British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854 Part 8

That is the confession of a man who has attempted the impossible, and who is being forced reluctantly to witness his own defeat. The ministry which he had created lacked the authority which can come only from the best political talent of a people acting in sympathy with the opinions of that people. He had, with great difficulty, found a House of a.s.sembly willing by a narrow majority to support him, but personal support is not in itself a political programme, and the fallacy of his calculations appeared when work in detail had to be accomplished. He had reprobated party, and he found in a party--narrower in practice even than that which he had displaced--the only possible foundation for his authority. He had come to Canada to complete the reconciliation of opposing races within the colony, and, when he left, the French seemed once more about to retreat into their old position of invincible hostility to all things British. The governor-generalship of Lord Metcalfe is almost the clearest ill.u.s.tration in the nineteenth century of the weakness of the doctrinaire in practical politics.

Unfortunately, the {186} doctrine which Metcalfe had strenuously enforced was backed by the highest of imperial authorities, and sanctioned by monarchy itself. In less than ten years after the Rebellion, the renovated theory of colonial autonomy had produced a new dilemma. It remained with Metcalfe's successor to decide whether Britain preferred a second rebellion and probable separation to a radical change of system.

[1] Kaye, _Life of Lord Metcalfe_, revised edition, ii. p. 313.

[2] _A View of Sir Charles Metcalfe's Government of Canada_, by a member of the Provincial Parliament, p. 29.

[3] Baldwin Correspondence: La Fontaine to Baldwin, 26 July, 1845.

[4] _Parliamentary Paper concerning the Canadian Civil List_ (1 April, 1844), p. 5.

[5] Metcalfe to Stanley, 5 August, 1843.

[6] Metcalfe to Stanley, 13 May, 1845.

[7] Metcalfe to Stanley, 6 August, 1843.

[8] Metcalfe to Stanley, 13 May, 1845.

[9] Kaye, _Life of Lord Metcalfe_, ii. pp. 367-8.

[10] _Ibid._ ii. p. 369.

[11] See Hincks, _Lecture on the Political History of Canada_; and Dent, _The Last Forty Years_. The latter work was written under the influence of Sir Francis Hincks, whose comments on it are contained in the inter-leaved copy in the possession of the Canadian archives.

[12] Metcalfe to Stanley, 26 December, 1843.

[13] _A Letter on the Ministerial Crisis, by the old Montreal Correspondent of the Colonial Gazette_, Kingston, 1843.

[14] Quoted from Ryerson, _Story of my Life_, pp. 332-3.

[15] Ryerson, _op. cit._ p. 323.

[16] See above, p. 116.

[17] Viger was defeated in the election of 1844.

[18] Kaye, _Papers and Correspondence of Lord Melcalfe_, p. 426.

[19] See, for the whole intrigue, _Correspondence between the Hon. W.

H. Draper and the Hon. B. E. Garon; and, between the Honbles. L. H. La Fontaine and A. N. Morin_, Montreal, 1840.

[20] The Rev. John Ryerson to Egerton Ryerson, February, 1844, in _The Story of my Life_.

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

[22] Montreal Gazette, 23 April, 1844.

[23] _Montreal Daily Witness_, 7 March, 1896, containing reminiscences by Dr. William Kingsford.

[24] Young, _Early History of Galt and Dumfries_, p. 193.

[25] Metcalfe to Stanley, 23 November, 1844.

[26] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 9 December, 1847.

[27] Stanley to Metcalfe, 18 May, 1844.

[28] _Hansard_, 30 May, 1844.

[29] Kaye, _Life of Lord Metcalfe_, ii. pp. 405-9.

[30] Metcalfe to Stanley, 13 May, 1845.

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CHAPTER VI.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD ELGIN.

