British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854 Part 9

One sweeping remedy, he had, within a few months of his arrival, laid aside as impossible. Lord John Russell and Grey had discussed with {197} him the possibility of raising Canadian politics out of their pettiness by a federal union of all the British North American colonies. But as early as May 1847, Elgin had come to doubt whether the free and independent legislatures of the colonies would be willing to delegate any of their authority to please a British ministry.[10]

It was necessary then to fall back on the unromantic alternative of modifying the const.i.tution of the ministry; and here French solidarity had made his task difficult. Yet the amazing thing in Elgin was the speed, the ease, and the accuracy, with which he saw what none of his predecessors had seen--the need to concede, and the harmlessness of conceding, responsible government in Baldwin's sense of the term.

Within two months of his accession to power, he declared, "I am determined to do nothing which will put it out of my power to act with the opposite party, if it is forced upon me by the representatives of the people."[11] Two months later, sick of the struggles by which his ministers were trying to gain here and there some trivial vote to keep them in office, he recurred to the same idea as not merely harmless but sound. That ministers {198} and opposition should occasionally change places struck him not merely as const.i.tutional, but as the most conservative convention in the const.i.tution; and in answer to the older school to whom a change of ministers at the dictation of a majority in the a.s.sembly meant the degradation of the governor-generalship, he hoped "to establish a moral influence in the province, which will go far to compensate for the loss of power consequent on the surrender of patronage to an executive responsible to the local parliament."[12]

To give his ministers a last fair chance of holding on to office, he dissolved parliament at the end of 1847, recognizing that, in the event of a victory, their credit would be immensely increased. The struggle of December 1847, to January 1848, was decisive. While the French const.i.tuencies maintained their former position, even in Upper Canada the discredited ministry found few supporters. The only element in the situation which disturbed Elgin was the news that Papineau, the arch-rebel of 1837, had come back to public life with a flourish of agitating declarations; and that the French people had not condemned with sufficient decisiveness his seditious utterances. Yet he need have {199} had no qualms. _La Revue Canadienne_ in reviewing the situation certainly refused to condemn Papineau's extravagances, but its conclusion took the ground from under the agitator's feet, for it declared that "cette moderation de nos chefs politiques a puissamment contribue a placer notre parti dans la position avantageuse qu'il occupe maintenant."[13] Now Papineau was incapable of political moderation.

The fate of the ministry was quickly settled. Their candidate for the speakership of the Lower House was defeated by 54 votes to 19; a vote of no confidence was carried by 54 to 20; on March 23rd parliament was prorogued and a new administration, the first truly popular ministry in the history of Canada, accepted office, and the country, satisfied at last, was promised "various measures for developing the resources of the province, and promoting the social well-being of its inhabitants."[14]

The change was the more decisive because it was made with the approval of the Whig government in England. "I can have no doubt," Grey wrote to Elgin on February 22nd, "that you must accept {200} such a council as the newly elected parliament will support, and that however unwise as relates to the real interests of Canada their measures may be, they must be acquiesced in, until it shall pretty clearly appear that public opinion will support a resistance to them. There is no middle course between this line of policy, and that which involves in the last resort an appeal to parliament to overrule the wishes of the Canadians, and this I agree with Gladstone and Stanley in thinking impracticable."[15]

The only precaution he bade Elgin take was to register his dissent carefully in cases of disagreement. Having conceded the essential, it mattered little that Grey could not quite rid himself of doubts as to the consequences of his previous daring. The concession had come most opportunely, for Elgin, who feared greatly the disturbing influences of European revolutionism, Irish discontent, and American democracy in its cruder forms, believed that, had the change not taken place, "we should by this hour (November 30th, 1848) either have been ignominiously expelled from Canada, or our relations with the United States would have been in a most precarious condition."

