mainly Scotch Presbyterians, foes of

any claim to undue power on the part of class or clergy. In Canada East the English members from the

Townships, under A. T. Galt, were ceasing to vote as a unit, and the main body of FrenchCanadian

members were breaking up into a moderate Liberal party, and a smaller group of Rouges, fiery young men

under the leadership of Papineau, now returned from exile, were crusading against clerical pretensions and all

The situation was one made to the hand of a master tactician. The time brought forth the man. John A.

Macdonald, a young Kingston lawyer of Tory upbringing, or "John A.", as generation after generation

affectionately called him, was to prove the greatest leader of men in Canada's annals. Shrewd, tactful, and

genial, never forgetting a face or a favor, as popular for his human frailties as for his strength, Macdonald

saw that the old party lines drawn in the days of the struggle for responsible government were breaking down

and that the future lay with a union of the moderate elements in both parties and both sections. He succeeded

in 1854 in bringing together in Canada West a strong LiberalConservative group and in effecting a

permanent alliance with the main body of FrenchCanadian Liberals, now under the leadership of Cartier, a

vigorous fighter and an easygoing opportunist. With the addition of Galt as the financial expert, these allies

held power throughout the greater part of the next dozen years. Their position was not unchallenged. The

Clear Grits had found a leader after their own heart in George Brown, a Scotchman of great ability, a hard

hitter and a good hater especially of slavery, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and "John A." Through his

newspaper, the Toronto "Globe", he wielded a power unique in Canadian journalism. The Rouges, now led

by A. A. Dorion, a man of stainless honor and essentially moderate temper, withdrew from. their extreme

anticlerical position but could not live down their youth or make head against the forces of conservatism in

their province. They did not command many votes in the House, but every man of them was an orator, and

Step by step, under Liberal and under Liberal Conservative Governments, the programme of Canadian

Liberalism was carried into effect. Selfgovernment, at least in domestic affairs, had been attained. An

effective system of municipal government and a good beginning in popular education followed. The last link

between Church and State was severed in 1854 when the Clergy Reserves were turned over to the

municipalities for secular purposes, with life annuities for clergymen who had been receiving stipends from

the Reserves. In Lower Canada the remnants of the old feudal system, the rights of the seigneurs, were

abolished in the same year with full compensation from the state. An elective upper Chamber took the place

of the appointed Legislative Council a year later. The Reformers, as the Clear Grits preferred to call

themselves officially, should perhaps have been content with so much progress. They insisted, however, that

a new and more intolerable privilege had arisenthe privilege which Canada East held of equal

representation in the Legislative Assembly long after its population had fallen behind that of Canada West.

The political union of the two Canadas in fact had never been complete. Throughout the Union period there

were two leaders in each Cabinet, two Attorney Generals, and two distinct judicial systems. Every session

laws were passed applying to one section alone. This continued separation had its beginning in a clause of the

Union Act itself, which provided that each section should have equal representation in the Assembly, even

though Lower Canada then had a much larger population than Upper Canada. When the tide of overseas

immigration put Canada West well in the lead, it in its turn was denied the full representation its greater

population warranted. First the Conservatives, and later the Clear Grits, took up the cry of "Representation by

Population." It was not difficult to convince the average Canada West elector that it was an outrage that three

FrenchCanadian voters should count as much as four Englishspeaking voters. Macdonald, relying for

power on his alliance with Cartier, could not accept the demand, and saw seat after seat in Canada West fall

to Brown and his "Rep. by Pop." crusaders. Brown's success only solidified Canada East against him, until, in

the early sixties, party lines coincided almost with sectional lines. Parties were so closely matched that the

life of a Ministry was short. In the three years ending in 1864 there were two general elections and four

Ministries. Political controversy became bitterly personal, and corruption was spreading fast.

Constant efforts were made to avert the threatened deadlock. Macdonald, who always trusted more to

personal management than to constitutional expedients, won over one after another of the opponents who

troubled him, and thus postponed the day of reckoning. Rival plans of constitutional reform were brought

forward. The simplest remedy was the repeal of the union, leaving each province to go its own way. But this

solution was felt to be a backward step and one which would create more problems than it would solve. More

support was given the double majority principle, a provision that no measure affecting one section should be

passed unless a majority from that section favored it, but this method broke down when put to a practical test.

The Rouges, and later Brown, put forward a plan for the abolition of legislative union in favor of a federal

union of the two Canadas. This lacked the wide vision of the fourth suggestion, which was destined to be

Federal union, it was urged, would solve party and sectional deadlock by removing to local legislatures the

questions which created the greatest divergence of opinion. The federal union of the Canadas alone or the

federal union of all British North America would either achieve this end. But there were other ends in view

which only the wider plan could serve. The needs of defense demanded a single control for all the colonies.

The probable loss of the open market of the United States made it imperative to unite all the provinces in a

single free trade area. The first faint stirrings of national ambition, prompting the younger men to throw off

the leading strings of colonial dependence, were stimulated by the vision of a country which would stretch

from sea to sea. The westward growth of the United States and the reports of travelers were opening men's

eyes to the possibilities of the vast lands under the control of the Hudson's Bay Company and the need of

asserting authority over these northern regions if they were to be held for the Crown. Eastward, also, men

were awaking to their isolation. There was not, in the Maritime Provinces, any popular desire for union with

the Canadas or any political crisis compelling drastic remedy, but the need of union for defense was felt in

some quarters, and ambitious politicians who had mastered their local fields were beginning to sigh for larger

It took the patient and courageous striving of many men to make this vision of a united country a reality. The

roll of the Fathers of Confederation is a long and honored one. Yet on that roll there are some outstanding

names, the names of men whose services were not merely devoted but indispensable. The first to bring the

question within the field of practical politics was A. T. Galt, but when attempt after attempt in 1864 to

organize a Ministry with a safe working majority had failed, it was George Brown who proposed that the

party leaders should join hands in devising some form of federation. Macdonald had hitherto been a stout

opponent of all change but, once converted, he threw himself into the struggle, with energy. He never

appeared to better advantage than in the negotiations of the next few years, steering the ship of Confederation

through the perilous shoals of personal and sectional jealousies. Few had a harder or a more important task

than Cartier'sreconciling Canada East to a project under which it would be swamped, in the proposed

federal House, by the representatives of four or five Englishspeaking provinces. McDougall, a Canada West

Reformer, shared with Brown the credit for awakening Canadians to the value of the Far West and to the

need of including it in their plans of expansion. D'Arcy McGee, more than any other, fired the imagination of

the people with glowing pictures of the greatness and the limitless possibilities of the new nation. Charles

Tupper, the head of a Nova Scotia Conservative Ministry which had overthrown the old tribune, Joseph

Howe, had the hardest and seemingly most hopeless task of all; for his province appeared to be content with

its separate existence and was inflamed against union by Howe's eloquent opposition; but to Tupper a hard

fight was as the breath of his nostrils. In New Brunswick, Leonard Tilley, a man of less vigor but equal

It was in June, 1864, that the leaders of the Parliament of Canada became convinced that federation was the

only way out. A coalition Cabinet was formed, with Sir Etienne Tache as nominal Premier, and with

Macdonald, Brown, Cartier, and Galt all included. An opening for discussing the wider federation was

offered by a meeting which was to be held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, of delegates from the

three Maritime Provinces to consider the formation of a local union. There, in September, 1864, went eight of

the Canadian Ministers. Their proposals met with favor. A series of banquets brought the plans before the

public, seemingly with good results. The conference was resumed a month later at Quebec. Here, in sixteen

working days, delegates from Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and also from

Newfoundland, thirtythree in all, after frank and full deliberation behind closed doors, agreed upon the

terms of union. Macdonald's insistence upon a legislative union, wiping out all provincial boundaries, was

overridden; but the lesson of the conflict between the federal and state jurisdiction in the United States was

seen in provisions to strengthen the central authority. The general government was empowered to appoint the

lieutenant governors of the various provinces and to veto any provincial law; to it were assigned all

legislative powers not specifically granted to the provinces; and a subsidy granted by the general government

in lieu of the customs revenues resigned by the provinces still further increased their dependence upon the

It had taken less than three weeks to draw up the plan of union. It took nearly three years to secure its

adoption. So far as Canada was concerned, little trouble was encountered. British traditions of parliamentary

supremacy prevented any direct submission of the question to the people; but their support was clearly

manifested in the press and on the platform, and the legislature ratified the project with emphatic majorities

from both sections of the province. Though it did not pass without opposition, particularly from the Rouges

under Dorion and from steadfast supporters of old ways like Christopher Dunkin and Sandfield Macdonald,

the fight was only halfhearted. Not so, however, in the provinces by the sea. The delegates who returned from

the Quebec Conference were astounded to meet a storm of criticism. Local pride and local prejudice were

aroused. The thrifty maritime population feared Canadian extravagance and Canadian high tariffs. They were

content to remain as they were and fearful of the unknown. Here and there advocates of annexation to the

United States swelled the chorus. Merchants in Halifax and St. John feared that trade would be drawn away

to Montreal. Above all, Howe, whether because of personal pique or of intense local patriotism, had put

himself at the head of the agitation against union, and his eloquence could still play upon the prejudices of the

people. The Tilley Government in New Brunswick was swept out of power early in 1865. Prince Edward

Island and Newfoundland both drew back, the one for eight years, the other to remain outside the fold to the

present day. In Nova Scotia a similar fate was averted only by Tupper's Fabian tactics. Then the tide turned.

In New Brunswick the Fenian Raids, pressure from the Colonial Office, and the blunders of the

antiConfederate Government brought Tilley back to power on a Confederation platform a year later. Tupper

seized the occasion and carried his motion through the Nova Scotia House. Without seeking further warrant

the delegates from Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick met in London late in 1866, and there in

consultation with the Colonial Office drew up the final resolutions. They were embodied in the British North

America Act which went through the Imperial Parliament not only without raising questions but even without

exciting interest. On July 1, 1867, the Dominion of Canada, as the new federation was to be known, came

into being. It is a curious coincidence that the same date witnessed the establishment of the North German

The federation of the four provinces was an excellent achievement, but it was only a beginning on the long,

hard road to nationhood. The Fathers of Confederation had set their goal and had proclaimed their faith. It

remained for the next generation to seek to make their vision a reality. It was still necessary to make the

Dominion actual by bringing in all the lands from sea to sea. And when, on paper, Canada covered half a

continent, union had yet to be given body and substance by railway building and continuous settlement. The

task of welding two races and many scattered provinces into a single people would call for all the

statesmanship and prudence the country had to give. To chart the relations between the federal and the

provincial authorities, which had so nearly brought to shipwreck the federal experiment of Canada's great

neighbor, was like navigating an unknown sea. And what was to be the attitude of the new Dominion, half

nation, half colony, to the mother country and to the republic to the south, no one could yet foretell.

The first problem which faced the Dominion was the organization of the new machinery of government. It

was necessary to choose a federal Administration to guide the Parliament which was soon to meet at Ottawa,

the capital of the old Canada since 1858 and now accepted as the capital of the larger Canada. It was

necessary also to establish provincial Governments in Canada West, henceforth known as Ontario and in

Canada East, or Quebec. The provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were to retain their existing

There was no doubt as to whom the Governor General, Lord Monck, should call to form the first federal

Administration. Macdonald had proved himself easily the greatest leader of men the four provinces had

produced. The entrance of two new provinces into the union, with all the possibilities of new party groupings

and new personal alliances it involved, created a situation in which he had no rival. His great antagonist,

Brown, passed off the parliamentary stage. When he proposed a coalition to carry through federation, Brown

had recognized that he was sacrificing his chief political asset, the discontent of Canada West. But he was too

true a patriot to hesitate a moment on that score, and in any case he was sufficiently confident of his own

abilities to believe that he could hold his own in a fresh field. In this expectation he was deceived. No man

among his contemporaries surpassed him in sheer ability, in fearless honesty, in vigor of debate, but he

lacked Macdonald's genial and supple art of managing men. And with broad questions of state policy for the

moment out of the way, it was capacity in managing men that was to count in determining success. Never

afterward did Brown take an active part in parliamentary life, though still a power in the land through his

newspaper, the Toronto "Globe", which was regarded as the Scotch Presbyterian's second Bible. Of the other

leaders of old Canada, Cartier with failing health was losing his vigor and losing also the prestige with his

party which his solid Canada East majority had given him; Galt soon retired to private business, with

occasional incursions into diplomacy; and McGee fell a victim in 1868 to a Fenian assassin. From the

Maritime Provinces the ablest recruit was Tupper, the most dogged fighter in Canadian parliamentary annals

It was at first uncertain what the grouping of parties would be. Macdonald naturally wished to retain the

coalition which assured him unquestioned mastery, and the popular desire to give Confederation a good start

also favored such a course. In his first Cabinet, formed with infinite difficulty, with provinces, parties,

religions, races, all to consider in filling a limited number of posts, Macdonald included six Liberal ministers

out of thirteen, three from Ontario, and three from the Maritime Provinces. Yet if an Opposition had not

existed, it would have been necessary to create one in order to work the parliamentary machine. The attempt

to keep the coalition together did not long succeed. On the eve of the first federal election the Ontario

Reformers in convention decided to oppose the Government, even though it contained three of their former

leaders. In the contest, held in August and September, 1867, Macdonald triumphed in every province except

Nova Scotia but faced a growing Opposition party. Under the virtual leadership of Alexander Mackenzie,

fragments of parties from the four provinces were united into a single Liberal group. In a few years the

majority of the Liberal rank and file were back in the fold, and the Liberal members in the Cabinet had

Within six years after Confederation the whole northern half of the continent had been absorbed by Canada.

The four original provinces comprised only onetenth of the area of the present Dominion, some 377,000

square miles as against 3,730,000 today. The most easterly of the provinces, little Prince Edward Island, had

drawn back in 1865, content in isolation. Eight years later this province entered the fold. Hard times and a

glimpse of the financial strength of the new federation had wrought a change of heart. The solution of the

centuryold problem of the island, absentee landlordism, threatened to strain the finances of the province;

and men began to look to Ottawa for relief. A railway crisis turned their thoughts in the same direction. The

provincial authorities had recently arranged for the building of a narrowgauge road from one end of the

island to the other. It was agreed that the contractors should be paid 5000 pounds a mile in provincial

debentures, but without any stipulation as to the total length, so that the builders caused the railway to

meander and zigzag freely in search of lower grades or long paying stretches. In 1873, which was everywhere

a year of black depression, it was found that these debentures, which were pledged by the contractors to a

local bank for advances, could not be sold except at a heavy loss. The directors of the bank were influential in

the Government of the province. It was not surprising, therefore, that the government soon opened

negotiations with Ottawa. The Dominion authorities offered generous terms, financing the land purchase

scheme, and taking over the railway. Some of the islanders made bitter charges, but the Legislature confirmed

While Prince Edward Island was deciding to come in, Nova Scotia was straining every nerve to get out.

There was no question that Nova Scotia had been brought into the union against its will. The provincial

Legislature in 1866, it is true, backed Tupper. But the people backed Howe, who thereupon went to London

to protest against the inclusion of Nova Scotia without consulting the electors, but he was not heeded. The

passing of the Act only redoubled the agitation. In the provincial election of 1867, the antiConfederates

carried thirtysix out of thirtyeight seats. In the federal election Tupper was the only union candidate

returned in nineteen seats contested. A second delegation was sent to London to demand repeal. Tupper

crossed the ocean to counter this effort and was successful. Then he sought out Howe, urged that further

agitation was useless and could only bring anarchy or, what both counted worse, a movement for annexation

to the United States, and pressed him to use his influence to allay the storm. Howe gave way; unfortunately

for his own fame, he went further and accepted a seat in the federal Cabinet. Many of his old followers kept

up the fight, but others decided to make a bargain with necessity. Macdonald agreed to give the province

"better terms," and the Dominion assumed a larger part of its debt. The bitterness aroused by Tupper's

highhanded procedure lingered for many a day; but before the first Parliament was over, repeal had ceased

Union could never be real so long as leagues of barren, unbroken wilderness separated the maritime from the

central provinces. Free intercourse, ties of trade, knowledge which would sweep away prejudice, could not

come until a railway had spanned this wilderness. In the fifties plans had been made for a main trunk line to

run from Halifax to the Detroit River. This ambitious scheme proved too great for the resources of the

separate provinces, but sections of the road were built in each province. As a condition of Confederation, the

Dominion Government undertook to fill in the long gaps. Surveys were begun immediately; and by 1876,

under the direction of Sandford Fleming, an engineer of eminence, the Intercolonial Railway was completed.

It never succeeded in making ends meet financially, but it did make ends meet politically. In great measure it

achieved the purpose of national solidification for which it was mainly designed.