The year which intervened between Metcalfe's departure and the arrival of Lord Elgin at the beginning of 1847, may be disregarded in this inquiry. Earl Cathcart, who held office in the interval, was chosen because relations with the United States at that time were serious enough to make it desirable to combine the civil and the military headship in Canada in one person. In domestic politics the governor-general was a negligible quant.i.ty, as his successor confessed: "Lord Cathcart, not very unreasonably perhaps, has allowed everything that required thought to lie over for me."[1]

But the arrival of Elgin changed the whole aspect of affairs, and introduced the most {188} important modification that was made in Canadian government between 1791 and the year of Confederation. Since 1839, governors-general who took their instructions from Britain, and who seldom allowed the Canadian point of view to have more than an indirect influence on their administration, had introduced the most unhappy complications into politics. Both they and the home government were now reduced to the gloomiest speculations concerning the permanence of the British connection. In place of the academic or official view of colonial dependence which had hitherto dominated Canadian administration, Elgin came to subst.i.tute a policy which frankly accepted the Canadian position, and which as frankly trusted to a loyalty dependent for none of its sanctions upon external coercion or encouragement. With 1846, Great Britain entered on an era of which the predominating principle was _laissez faire_, and within twelve months of the concession of that principle in commerce, Elgin applied it with even more astonishing results in the region of colonial Parliamentary inst.i.tutions.

The Canadian episode in Elgin's career furnishes the most perfect and permanently useful service rendered by him to the Empire. Although he {189} gathered laurels in China and India, and earned a notable place among diplomatists, nothing that he did is so representative of the whole man, so valuable, and so completely rounded and finished, as the seven years of his work in Canada. Elsewhere he accomplished tasks, which others had done, or might have done as well. But in the history of the self-governing dominions of Britain, his name is almost the first of those who a.s.sisted in creating an Empire, the secret of whose strength was to be local autonomy.

He belonged to the most distinguished group of nineteenth century politicians, for with Gladstone, Canning, Dalhousie, Herbert, and others, he served his apprenticeship under Sir Robert Peel. All of that younger generation reflected the sobriety, the love of hard fact, the sound but progressive conservatism, and the high administrative faculty of their great master. It was an epoch when changes were inevitable; but the soundest minds tended, in spite of a powerful party tradition, to view the work in front of them in a non-partizan spirit.

Gladstone himself, for long, seemed fated to repeat the party-breaking record of Peel; and three great proconsuls of the group, Dalhousie, Canning, and Elgin, found in imperial administration a more {190} congenial task than Westminster could offer them. Elgin occupies a mediate position between the administrative careers of Dalhousie and Canning, and the parliamentary and const.i.tutional labours of Gladstone.

He was that strange being, a const.i.tutionalist proconsul; and his chief work in administration lay in so altering the relation of his office to Canadian popular government, as to take from the governor-generalship much of its initiative, and to make a great surrender to popular opinion. Between his arrival in Montreal at the end of January, 1847, and the writing of his last official despatch on December 18th, 1854, he had established on sure foundations the system of democratic government in Canada.

Never was man better fitted for his work. He came, a Scotsman, to a colony one-third Scottish, and the name of Bruce was itself soporific to the opposition of a perfervid section of the reformers. His wife was the daughter of Lord Durham, whom Canadians regarded as the beginner of a new age of Canadian const.i.tutionalism. He had been appointed by a Whig Government, and Earl Grey, the new Colonial Secretary, was already learned in liberal theory, both in politics and economics, and understood that Britons, abroad as at home, {191} must have liberty to misgovern themselves. Elgin's personal qualities were precisely those best fitted to control a self-governing community. Not only was he saved from extreme views by his caution and sense of humour, but he had, to an extraordinary degree, the power of seeing both sides, and more especially the other side, of any question. In Canada too, as later in China and India, he exhibited qualities of humanity which some might term quixotic;[2] and, as will be ill.u.s.trated very fully below, his gifts of tact and _bonhomie_ made him a singularly persuasive force in international affairs, and secured for Britain at least one clear diplomatic victory over America.