{201}

It is not necessary to follow Elgin through all the details of more than seven busy years. It will suffice to watch him at work on the three great allied problems which combined to form the const.i.tutional question in Canada; the character of the government to be conceded to, and worked along with, the colonists; the recognition to be given to French nationalist feeling; and the nature of the connection between Britain and Canada which would exist after concessions had been made on these points. The significance of his policy is the greater, because the example of Canada was certain, _mutatis mutandis_, to be followed by the other greater colonies. Elgin's solution of the question of responsible government was so natural and easy that the reader of his despatches forgets how completely his task had baffled all his predecessors, and that several generations of colonial secretaries had refused to admit what in his hands seemed a self-evident truth. At the outset Elgin's own mind had not been free from serious doubt. He had come to Canada with a traditional suspicion of the French Canadians and the progressives of Upper Canada; yet within a year, since the country so willed it, he had accepted a cabinet, composed entirely of these two sections. On his {202} way to the formation of that cabinet he not only brushed aside old suspicions, but he refused to surrender to the seductions of the eclectic principle, which allowed his predecessors to evade the force of popular opinion by selecting representatives of all shades of that opinion. He saw the danger of allowing responsible government to remain a party cry, and he removed "that most delicate and debatable subject" from party politics by conceding the whole position. The defects of the Canadian party system never found a severer critic than Elgin, but he saw that by party Canada would be ruled, and he could not, as Metcalfe had done, deceive himself into thinking he had abolished it by governing in accordance with the least popular party in the state. With the candour and the discriminating judgment which so distinguished all his doings in Canada, he admitted that, notwithstanding the high ground Lord Metcalfe had taken against party patronage, the ministers favoured by that governor-general had "used patronage for party purposes with quite as little scruple as his first council."[16]

Since the first general election had proved beyond a doubt that Canadians desired a {203} progressive ministry, he made the change with perfect success, and remained a consistent guide and friend to his new ministers.

There was something dramatic in the contrast between the possibilities of trouble in the year when the concession was made, and the peace which actually ensued. It was the year of revolution, and the men whom he called to his a.s.sistance were "persons denounced very lately by the Secretary of State to the Governor-General as impracticable and disloyal";[17] but before the year was out he was able to boast that when so many thrones were tottering and the allegiance of so many people was waxing faint, there is less political disaffection in Canada than there ever had been before. From 1848 until the year of his recall, he remained in complete accord with his liberal administration, and never was const.i.tutional monarch more intimately and usefully connected with his ministers than was Elgin, first with Baldwin and La Fontaine, and then with Hincks and Morin.

Elgin gave a rarer example of what fidelity to colonial const.i.tutionalism meant. In these years of liberal success, "Old Toryism" faced a new strain, and faced it badly. The party had {204} supported the empire, when that empire meant their supremacy. They had befriended the representative of the Crown, when they had all the places and profits. When the British connection took a liberal colour, when the governor-general acted const.i.tutionally towards the undoubtedly progressive tone of popular opinion, some of the tories became annexationists. Many of them, as will be shown later, encouraged a dastardly a.s.sault on the person of their official head; and all of them, supported by gentlemen of Her Majesty's army, treated the representative of the Crown with the most obvious discourtesy.[18]

Nevertheless, when opinion changed, and when a coalition attacked and unseated the Progressive ministry of 1848-1854, Elgin, without a moment's hesitation, turned to the men who had insulted him. "To the great astonishment of the public, as well as to his own," wrote Laurence Oliphant, who was then on Elgin's staff, "Sir Allan MacNab, who had been one of his bitterest opponents ever since the Montreal events, was sent for to form a ministry--Lord Elgin by this act satisfactorily disproving the charges of {205} having either personal or political partialities in the selection of his ministers."[19]

But the first great const.i.tutional governor-general of Canada had to interpret const.i.tutionalism as something more than mere obedience to public dictation with regard to his councillors. He had to educate these councillors, and the public, into the niceties of British const.i.tutional manners; and he had to create a new vocation for the governor-general, and to exchange dictation for rational influence. He had to teach his ministers moderation in their measures, and, indirectly, to show the opposition how to avoid crude and extreme methods in their fight for office. When his high political courage, in consenting to a bill very obnoxious to the opposition, forced them into violence, he kept his temper and his head, and the opposition leaders learned, not from punishment, but from quiet contempt, to express dissent in modes other than those of arson and sticks and stones. For seven years, by methods so restrained as to be hardly perceptible even in his private letters to Grey, he guided the first experimental cabinets into smooth water, and when he resigned, he left behind him politicians {206} trained by his efforts to govern Canada according to British usage.