Meanwhile the bounds of the Dominion were being pushed westward to the Pacific. The old province of

Canada, as the heir of New France, had vague claims to the western plains, but the Hudson's Bay Company

was in possession. The Dominion decided to buy out its rights and agreed, in 1869, to pay the Company

300,000 pounds for the transfer of its lands and exclusive privileges, the Company to retain its trading posts

and two sections in every township. So far all went well. But the Canadian Government, new to the tasks of

empire and not as efficient in administration as it should have been, overlooked the necessity of consulting

the wishes and the prejudices of the men on the spot. It was not merely land and buffalo herds which were

In the valley of the Red River there were some twelve thousand metis, or halfbreeds, descendants of Indian

mothers and French or Scottish fathers. The Dominion authorities intended to give them a large share in their

own government but neglected to arrange for a formal conference. The metis were left to gather their

impression of the character and intentions of the new rulers from indiscreet and sometimes overbearing

surveyors and land seekers. In 1869, under the leadership of Louis Riel, the one man of education in the

settlement, able but vain and unbalanced, and with the Hudson's Bay officials looking on unconcerned, the

metis decided to oppose being made "the colony of a colony." The Governor sent out from Ottawa was

refused entrance, and a provisional Government under Riel assumed control. The Ottawa authorities first

tried persuasion and sent a commission of three, Donald A. Smith (afterwards Lord Strathcona), Colonel de

Salaberry, and Vicar General Thibault. Smith was gradually restoring unity and order, when the act of Riel in

shooting Thomas Scott, an Ontario settler and a member of the powerful Orange order, set passions flaring.

Mgr. Tache, the Catholic bishop of the diocese, on his return aided in quieting the metis. Delegates were sent

by the Provisional Government to Ottawa, and, though not officially recognized, they influenced the terms of

settlement. An expedition under Colonel Wolseley marched through the wilderness north of Lake Superior

only to find that Riel and his lieutenants had fled. By the Manitoba Act the Red River country was admitted

to Confederation as a selfgoverning province, under the name of Manitoba, while the country west to the

Rockies was given territorial status. The Indian tribes were handled with tact and justice, but though for the

time the danger of armed resistance had passed, the embers of discontent were not wholly quenched.

The extension of Canadian sovereignty beyond the Rockies came about in quieter fashion. After Mackenzie

had shown the way, Simon Fraser and David Thompson and other agents of the NorthWest Company took up

the work of exploration and fur trading. With the union of the two rival companies in 1821, the Hudson's Bay

Company became the sole authority on the Pacific coast. Settlers straggled in slowly until, in the late fifties,

the discovery of rich placer gold on the Fraser and later in the Cariboo brought tens of thousands of miners

from Australia and California, only to drift away again almost as quickly when the sands began to fail.

Local governments had been established both in Vancouver Island and on the mainland. They were joined in

a single province in 1866. One of the first acts of the new Legislature was to seek consolidation with the

Dominion. Inspired by an enthusiastic Englishman, Alfred Waddington, who had dreamed for years of a

transcontinental railway, the province stipulated that within ten years Canada should complete a road from

the Pacific to a junction with the railways of the East. These terms were considered presumptuous on the part

of a little settlement of ten or fifteen thousand whites; but Macdonald had faith in the resources of Canada

and in what the morrow would bring forth. The bargain was made; and British Columbia entered the

East and West were now staked out. Only the Far North remained outside the bounds of the Dominion and

this was soon acquired. In 1879 the British Government transferred to Canada all its rights and claims over

the islands in the Arctic Archipelago and all other British territory in North America save Newfoundland and

its strip of Labrador. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the fortyninth parallel to the North Pole,

Confederation brought new powers and new responsibilities and thrust Canada into the field of foreign

affairs. It was with slow and groping steps that the Dominion advanced along this new path. Thenas

nowfor Canada foreign relations meant first and foremost relations with her great neighbor to the south.

The likelihood of war had passed. The need for closer trade relations remained. When the Reciprocity Treaty

was brought to an end, on March 17, 1866, Canada at first refrained from raising her tariff walls. "The

provinces," as George Brown declared in 1874, "assumed that there were matters existing in 186566 to

trouble the spirit of American statesmen for the moment, and they waited patiently for the sober second

thought which was very long in coming, but in the meantime Canada played a good neighbor's part, and

incidentally served her own ends, by continuing to grant the United States most of the privileges which had

been given under the treaty free navigation and free goods, and, subject to a license fee, access to the

It was over these fisheries that friction first developed.* Canadian statesmen were determined to prevent

poaching on the inshore fisheries, both because poaching was poaching and because they considered the

fishery privileges the best makeweight in trade negotiations with the United States. At first American vessels

were admitted on payment of a license fee; but when, on the increase of the fee, many vessels tried to fish

inshore without permission, the license system was abolished, and in 1870 a fleet of revenue cruisers began to

police the coast waters. American fishermen chafed at exclusion from waters they had come to consider

almost their own, and there were many cases of seizure and of angry charge and countercharge. President

Grant, in his message to Congress in 1870, denounced the policy of the Canadian authorities as arbitrary and

provocative. Other issues between the two countries were outstanding as well. Canada had a claim against the

United States for not preventing the Fenian Raids of 1866; and the United States had a much bigger bill

against Great Britain for neglect in permitting the escape of the Alabama. Some settlement of these disputed

matters was necessary; and it was largely through the activities of a Canadian banker and politician, Sir John

Rose, that an agreement was reached to submit all the issues to a joint commission.

Macdonald was offered and accepted with misgivings a post as one of the five British Commissioners. He

pressed the traditional Canadian policy of offering fishery for trade privileges but found no backing in this or

other matters from his British colleagues, and he met only unyielding opposition from the American

Commissioners. He fell back, under protest, on a settlement of narrower scope, which permitted reciprocity in

navigation and bonding privileges, free admission of Canadian and Newfoundland fish to United States

markets and of American fishermen to Canadian and Newfoundland waters, and which provided for a

subsidiary commission to fix the amount to be paid by the United States for the surplus advantage thus

received. The Fenian Raids claims were not even considered, and Macdonald was angered by this

indifference on the part of his British colleagues. "They seem to have only one thing in their minds, " he

reported privately to Ottawa, "that is, to go home to England with a treaty in their pocket, settling everything,

no matter at what cost to Canada." Yet when the time came for the Canadian Parliament to decide whether to

ratify the fishery clauses of the Treaty of Washington in which the conclusions of the commission were

embodied, Macdonald, in spite of the unpopularity of the bargain in Canada, "urged Parliament" to accept the

treaty, accept it with all its imperfections, to accept it for the sake of peace and for the sake of the great

Empire of which we form a part." The treaty was ratified in 1871 by all the powers concerned; and the

stimulus to the peaceful settlement of international disputes given by the Geneva Tribunal which followed*

A change in party now followed in Canada, but the new Government under Alexander Mackenzie "was as

fully committed as the Government of Sir John Macdonald to the policy of bartering fishery for trade

advantage. Canada therefore proposed that instead of carrying out the provisions for a money settlement, the

whole question should be reopened. The Administration at Washington was sympathetic. George Brown was

appointed along with the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Thornton, to open negotiations. Under Brown's

energetic leadership a settlement of all outstanding issues was drafted in 1874, which permitted freedom of

trade in natural and in most manufactured products for twentyone years, and settled fishery, coasting trade,

navigation, and minor boundary issues. But diplomats proposed, and the United States Senate disposed.

Protectionist feeling was strong at Washington, and the currency problem absorbing, and hence this broad

and statesmanlike essay in neighborliness could not secure an hour's attention. This plan having failed, the

Canadian Government fell back on the letter of the treaty. A Commission which consisted of the Honorable

E. H. Kellogg representing the United States, Sir Alexander T. Galt representing Canada, and the Belgian

Minister to Washington, M. Delfosse, as chairman, awarded Canada and Newfoundland $5,500,000 as the

excess value of the fisheries for the ten years the arrangement was to run. The award was denounced in the

United States as absurdly excessive; but a sense of honor and the knowledge that millions of dollars from the

Alabama award were still in the Treasury moved the Senate finally to acquiesce, though only for the tenyear

term fixed by treaty. In Canada the award was received with delight as a signal proof that when left to

themselves Canadians could hold their own. The prevailing view was well summed up in a letter from

Mackenzie to the Canadian representative on the Halifax commission, written shortly before the decision: "I

am glad you still have hopes of a fair verdict. I am doubly anxious to have it, first, because we are entitled to

it and need the dollars, and, second, because it will be the first Canadian diplomatic triumph, and will justify

me in insisting that we know our neighbors and our own business better than any Englishmen."

Mackenzie's insistence that Canada must take a larger share in the control of her foreign affairs was too

advanced a stand for many of his more conservative countrymen. For others, he did not go far enough. The

early seventies saw the rise of a shortlived movement in favor of Canadian independence. To many

independence from England seemed the logical sequel to Confederation; and the rapid expansion of Canadian

territory over half a continent stimulated national pride and national selfconsciousness Opinion in England

regarding Canadian independence was still more outspoken. There imperialism was at its lowest ebb. With

scarcely an exception, English politicians, from Bright to Disraeli, were hostile or indifferent to connection

with the colonies, which had now ceased to be a trade asset and had clearly become a military liability.

But no concrete problem arose to make the matter a political issue. In England a growing uneasiness over the

protectionist policies and the colonial ambitions of her European rivals were soon to revive imperial

sentiment. In Canada the ties of affection for the old land, as well as the inertia fostered by long years of

colonial dependence, kept the independence movement from spreading far. For the time the rising national

spirit found expression in economic rather than political channels. The protectionist movement which a few

years later swept all Canada before it owed much of its strength to its claim to be the national policy.

But it was not imperial or foreign relations that dominated public interest in the seventies. Domestic politics

were intensely absorbing and bitterly contested. Within five years there came about two sudden and sweeping

reversals of power. Parties and Cabinets which had seemed firmly entrenched were dramatically overthrown

by sudden changes in the personal factors and in the issues of the day. In the summer of 1872 the second

general election for the Dominion was held. The Opposition had now gained in strength. The Government

had ceased to be in any real sense a coalition, and most of the old Liberal rank and file were back in the party

Mackenzie had come to Canada from Scotland in 1842 as a lad of twenty. He worked at his trade as a

stonemason, educated himself by wide reading and constant debating, became a successful contractor and,

after Confederation, had proved himself one of the most aggressive and uncompromising champions of

Upper Canada Liberalism. In the first Dominion Parliament he tacitly came to be regarded as the leader of all

the groups opposed to the Macdonald Administration. He was at the same time active in the Ontario

Legislature since, for the first five years of Confederation, no law forbade membership in both federal and

provincial Parliaments, and the short sessions of that blessed time made such double service feasible. Here he

was aided by two other men of outstanding ability, Edward Blake and Oliver Mowat. Blake, the son of a

welltodo Irishman who had been active in the fight for responsible government, became Premier of

Ontario in 1871 but retired in 1872 when a law abolishing dual representation made it necessary for him to

choose between Toronto and Ottawa. His place was taken by Mowat, who for a quarter of a century gave the

In spite of the growing forces opposed to him Macdonald triumphed once more in the election of 1872.

Ontario fell away, but Quebec and the Maritime Provinces stood true. A Conservative majority of thirty or

forty seemed to assure Macdonald another fiveyear lease of power. Yet within a year the Pacific Scandal

The Pacific Scandal occurred in connection with the financing of the railway which the Dominion

Government had promised British Columbia, when that province entered Confederation in 1871, would be

built through to the Pacific coast within ten years. The bargain was good politics but poor business. It was a

rash undertaking for a people of three and a half millions, with a national revenue of less than twenty million

dollars, to pledge itself to build a railway through the rocky wilderness north of Lake Superior, through the

trackless plains and prairies of the middle west, and across the mountain ranges that barred the coast. Yet

Macdonald had sufficient faith in the country, in himself, and in the happy accidents of timea confidence

that won him the nickname of "Old Tomorrow"to give the pledge. Then came the question of ways and

means. At first the Government planned to build the road. On second thoughts, however, it decided to follow

the example set by the United States in the construction of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, and to

entrust the work to a private company liberally subsidized with land and cash. Two companies were

organized with a view to securing the contract, one a Montreal company under Sir Hugh Allan, the foremost

Canadian man of business and the head of the Allan steamship fleet, and the other a Toronto company under

D. L. Macpherson, who had been concerned in the building of the Grand Trunk. Their rivalry was intense.

After the election of 1872 a strong compromise company was formed, with Allan at the head, and to this

When Parliament met in 1872, a Liberal member, L. S. Huntington, made the charge that Allan had really

been acting on behalf of certain American capitalists and that he had made lavish contributions to the

Government campaign fund in the recent election. In the course of the summer these charges were fully

substantiated. Allan was proved by his own correspondence, stolen from his solicitor's office, to have spent

over $350,000, largely advanced by his American allies, in buying the favor of newspapers and politicians.

Nearly half of this amount had been contributed to the Conservative campaign fund, with the knowledge and

at the instance of Cartier and Macdonald. Macdonald, while unable to disprove the charges, urged that there

was no connection between the contributions and the granting of the charter. But his defense was not heeded.

A wave of indignation swept the country; his own supporters in Parliament fell away; and in November,

1873, he resigned. Mackenzie, who was summoned to form a new Ministry, dissolved Parliament and was

Mackenzie gave the country honest and efficient administration. Among his most important achievements

were the reform of elections by the introduction of the secret ballot and the requirement that elections should

be held on a single day instead of being spread over weeks, a measure of local option in controlling the liquor

traffic, and the establishment of a Canadian Supreme Court and the Royal Military Collegethe Canadian

West Point. But fate and his own limitations were against him. He was too absorbed in the details of

administration to have time for the work of a party leader. In his policy of constructing the Canadian Pacific

as a government road, after Allan had resigned his charter, he manifested a caution and a slowness that

brought British Columbia to the verge of secession. But it was chiefly the worldwide depression that began

in his first year of office, 1873, which proved his undoing. Trade was stagnant, bankruptcies multiplied, and

acute suffering occurred among the poor in the larger cities. Mackenzie had no solution to offer except

patience and economy; and the Opposition were freer to frame an enticing policy. The country was turning

toward a high tariff as the solution of its ills. Protection had not hitherto been a party issue in Canada, and it

was still uncertain which party would take it up. Finally Mackenzie, who was an ardent free trader, and the

Nova Scotia wing of his party triumphed over the protectionists in their own ranks and made a low tariff the

party platform. Macdonald, who had been prepared to take up free trade if Mackenzie adopted protection,

now boldly urged the high tariff panacea. The promise of work and wages for all, the appeal to national spirit

made by the arguments of selfsufficiency and fully rounded development, the desire to retaliate against the

United States, which was still deaf to any plea for more liberal trade relations, swept the country. The

Conservative minority of over sixty was converted into a still greater majority in the general election of 1878,

and the leader whom all men five years before had considered doomed, returned to power, never to lose it

The first task of the new Government, in which Tupper was Macdonald's chief supporter, was to carry out its

high tariff pledges. "Tell us how much protection you want, gentlemen," said Macdonald to a group of

Ontario manufacturers, "and we'll give you what you need." In the new tariff needs were rated almost as high

as wants. Particularly on textiles, sugar, and iron and steel products, duties were raised far beyond the old

levels and stimulated investment just as the worldwide depression which had lasted since 1873 passed away.

Canada shared in the recovery and gave the credit to the welladvertised political patent medicine taken just

before the turn for the better came. For years the National Policy or "N.P.," as its supporters termed it, had all

The next task of the Government was to carry through in earnest the building of the railway to the Pacific.

For over a year Macdonald persisted in Mackenzie's policy of government construction but with the same

slow and unsatisfactory results. Then an opportunity came to enlist the services of a private syndicate. Four

Canadians, Donald A. Smith, a former Hudson's Bay Company factor, George Stephen, a leading merchant

and banker of Montreal, James J. Hill and Norman W. Kittson, owners of a small line of boats on the Red

River, had joined forces to revive a bankrupt Minnesota railway.* They had succeeded beyond all parallel,

and the reconstructed road, which later developed into the Great Northern, made them all rich overnight. This

success whetted their appetite for further western railway building and further millions of rich western acres

in subsidies. They met Macdonald and Tupper half way. By the bargain completed in 1881 the Canadian

Pacific Railway Company undertook to build and operate the road from the Ottawa Valley to the Pacific

coast, in return for the gift of the completed portions of the road (on which the Government spent over

$37,000,000), a subsidy of $25,000,000 in cash, 25,000,000 selected acres of prairie land, exemption from

taxes, exemption from regulation of rates until ten per cent was earned, and a promise on the part of the

Dominion to charter no western lines connecting with the United States for twenty years. The terms were

lavish and were fiercely denounced by the Opposition, now under the leadership of Edward Blake. But the

people were too eager for railway expansion to criticize the terms. The Government was returned to power in

The new company was rich in potential resources but weak in available cash. Neither in New York nor in

London could purse strings be loosened for the purpose of building a road through what the world considered

a barren and Arctic wilderness. But in the faith and vision of the president, George Stephen, and the ruthless

energy of the general manager, William Van Horne, American born and trained, the Canadian Pacific had

priceless assets. Aided in critical times by further government loans, they carried the project through, and by

1886, five years before the time fixed by their contract, trains were running from Montreal to Port Moody,

A sudden burst of prosperity followed the building of the road. Settlers poured into the West by tens of

thousands, eastern investors promoted colonization companies, land values soared, and speculation gave a

fillip to every line of trade. The middle eighties were years of achievement, of prosperity, and of confident

hope. Then prosperity fled as quickly as it had come. The West failed to hold its settlers. Farm and factory

found neither markets nor profits. The country was bled white by emigration. Parliamentary contest and racial

feud threatened the hardwon unity. Canada was passing through its darkest hours.