Following on a succession of short-lived and troubled governorships, under which, while the principle of government had remained constant, nothing else had done so, Elgin had practically to begin Durham's work afresh, and build without much regard for the foundations laid since 1841. The alternatives before him were a grant of really responsible government, or a rebellion, with annexation to the United States as its probable end. The {192} new Governor saw very clearly the dangers of his predecessor's policy. "The distinction," he wrote at a later date, "between Lord Metcalfe's policy and mine is twofold. In the first place he profoundly distrusted the whole Liberal party in the province--that great party which, excepting at extraordinary conjunctures, has always carried with it the ma.s.s of the const.i.tuencies. He believed its designs to be revolutionary, just as the Tory party in England believed those of the Whigs and Reformers to be in 1832. And, secondly, he imagined that when circ.u.mstances forced the party upon him, he could check these revolutionary tendencies by manifesting his distrust of them, more especially in the matter of the distribution of patronage, thereby relieving them in a great measure from that responsibility, which is in all free countries the most effectual security against the abuse of power, and tempting them to endeavour to combine the role of popular tribunes with the prestige of ministers of the crown."[3]

The danger of a crisis was the greater because, as has been shown, Metcalfe's anti-democratic policy had been more than the expression of a personal {193} mood. It was the policy of the British government.

After Metcalfe's departure, and Stanley's resignation of the Colonial office, Gladstone, then for a few months Colonial Secretary, a.s.sured Cathcart that "the favour of his Sovereign and the acknowledgment of his country, have marked (Metcalfe's) administration as one which, under the peculiar circ.u.mstances of the task he had to perform, _may justly be regarded as a model for his successors_."[4] In truth, the British Colonial office was not only wrong in its working theory, but ignorant of the boiling tumult of Canadian opinion in those days; ignorant of the steadily increasing vehemence of the demand for true home rule, and of the possibility that French nationalism, Irish nationalism, and American aggression, might unite in a great upheaval, and the political tragedy find its consummation in another Declaration of Independence.

But Elgin was allowed little leisure for general reflections; the concrete details of the actual situation absorbed all his energies.

Since Metcalfe's resignation, matters had not improved. There was still an uncertain majority in the House of a.s.sembly, although, in the eyes of probably a {194} majority of voters, the disorders of the late election had discredited the whole a.s.sembly. But the ministry had gone on from weakness to further weakness. Draper, who did his best to preserve the political decencies, had been forced to ask Cathcart to a.s.sist him in removing certain of his colleagues. Viger had been a complete failure as President of the Council, and performed none of the duties of his department except that of signing his name to reports prepared by others. Daly was of little use to him; and, as for the solicitor-general for Upper Canada, Sherwood, "his repeated absence on important divisions, his lukewarm support, and occasional (almost) opposition, his habit of speaking of the Members of your Excellency's Government and of the policy pursued by them, his more than suspected intrigues to effect the removal of some members of the council, have altogether destroyed all confidence in him."[5] Draper himself had seemingly grown tired of the dust and heat of the struggle, and, soon after Elgin's a.s.sumption of authority, resigned his premiership for a legal position as honourable and more peaceful.

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Elgin, then, found a distracted ministry, a doubtful a.s.sembly, and an irritated country. His ministers he thought lacking in pluck, and far too willing to appeal to selfish and sordid motives in possible supporters.[6] He was irritated by what seemed to him the petty and inconsistent divisions of Canadian party life: "In a community like this, where there is little, if anything, of public principle to divide men, political parties will shape themselves under the influence of circ.u.mstances, and of a great variety of affections and antipathies, national, sectarian, and personal.... It is not even pretended that the divisions of party represent corresponding divisions of sentiment on questions which occupy the public mind, such as voluntaryism, Free Trade, etc., etc. Responsible Government is the one subject on which this coincidence is alleged to exist."[7] The French problem he found peculiarly difficult. Metcalfe's policy had had results disconcerting to the British authorities. Banishing, as he thought, sectarianism or racial views, he had yet practically shut out French statesmen from office so successfully, that, when Elgin, acting through Colonel Tache, {196} attempted to approach them, he found in none of them any disposition to enter into alliance with the existing ministry.[8]

Elgin, who was willing enough to give fair play to every political section, could not but see the obvious fault of French Canadian nationalism. "They seem incapable of comprehending that the principles of const.i.tutional government must be applied against them, as well as for them," he wrote to Grey. "Whenever there appears to be a chance of things taking this turn they revive the ancient cry of nationality, and insist on their right to have a share in the administration, not because the party with which they have chosen to connect themselves is in the ascendant, but because they represent a people of distinct origin."[9] Most serious of all, because it hampered his initiative, he found every party except that in office suspicious of the governor's authority, and newspapers like Hincks' _Pilot_ grumbling over Imperial interference.