At the same time his influence on the British Cabinet was as quiet and certain. He was still responsible to the British Crown and Cabinet, and a weaker man would have forgotten the problems which the new Canadian const.i.tutionalism was bound to create at the centre of authority. Two instances will ill.u.s.trate the point, and Elgin's clear perception of his duty. They are both taken from the episode of the Rebellion Losses Bill, and the Montreal riots of 1849. The Bill which caused the trouble had been introduced to complete a scheme of compensation for all those who had suffered loss in the late Rebellion, whether French or English, and had been pa.s.sed by majorities in both houses; but while there seemed no valid reason for disallowing it, Elgin suspected trouble--indeed, at first, he viewed the measure with personal disapproval.[20] He might have refused permission to bring in the bill; but the practical consequences of such a refusal were too serious to {207} be accepted. "Only imagine," he wrote, "how difficult it would have been to discover a justification for my conduct, if at a moment when America was boiling over with bandits and desperadoes, and when the leaders of every faction in the Union, with the view of securing the Irish vote for the presidential election, were vying with each other in abuse of England, and subscribing funds for the Irish Republican Union, I had brought on such a crisis in Canada by refusing to allow my administration to bring in a bill to carry out the recommendation of Lord Metcalfe's commissioners."[21] He might have dissolved Parliament, but, as he rightly pointed out, "it would be rather a strong measure to have recourse to dissolution because a Parliament, elected one year ago under the auspices of the present opposition, pa.s.sed by a majority of more than two to one a measure introduced by the Government." There remained only the possibility of reserving the bill for approval or rejection at home. A weaker man would have taken this easy and fatal way of evading responsibility; but Elgin rose to the height of his vocation, when he explained his reason for acting on his own {208} initiative. "I should only throw upon her Majesty's Government, or (as it would appear to the popular eye here) on Her Majesty herself, a responsibility which rests, and ought I think to rest, on my own shoulders."[22] He gave his a.s.sent to the bill, suffered personal violence at the hands of the Montreal crowd and the opposition, but, since he stood firm, he triumphed, and saved both the dignity of the Crown and the friendship of the French for his government.

The other instance of his skill in combining Canadian autonomy with British supremacy is less important, but, in a way, more extraordinary in its subtlety. As a servant of the Crown, he had to furnish despatches, which were liable to be published as parliamentary papers, and so to be perused by Canadian politicians. Elgin had therefore to reckon with two publics--the British Parliament, which desired information, and the Canadian Parliament, which desired to maintain its dignity and freedom. Before the Montreal outrage, and when it was extremely desirable to leave matters as vague as possible, Elgin simply refrained from giving details to the Colonial Office. "I could not have made my official communication to {209} you in reference to this Bill, which you could have laid before Parliament, without stating or implying an irrevocable decision on this point. To this circ.u.mstance you must ascribe the fact that you have not heard from me officially."[23] With even greater shrewdness, at a later date, he made Grey expunge, in his book on Colonial Policy, details of the outrage which followed the pa.s.sing of the Act; for, said he, "I am strongly of opinion that nothing but evil can result from the publication, at this period, of a detailed and circ.u.mstantial statement of the disgraceful proceedings which took place after the Bill pa.s.sed.... _The surest way to arrest a process of conversion is to dwell on the errors of the past, and to place in a broad light the contrast between present sentiments and those of an earlier date_."[24]

In const.i.tutional affairs manners make, not merely the statesman, but the possibility of government; and Elgin's highest quality as a const.i.tutionalist was, not so much his understanding of the machinery of government, as his knowledge of the const.i.tutional temper, and the need within it of humanity and common-sense.