During this period, political friction was incessant. Canada was striving to solve in the eighties the difficult

question which besets all federationsthe limits between federal and provincial power. Ontario was the

chief champion of provincial rights. The struggle was intensified by the fact that a Liberal Government

reigned at Toronto and a Conservative Government at Ottawa, as well as by the keen personal rivalry

between Mowat and Macdonald. In nearly every constitutional duel Mowat triumphed. The accepted range of

the legislative power of the provinces was widened by the decisions of the courts, particularly of the highest

court of appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England. The successful resistance of Ontario

and Manitoba to Macdonald's attempt to disallow provincial laws proved this power, though conferred by the

Constitution, to be an unwieldy weapon. By the middle nineties the veto had been virtually abandoned.

More serious than these political differences was the racial feud that followed the second Riel Rebellion. For

a second time the Canadian Government failed to show the foresight and the sympathy required in dealing

with an isolated and backward people. The valley of the Saskatchewan, far northwest of the Red River, was

the scene of the new difficulty. Here thousands of metis, or French halfbreeds, had settled. The passing of

the buffalo, which had been their chief subsistence, and the arrival of settlers from the East caused them

intense alarm. They pressed the Government for certain grants of land and for the retention of the old French

custom of surveying the land along the river front in deep narrow strips, rather than according to the

chessboard pattern taken over by Canada from the United States. Red tape, indifference, procrastination,

rather than any illwill, delayed the redress of the grievances of the halfbreeds. In despair they called Louis

Riel back from his exile in Montana. With his arrival the agitation acquired a new and dangerous force.

Claiming to be the prophet of a new religion, he put himself at the head of his people and, in the spring of

1885, raised the flag of revolt. His military adviser, Gabriel Dumont, an old buffalo hunter, was a

naturalborn general, and the halfbreeds were good shots and brave fighters. An expedition of Canadian

volunteers was rushed west, and the rebellion was put down quickly, but not without some hard fighting and

The racial passions roused by this conflict, however, did not pass so quickly. The fate to be meted out to Riel

was the burning question. Ontario saw in him the murderer of Scott and an ambitious plotter who had twice

stirred up armed rebellion. Quebec saw in him a man of French blood, persecuted because he had stood up

manfully for the undoubted rights of his kinsmen. Today experts agree that Riel was insane and should have

been spared the gallows on this if on no other account. But at the moment the plea of insanity was rejected.

The Government made up for its laxity before the rebellion by severity after it; and in November, 1885, Riel

was sent to the scaffold. Bitterness rankled in many a FrenchCanadian heart for long years after; and in

Ontario, where the Orange order was strongly entrenched, a faction threatened "to smash Confederation into

Racial and religious passions, once aroused, soon found new fuel to feed upon. Honore Mercier, a brilliant

but unscrupulous leader who had ridden to power in the province of Quebec on the Riel issue, roused

Protestant ire by restoring estates which had been confiscated at the conquest in 1763 to the Jesuits and other

Roman Catholic authorities, in proportions which the act provided were to be determined by "Our Holy

Father the Pope." In Ontario restrictions began to be imposed on the freedom of FrenchCanadian

communities on the border to make French the sole or dominant tongue in the schoolroom. A little later the

controversy was echoed in Manitoba in the repeal by a determined Protestant majority of the denominational

Economic discontent was widespread. It was a time of low and falling prices. Farmers found the American

market barred, the British market flooded, the home market stagnant. The factories stimulated by the "N. P."

lacked the growing market they had hoped for. In the West climatic conditions not yet understood, the

monopoly of the Canadian Pacific, and the competition of the States to the south, which still had millions of

acres of free land, brought settlement to a standstill. From all parts of Canada the "exodus" to the United

States continued until by 1890 there were in that country more than onethird as many people of Canadian

It was not surprising that in these extremities men were prepared to make trial of drastic remedies. Nor was it

surprising that it was beyond the borders of Canada itself that they sought the unity and the prosperity they

had not found at home. Many looked to Washington, some for unrestricted trade, a few for political union.

Others looked to London, hoping for a revival of the old imperial tariff preferences or for some closer

The decade from 1885 to 1895 stands out in the record of the relations of the Englishspeaking peoples as a

time of constant friction, of petty pin pricks, of bluster and retaliation. The United States was not in a

neighborly mood. The memories of 1776, of 1812, and of 1861 had been kept green by exuberant comment in

school textbooks and by "spreadeagle" oratory. The absence of any other rivalry concentrated American

opposition on Great Britain, and isolation from Old World interests encouraged a provincial lack of

responsibility. The sins of England in Ireland had been kept to the fore by the agitation of Parnell and Davitt

and Dillon; and the failure of Home Rule measures, twice in this decade, stirred IrishAmerican antagonism.

The accession to power of Lord Salisbury, reputed to hold the United States in contempt, and later the foolish

indiscretion of Sir Lionel SackvilleWest, British Ambassador at Washington, in intervening in a guileless

way in the presidential election of 1888, did as much to nourish illwill in the United States as the dominance

of Blaine and other politicians who cultivated the gentle art of twisting the tail of the British lion.

Protection, with the attitude of economic warfare which it involved and bred, was then at its height. Much of

this hostility was directed against Canada, as the nearest British territory. The Dominion, on its part, while

persistently seeking closer trade relations, sometimes sought this end in unwise ways. Many good people in

Canada were still fighting the War of 1812. The desire to use the inshore fishery privileges as a lever to force

tariff reductions led to a rigid and literal enforcement of Canadian rights and claims which provoked

widespread anger in New England. The policy of discrimination in canal tolls in favor of Canadian as against

United States ports was none the less irritating because it was a retort in kind. And when United States

customs officials levied a tax on the tin cans containing fish free by treaty, Canadian officials had retaliated

The most important specific issue was once more the northeastern fisheries. As a result of notice given by the

United States the fisheries clauses of the Treaty of Washington ceased to operate on July 1, 1885. Canada, for

the sake of peace, admitted American fishing vessels for the rest of that season, though Canadian fish at once

became dutiable. No further grace was given. The Canadian authorities rigidly enforced the rules barring

inshore fishing, and in addition denied port privileges to deepsea fishing vessels and forbade American

boats to enter Canadian ports for the purpose of transshipping crews, purchasing bait, or shipping fish in

bond to the United States. Every time a Canadian fishery cruiser and a Gloucester skipper had a difference of

opinion as to the exact whereabouts of the threemile limit, the press of both countries echoed the conflict.

Congress in 1887 empowered the President to retaliate by excluding Canadian vessels and goods from

American ports. Happily this power was not used. Cleveland and Secretary of State Bayard were genuinely

anxious to have the issue settled. A joint commission drew up a wellconsidered plan, but in the face of a

presidential election the Senate gave it short shrift. Fortunately, however, a modus vivendi was arranged by

which American vessels were admitted to port privileges on payment of a license. Healing time, a healthful

lack of publicity, changing fishing methods, and Canada's abandonment of her old policy of using fishing

Yet if it was not the fishing question, there was sure to be some other issuebonding privileges, Canadian

Pacific interloping in western rail hauls, tariff rates, or canal tollsto disturb the peace. Why not seek a

remedy once for all, men now began to ask, by ending the unnatural separation between the halves of the

continent which God and geography had joined and history and perverse politicians had kept asunder?

The political union of Canada and the United States has always found advocates. In the United States a large

proportion, perhaps a majority, of the people have until recently considered that the absorption of Canada into

the Republic was its manifest destiny, though there has been little concerted effort to hasten fate. In Canada

such course of action has found much less backing. United Empire Loyalist traditions, the ties with Britain

constantly renewed by immigration, the dim stirrings of national sentiment, resentment against the trade

policy of the United States, have all helped to turn popular sentiment into other channels. Only at two

periods, in 1849, and forty years later, has there been any active movement for annexation.

In the late eighties, as in the late forties, commercial depression and racial strife prepared the soil for the seed

of annexation. The chief sower in the later period was a brilliant Oxford don, Goldwin Smith, whose

sympathy with the cause of the North had brought him to the United States. In 1871, after a brief residence at

Cornell, he made his home in Toronto, with high hopes of stimulating the intellectual life and molding the

political future of the colony. He so far forsook the strait "Manchester School" of his upbringing as to support

Macdonald's campaign for protection in 1878. But that was the limit of his adaptability. To the end he

remained out of touch with Canadian feeling. His campaign for annexation, or for the reunion of the

Englishspeaking peoples on this continent, as he preferred to call it, was able and persistent but moved only

a narrow circle of readers. It was in vain that he offered the example of Scotland's prosperity after her union

with her southern neighbor, or insisted that Canada was cut into four distinct and unrelated sections each of

which could find its natural complement only in the territory to the south. Here and there an editor or a minor

politician lent some support to his views, but the great mass of the people strongly condemned the movement.

There was to be no going back to the parting of the ways: the continent north of Mexico was henceforth to

Commercial union was a halfway measure which found more favor. A North American customs union had

been supported by such public men as Stephen A. Douglas, Horace Greeley, and William H. Seward, by

official investigators such as Taylor, Derby, and Larned, and by committees of the House of Representatives

in 1862, 1876, 1880, and 1884. In Canada it had been endorsed before Confederation by Isaac Buchanan, the

father of the protection movement, and by Luther Holton and John Young. Now for the first time it became a

practical question. Erastus Wiman, a Canadian who had found fortune in the United States, began in 1887 a

vigorous campaign in its favor both in Congress and among the Canadian public. Goldwin Smith lent his

dubious aid, leading Toronto and Montreal newspapers joined the movement, and Ontario farmers'

organizations swung to its support. But the agitation proved abortive owing to the triumph of high protection

in the presidential election of 1888; and in Canada the red herring of the Jesuits' Estates controversy was

Yet the question would not down. The political parties were compelled to define their attitude. The Liberals

had been defeated once more in the election of 1887, where the continuance of the National Policy and of aid

to the Canadian Pacific had been the issue. Their leader, Edward Blake, had retired disheartened. His place

had been taken by a young Quebec lieutenant, Wilfrid Laurier, who had won fame by his courageous

resistance to clerical aggression in his own province and by his indictment of the Macdonald Government in

the Riel issue. A veteran Ontario Liberal, Sir Richard Cartwright, urged the adoption of commercial union as

the party policy. Laurier would not go so far, and the policy of unrestricted reciprocity was made the official

programme in 1888. Commercial union had involved not only absolute free trade between Canada and the

United States but common excise rates, a common tariff against the rest of the world, and the division of

customs and excise revenues in some agreed proportion. Unrestricted reciprocity would mean free trade

between the two countries, but with each left free to levy what rates it pleased on the products of other

When in 1891 the time came round once more for a general election, it was apparent that reciprocity in some

form would be the dominant issue. Though the Republicans were in power in the United States and though

they had more than fulfilled their high tariff pledges in the McKinley Act, which hit Canadian farm products

particularly hard, there was some chance of terms being made. Reciprocity, as a form of tariff bargaining,

really fits in better with protection than with free trade, and Blaine, Harrison's Secretary of State, was

committed to a policy of trade treaties and trade bargaining. In Canada the demand for the United States

market had grown with increasing depression. The Liberals, with their policy of unrestricted reciprocity,

seemed destined to reap the advantage of this rising tide of feeling. Then suddenly, on the eve of the election,

Sir John Macdonald sought to cut the ground from under the feet of his opponents by the announcement that

in the course of a discussion of Newfoundland matters the United States had taken the initiative in suggesting

to Canada a settlement of all outstanding difficulties, fisheries, coasting trade, and , on the basis of a renewal

and extension of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854. This policy promised to meet all legitimate economic needs

of the country and at the same time avoid the political dangers of the more sweeping policy. Its force was

somewhat weakened by the denials of Secretary Blaine that he had taken the initiative or made any definite

promises. As the election drew near and revelations of the annexationist aims of some supporters of the wider

trade policy were made, the Government made the loyalty cry its strong card. "The old man, the old flag, and

the old policy," saved the day. In Ontario and Quebec the two parties were evenly divided, but the West and

the Maritime Provinces, the "shreds and patches of Confederation," as Sir Richard Cartwright, too ironic and

vitriolic in his speech for political success, termed them, gave the Government a working majority, which

Again in power, the Government made a formal attempt to carry out its pledges. Two pilgrimages were made

to Washington, but the negotiators were too far apart to come to terms. With the triumph of the Democrats in

1899. and the lowering of the tariff on farm products which followed, there came a temporary improvement

in trade relations. But the tariff reaction and the silver issue brought back the Republicans and led to that

climax in agricultural protection, the Dingley Act of 1897, which killed among Canadians all reciprocity

longings and compelled them to look to themselves for salvation. Although Canadians were anxious for trade

relations, they were not willing to be bludgeoned into accepting onesided terms. The settlement of the

Bering Sea dispute in 1898 by a board of arbitration, which ruled against the claims of the United States but

suggested a restriction of pelagic sealing by agreement, removed one source of friction. Hardly was that out

of the way when Cleveland's Venezuela message brought Great Britain and the United States once more to

the verge of war. In such a war Canadians knew they would be the chief sufferers, but in 1895, as in 1862,

they did not flinch and stood ready to support the mother country in any outcome. The Venezuela episode

stirred Canadian feeling deeply, revived interest in imperialism, and ended the last lingering remnants of any

sentiment for annexation. As King Edward I was termed "the hammer of the Scots," so McKinley and

While most Canadians were ceasing to look to Washington for relief, an increasing number were looking

once more to London. The revival of imperial sentiment which began in the early eighties, seemed to promise

new and greater possibilities for the colonies overseas. Political union in the form of imperial federation and

commercial union through reciprocal tariff preferences were urged in turn as the cure for all Canada's ills.

Neither solution was adopted. The movement greatly influenced the actual trend of affairs, but there was to

The period of laissez faire in imperial matters, of Little Englandism, drew to a close in the early eighties.

Once more men began to value empire, to seek to annex new territory overseas, and to bind closer the

existing possessions. The world was passing through a reaction destined to lead to the earthshaking

catastrophe of 1914. The ideals of peace and free trade preached and to some degree practiced in the fifties

and sixties were passing under an eclipse. In Europe the swing to free trade had halted, and nation after nation

was becoming aggressively protectionist. The triumph of Prussia in the War of 1870 revived and intensified

military rivalry and military preparations on the part of all the powers of Europe. A new scramble for

colonies and possessions overseas began, with the late comers nervously eager to make up for time lost. In

this reaction Britain shared. Protection raised its head again in England; only by tariffs and tariff bargaining,

the Fair Traders insisted, could the country hold its own. Odds and ends of territory overseas were annexed

and a new value was attached to the existing colonies. The possibility of obtaining from them military

support and trade privileges, the desirability of returning to the old ideal of a selfcontained and centralized

empire, appealed now to influential groups. This goal might be attained by different paths. From the United

Kingdom came the policy of imperial federation and from the colonies the policy of preferential trade as

In 1884 the Imperial Federation League was organized in London with important men of both parties in its

ranks. It urged the setting up in London of a new Parliament, in which the United Kingdom and all the

colonies where white men predominated would be represented according to population. This Parliament

would have power to frame policies, to make laws, and to levy taxes for the whole Empire. To the colonist it

offered an opportunity to share in the control of foreign affairs; to the Englishman it offered the support of

colonies fast growing to power and the assurance of one harmonious policy for all the Empire. Both in Britain

and overseas the movement received wide support and seemed for a time likely to sweep all before it. Then a

Imperial federation had been brought forward a generation too late to succeed. The Empire had been

developing upon lines which could not be made to conform to the plans for centralized parliamentary control.