{210}

Great as was Elgin's achievement in rectifying Canadian const.i.tutional practice, his solution of the nationalist difficulty in Lower Canada was possibly a greater triumph of statesmanship; for the present _modus vivendi_, which still shows no signs of breaking down, dates from the years of Elgin's governorship. The decade which included his rule in Canada was pre-eminently the epoch of nationalism. Italy, Germany, and Hungary, with Mazzini as their prophet, were all struggling for the acknowledgment of their national claims, and within the British Islands themselves, the Irish nationalists furnished, in Davis and the writers to _The Nation_, disciples and apostles of the new gospel. It is always dangerous to trace European influences across the Atlantic; but there is little doubt that as the French rebellion of 1837 owed something to Europe, so the arch-rebel Papineau's paper, _L'Avenir_, echoed in an empty bl.u.s.tering fashion, the cries of the nationalist revolution of 1848.[25]

Elgin found on his arrival that British administration had thrown every element in French-Canadian politics into headlong opposition to itself.

How dangerous the situation was, one may infer from {211} the disquieting rumours of the ambitions of the American Union, and from the pa.s.sions and memories of injustice which floods of unkempt and wretched Irish immigrants were bringing with them to their new homes in America. In Elgin's second year of office, 1848, he had to face the possibility of a rising under the old leaders of 1837. His solution of the difficulty proceeded _pari pa.s.su_ with his const.i.tutional work. In the latter he had seen that he must remove the disquieting subject of "responsible government" from the party programme of the progressives, and the politic surrender of 1847 had gained his end. Towards French nationalism he acted in the same spirit. As has already been seen, he was conscious of the political shortcomings of the French. Yet there was nothing penal in his att.i.tude towards them, and he saw, with a clearness to which Durham never attained, how idle all talk of anglicizing French Canada must be. "I for one," he said, "am deeply convinced of the impolicy of all such attempts to denationalize the French. Generally speaking, they produce the opposite effect from that intended, causing the flame of national prejudice and animosity to burn more fiercely."[26]

{212}

But how could the pathological phase of nationalism be ended? His first Tory advisers suggested the old trick of making converts, but the practice had long since been found useless. His next speculation was whether the French could be made to take sides as Liberals or Tories, apart altogether from nationalist considerations. But the political solidarity of the French had been a kind of trades-unionism, claiming to guard French interests against an actual menace to their very existence as a nation within the empire; and they were certain to act only with Baldwin and his friends, the one party which had regarded them as other than traitors or suspects, or at best tools.

No complete solution of the problem was possible; but when Elgin surrendered to the progressives, he was making concessions also to the French--by admitting them to a recognized place within the const.i.tution, and doing so without reservation. The joint ministry of La Fontaine and Baldwin was, in a sense, the most satisfactory answer that could be made to the difficulty. From the moment of its creation Elgin and Canada were safe. He remained doubtful during part of 1848, for Papineau had been elected by acclamation to the Parliament which held its first session that year; and he "had {213} searched in vain ... through the French organs of public opinion for a frank and decided expression of hostility to the anti-British sentiments propounded in Papineau's address."[27] He did not at first understand that La Fontaine, not Papineau, was the French leader, and that the latter represented only himself and a few _Rouges_ of violent but unsubstantial revolutionary opinions. Nevertheless, he gave his French ministers his confidence, and he applied his singular powers of winning men to appeasing French discontent. As early as May, 1848, he saw how the land lay--that French Canada was fundamentally conservative, and that discontent was mainly a consequence of sheer stupidity and error on the part of England. "Who will venture to say," he asked, "that the last hand which waves the British flag on American ground may not be that of a French Canadian?"[28]

His final settlement of the question came in 1849, and the introduction of that Rebellion Losses Bill which has been already mentioned. The measure was, in the main, an act of justice to French sufferers from the disturbances created by the Rebellion; for they had naturally shared but slightly {214} in earlier and partial schemes of compensation; and the opposition to the bill was directed quite frankly against the French inhabitants of Canada as traitors, who deserved, not recompense, but punishment. Now there were many cases of real hardship, like that of the inhabitants of St. Benoit, a village which Sir John Colborne had pledged himself to protect when he occupied it for military purposes, but which, in his absence, the loyalist volunteers had set on fire and destroyed. The inhabitants might be disloyal, but in the eyes of an equal justice a wrong had been done, and must be righted. The idea of the bill was not new--it was not Elgin's bill; and if his predecessors had been right, then the French politicians were justified in claiming that the system of compensation already initiated must be followed till all legitimate claims had been met.

It would be disingenuous to deny that Elgin calculated on the pacific influence which his support of the bill would exert in Lower Canada.

"I was aware of two facts," he told Grey in 1852: "Firstly, that M. La Fontaine would be unable to retain the support of his countrymen if he failed to introduce a measure of this description; and secondly, that my refusal would be taken by him and his friends {215} as a proof that they had not my confidence." But his chief concern was to hold the balance level, to redress an actual grievance, and to repress the fury of Canadian Tories whose unrestrained action would have flung Canada into a new and complicated struggle of races and parties. "I am firmly convinced," he told Grey in June, speaking of American election movements at this time, "that the only thing which prevented an invasion of Canada was the political contentment prevailing among the French Canadians and Irish Catholics"; and that political contentment was the result of Elgin's action in supporting his ministers. A happy chance, utilized to the full by Elgin's cautious wisdom, had enabled him to do the French what they counted a considerable service; and the rage and disorder of the opposition only played the more surely into the hands of the governor-general, and established, beyond any risk of alteration, French loyalty to him personally.[29]

From that day, with trivial intervals or incidents of misunderstanding, the British and the French in Canada have played the political game together. It was in the La Fontaine-Baldwin ministry that {216} the joint action, within the Canadian parties, of the two races had its real beginning; and while the traditions and idiosyncrasies of Quebec were too ingrained and fundamental to admit of modification beyond a certain point, Canadian parliamentary life was henceforth based on the free co-operation of French and English, in a party system which tried to forget the distinction of race. From this time, too, Elgin began to discern the conservative genius of the French people, and to prophesy that, when Baldwin's moderate reforming influence should have been withdrawn, the French would naturally incline to unite with the moderate Conservatives--the combination on which, in actual fact, John A. Macdonald based his long control of power in Canada.

The nationalist question is so intermingled with the const.i.tutional that it is not always easy to separate the two issues. The same qualities which settled the latter difficulty ended also French grievances--saving common-sense which did not refuse to do the obvious thing; _bonhomie_ which understood that a well-mannered people may be wooed from its isolation by a little humouring; a mind resolute to administer to every British subject equal rights; and an austere refusal to let an {217} arrogant and narrow-minded minority claim to itself a kind of oligarchic glory at the expense of citizens who did not belong to the Anglo-Saxon stock.

There is a third aspect of Elgin's work in Canada of wider scope than either of those already mentioned, and one in which his claims to distinction have been almost forgotten--his contribution to the working theory of the British Empire. Elgin was one of those earlier sane imperialists whose achievements it is very easy to forget. It is not too much to say that, when Elgin came to Canada, the future of the British colonial empire was at best gloomy. Politicians at home had placed in front of themselves an awkward dilemma. According to the stiffer Tories, the colonies must be held in with a firm hand--how firm, Stanley had ill.u.s.trated in his administration of Canada. Yet Tory stiffness produced colonial discontent, and colonial discontent bred very natural doubts at home as to the possibility of holding the colonies by the old methods. On the other hand, there were those, like Cobden, who, while they believed with the Tories that colonial home-rule was certain to result in colonial independence, were nevertheless too loyal to their doctrine of political liberty to resist colonial claims. They looked to an immediate but {218} peaceful dissolution of the empire. It seemed never to strike anyone but a few radicals, like Durham and Buller, that Britons still held British sentiments, even across the seas, and that they desired to combine a continuance of the British connection with the retention of all those popular rights in government which they had possessed at home. A Canadian governor-general, then, had to deal with British Cabinets which alternated between foolish rigour and foolish slackness, and with politicians who reflected little on the responsibilities of empire, when they flung before careless British audiences irresponsible discussions on colonial independence--as if it were an academic subject and not a critical issue.