It was not possible to go back to the parting of the ways. Slowly, unconsciously, unevenly, yet steadily, the

colonies had been ceasing to be dependencies and had been becoming nations. With Canada in the vanguard

they had been taking over one power after another which had formerly been wielded by the Government of

the United Kingdom. It was not likely that they would relinquish these powers or that selfgoverning

colonies would consent to be subordinated to a Parliament in London in which each would have only a

The policy of imperial cooperation which began to take shape during this period sought to reconcile the

existing desire for continuing the connection with the mother country with the growing sense of national

independence. This policy involved two different courses of action: first, the colonies must assert and secure

complete selfgovernment on terms of equality with the United Kingdom; second, they must unite as partners

or allies in carrying out common tasks and policies and in building up machinery for mutual consultation and

It was chiefly in matters of trade and tariffs that progress was made in the direction of selfgovernment. Galt

had asserted in 1859 Canada's right to make her own tariffs, and Macdonald twenty years later had carried

still further the policy of levying duties upon English as well as foreign goods. That economic point was

therefore settled, but it was a slower matter to secure control of treatymaking powers. When Galt and

Huntington urged this right in 1871 and when Blake and Mackenzie pressed it ten years later, Macdonald

opposed such a demand as equivalent to an effort for independence. Yet he himself was compelled to change

his conservative attitude. After 1877 Canada ceased to be bound by commercial treaties made by the United

Kingdom, unless it expressly desired to be included. In 1879 Galt was sent to Europe to negotiate Canadian

trade agreements with France and Spain; and in the next decade Tupper carried negotiations with France to a

successful conclusion, though the treaty was formally concluded between France and Britain. By 1891 the

Canadian Parliament could assert with truth that "the selfgoverning colonies are recognized as possessing

the right to define their respective fiscal relations to all countries." But Canada as yet took no step toward

assuming a share in her own naval defense, though the Australasian colonies made a beginning, along

colonial rather than national lines, by making a money contribution to the British navy.

The second task confronting the policy of imperial cooperation was a harder one. For a partnership between

colony and mother country there were no precedents. Centralized empires there had been; colonies there had

been which had grown into independent states; but there was no instance of an empire ceasing to be an

empire, of colonies becoming selfgoverning states and then turning to closer and cooperative union with one

Along this unblazed trail two important advances were made. The initiative in the first came from Canada. In

1880 a High Commissioner was appointed to represent Canada in London. The appointment of Sir Alexander

Galt and the policy which it involved were significant. The GovernorGeneral had ceased to be a real power;

he was becoming the representative not of the British Government but of the King; and, like the King, he

governed by the advice of the responsible ministers in the land where he resided. His place as the link

between the Government of Canada and the Government of Britain was now taken in part by the High

Commissioner. The relationship of Canada to the United Kingdom was becoming one of equality not of

The initiative in the second step came from Britain, though Canada's leaders gave the movement its final

direction. Imperial federationists urged Lord Salisbury to summon a conference of the colonies to discuss the

question they had at heart. Salisbury doubted the wisdom of such a policy but agreed in 1887 to call a

conference to discuss matters of trade and defense. Every selfgoverning colony sent representatives to this

first Colonial Conference; but little immediate fruit came of its sessions. In 1894 a second Conference was

held at Ottawa, mainly to discuss intercolonial preferential trade. Only a beginning had been made, but

already the Conferences were coming to be regarded as meetings of independent governments and not, as the

federationists had hoped, the germ of a single dominating new government. The Imperial Federation League

Preferential trade was the alternative path to imperial federation. Macdonald had urged it in 1879 when he

found British resentment strong against his new tariff. Again, ten years later, when reciprocity with the

United States was finding favor in Canada, imperialists urged the counterclaims of a policy of imperial

reciprocity, of special tariff privileges to other parts of the Empire. The stumblingblock in the way of such a

policy was England's adherence to free trade. For the protectionist colonies preference would mean only a

reduction of an existing tariff. For the United Kingdom, however, it would mean a complete reversal of fiscal

policy and the abandonment of free trade for protection in order to make discrimination possible. Few

Englishmen believed such a reversal possible, though every trade depression revived talk of "fair trade" or

tariffs for bargaining purposes. A further obstacle to preferential trade lay in the existence of treaties with

Belgium and Germany, concluded in the sixties, assuring them all tariff privileges granted by any British

colony to Great Britain or to sister colonies. In 1892 the Liberal Opposition in Canada indicated the line upon

which action was eventually to be taken by urging a resolution in favor of granting an immediate and

unconditional preference on British goods as a step toward freer trade and in the interest of the Canadian

Little came of looking either to London or to Washington. Until the middle nineties Canada remained

commercially stagnant and politically distracted. Then came a change of heart and a change of policy. The

In March, 1891, Sir John Macdonald was returned to office for the sixth time since Confederation, but he was

not destined to enjoy power long. The winter campaign had been too much for his weakened constitution, and

he died on June 6, 1891. No man had been more hated by his political opponents, no man more loved by his

political followers. Today the hatred has long since died, and the memory of Sir John Macdonald has become

the common pride of Canadians of every party, race, and creed. He had done much to lower the level of

Canadian politics; but this fault was forgiven when men remembered his unfailing courage and confidence,

his constructive vision and fertility of resource, his deep and unquestioned devotion to his country.

The Conservative party had with difficulty survived the last election. Deprived of the leader who for so long

had been half its force, the party could not long delay its breakup. No one could be found to fill Macdonald's

place. The helm was taken in turn by J. J. C. Abbott, "the confidential family lawyer of the party," by Sir

John Thompson, solid and efficient though lacking in imagination, and by Sir Mackenzie Bowell, an Ontario

veteran. Abbott was forced to resign because of ill health; Thompson died in office; and Bowell was forced

out by a revolt within the party. Sir Charles Tupper, then High Commissioner in London, was summoned to

take up the difficult task. But it proved too great for even his fighting energy. The party was divided. Gross

corruption in the awarding of public contracts had been brought to light. The farmers were demanding a

lower tariff. The leader of the Opposition was proving to have all the astuteness and the mastery of his party

which had marked Macdonald and a courage in his convictions which promised well. Defeat seemed

inevitable unless a new issue which had invaded federal politics, the Manitoba school question, should prove

The Manitoba school question was an echo of the racial and religious strife which followed the execution of

Riel and in which the Jesuits' Estates controversy was an episode. In the early days of the province, when it

was still uncertain which religion would be dominant among the settlers, a system of stateaided

denominational schools had been established. In 1890 the Manitoba Government swept this system away and

replaced it by a single system of nonsectarian and statesupported schools which were practically the same

as the old Protestant schools. Any Roman Catholic who did not wish to send his children to such a school

was thus compelled to pay for the maintenance of a parochial school as well as to pay taxes for the public

schools. A provision of the Confederation Act, inserted at the wish of the Protestant minority in Quebec,

safeguarded the educational privileges of religious minorities. A somewhat similar clause had been inserted

in the Manitoba Act of 1870. To this protection the Manitoba minority now appealed. The courts held that the

province had the right to pass the law but also that the Dominion Government had the constitutional right to

pass remedial legislation restoring in some measure the privileges taken away. The issue was thus forced into

A curious situation then developed. The leader of the Government, Sir Mackenzie Bowell, was a prominent

Orangeman. The leader of the Opposition, Wilfrid Laurier, was a Roman Catholic. The Government, after a

vain attempt to induce the province to amend its measure, decided to pass a remedial act compelling it to

restore to the Roman Catholics their rights. The policy of the Opposition leader was awaited with keen

expectancy. Strong pressure was brought upon Laurier by the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Quebec. Most

men expected a temporizing compromise. Yet the leader of the Opposition came out strongly and flatly

against the Government's measure. He agreed that a wrong had been done but insisted that compulsion could

not right it and promised that, if in power, he would follow the path of conciliation. At once all the wrath of

the hierarchy was unloosed upon him, and all its influence was thrown to the support of the Government. Yet

when the Liberals blocked the Remedial Bill by obstructing debate until the term of Parliament expired, and

forced an election on this issue in the summer of 1896, Quebec gave a big majority to Laurier, while

Manitoba stood behind the party which had tried to coerce it. The country over, the Liberals had gained a

Wilfrid Laurier was summoned to form his first Cabinet in July, 1896. For eighteen years previous to that

time the Liberals had sat in what one of their number used to call "the cold shades of Opposition." For half of

that term Laurier had been leader of the party, confined to the negative task of watching and criticizing the

administration of his great predecessor and of the four premiers who followed in almost as many years. Now

he was called to constructive tasks. Fortune favored him by bringing him to power at the very turn of the tide;

but he justified fortune's favor by so steering the ship of state as to take full advantage of wind and current.

Through four Parliaments, through fifteen years of office, through the time of fruition of so many

Laurier began his work by calling to his Cabinet not merely the party leaders in the federal arena but four of

the outstanding provincial LiberalsOliver Mowat, Premier of Ontario, William S. Fielding, Premier of

Nova Scotia, Andrew G. Blair, Premier of New Brunswick, and, a few months later, Clifford Sifton of

Manitoba. The Ministry was the strongest in individual capacity that the Dominion had yet possessed. The

prestige of the provincial leaders, all men of long experience and tested shrewdness, strengthened the

Administration in quarters where it otherwise would have been weak, for there had been many who doubted

whether the untried Liberal party could provide capable administrators. There had also been many who

doubted the expediency of making Prime Minister a FrenchCanadian Catholic. Such doubters were

reassured by the presence of Mowat and Fielding, until the Prime Minister himself had proved the wisdom of

the choice. There were others who admitted Laurier's personal charm and grace but doubted whether he had

the political strength to control a party of conflicting elements and to govern a country where different race

and diverging religious and sectional interests set men at odds. Here again time proved such fears to be

groundless. Long before Laurier's long term of office had ended, any distrust was transformed into the charge

of his opponents that he played the dictator. His courtly manners were found not to hide weakness but to

The first task of the new Government was to settle the Manitoba school question. Negotiations which were at

once begun with the provincial Government were doubtless made easier by the fact that the same party was in

power at Ottawa and at Winnipeg, but it was not this fact alone which brought agreement. The Laurier

Government, unlike its predecessor, did not insist on the restoration of separate schools. It accepted a

compromise which retained the single system of public schools, but which provided religious teaching in the

last half hour of school and, where numbers warranted, a teacher of the same faith as the pupils. The

compromise was violently denounced by the Roman Catholic hierarchy but, except in two cities, where

With this thorny question out of the way, the Government turned to what it recognized as its greatest task, the

promotion of the country's material prosperity. For years industry had been at a standstill. Exports and

imports had ceased to expand; railway building had halted; emigrants outnumbered immigrants. The West,

the center of so many hopes, the object of so many sacrifices, had not proved the El Dorado so eagerly sought

by fortune hunters and home builders. There were little over two hundred thousand white men west of the

Great Lakes. Homesteads had been offered freely; but in 1896 only eighteen hundred were taken up, and less

than a third of these by Canadians from the East. The stock of the Canadian Pacific was selling at fifty. All

Then suddenly a change came. The failure of the West to lure pioneers was not due to poverty of soil or lack

of natural riches: its resources were greater than the most reckless orator had dreamed. It was merely that its

time had not come and that the men in charge of the country's affairs had not thrown enough energy into the

task of speeding the coming of that time. Now fortune worked with Canada, not against it. The long and

steady fall of prices, and particularly of the prices of farm products, ended; and a rapid rise began to make

farming pay once more. The good free lands of the United States had nearly all been taken up. Canada's West

was now the last great reserve of free and fertile land. Improvements in farming methods made it possible to

cope with the peculiar problems of prairie husbandry. British capital, moreover, no longer found so ready an

outlet in the United States, which was now financing its own development; and it had suffered severe losses

in Argentine smashes and Australian droughts. Capital, therefore, was free to turn to Canada.

But it was not enough merely to have the resources; it was essential to display them and to disclose their

value. Canada needed millions of men of the right stock, and fortunately there were millions who needed

Canada. The work of the Government was to put the facts before these potential settlers. The new Minister of

the Interior, Clifford Sifton, himself a western man, at once began an immigration campaign which has never

been equaled in any country for vigor and practical efficiency. Canada had hitherto received few settlers

direct from the Continent. Western Europe was now prosperous, and emigrants were few. But eastern Europe

The activities of a subsidized immigration agency, the North Atlantic Trading Company, brought great

numbers of these peoples. Foremost in numbers were the Ruthenians from Galicia. Most distinctive were the

Doukhobors or Spirit Wrestlers of Southern Russia, about ten thousand of whom were brought to Canada at

the instance of Tolstoy and some English Quakers to escape persecution for their refusal to undertake military

service. The religious fanaticism of the Doukhobors, particularly when it took the form of midwinter

pilgrimages in nature's garb, and the clannishness of the Ruthenians, who settled in solid blocks, gave rise to

many problems of government and assimilation which taught Canadians the unwisdom of inviting

immigration from eastern or southern Europe. Ruthenians and Poles, however, continued to come down to

the eve of the Great War, and nearly all settled on western lands. Jewish Poland sent its thousands who settled

in the larger cities, until Montreal had more Jews than Jerusalem and its Protestant schools held their Easter

holidays in Passover. Italian navvies came also by the thousands, but mainly as birds of passage; and Greeks

and men from the Balkan States were limited in numbers. Of the three million immigrants who came to

Canada from the beginning of the century to the outbreak of the war, some eight hundred thousand came

from continental Europe, and of these the Ruthenians, Jews, Italians, and Scandinavians were the most

It was in the United States that Canada made the greatest efforts to obtain settlers and that she achieved the

most striking success. Beginning in 1897 advertisements were placed in five or six thousand American farm

and weekly newspapers. Booklets were distributed by the million. Hundreds of farmer delegates were given

free trips through the promised land. Agents were appointed in each likely State, with subagents who were

paid a bonus on every actual settler. The first settlers sent back word of limitless land to be had for a song,

and of No. 1 Northern Wheat that ran thirty or forty bushels to the acre. Soon immigration from the States

began; the trickle became a trek; the trek, a stampede. In 1896 the immigrants from the United States to

Canada had been so few as not to be recorded; in 1897 there were 2000; in 1899, 12,000; in the fiscal year

190203, 50,000; and in 191213, 139,000. The new immigrants proved to be the best of settlers; nearly all

were progressive farmers experienced in western methods and possessed of capital. The countermovement

from Canada to the United States never wholly ceased, but it slackened and was much more than offset by

this northward rush. Nothing so helped to confirm Canadian confidence in their own land and to make the

outside world share this high estimate as this unimpeachable evidence from over a million American

newcomers who found in Canada, between 1897 and 1914, greater opportunities than even the United States

could offer. The Ministry then carried its propaganda to Great Britain. Newspapers, schools, exhibitions were

used in ways which startled the stolid Englishman into attention. Circumstances played into the hands of the

propagandists, who took advantage of the flow of United States settlers into the West, the Klondike gold

fields rush, the presence of Laurier at the Jubilee festivities at London in 1897, Canada's share in the Boer

War. British immigrants rose to 50,000 in 190304, to 120,000 in 190708, and to 150,000 in 191213.

From 1897 to the outbreak of the war over 1,100,000 Britishers came to Canada. Three out of four were

English, the rest mainly Scotch; the Irish, who once had come in tens of thousands and whose descendants

still formed the largest element in the Englishspeaking peoples of Canada, now sent only one man for every

twelve from England. The gates of Canadian immigration, however, were not thrown open to all comers. The

criminal, the insane and feebleminded, the diseased, and others likely to become public charges, were

barred altogether or allowed to remain provisionally, subject to deportation within three years. Immigrants

sent out by British charitable societies were subjected, after 1908, to rigid inspection before leaving England.

No immigrant was admitted without sufficient money in his purse to tide over the first few weeks, unless he

were going to farm work or responsible relatives. Asiatics were restricted by special regulations. Steadily the

Not all the 3,000,000 who came to Canada between 1897 and 1914 remained. Many drifted across the border;

many returned to their old homes, their dreams fulfilled or shattered; yet the vast majority remained. Never

had any country so great a task of assimilation as faced Canada, with 3,000,000 pouring into a country of

5,000,000 in a dozen years. Fortunately the great bulk of the newcomers were of the old stocks.

Closely linked with immigration in promoting the prosperity of the country were the land policy and the

railway policy of the Administration. The system of granting free homesteads to settlers was continued on an

even more generous scale. The 1800 entries for homesteads in 1896 had become 40,000 ten years later. In

1906 land equal in area to Massachusetts and Delaware was given away; in 1908 a Wales, in 1909 five Prince

Edward Islands, and in 1910 and 1911 a Belgium, a Netherlands, and two Montenegros passed from the state

to the settler. Unfortunately not every homesteader became an active farmer, and production, though

Railway building had almost ceased after the completion of the Canadian Pacific system. Now it revived on a

greater scale than ever before. In the twenty years after 1896 the miles in operation grew from 16,000 to

nearly 40,000. Two new transcontinentals were added, and the older roads took on a new lease of life. At the

end of this period of expansion, only the United States, Germany, and Russia had railroad mileage exceeding

that of Canada. Much of the building was premature or duplicated other roads. The scramble for state aid,

federal and provincial, had demoralized Canadian politics. A large part of the notes the country rashly

backed, by the policy of guaranteeing bond issues, were in time presented for payment. Yet the railway

policies of the period were broadly justified. New country was opened to settlers; outlets to the sea were

provided; capital was obtained in the years when it was still abundant and cheap; the whole industry of the

country was stimulated; East was bound closer to West and depth was added to length.*

* During the Great War it became necessary for the Federal Government to take over both the National

Transcontinental, running from Moncton in New Brunswick to Winnipeg, and the Canadian Northern,

running from ocean to ocean, and to incorporate both, along with the Intercolonial, in the Canadian National

The opening of the West brought new prosperity to every corner of the East. Factories found growing

markets; banks multiplied branches and business; exports mounted fast and imports faster; closer relations

were formed with London and New York financial interests; mushroom millionaires, country clubs, city

slums, suburban subdivisions, land booms, grafting aldermen, and all the apparatus of an advanced

civilization grew apace. A new selfconfidence became the dominant note alike of private business and of

With industrial prosperity, political unity became assured. Canada became more and more a name of which

all her sons were proud. Expansion brought men of the different provinces together. The Maritime Provinces

first felt fully at one with the rest of Canada when Vancouver and Winnipeg rather than Boston and New

York called their sons. Even Ontario and Quebec made some advance toward mutual understanding, though

clerical leaders who sought safety for their Church in the isolation of its people, imperialists who drove a

wedge between Canadians by emphasizing AngloSaxon racial ties, and politicians of the baser sort

exploiting race prejudice for their own gain, opened rifts in a society already seamed by differences of

language and creed. In the West unity was still harder to secure, for men of all countries and of none poured

into a land still in the shaping. The divergent interests of the farming, free trade West and of the

manufacturing, protectionist East made for friction. Fortunately strong ties held East and West together.