Elgin had imperial difficulties, all his own, to make his task more complicated. Not only were there French and Irish nationalists ready for agitation, but the United States lay across the southern border; and annexation to that mighty and flourishing republic seemed to many the natural euthanasia of British rule in North America. Peel's sweeping reforms in the tariff had rekindled annexationist talk; for while Lord Stanley's bill of 1843 had attracted all the produce of the west to the St. Lawrence by its grant of preference to the {219} colony, "Peel's bill of 1846 drives the whole of the produce down the New York channels of communication ... ruining at once mill-owners, forwarders and merchants."[30] And every petty and personal disappointment, every error in colonial office administration, raised a new group to cry down the British system, and to call for a peaceful junction with the United States.

Elgin had not been long in Canada before he saw one important fact--that the real annexationist feeling had commercial, not political roots. Without diminishing the seriousness of the situation, the discovery made it more susceptible of rational treatment. A colony suffering a severe set-back in trade found the precise remedy it looked for in transference of its allegiance. "The remedy offered them,"

wrote Elgin, "is perfectly definite and intelligible. They are invited to form part of a community which is neither suffering nor free-trading ... a community, the members of which have been within the last few weeks pouring into their multifarious places of worship, to thank G.o.d that they are exempt from the ills which affect other men, from those more especially which affect their despised neighbours, the inhabitants of North {220} America, who have remained faithful to the country which planted them."[31] With free-trade in the ascendant, and, to the maturest minds of the time, unanswerably sound in theory, Elgin had to dismiss schemes of British preference from his mind; and, towards the end of his rule, when American policy was irritating Canada, he had even to restrict the scope within which Canadian retaliation might be practised. There could be no imperial Zollverein. But he saw that a measure of reciprocity might give the Canadians all the economic benefits they sought, and yet leave to them the allegiance and the government which, in their hearts, they preferred. The annexationist clamour fell and rose, mounting highest in Montreal, and reaching a crisis in the year of the Rebellion Losses disturbance; but Elgin, while sometimes he grew despondent, always kept his head, and never ceased to hope for the reciprocity which would at once bring back prosperity and still the disloyal murmurs. Once or twice, when the annexationists were at their worst, and when his Tory opponents chose support of that disloyal movement as the means of insulting their governor, he took stern measures for repressing an unnatural evil. "We intend," {221} he wrote in November, 1849, after an annexation meeting at which servants of the State had been present, "to dismiss the militia officers and magistrates who have taken part in these affairs, and to deprive the two Queen's Counsels of their silk gowns." But he relied mainly on the positive side of his policy, and few statesmen have given Canada a more substantial boon than did Elgin when, just before his recall, he went to Washington on that mission which Laurence Oliphant has made cla.s.sic by his description, and concluded by far the most favourable commercial treaty ever negotiated by Britain with the United States.

There is perhaps a tendency to underestimate the work of his predecessors and a.s.sistants in preparing the way, but no one can doubt that it was Elgin's persistence in urging the treaty on the home Cabinet, and his wonderful diplomatic gifts, which ultimately won the day. Oliphant, certainly, had no doubt as to his chief's share in the matter. "He is the most thorough diplomat possible--never loses sight for a moment of his object, and while he is chaffing Yankees, and slapping them on the back, he is systematically pursuing that object";[32] and again, "There was concluded in {222} exactly a fortnight a treaty, to negotiate which had taxed the inventive genius of the Foreign Office, and all the conventional methods of diplomacy, for the previous seven years."[33]

It was a long, slow process by which Elgin restored the tone of Canadian loyalty. Frenchmen who had dreamed of renouncing allegiance he won by his obvious fairness, and the recognition accorded by him to their leaders. He took the heart out of Irish disaffection by his popular methods and love of liberty. Tory dissentients fell slowly in to heel, as they found their governor no lath painted to look like iron, but very steel. To desponding Montreal merchants his reciprocity treaty yielded naturally all they had expected from a more drastic change. It is true that, owing to untoward circ.u.mstances, the treaty lasted only for the limited period prescribed by Elgin; but it tided over an awkward interval of disaffection and disappointment.