Eastern Canadians or their sons filled most of the strategic posts in Government and business, in school and

church and press in the West. Transcontinental railways, chartered banks with branches and interests in every

province, political parties organizing their forces from coast to coast, played their part. Much had been

accomplished; but much remained to be done. With this background of rapid industrial development and

growing national unity, Canada's relations with the Empire, with her sister democracy across the border, and

with foreign states, took on new importance and divided interest with the changes in her internal affairs.

From being a state wherein the mother country exercised control and the colonies yielded obedience the

Empire was rapidly being transformed into a free and equal partnership of independent commonwealths

under one king. Out of the clash of rival theories and conflicting interests a new ideal and a new reality had

developed. The policy of imperial cooperationthe policy whereby each great colony became independent

of outside control but voluntarily acted in concert with the mother country and the sister states on matters of

common concernsought to reconcile liberty and unity, nationhood and empire, to unite what was most

practicable in the aims of the advocates of independence and the advocates of imperial federation. The

movement developed unevenly. At the outbreak of the Great War, it was still incomplete. The ideal was not

always clearly or consciously held in the Empire itself and was wholly ignored or misunderstood in Europe

and even in the United States. Yet in twenty years' space it had become dominant in practice and theory and

had built up a new type of political organization, a virtual league of nations, fruitful for the future ordering of

The three fields in which this new policy was worked out were trade, defense, and political organization.

Canada had asserted her right to control her tariff and commercial treaty relations as she pleased. Now she

used this freedom to offer, without asking any return in kind, tariff privileges to the mother country. In the

first budget brought down by the Minister of Finance in the Laurier Cabinet, William S. Fielding, a reduction,

by instalments, of twentyfive per cent in tariff duties was offered to all countries with rates as low as

Canada'sthat is, to the United Kingdom and possibly to the Netherlands and New South Wales. The

reduction was meant both as a fulfilment of the Liberal party's free trade pledges and as a token of filial good

will to Britain. It was soon found that Belgium and Germany, by virtue of their special treaty rights, would

claim the same privileges as Britain, and that all other countries with most favored nation clauses could then

demand the same rates. This might serve the free trade aims of the Fielding tariff but would block its imperial

purpose. If this purpose was to be achieved, these treaties must be denounced. To effect this was one of the

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of her reign, was made the

occasion for holding the third Colonial Conference. It was attended by the Premiers of all the colonies.

Among them Wilfrid Laurier, or Sir Wilfrid as he now became, stood easily preeminent. In the Jubilee

festivities, among the crowds in London streets and the gatherings in court and council, his picturesque and

courtly figure, his unmistakable note of distinction, his silvery eloquence, and, not least, the fact that this

ruler of the greatest of England's colonies was wholly of French blood, made him the lion of the hour. In the

Colonial Conference, presided over by Joseph Chamberlain, the new Colonial Secretary, Laurier achieved his

immediate purpose. The British Government agreed to denounce the Belgian and German treaties, now that

the preference granted her came as a free gift and not as part of a bargain which involved Britain's

abandonment of free trade. The other Premiers agreed to consider whether Canada's preferential tariff policy

could be followed. Chamberlain in vain urged defense and political policies designed to centralize power in

London. He praised the action of the Australian colonies in contributing money to the British navy but could

get no promise of similar action from the others. He urged the need of setting up in London an imperial

council, with power somewhat more than advisory and likely "to develop into something still greater," but for

this scheme he elicited little support. After the Conference Sir Wilfrid visited France and in ringing speeches

in Paris did much to pave the way for the good understanding which later developed into the entente cordiale.

The glitter and parade of the Jubilee festivities soon gave way to a sterner phase of empire. For years South

Africa had been in ferment owing to the conflicting interests of narrow, fanatical, often corrupt Boer leaders,

greedy AngloJewish mining magnates, and British statesmenRhodes, Milner, Chamberlaindominated

by the imperial idea and eager for an "allred" South Africa. Eventually an impasse was reached over the

question of the rights and privileges of British subjects in the Transvaal Republic. On October 9, 1899,

What would be Canada's attitude toward this imperial problem? She had never before taken part in an

overseas war. Neither her own safety nor the safety of the mother country was considered to be at stake. Yet

war had not been formally declared before a demand arose among Canadians that their country should take a

hand in rescuing the victims of Boer tyranny. The Venezuela incident and the recent Jubilee ceremonies had

fanned imperialist sentiment. The growing prosperity was increasing national pride and making many eager

to abandon the attitude of colonial dependence in foreign affairs. The desire to emulate the United States,

which had just won more or less glory in its little war with Spain, had its influence in some quarters. Belief in

the justice of the British cause was practically universal, thanks to the skillful manipulation of the press by

the war party in South Africa. Leading newspapers encouraged the campaign for participation. Parliament

was not in session, and the Government hesitated to intervene, but the swelling tide of public opinion soon

warranted immediate action. Three days after the declaration of war an order in council was passed providing

for a contingent of one thousand men. Other infantry battalions, Mounted Rifles, and batteries of artillery

were dispatched later. Lord Strathcona, formerly Donald Smith of the Canadian Pacific syndicate, by a deed

recalling feudal days, provided the funds to send overseas the Strathcona Horse, roughriders from the

Canadian West. In the last years of the war the South African Constabulary drew many recruits from Canada.

All told, over seven thousand Canadians crossed half the world to share in the struggle on the South African

The Canadian forces held their own with any in the campaign. The first contingent fought under Lord Roberts

in the campaign for the relief of Kimberley; and it was two charges by Canadian troops, charges that cost

heavily in killed and wounded, that forced the surrender of General Cronje, brought to bay at Paardeberg.

One Canadian battery shared in the honor of raising the siege of Mafeking, where BadenPowell was

besieged, and both contingents marched with Lord Roberts from Bloemfontein to Pretoria and fought hard

and well at Doornkop and in many a skirmish. Perhaps the politic generosity of the British leaders and the

patriotic bias of correspondents exaggerated the importance of the share of the Canadian troops in the whole

campaign; but their courage, initiative, and endurance were tested and proved beyond all question.

The only province which stood aloof from wholehearted participation in the war was Quebec. Many French

Canadians had been growing nervous over the persistent campaign of the imperialists. They exhibited a

certain unwillingness to take on responsibilities, perhaps a survival of the dependence which colonialism had

bred, a dawning aspiration toward an independent place in the world's work, and a disposition to draw tighter

racial and religious lines in order to offset the emphasis which imperialists placed on AngloSaxon ties. Now

their sympathies went out to a people, like themselves an alien minority brought under British rule, and in

this attitude they were strengthened by the almost unanimous verdict of the neutral world against British

policy. Laurier tried to steer a middle course, but the attacks of ultraimperialists in Ontario and of

ultranationalists in Quebec, led henceforward by a brilliant and eloquent grandson of Papineau, Henri

Bourassa, hampered him at every turn. The South African War gave a new unity to Englishspeaking

The part which Australia and New Zealand, like Canada, had taken in the war gave new urgency to the

question of imperial relations. English imperialists were convinced that the time was ripe for a great advance

toward centralization, and they were eager to crystallize in permanent institutions the imperial sentiment

called forth by the war. When, therefore, the fourth Colonial Conference was summoned to meet in London

in 1902 on the occasion of the coronation of Edward VII, Chamberlain urged with all his force and keenness

a wide programme of centralized action. "Very great expectations," he declared in his opening address, "have

been formed as to the results which may accrue from our meeting." The expectations, however, were doomed

to disappointment. He and those who shared his hopes had failed to recognize that the war had called forth a

new national consciousness in the Dominions, as the selfgoverning colonies now came to be termed, even

more than it had developed imperial sentiment. In the smaller colonies, New Zealand, Natal, Cape of Good

Hope, the old attitude of colonial dependence survived in larger measure; but in Canada and in Australia, now

Chamberlain brought forward once more his proposal for an imperial council, to be advisory at first and later

to attain power to tax and legislate for the whole Empire, but he found no support. Instead, the Conference

itself was made a more permanent instrument of imperial cooperation by a provision that it should meet at

least every four years. The essential difference was that the Conference was merely a meeting of independent

Governments on an equal footing, each claiming to be as much "His Majesty's Government" as any other,

whereas the council which Chamberlain urged in vain would have been a new Government, supreme over all

the Empire and dominated by the British representatives. Chamberlain then suggested more centralized

means of defense, grants to the British navy, and the putting of a definite proportion of colonial militia at the

disposal of the British War Office for overseas service. The Cape and Natal promised naval grants; Australia

and New Zealand increased their contributions for the maintenance of a squadron in Pacific waters; but

Canada held back. The smaller colonies were sympathetic to the militia proposal; but Canada and Australia

rejected it on the grounds that it was "objectionable in principle, as derogating from the powers of

selfgovernment enjoyed by them, and would be calculated to impede the general improvement in training

and organization of their defense forces." Chamberlain's additional proposal of free trade within the Empire

and of a common tariff against all foreign countries found little support. That each part of the Empire should

control its own tariff and that it should make what concessions it wished on British imports, either as a part of

a reciprocal bargain or as a free gift, remained a fixed idea in the minds of the leaders of the Dominions.

Throughout the sessions it was Laurier rather than Chamberlain who dominated the Conference.

Balked in his desire to effect political or military centralization, Chamberlain turned anew to the possibilities

of trade alliance. His tariff reform campaign of 1903, which was a sequel to the Colonial Conference of 1902,

proposed that Great Britain set up a tariff, incidentally to protect her own industries and to have matter for

bargaining with foreign powers, but mainly in order to keep the colonies within her orbit by offering them

special terms. In this way the Empire would become once more selfsufficient. The issue thus thrust upon

Great Britain and the Empire in general was primarily a contest between free traders and protectionists, not

between the supporters of cooperation and the supporters of centralization. On this basis the issue was fought

out in Great Britain and resulted in the overwhelming victory of free trade and the Liberal party, aided as they

were by the popular reaction against the jingoist policy which had culminated in the war. When the fifth

Conference, now termed Imperial instead of Colonial, met in 1907, there was much impassioned advocacy of

preference and protection on the part of Alfred Deakin of Australia and Sir L.S. Jameson of the Cape; but the

British representatives stuck to their guns and, in Winston Churchill's phrase, the door remained "banged,

barred, and bolted" against both policies. At this conference Laurier took the ground that, while Canada

would be prepared to bargain preference for preference, the people of Great Britain must decide what fiscal

system would best serve their own interests. A consistent advocate of home rule, he was willing, unlike some

of his colleagues, from the other Dominions, to let the United Kingdom control its own affairs.

The defense issue had slumbered since the Boer War. Now the unbounded ambitions of Germany gave it

startling urgency. It was about 1908 that the British public first became seriously alarmed over the danger

involved in the lessening margin of superiority of the British over the German navy. The alarm was echoed

throughout the Dominions. The Kaiser's challenge threatened the safety not only of the mother country but of

every part of the Empire. Hitherto the Dominions had done little in the way of naval defense, though they had

one by one assumed full responsibility for their land defense. The feeling had been growing that they should

take a larger share of the common burden. Two factors, however, had blocked advance in this direction. The

British Government had claimed and exercised full control of the issues of peace and war, and the Dominions

were reluctant to assume responsibility for the consequences of a foreign policy which they could not direct.

The hostility of the British Admiralty, on strategic and political grounds, to the plan of local Dominion

navies, had prevented progress on the most feasible lines. The deadlock was a serious one. Now the

imminence of danger compelled a solution. Taking the lead in this instance in the working out of the policy

of colonial nationalism, Australia had already insisted upon abandoning the barren and inadequate policy of

making a cash contribution for the support of a British squadron in Australasian waters and had established a

local navy, manned, maintained, and controlled by the Commonwealth. Canada decided to follow her

example. In March, 1909, the Canadian House of Commons unanimously adopted a resolution in favor of

establishing a Canadian naval service to cooperate in close relation with the British navy. During the summer

a special conference was held in London attended by ministers from all the Dominions. At this conference the

Admiralty abandoned its old position; and it was agreed that Australia and Canada should establish local

forces, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, with auxiliary ships and naval bases.

When the Canadian Parliament met in 1910, Sir Wilfrid Laurier submitted a Naval Service Bill, providing for

the establishment of local fleets, of which the smaller vessels were to be built in Canada. The ships were to be

under the control of the Dominion Government, which might, in case of emergency, place them at the

disposal of the British Admiralty. The bill was passed in March. In the autumn two cruisers, the Rainbow and

the Niobe, were bought from Britain to serve as training ships. In the following spring a naval college was

opened at Halifax, and tenders were called for the construction, in Canada, of five cruisers and six destroyers.

In June, 1911, at the regular Imperial Conference of that year, an agreement was reached regarding the

boundaries of the Australian and Canadian stations and uniformity of training and discipline.

Then came the reciprocity fight and the defeat of the Government. No tenders had been finally accepted, and

The naval issue had now become a party question. The policy of a Dominion navy, a policy which was the

logical extension of the principles of colonial nationalism and imperial cooperation which had guided

imperial development for many years, was attacked by ultraimperialists in the Englishspeaking provinces

as strategically unsound and as leading inevitably to separation from the Empire. It was also attacked by the

Nationalists of Quebec, the ultracolonialists or provincialists, as they might more truly be termed, under the

vigorous leadership of Henri Bourassa, as yet another concession to imperialism and to militarism. In

November, 1910, by alarming the habitant by pictures of his sons being dragged away by naval press gangs,

the Nationalists succeeded in defeating the Liberal candidate in a byelection in DrummondArthabaska, at

one time Laurier's own constituency. In the general election which followed in 1911, the same issue cost the

When, therefore, the new Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, faced the issue, he endeavored to frame a policy

which would suit both wings of his following. In 1912 he proposed as an emergency measure to appropriate a

sum sufficient to build three dreadnoughts for the British navy, subject to recall if at any time the Canadian

people decided to use them as the nucleus of a Canadian fleet. At the same time he undertook to submit to the

electorate his permanent naval policy, as soon as it was determined. What that permanent policy would be he

was unwilling to say, but the Prime Minister made clear his own leanings by insisting that it would take half a

century to form a Canadian navy, which at best would be a poor and weak substitute for the organization the

Empire already possessed. The contribution to the British navy satisfied the ultraimperialists, while the

promise of a referendum and the call for money alone, and not men, appealed to the Nationalist wing. Under

the impetuous control of its new head, Winston Churchill, the British Admiralty showed that it had repented

its brief conversion to the Dominion navy policy, by preparing an elaborate memorandum to support Borden's

proposals, and also by formulating plans for imperial flying squadrons to be supplied by the Dominions,

which made clear its wish to continue the centralizing policy permanently. The Liberal Opposition vigorously

denounced the whole dreadnought programme, advocating instead two Canadian fleet units somewhat larger

than at first contemplated. Their obstruction was overcome in the Commons by the introduction of the

closure, but the Liberal majority in the Senate, on the motion of Sir George Ross, a former Premier of

Ontario, threw out the bill by insisting that it should not be passed before being "submitted to the judgment of

the country." This challenge the Government did not accept. Until the outbreak of the war no further steps

were taken either to arrange for contribution or to establish a Canadian navy, though the naval college at

Halifax was continued, and the training cruisers were maintained in a halfhearted way.

In the Imperial Conference of 1911, one more attempt was made to set up a central governing authority in

London. Sir Joseph Ward, of New Zealand, acting as the mouthpiece of the imperial federationists, urged the

establishment, first of an Imperial Council of State and later of an Imperial Parliament. His proposals met no

support. "It is absolutely impracticable," was Laurier's verdict. "Any scheme of representationno matter

what you call it, parliament or councilof the overseas Dominions, must give them so very small a

representation that it would be practically of no value," declared Premier Morris of Newfoundland. "It is not a

practical scheme," Premier Fisher of Australia agreed; "our present system of responsible government has not

broken down." "The creation of some body with centralized authority over the whole Empire," Premier Botha

of South Africa cogently insisted, "would be a step entirely antagonistic to the policy of Great Britain which

has been so successful in the past . . . . It is the policy of decentralization which has made the Empirethe

power granted to its various peoples to govern themselves." Even Premier Asquith of the United Kingdom

declared the proposals "fatal to the very fundamental conditions on which our empire has been built up and

Stronger than any logic was the presence of Louis Botha in the conferences of 1907 and 1911. On the former

occasion it was only five years since he had been in arms against Great Britain. The courage and vision of Sir

Henry CampbellBannerman in granting full and immediate selfgovernment to the conquered Boer

republics had been justified by the results. Once more freedom proved the only enduring basis of empire.