He did more, however, than cure definite phases of Canadian disaffection; his influence through Earl Grey told powerfully for a fuller and more optimistic conception of empire. With all its virtues, the bureaucracy of the Colonial Office did not understand the government of colonies such {223} as Canada; and where colonial secretaries had the ability and will, they had not knowledge sufficient to lead them into paths at once democratic and imperial. Even Grey relapsed on occasion from the optimism which empire demands of its statesmen. It was not simply that he emphasized the wrong points--military and diplomatic issues, which in Canada were minor and even negligible matters; but at times he seemed prepared to believe that the days of the connection were numbered.[34]

In 1848 he had impaled himself on the horns of one of those dilemmas which present themselves so frequently to absentee governments and secretaries of state--either reciprocity and an Americanized colony, or a new rebellion as the consequence of a refusal in Britain to consent to a reciprocity treaty.[35] In 1849, "looking at these indications of the state of feeling in Canada, and at the equally significant indications as to the feeling of the House of Commons respecting the value of our colonies," he had begun to despair of their retention.[36]

But there were greater sinners than those of the Colonial Office.

While Elgin {224} was painfully removing all the causes of trouble in Canada, and proving without argument, but in deeds, that the British connection represented normal conditions for both England and Canada, politicians insisted on making foolish speeches. At last, an offence by the Prime Minister himself drove Elgin into a pa.s.sion unusual in so equable a mind, and which, happily, he expressed in the best of all his letters. "I have never been able to comprehend why, elastic as our const.i.tutional system is, we should not be able, now more especially when we have ceased to control the trade of our colonies, to render the links which bind them to the British Crown at least as lasting as those which unite the component parts of the Union.... You must renounce the habit of telling the colonies that the colonial is a provisional existence.... Is the Queen of England to be the sovereign of an empire, growing, expanding, strengthening itself from age to age, striking its roots deep into fresh earth and drawing new supplies of vitality from virgin soils? Or is she to be for all essential purposes of might and power monarch of Great Britain and Ireland merely, her place and that of her land in the world's history determined by the productiveness of 12,000 square miles of a coal {225} formation which is being rapidly exhausted, and the duration of the social and political organization over which she presides dependent on the annual expatriation, with a view to its eventual alienization, of the surplus swarm of her born subjects?"[37] That is the final question of imperialism; and Elgin had earned the right not only to put it to the home government with emphasis, but also to answer it in an affirmative and constructive sense.

The argument forbids any mention of the less public episodes in Elgin's Canadian adventure; his whimsical capacity for getting on with men, French, British, and American; the sly humour of his correspondence with his official chief; the searching comments made by him on men and manners in America; the charm of such social and diplomatic incidents as Laurence Oliphant has related in his letters and his _Episodes in a Life of Adventure_. But it may be permitted to sum up his qualities as governor, and to connect his work with the general movement towards self-government which had been proceeding so rapidly since 1839.

He was too human, easy, uncla.s.sical, and, on {226} the other hand, too little touched with Byronic or revolutionary feeling, even to suggest the age of Pitt, Napoleon, Canning; he was too sensible, too orthodox, too firmly based on fact and on the past, to have any affinity with our own transitionary politics. Like Peel, although in a less degree, he had at once a firm body of opinions, a keen eye for new facts, and a sure, slow capacity for bringing the new material to bear on old opinion.