Botha's task in attempting to make Boer and Briton work together, first in the Transvaal, and, after 1910, in

the Union of South Africa, had not been an easy one. Attacked by extremists from both directions, he faced

much the same difficulties as Laurier, and he found in Laurier's friendship, counsel, and example much that

Not less important than the relations with the United Kingdom in this period were the relations with the

United States. The Venezuela episode was the turning point in the relations between the United States and the

British Empire. Both in Washington and in London men had been astounded to find themselves on the verge

of war. The danger passed, but the shock awoke thousands to a realization of all that the two peoples had in

common and to the need of concerted effort to remove the sources of friction. Then hard on the heels of this

episode followed the SpanishAmerican War.* Not the least of its byproducts was a remarkable

improvement in the relations of the Englishspeaking nations. The course of the war, the intrigues of

European courts to secure intervention on behalf of Spain, and the lining up of a British squadron beside

Dewey in Manila Bay when a German Admiral blustered, revealed Great Britain as the one trustworthy friend

the United States possessed abroad. The annexation of the Philippines and the definite entry of the United

States upon world politics broke down the irresponsible isolation which British ministers had found so much

of a barrier to diplomatic accommodations. With John Hay and later Elihu Root at the State Department, and

Lansdowne and Grey at the Foreign Office in London, there began an era of good feeling between the two

Ottawa and Washington were somewhat slower in coming to terms. Many difficulties can arise along a three

thousand mile border, and with a people so sure of themselves as the Americans were at this period and a

people so sensitive to any infringements of their national rights as the Canadians were, petty differences often

loomed large. The Laurier Government, therefore, proposed shortly after its accession to power in 1896 that

an attempt should be made to clear away all outstanding issues and to effect a trade agreement. A Joint High

Commission was constituted in 1898. The members from the United States were Senator Fairbanks, Senator

Gray, Representative Nelson Dingley, General Foster, J.A. Kasson, and T.J. Coolidge of the State

Department. Great Britain was represented by Lord Herschell, who acted as chairman, Newfoundland by Sir

James Winter, and Canada by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Sir Richard Cartwright, Sir Louis Davies, and John

The Commission held prolonged sittings, first at Quebec and later at Washington, and reached tentative

agreement on nearly all of the troublesome questions at issue. The bonding privileges on both sides the

border were to be given an assured basis; the unneighborly alien labor laws were to be relaxed; the

RushBagot Convention regarding armament on the Great Lakes was to be revised; Canadian vessels were to

abandon pelagic sealing in Bering Sea for a money compensation; and a reciprocity treaty covering natural

products and some manufactures was sketched out. Yet no agreement followed. One issue, the Alaska

boundary, proved insoluble, and as no agreement was acceptable which did not cover every difference, the

The boundary between Alaska and the Dominion was the only bit of the border line not yet determined. As in

former cases of boundary disputes, the inaccuracies of map makers, the ambiguities of diplomats, the clash of

local interests, and stiffnecked national pride made a settlement difficult. In 1825 Russia and Great Britain

had signed a treaty which granted Russia a long panhandle strip down the Pacific coast. With the purchase of

Alaska in 1867 the United States succeeded to Russia's claim. With the growth of settlement in Canada this

long barrier down half of her Pacific coast was found to be irksome. Attempt after attempt to have the line

determined only added to the stock of memorials in official pigeonholes. Then came the discovery of gold in

the Klondike in 1896, and the question of easy access by sea to the Canadian back country became an urgent

one. Canada offered to compromise, admitting the American title to the chief ports on Lynn Canal, Dyea and

Skagway, if Pyramid Harbor were held Canadian. She urged arbitration on the model the United States had

dictated in the Venezuela dispute. But the United States was in possession of the most important points. Its

people believed the Canadian claims had been trumped up when the Klondike fields were opened. The Puget

Sound cities wanted no breach in their monopoly of the supply trade to the north. The only concession the

United States would make was to refer the dispute to a commission of six, three from each country, with the

proviso that no area settled by Americans should in any event pass into other bands. Canada felt that

arbitration under these conditions would either end in deadlock, leaving the United States in possession, or in

concession by one or more of the British representatives, and so declined to accept the proposed arrangement.

Finally, in 1903, agreement was reached between London and Washington to accept the tribunal proposed by

the United States, which in turn withdrew its veto on the transfer of any settled area. Canada's reluctant

consent was won by a provision that the members of the tribunal should be "impartial jurists of repute,"

sworn to render a judicial verdict. When Elihu Root, Senator Lodge, and Senator Turner were named as the

American representatives, Ottawa protested that eminent and honorable as they were, their public attitude on

this question made it impossible to consider them "impartial jurists." The Canadian Government in return

nominated three judges, Lord Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir Louis Jette, of Quebec, and Mr.

Justice Armour, succeeded on his death by A. B. Aylesworth, a leader of the Ontario bar. The tribunal met in

The Treaty of 1825 had provided that the southern boundary should follow the Portland Canal to the

fiftysixth parallel of latitude and thence the summits of the mountains parallel to the coast, with the

stipulation that if the summit of the mountains anywhere proved to be more than ten marine leagues from the

ocean, a line drawn parallel to the windings of the coast not more than ten leagues distant should form the

boundary. Three questions arose: What was the Portland Canal? Did the treaty assure Russia an unbroken

strip by making the boundary run round the ends of deep inlets? Did mountains exist parallel to the coast

within ten leagues' distance? In October these questions received their answer. Lord Alverstone and the three

American members decided in favor of the United States on the main issues. The two Canadian,

representatives refused to sign the award and denounced it as unjudicial and unwarranted.

The decision set Canada aflame. Lord Alverstone was denounced in unmeasured terms. From Atlantic to

Pacific the charge was echoed that once more the interests of Canada had been sacrificed by Britain on the

altar of AngloAmerican friendship. The outburst was not understood abroad. It was not, as United States

opinion imagined, merely childish petulance or the whining of a poor loser. It was against Great Britain, not

against the United States, that the criticism was directed. It was not the decision, but the way in which it was

made, that roused deep anger. The decision on the main issue, that the line ran back of even the deepest inlets

and barred Canada from a single harbor, though unwelcome, was accepted as a judicial verdict and has since

been little questioned. The finding that the boundary should follow certain mountains behind those Canada

urged, but short of the ten league line, was attacked by the Canadian representatives as a compromise, and its

judicial character is certainly open to some doubt. But it was on the third finding that the thunders broke. The

United States had contended that the Portland Channel of the treaty makers ran south of four islands which

lay east of Prince of Wales Island, and Canada that it ran north of these islands. Lord Alverstone, after joining

in a judgment with the Canadian commissioners that it ran north, suddenly, without any conference with

them, and, as the wording of the award showed, by agreement with the United States representatives,

announced that it ran where no one had ever suggested it could run, north of two and south of two, thus

dividing the land in dispute. The islands were of little importance even strategically, but the incontrovertible

evidence that instead of a judicial finding a political compromise had been effected was held of much

importance. After a time the storm died down, but it revealed one unmistakable fact: Canadian nationalism

The relations between Canada and the United States now came to show the effect of increasingly close

business connections. The northward trek of tens of thousands of American farmers was under way. United

States capitalists began to invest heavily in farm and timber lands. Factory after factory opened a Canadian

branch. Ten years later these investments exceeded six hundred millions. In the West, James J. Hill was

planning the expansion of the Great Northern system throughout the prairie provinces and was securing an

interest in the great Crow's Nest Pass coal fields. Tourist travel multiplied. The two peoples came to know

each other better than ever before, and with knowledge many prejudices and misunderstandings vanished.

Canada's growing prosperity did not merely bring greater individual intercourse; it made the United States as

a whole less patronizing in its dealings with its neighbor and Canada less querulous and thinskinned.

In this more favorable temper many old issues were cleared off the slate. The northeastern fisheries question,

revived by a conflict between Newfoundland and the United States as to treaty privileges, was referred to the

Hague Court in 1909. The verdict of the arbitrators recognized a measure of right in the contentions of both

sides. A detailed settlement was prescribed which was accepted without demur in the United States,

Newfoundland, and Canada alike. Pelagic sealing in the North Pacific was barred in 1911 by an international

agreement between the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Russia. Less success attended the attempt to

arrange joint action to regulate and conserve the fisheries of the Great Lakes and the salmon fisheries of the

Pacific, for the treaty drawn up in 1911 by the experts from both countries failed to pass the United States

But the most striking development of the decade was the businesslike and neighborly solution found for the

settlement of the boundary waters controversy. The growing demands for the use of streams such as the

Niagara, the St. Lawrence, and the Sault for power purposes, and of western border rivers for irrigation

schemes, made it essential to take joint action to reconcile not merely the conflicting claims from the opposite

sides of the border but the conflicting claims of power and navigation and other interests in each country. In

1905 a temporary waterways commission was appointed, and four years later the Boundary Waters Treaty

provided for the establishment of a permanent Joint High Commission, consisting of three representatives

from each country, and with authority over all cases of use, obstruction, or diversion of border waters.

Individual citizens of either country were allowed to present their case directly before the Commission, an

innovation in international practice. Still more significant of the new spirit was the inclusion in this treaty of a

clause providing for reference to the Commission, with the consent of the United States Senate and the

Dominion Cabinet, of any matter whatever at issue between the two countries. With little discussion and as a

matter of course, the two democracies, in the closing years of a full century of peace, thus made provision for

The chief barrier to good relations was the customs tariff. Protectionism, and the attitude of which it was born

and which it bred in turn, was still firmly entrenched in both countries. Tariff bars, it is true, had not been

able to prevent the rapid growth of trade; imports from the United States to Canada had grown especially fast

and Canada now ranked third in the list of the Republic's customers. Yet in many ways the tariff hindered

free intercourse. Though every dictate of selfinterest and good sense demanded a reduction of duties,

Canada would not and did not take the initiative. Time and again she had sought reciprocity, only to have her

proposals rejected, often with contemptuous indifference. When Sir Wilfrid Laurier announced in 1900 that

there would be no more pilgrimages to Washington, he voiced the almost unanimous opinion of a people

Meanwhile protectionist sentiment had grown stronger in Canada. The opening of the West had given an

expanding market for eastern factories and had seemingly justified the National Policy. The Liberals, the

traditional upholders of freer trade, after some initial redemptions of their pledges, had compromised with the

manufacturing interests. The Conservatives, still more protectionist in temper, voiced in Parliament little

criticism of this policy, and the free trade elements among the farmers were as yet unorganized and

inarticulate. Signs of this protectionist revival, which had in it, as in the seventies, an element of nationalism,

were many. A fourstory tariff was erected. The lowest rates were those granted the United Kingdom; then

came the intermediate tariff, for the products of countries giving Canada special terms; next the general tariff;

and, finally, the surtax for use against powers discriminating in any special degree against the Dominion. The

provinces one by one forbade the export of pulp wood cut on Crown Lands, in order to assure its manufacture

into wood pulp or paper in Canada. The Dominion in 1907 secured the abrogation of the postal convention

made with the United States in 1875 providing for the reciprocal free distribution of second class mail matter

originating in the other country. This step was taken at the instance of Canadian manufacturers, alarmed at

the effect of the advertising pages of United States magazines in directing trade across the line. Yet even with

In the United States the tendency was in the other direction. With the growth of cities, the interests of the

consumers of foods outweighed the influence of the producers. Manufacturers in many cases had reached the

export stage, where foreign markets, cheap food, and cheap raw materials were more necessary than a

protected home market. The "muckrakers" were at the height of their activity; and the tariff, as one

instrument of corruption and privilege, was suffering with the popular condemnation of all big interests.

United States newspapers were eager for free wood pulp and cheaper paper, just as Canadian newspapers

defended the policy of checking export. It was not surprising, therefore, that reciprocity with Canada, as one

means of increasing trade and reducing the tariff, took on new popularity. New England was the chief seat of

the movement, with Henry M. Whitney and Eugene N. Foss as its most persistent advocates. Detroit,

Official action soon followed this unofficial campaign. Curiously enough, it came as an unexpected

byproduct of a further experiment in protection, the PayneAldrich tariff. For the first time in the

experience of the United States this tariff incorporated the principle of minimum and maximum schedules.

The maximum rates, fixed at twentyfive per cent ad valorem above the normal or minimum rates, were to be

enforced upon the goods of any country which had not, before March 10, 1910, satisfied the President that it

did not discriminate against the products of the United States. One by one the various nations demonstrated

this to President Taft's satisfaction or with wry faces made the readjustments necessary. At last Canada alone

remained. The United States conceded that the preference to the United Kingdom did not constitute

discrimination, but it insisted that it should enjoy the special rates recently extended to France by treaty. In

Canada this demand was received with indignation. Its tariff rates were much lower than those which the

United States imposed, and its purchases in that country were twice as great as its sales. The demand was

based on a sudden and complete reversal of the traditional American interpretation of the most favored nation

policy. The President admitted the force of Canada's contentions, but the law left him no option. Fortunately

it did leave him free to decide as to the adequacy of any concessions, and thus agreement was made possible

at the eleventh hour. At the President's suggestion a conference at Albany was arranged, and on the 30th of

March a bargain was struck. Canada conceded to the United States its intermediate tariff rates on thirteen

minor scheduleschinaware, nuts, prunes, and whatnot. These were accepted as equivalent to the special

terms given France, and Canada was certified as being entitled to minimum rates. The United States had

saved its face. Then to complete the comedy, Canada immediately granted the same concessions to all other

countries, that is, made the new rates part of the general tariff. The United States ended where it began, in

receipt of no special concessions. The motions required had been gone through; phantom reductions had been

This was only the beginning of attempts at accommodation. The threat of tariff war had called forth in the

United States loud protests against any such reversion to economic barbarism. President Taft realized that he

had antagonized the growing lowtariff sentiment of the country by his support of the PayneAldrich tariff

and was eager to set himself right. A week before the March negotiations were concluded, a Democratic

candidate had carried a strongly Republican congressional district in Massachusetts on a platform of

reciprocity with Canada. The President, therefore, proposed a bold stroke. He made a sweeping offer of better

trade relations. Negotiations were begun at Ottawa and concluded in Washington. In January, 1911,

announcement was made that a broad agreement had been effected. Grain, fruit, and vegetables, dairy and

most farm products, fish, hewn timber and sawn lumber, and several minerals were put on the free list. A few

manufactures were also made free, and the duties on meats, flour, coal, agricultural implements, and other

products were substantially reduced. The compact was to be carried out, not by treaty, but by concurrent

legislation. Canada was to extend the same terms to the most favored nations by treaty, and to all parts of the

For fifty years the administrations of the two countries had never been so nearly at one. More difficulty was

met with in the legislatures. In Congress, farmers and fishermen, standpat Republicans and Progressives

hostile to the Administration, waged war against the bargain. It was only in a special session, and with the aid

of Democratic votes and a Washington July sun, that the opposition was overcome. In the Canadian

Parliament, after some initial hesitation, the Conservatives attacked the proposal. The Government had a safe

majority, but the Opposition resorted to obstruction; and late in July, Parliament was suddenly dissolved and

When the bargain was first concluded, the Canadian Government had imagined it would meet little

opposition, for it was precisely the type of agreement that Government after Government, Conservative as

well as Liberal, had sought in vain for over forty years. For a day or two that expectation was justified. Then

the forces of opposition rallied, timid questioning gave way to violent denunciation, and at last agreement and

One reason for this result was that the verdict was given in a general election, not in a referendum. The fate of

the Government was involved; its general record was brought up for review; party ambitions and passions

were stirred to the utmost. Fifteen years, of officeholding had meant the accumulation of many scandals, a

slackening in administrative efficiency, and the cooling by official compromise of the ardent faith of the

Liberalism of the earlier day. The Government had failed to bring in enough new blood. The Opposition

fought with the desperation of fifteen years of fasting and was better served by its press.

Of the side issues introduced into the campaign, the most important were the naval policy in Quebec and the

racial and religious issue in the Englishspeaking provinces. The Government had to face what Sir Wilfrid

Laurier termed "the unholy alliance" of Roman Catholic Nationalists under Bourassa in Quebec and

Protestant Imperialists in Ontario. In the Frenchspeaking districts the Government was denounced for

allowing Canada to be drawn into the vortex of militarism and imperialism and for sacrificing the interests of

Roman Catholic schools in the West. On every hand the naval policy was attacked as inevitably bringing in

its train conscription to fight European wars a contention hotly denied by the Liberals. The Conservative

campaign managers made a working arrangement with the Nationalists as to candidates and helped liberally

in circulating Bourassa's newspaper, Le Devoir. On the back "concessions" of Ontario a quieter but no less

effective campaign was carried on against the domination of Canadian politics by a French Roman Catholic

province and a French Roman Catholic Prime Minister. In vain the Liberals appealed to national unity or

started back fires in Ontario by insisting that a vote for Borden meant a vote for Bourassa. The

ConservativeNationalist alliance cost the Government many seats in Quebec and apparently did not frighten

Reciprocity, however, was the principal issue everywhere except in Quebec. Powerful forces were arrayed

against it. Few manufactures had been put on the free list, but the argument that the reciprocity agreement

was the thin edge of the wedge rallied the organized manufacturers in almost unbroken hostile array. The

railways, fearful that western traffic would be diverted to United States roads, opposed the agreement

vigorously under the leadership of the exAmerican chairman of the board of directors of the Canadian

Pacific, Sir William Van Horne, who made on this occasion one of his few public entries into politics. The

banks, closely involved in the manufacturing and railway interests, threw their weight in the same direction.

They were aided by the prevalence of protectionist sentiment in the eastern cities and industrial towns, which

were at the same stage of development and in the same mood as the cities of the United States some decades

earlier. The Liberal fifteenyear compromise with protection made it difficult in a seven weeks' campaign to

revive a desire for freer trade. The prosperity of the country and the cry, "Let well enough alone," told

powerfully against the bargain. Yet merely from the point of view of economic advantage, the popular verdict

would probably have been in its favor. The United States market no longer loomed so large as it had in the

eighties, but its value was undeniable. Farmer, fisherman, and miner stood to gain substantially by the

lowering of the bars into the richest market in the world. Every farm paper in Canada and all the important

farm organizations supported reciprocity. Its opponents, therefore, did not trust to a direct frontal attack.

Their strategy was to divert attention from the economic advantages by raising the cry of political danger.

The red herring of annexation was drawn across the trail, and many a farmer followed it to the polling booth.

From the outset, then, the opponents of reciprocity concentrated their attacks on its political perils. They

denounced the reciprocity agreement as the forerunner of annexation, the deathblow to Canadian nationality

and British connection. They prophesied that the trade and intercourse built up between the East and the West

of Canada by years of sacrifice and striving would shrivel away, and that each section of the Dominion would

become a mere appendage to the adjacent section of the United States. Where the treasure was, there would

the heart be also. After some years of reciprocity, the channels of Canadian trade would be so changed that a

sudden return to high protection on the part of the United States would disrupt industry and a mere threat of

This prophecy was strengthened by apposite quotations showing the existing drift of opinion in the United

States. President Taft's reference to the "light and imperceptible bond uniting the Dominion with the mother

country" and his "parting of the ways" speech received sinister interpretations. Speaker Champ Clark's

announcement that he was in favor of the agreement because he hoped "to see the day when the American

flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions" was worth tens of thousands

of votes. The antireciprocity press of Canada seized upon these utterances, magnified them, and sometimes,

it was charged, inspired or invented them. Every American crossroads politician who found a useful

peroration in a vision of the Stars and Stripes floating from Panama to the North Pole was represented as a

statesman of national power voicing a universal sentiment. The action of the Hearst papers in sending

proreciprocity editions into the border cities of Canada made many votesbut not for reciprocity. The

Canadian public proved that it was unable to suffer fools gladly. It was vain to argue that all men of weight in

the United States had come to understand and to respect Canada's independent ambitions; that in any event it

was not what the United States thought but what Canada thought that mattered; or that the Canadian farmer

who sold a bushel of good wheat to a United States miller no more sold his loyalty with it than a Kipling

selling a volume of verse or a Canadian financier selling a block of stock in the same market. The flag was

waved, and the Canadian voter, mindful of former American slights and backed by newly arrived Englishmen

admirably organized by the antireciprocity forces, turned against any "entangling alliance." The prosperity

of the country made it safe to express resentment of the slights of half a century or fear of this too sudden

The result of the elections, which were held on September 21, 1911, was the crushing defeat of the Liberal

party. A Liberal majority of fortyfour in a house of two hundred and twentyone members was turned into a

Conservative majority of fortynine. Eight cabinet ministers went down to defeat. The Government had a

slight majority in the Maritime Provinces and Quebec, and a large majority in the prairie West, but the

overwhelming victory of the Opposition in Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia turned the day.

The appeal to loyalty revealed much that was worthy and much that was sordid in Canadian life. It was well

that a sturdy national selfreliance should be developed and expressed in the face of American prophets of

"manifest destiny," and that men should be ready to set ideals above pocket. It was unfortunate that in order

to demonstrate a loyalty which might have been taken for granted economic advantage was sacrificed; and it

was disturbing to note the ease with which big interests with unlimited funds for organizing, advertising, and

newspaper campaigning, could pervert national sentiment to serve their own ends. Yet this was possibly a

stage through which Canada, like every young nation, had to pass; and the gentle art of twisting the lion's tail

The growth of Canada brought her into closer touch with lands across the sea. Men, money, and merchandise

came from East and West; and with their coming new problems faced the Government of the Dominion. With

Europe they were trade questions to solve, and with Asia the more delicate issues arising out of oriental

In 1907 the Canadian Government had established an intermediate tariff, with rates halfway between the

general and the British preferential tariffs, for the express purpose of bargaining with other powers. In that

year an agreement based substantially on these intermediate rates was negotiated with France, though

protectionist opposition in the French Senate prevented ratification until 1910. Similar reciprocal

arrangements were concluded in 1910 with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy. The manner of the

negotiation was as significant as the matter. In the case of France the treaty was negotiated in Paris by two

Canadian ministers, W.S. Fielding and L.P. Brodeur, appointed plenipotentiaries of His Majesty for that

purpose, with the British Ambassador associated in what Mr. Arthur Balfour termed a "purely technical"

capacity. In the case of the other countries even this formal recognition of the old colonial status was

abandoned. The agreement with Italy was negotiated in Canada between "the Royal Consul of Italy for

Canada, representing the government of the Kingdom of Italy, and the Minister of Finance of Canada,

representing His Excellency the Governor General acting in conjunction with the King's Privy Council for

Canada." The conclusions in these later instances were embodied in conventions, rather than formal treaties.

With one country, however, tariff war reigned instead of treaty peace. In 1899 Germany subjected Canadian

exports to her general or maximum tariff, because the Dominion refused to grant her the preferential rates

reserved for members of the British Empire group of countries. After four years' deliberation Canada

eventually retaliated by imposing on German goods a special surtax of thirtythree and onethird per cent.

The trade of both countries suffered, but Germany's, being more specialized, much the more severely. After

seven years' strife, Germany took the initiative in proposing a truce. In 1910 Canada agreed to admit German

goods at the rates of the generalnot the intermediatetariff, while Germany in return waived her protest

against the British preference and granted minimum rates on the most important Canadian exports.

Oriental immigration had been an issue in Canada ever since Chinese navvies had been imported in the early

eighties to work on the government sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mine owners, fruit farmers,

and contractors were anxious that the supply should continue unchecked; but, as in the United States, the

economic objections of the labor unions and the political objections of the advocates of a "White Canada"

Chinese immigration had been restricted in 1885 by a head tax of $50 on all immigrants save officials,

merchants, or scholars; in 1901 this tax was doubled; and in 1904 it was raised to $500. In each case the tax

proved a barrier only for a year or two, when wages would rise sufficiently to warrant Orientals paying the

higher toll to enter the Promised Land. Japanese immigrants did not come in large numbers until 1906, when

the activities of employment companies brought seven thousand Japanese by way of Hawaii. Agitators from

.the Pacific States fanned the flames of opposition in British Columbia, and antiChinese and antiJapanese

riots broke out in Vancouver in 1907. The Dominion Government then grappled with the question. Japan's

national sensitiveness and her position as an ally of Great Britain called for diplomatic handling. A member

of the Dominion Cabinet, Rodolphe Lemieux, succeeded in 1907 in negotiating at Tokio an agreement by

which Japan herself undertook to restrict the number of passports issued annually to emigrants to Canada.

The Hindu migration, which began in 1907, gave rise to a still more delicate situation. What did the British

Empire mean, many a Hindu asked, if British subjects were to be barred from British lands? The only reply

was that the British Government which still ruled India no longer ruled the Dominions, and that it was on the

Dominions that the responsibility for the exclusion policy must rest. In 1909 Canada suggested that the

Indian Government itself should limit emigration, but this policy did not meet with approval at the time.

Failing in this measure, the Laurier Government fell back on a general clause in the Immigration Act

prohibiting the entrance of immigrants except by direct passage from the country of origin and on a

continuous ticket, a rule which effectually barred the Hindu because of the lack of any direct steamship line

between India and Canada. An OrderinCouncil further required that immigrants from all Asiatic countries

must possess at least $200 on entering Canada. The Borden Government supplemented these restrictions by a

special OrderinCouncil in 1913 prohibiting the landing of artisans or unskilled laborers of any race at ports

in British Columbia, ostensibly because of depression in the labor market. The leaders of the Hindu

movement, with apparently some German assistance, determined to test these restrictions. In May, 1914,

there arrived at Vancouver from Shanghai a Japanese ship carrying four hundred Sikhs from India. A few

were admitted, as having been previously domiciled in Canada; the others, after careful inquiry, were refused

admittance and ordered to be deported. Local police were driven away from the ship when attempting to

enforce the order, and the Government ordered H.M.C.S. Rainbow to intervene. By a curious irony of history,

the first occasion on which this first Canadian warship was called on to display force was in expelling from

Canada the subjects of another part of the British Empire. Further trouble followed when the Sikhs reached

Calcutta in September, 1914, for riots took place involving serious loss of life and later an abortive attempt at

rebellion. Fortunately there were good prospects that the Indian Government would in future accept the

proposal made by Canada in 1909. At the Imperial Conference of 1917, where representatives of India were

present for the first time, it was agreed to recommend the principle of reciprocity in the treatment of

immigrants, India thus being free to save her pride by imposing on men from the Dominions the same

But all these dealings with lands across the sea paled into insignificance beside the task imposed on Canada

by the Great War. In the sudden crisis the Dominion attained a place among the nations which the slower

When the war party in Germany and AustriaHungary plunged Europe into the struggle the world had long

been fearing, there was not a moment's hesitation on the part of the people of Canada. It was not merely the

circumstance that technically Canada was at war when Britain was at war that led Canadians to instant action.

The degree of participation, if not the fact of war, was wholly a matter for the separate Dominions. It was the

deep and abiding sympathy with the mother country whose very existence was to be at stake. Later, with the

unfolding of Germany's full designs of world dominance and the repeated display of her callous and ruthless

policies, Canada comprehended the magnitude of the danger threatening all the world and grimly set herself

On August 1, 1914, two days before Belgium was invaded, and three days before war between Britain and

Germany had been declared, the Dominion Government cabled to London their firm assurance that the

people of Canada would make every sacrifice necessary to secure the integrity and honor of the Empire and

asked for suggestions as to the form aid should take. The financial and administrative measures the

emergency demanded were carried out by OrdersinCouncil in accordance with the scheme of defense

which only a few months before had been drawn up in a "War Book". Two weeks later, Parliament met in a

special four day session and without a dissenting voice voted the war credits the Government asked and

conferred upon it special war powers of the widest scope. The country then set about providing men, money,

The day after war was declared, recruiting was begun for an expeditionary force of 21,000 men. Half as many

more poured into the camp at Valcartier near Quebec; and by the middle of October this first Canadian

contingent, over 30,000 strong, the largest body of troops which had ever crossed the Atlantic, was already in

England, where its training was to be completed. As the war went on and all previous forecasts of its duration

and its scale were far outrun, these numbers were multiplied many times. By the summer of 1917 over

400,000 men had been enrolled for service, and over 340,000 had already gone overseas, aside from over

Naturally enough it was the young men of British birth who first responded in large numbers to the recruiting

officer's appeal. A military background, vivid home memories, the enlistment of kinsmen or friends overseas,

the frequent slightness of local ties, sent them forth in splendid and steady array. Then the call came home to

the nativeborn, and particularly to Canadians of English speech. Few of them had dreamed of war, few had

been trained even in militia musters; but in tens of thousands they volunteered. From Frenchspeaking

Canada the response was slower, in spite of the endeavors of the leaders of the Opposition as well as of the

Government to encourage enlistment. In some measure this was only to be expected. Quebec was dominantly

rural; its men married young, and the country parishes had little touch with the outside world. Its people had

no racial sympathy with Britain and their connection with France had long been cut by the cessation of

immigration from that country. Yet this is not the complete explanation of that aloofness which marked a

great part of Quebec. Account must be taken also of the resentment caused by exaggerated versions of the

treatment accorded the FrenchCanadian minority in the schools of Ontario and the West, and especially of

the teaching of the Nationalists, led by Henri Bourassa, who opposed active Canadian participation in the

war. Lack of tact on the part of the Government and reckless taunts from extremists in Ontario made the

breach steadily wider. Yet there were many encouraging considerations. Another grandson of the leader of

'37, Talbot Papineau, fell fighting bravely, and it was a FrenchCanadian battalion, Les Vingt Deuxiemes,

When the war first broke out, no one thought of any but voluntary methods of enlistment. As the magnitude

of the task came home to men and the example of Great Britain had its influence, voices began to be raised in

favor of compulsion. Sir Robert Borden, the Premier, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier alike opposed the suggestion.

Early in 1917 the adoption of conscription in the United States, and the need of reenforcements for the

Canadian forces at the front led the Prime Minister, immediately after his return from the Imperial

Conference in London, to bring down a measure for compulsory service. He urged in behalf of this course

that the need for men was urgent beyond all question; that the voluntary system, wasteful and unfair at best,

had ceased to bring more than six or seven thousand men a month, chiefly for other than infantry ranks; and

that only by compulsion could Quebec be brought to shoulder her fair share and the slackers in all the

provinces be made to rise to the need. It was contended, on the other hand, that great as was the need for men,

the need for food, which Canada could best of all countries supply, was greater still; that voluntary recruiting

had yielded over four hundred thousand men, proportionately equivalent to six million from the United

States, and was slackening only because the reservoir was nearly drained dry; and that Quebec could be

The issue of conscription brought to an end the political truce which had been declared in August, 1914. The

keener partisans on both sides had not long been able to abide on the heights of nonpolitical patriotism

which they had occupied in the first generous weeks of the war. But the public was weary of party cries and

called for unity. Suggestions of a coalition were made at different times, but the party in power, new to the

sweets of office, confident of its capacity, and backed by a strong majority, gave little heed to the demand.

Now, however, the strong popular opposition offered to the announcement of conscription led the Prime

Minister to propose to Sir Wilfrid Laurier a coalition Government on a conscription basis. Sir Wilfrid, while

continuing to express his desire to cooperate in any way that would advance the common cause, declined to

enter a coalition to carry out a programme decided upon without consultation and likely, in his view, to wreck

national unity without securing any compensating increase in numbers beyond what a vigorous and

For months negotiations continued within Parliament and without. The Military Service Act was passed in

August, 1917, with the support of the majority of the Englishspeaking members of the Opposition. Then the

Government, which had already secured the passage of an Act providing for taking the votes of the soldiers

overseas, forced through under closure a measure depriving of the franchise all aliens of enemy birth or

speech who had been admitted to citizenship since 1902, and giving a vote to every adult woman relative of a

soldier on active service. Victory for the Government now appeared certain. Leading Englishpeaking

Liberals, particularly from the West, convinced that conscription was necessary to keep Canada's forces up to

the need, or that the War Times Election Act made opposition hopeless, decided to accept Sir Robert

In the election of December, 1917, in which passion and prejudice were stirred as never before in the history

of Canada, the Unionist forces won by a sweeping majority. Ontario and the West were almost solidly behind

the Government in the number of members elected, Quebec as solidly against it, and the Maritime Provinces

nearly evenly divided. The soldiers' vote, contrary to Australian experience, was overwhelmingly for

conscription. The Laurier Liberals polled more civilian votes in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British

Columbia, and in the Dominion as a whole, than the united Liberal party had received in the Reciprocity

election of 1911. The increase in the Unionist popular vote was still greater, however, and gave the

Government fiftyeight per cent of the popular vote and sixtyfive per cent of the seats in the House.