He was able, as few have been, to set the personal equation aside in his political plans, holding the balance between friends and foes with almost uncanny fairness, and astonishing his petty enemies by his moderation. His mind could regard not merely Canada but also Britain, as it reflected on future policy; and, in his letters, he sometimes seems the one man in the empire at the time who understood the true relation of colonial autonomy to British supremacy. Not even his most foolish eulogist will attribute anything romantic to his character.

There was nothing of Disraeli's "glitter of dubious gems" about the honest phrases in which he bade Russell think imperially. Unlike Mazzini, it was his business to destroy false nationalism, not to exalt that which was true, and {227} for that cool business the glow and fervour of prophecy were not required. We like to see our leaders standing rampant, and with sulphurous, or at least thundery, backgrounds. But Elgin's ironic Scottish humour forbade any pose, and it was his business to keep the cannon quiet, and to draw the lightning harmless to the ground. The most heroic thing he did in Canada was to refrain from entering Montreal at a time when his entrance must have meant insult, resistance, and bloodshed, and he bore quietly the taunts of cowardice which his enemies flung at his head.

He was far too clear-sighted to think that statesmanship consists in decisions between very definitely stated alternatives of right and wrong. "My choice," he wrote in characteristic words, "was not between a clearly right and clearly wrong course--_how easy is it to deal with such cases, and how rare are they in life_--but between several difficulties. I think I chose the least."[38] His kindly, shrewd, and honest countenance looks at us from his portraits with no appeal of sentiment or pathos. He asked of men that which they find it most difficult to give--moderation, common-sense, a willingness to look at both sides, and to {228} subordinate their egoisms to a wider good; and he was content to do without their worship.

It is now possible to summarize the movement towards autonomy so far as it was affected by the governors-general of the transition period.

The characteristic note in the earlier stages had been the domination of the governor-general's mind by a clear-cut theory--that of Lord John Russell. That theory was in itself consistent, and of a piece with the rest of the const.i.tution; and its merits stood out more clearly because Canadian progressives had an unfortunate faculty for setting themselves in the wrong--making party really appear as faction, investing self-government with something of the menace of independence, and treating the responsibility they sought in the most irresponsible way.

The British theory, too, as guaranteeing a definitely British predominance in Canada, brought into rather lurid relief the mistaken fervour of French-Canadian nationalism.

Yet Sydenham, who never consciously, or at least openly, surrendered one detail of the system entrusted to him by Russell, found events too much for him; and that which conquered Sydenham's resolution made short work of any resistance Bagot may have dreamed of offering. Metcalfe was wrong {229} in suspecting a conscious intention in Sydenham's later measures, but he was absolutely right when he wrote, "Lord Sydenham, whether intending it or not, did concede Responsible Government practically, by the arrangements which he adopted, although the full extent of the concession was not so glaringly manifested during his administration as in that of his successor."[39]

Canadian conditions were, in fact, evolving for themselves a new system--Home Rule with its limits and conditions left as vague as possible--and that new system contradicted the very postulates of Russell's doctrine. It was only when the system of Russell became incarnate in a governor, Lord Metcalfe, and when the opposing facts also took personal form in the La Fontaine-Baldwin ministry, that both in Canada and Britain men came to see that two contradictory policies faced each other, and that one or other alternative must be chosen. To Elgin fell the honour not merely of seeing the need to choose the Canadian alternative, but also of recognizing the conditions under which the new plan would bring a deeper loyalty, and a more lasting union with Britain, as well as political content to Canada.

[1] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 24 February, 1847. It would be wrong to call Cathcart the "acting governor-general"; yet apart from military matters that term describes his position in civil matters not inadequately.

[2] Walrond, _Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin_, p. 424. "During a public service of twenty-five years I have always sided with the weaker party."

[3] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey on Grey's Colonial Policy, 8 October, 1852.

[4] Gladstone to Cathcart, 3 February, 1846. The italics are my own.

[5] W. H. Draper to the Earl Cathcart, in Pope, _Life of Sir John Macdonald_, i. pp. 43-4.

[6] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 24 February, 1847.