Confidence in the administrative capacity of the new Government, the belief that it would be more vigorous

in carrying on the war, the desire to make Quebec do its share, the influence of the leaders of the Western

Liberals and of the Grain Growers' Associations, wholesale promises of exemption to farmers, and the

working of the new franchise law all had their part in the result. Eight months after the Military Service Act

was passed, it had added only twenty thousand men to the nearly five hundred thousand volunteers; but steps

were then taken to cancel exemptions and to simplify the machinery of administration. Some eighty thousand

men were raised under conscription, but the war, so far as Canada was concerned, was fought and won by

"The selfgoverning British colonies," wrote Bernhardi before the war, "have at their disposal a militia,

which is sometimes only in process of formation. They can be completely ignored so far as concerns any

European theater of war." This contemptuous forecast might have been justified had German expectations of

a short war been fulfilled. Though large and increasing sums had in recent years been spent on the Canadian

militia and on a small permanent force, the work of building up an army on the scale the war demanded had

virtually to be begun from the foundation. It was pushed ahead with vigor, under the direction, for the first

three years, of the Minister of Militia, General Sir Sam Hughes. Many mistakes were made. Complaints of

waste in supply departments and of slackness of discipline among the troops were rife in the early months.

But the work went on; and when the testing time came, Canada's civilian soldiers held their own with any

It was in April, 1915, at the second battle of Ypresor, as it is more often termed in Canada, St. Julien or

Langemarckthat the quality of the men of the first contingent was blazoned forth. The Germans had

launched a determined attack on the junction of the French and Canadian forces, seeking to drive through to

Calais. The use, for the first time, of asphyxiating gases drove back in confusion the French colonial troops

on the left of the Canadians. Attacked and outflanked by a German army of 150,000 men, four Canadian

brigades, immensely inferior in heavy artillery and tortured by the poisonous fumes, filled the gap, hanging

on doggedly day and night until reenforcements came and Calais was saved. In sober retrospection it was

almost incredible that the thin khaki line had held against the overwhelming odds which faced it. A few

weeks later, at Givenchy and Festubert, in the same bloody salient of Ypres, the Canadian division displayed

equal courage with hardly equal success. In the spring of 1916, when the Canadian forces grew first to three

and then to four divisions, heavy toll was taken at St. Eloi and Sanctuary Wood.

When they were shifted from the Ypres sector to the Somme, the dashing success at Courcelette showed them

as efficient in offense as in defense. In 1917 a Canadian general, Sir Arthur Currie, three years before only a

business man of Vancouver, took command of the Canadian troops. The capture of Vimy Ridge, key to the

whole Arras position, after months of careful preparation, the hardfought struggle for Lens, and toward the

close of the year the winning of the Passchendaele Ridge, at heavy cost, were instances of the increasing

In the closing year of the war the Canadian corps played a still more distinctive and essential part. During the

early months of 1918, when the Germans were making their desperate thrusts for Paris and the Channel, the

Canadians held little of the line that was attacked. Their divisions had been withdrawn in turn for special

training in open warfare movements, in close cooperation with tanks and air forces. When the time came to

launch the Allied offensive, they were ready. It was Canadian troops who broke the hitherto unbreakable

Wotan line, or DrocourtQueant switch; it was Canadians who served as the spearhead in the decisive thrust

against Cambrai; and it was Canadians who captured Mons, the last German stronghold taken before the

armistice was signed, and thus ended the war at the very spot where the British "Old Contemptibles" had

Through all the years of war the Canadian forces never lost a gun nor retired from a position they had

consolidated. Canadians were the first to practice trench raiding; and Canadian cadets thronged that branch of

the service, the Royal Flying Corps, where steady nerves and individual initiative were at a premium. In

countless actions they proved their fitness to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best that Britain and France

and the United States could send: they asked no more than that. The casualty list of 220,000 men, of whom

60,000 sleep forever in the fields of France and Flanders and in the plains of England, witnesses the price this

people of eight millions paid as its share in the task of freeing the world from tyranny.

The realization that in a world war not merely the men in the trenches but the whole nation could and must be

counted as part of the fighting force was slow in coming in Canada as in other democratic and unwarlike

lands. Slowly the industry of the country was adjusted to a war basis. When the conflict broke out, the

country was pulling itself together after the sudden collapse of the speculative boom of the preceding decade.

For a time men were content to hold their organization together and to avert the slackening of trade and the

spread of unemployment which they feared. Then, as the industrial needs and opportunities of the war

became clear, they rallied. Field and factory vied in expansion, and the Canadian contribution of food and

munitions provided a very substantial share of the Allies' needs. Exports increased threefold, and the total

The financing of the war and of the industrial expansion which accompanied it was a heavy task. For years

Canada had looked to Great Britain for a large share alike of public and of private borrowings. Now it

became necessary not merely to find at home all the capital required for ordinary development but to meet the

burden of war expenditure, and later to advance to Great Britain the funds she required for her purchase of

supplies in Canada. The task was made easier by the effective working of a banking system which had many

times proved its soundness and its flexibility. When the money market of Britain was no longer open to

overseas borrowers, the Dominion first turned to the United States, where several federal and provincial loans

were floated, and later to her own resources. Domestic loans were issued on an increasing scale and with

increasing success, and the Victory Loan of 1918 enrolled one out of every eight Canadians among its

subscribers. Taxation reached an adequate basis more slowly. Inertia and the influence of business interests

led the Government to cling for the first two years to customs and excise duties as its main reliance. Then

excess profits and income taxes of steadily increasing weight were imposed, and the burdens were distributed

more fairly. The Dominion was able not only to meet the whole expenditure of its armed forces but to reverse

the relations which existed before the war and to become, as far as current liabilities went, a creditor rather

It was not merely the financial relations of Canada with the United Kingdom which required readjustment.

The service and the sacrifices which the Dominions had made in the common cause rendered it imperative

that the political relations between the different parts of the Empire should be put on a more definite and

equal basis. The feeling was widespread that the last remnants of the old colonial subordination must be

removed and that the control exercised by the Dominions should be extended over the whole field of foreign

The Imperial Conference met in London in the spring of 1917. At special War Cabinet meetings the

representatives of the Dominions discussed war plans and peace terms with the leaders of Britain. It was

decided to hold a Conference immediately after the end of the war to discuss the future constitutional

organization of the Empire. Premier Borden and General Smuts both came out strongly against the projects of

imperial parliamentary federation which aggressive organizations in Britain and in some of the Dominions

had been urging. The Conference of 1917 recorded its view that any coming readjustment must be based on a

full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an imperial commonwealth; that it should

recognize the right of the Dominions and of India to an adequate voice in foreign policy; and that it should

provide effective arrangements for continuous consultation in all important matters of common concern and

for such concerted action as the several Governments should determine. The policy of alliance, of

cooperation between the Governments of the equal and independent states of the Empire, searchingly tested

The coming of peace gave occasion for a wider and more formal recognition of the new international status

of the Dominions. It had first been proposed that the British Empire should appear as a unit, with the

representatives of the Dominions present merely in an advisory capacity or participating in turn as members

of the British delegation. The Dominion statesmen assembled in London and Paris declined to assent to this

proposal, and insisted upon representation in the Peace Conference and in the League of Nations in their own

right. The British Government, after some debate, acceded, and, with more difficulty, the consent of the

leading Allies was won. The representatives of the Dominions signed the treaty with Germany on behalf of

their respective countries, and each Dominion, with India, was made a member of the League. At the same

time only the British Empire, and not any of the Dominions, was given a place in the real organ of power, the

Executive Council of the League, and in many respects the exact relationship between the United Kingdom

and the other parts of the Empire in international affairs was left ambiguous, for later events and counsel to

determine. Many French and American observers who had not kept in close touch with the growth of national

consciousness within the British Empire were apprehensive lest this plan should prove a deeplaid scheme

for multiplying British influence in the Conference and the League. Some misunderstanding was natural in

view not only of the unprecedented character of the Empire's development and polity, but of the incomplete

and ambiguous nature of the compromise affected at Paris between the nationalist and the imperialist

tendencies within the Empire. Yet the reluctance of the British imperialists of the straiter sect to accede to the

new arrangement, and the independence of action of the Dominion representatives at the Conference, as in

the stand of Premier Hughes of Australia on the Japanese demand for recognition of racial equality and in the

statement of protest by General Smuts of South Africa on signing the treaty, made it clear that the Dominions

would not be merely echoes. Borden and Botha and Smuts, though new to the ways of diplomacy, proved

that in clear understanding of the broader issues and in moderation of policy and temper they could bear

The war also brought changes in the relations between Canada and her great neighbor. For a time there was

danger that it would erect a barrier of differing ideals and contrary experience. When month after month went

by with the United States still clinging to its policy of neutrality, while long lists of wounded and dead and

missing were filling Canadian newspapers, a quiet but deep resentment, not without a touch of conscious

superiority, developed in many quarters in the Dominion. Yet there were others who realized how difficult

and how necessary it was for the United States to attain complete unity of purpose before entering the war,

and how different its position was from that. of Canada, where the political tie with Britain had brought

immediate action more instinctive than reasoned. It was remembered, too, that in the first 360,000 Canadians

who went overseas, there were 12,000 men of American birth, including both residents in Canada and men

who had crossed the border to enlist. When the patience of the United States was at last exhausted and it took

its place in the ranks of the nations fighting for freedom, the joy of Canadians was unbounded. The entrance

of the United States into the war assured not only the triumph of democracy in Europe but the continuance

and extension of frank and friendly relations between the democracies of North America. As the war went on

and Canada and the United States were led more and more to pool their united resources, to cooperate in

finance and in the supply of coal, iron, steel, wheat, and other war essentials, countless new strands were

woven into the bond that held the two countries together. Nor was it material unity alone that was attained; in

the utterances of the head of the Republic the highest aspirations of Canadians for the future ordering of the

Canada had done what she could to assure the triumph of right in the war. Not less did she believe that she

had a contribution to make toward that new ordering of the world after the war which alone could

compensate her for the blood and treasure she had spent. It would be her mission to bind together in

friendship and common aspirations the two larger Englishspeaking states, with one of which she was linked

by history and with the other by geography. To the world in general Canada had to offer that achievement of

difference in unity, that reconciliation of liberty with peace and order, which the British Empire was

struggling to attain along paths in which the Dominion had been the chief pioneer. "In the British

Commonwealth of Nations," declared General Smuts, "this transition from the old legalistic idea of political

sovereignty based on force to the new social idea of constitutional freedom based on consent, has been

gradually evolving for more than a century. And the elements of the future world government, which will no

longer rest on the imperial ideas adopted from the Roman law, are already in operation in our Commonwealth

of Nations and will rapidly develop in the near future." This may seem an idealistic aim; yet, as Canada's

Prime Minister asked a New York audience in 1916, "What great and enduring achievement has the world

For the whole period since 1760 the most comprehensive and thorough work is "Canada and its Provinces",

edited by A. Shortt and A. G. Doughty, 23 vols. (1914). W. Kingsford's "History of Canada", 10 vols.

(18871898), is badly written but is an ample storehouse of material. The "Chronicles of Canada" series

(19141916) covers the whole field in a number of popular volumes, of which several are listed below. F. X.

Garneau's "Histoire du Canada" (18451848; new edition, edited by Hector Garneau, 1913), the classical

FrenchCanadian record of the development of Canada down to 1840, is able and moderate in tone, though

Of brief surveys of Canada's history the best are W. L. Grant's "History of Canada" (1914) and H. E.

The primary sources are abundant. The Dominion Archives have made a remarkable collection of original

official and private papers and of transcripts of documents from London and Paris. See D. W. Parker, "A

Guide to the Documents in the Manuscript Room at the Public Archives of Canada" (1914). Many of these

documents are calendared in the "Report on Canadian Archives" (1882 to date), and complete reprints,

systematically arranged and competently annotated, are being issued by the Archives Branch, of which A.

Shortt and A. G. Doughty, "Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada", 17591791, and

Doughty and McArthur, "Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada", 17911818, have

already appeared. A useful collection of speeches and dispatches is found in H. E. Egerton and W. L. Grant,

"Canadian Constitutional Development" (1907), and W. P. M. Kennedy has edited a somewhat larger

collection, "Documents of the Canadian Constitution", 17591915 (1918). The later Sessional Papers and

Hansards or Parliamentary Debates are easily accessible. Files of the older newspapers, such as the Halifax

"Chronicle" (1820 to date, with changes of title), Montreal "Gazette" (1778 to date), Toronto "Globe" (1844

to date), "Manitoba Free Press" (1879 to date), Victoria "Colonist" (1858 to date), are invaluable. "The

Dominion Annual Register and Review", ed. by H. J. Morgan, 8 vols. (18791887) and "The Canadian

Annual Review of Public Affairs", by John Castell Hopkins (1901 to date), are useful for the periods covered.

For the first chapter, Sir Charles P. Lucas, "A History of Canada", 17651812 (1909) and A. G. Bradley,

"The Making of Canada" (1908) are the best single volumes. William Wood, "The Father of British Canada"

("Chronicles of Canada", 1916), records Carleton's defense of Canada in the Revolutionary War; and Justin

H. Smith's "Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony" (1907) is a scholarly and detailed account of the same

period from an American standpoint. Victor Con's "The Province of Quebec and the Early American

Revolution" (1896), with a review of the same by Adam Shortt in the "Review of Historical Publications

Relating to Canada", vol. 1 (University of Toronto, 1897), and C. W. Alvord's "The Mississippi Valley in

British Politics", 2 vols. (1917) should be consulted for an interpretation of the Quebec Act. For the general

reader, W. S. Wallace's "The United Empire Loyalists" ("Chronicles of Canada", 1914) supersedes the earlier

Canadian compilations; C. H. Van Tyne's "The Loyalists in the American Revolution" (1902) and A. C.

Flick's "Loyalism in New York during the American Revolution" (1901) embody careful researches by two

American scholars. The War of 1812 is most competently treated by William Wood in "The War with the

United States" ("Chronicles of Canada", 1915); the naval aspects are sketched in Theodore Roosevelt's "The

Naval War of 1812" (1882) and analyzed scientifically in A. T. Mahan's "Sea Power in its Relations to the

For the period, 18151841, W. S. Wallace's "The Family Compact" ("Chronicles of Canada", 1915) and A.

D. De Celles's "The Patriotes of '37" ("Chronicles of Canada", 1916) are the most concise summaries. J. C.

Dent's "The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion" (1885) is biased but careful and readable. "William

Lyon Mackenzie", by Charles Lindsey, revised by G. G. S. Lindsey (1908), is a sober defense of Mackenzie

by his soninlaw and grandson. Robert Christie's "A History of the Late Province of Lower Canada", 6 vols.

(18481866) preserves much contemporary material. There are few secondary books taking the antipopular

side: T. C. Haliburton's "The Bubbles of Canada" (1839) records Sam Slick's opposition to reform; C. W.

Robinson's "Life of Sir John Beverley Robinson" (1904) is a lifeless record of the greatest Compact leader.

Lord Durham's "Report on the Affairs of British North America" (1839; available in Methuen reprint, 1902,

or with introduction and notes by Sir Charles Lucas, 3 vols., 1912) is indispensable. For the Union period

there are several political biographies available. G. M. Wrong's "The Earl of Elgin" (1905), John Lewis's

"George Brown" (1906), W. L. Grant's "The Tribune of Nova Scotia" ("Chronicles of Canada", 1915), J.

Pope's "Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir John Alexander Macdonald", 2 vols. (1894), J. Boyd's "Sir

George Etienne Cartier" (1914), and O. D. Skelton's "Life and Times of Sir A. T. Galt" (1919), cover the

political developments from various angles. A. H. U. Colquhoun's "The Fathers of Confederation"

("Chronicles of Canada", 1916) is a clear and impartial account of the achievement of Confederation; while

M. O. Hammond's "Canadian Confederation and its Leaders" (1917) records the service of each of its chief

For the years since Confederation biographies again give the most accessible record. Sir John S. Willison's

"Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal Party" (1903) is the best political biography yet written in Canada. Sir

Richard Cartwright's Reminiscences (1912) reflects that statesman's individual and pungent views of affairs,

while Sir Charles Tupper's "Recollections of Sixty Years" (1914) and John Castell Hopkins's "Life and Work

of Sir John Thompson" (1895) give a Conservative version of the period. Sir Joseph Pope's "The Day of Sir

John Macdonald" ("Chronicles of Canada", 1915), and O. D. Skelton's "The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier"

("Chronicles of Canada", 1916) between them cover the whole period briefly. L. J. Burpee's "Sandford

Fleming" (1915) is one of the few biographies dealing with industrial as distinct from political leaders.

Imperial relations may be studied in G. R. Parkin's "Imperial Federation, the Problem of National Unity"

(1892) and in L. Curtis's "The Problem of the Commonwealth" (1916), which advocate imperial federation,

and in R. Jebb's "The Britannic Question; a Survey of Alternatives" (1913), J. S. Ewart's "The Kingdom

Papers" (1912), and A. B. Keith's "Imperial Unity and the Dominions" (1916), which criticize that solution

from different standpoints. The "Reports" of the Imperial Conferences of 1887, 1894, 1897, 1902, 1907,

1911, 1917, are of much value. Relations with the United States are discussed judiciously in W. A. Dunning's

"The British Empire and the United States" (1914). Phases of Canada's recent development other than

political are covered best in the volumes of "Canada and its Provinces", a History of the Canadian people and

A useful guide to recent books dealing with Canadian history will be found in the annual "Review of

Historical Publications Relating to Canada", published by the University of Toronto (1896 to date).