Greater Britain Part 4

_My Neighbor.--"No; I was a slaver."_

Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the lakes of Maine, it is impossible for a stranger, starting free from prejudice, not to end by loving the pious people of New England, for he will see that there could be no severer blow to the cause of freedom throughout the world than the loss by them of an influence upon American life and thought, which has been one of unmixed good. Still, New England is not America.

CHAPTER VI.

CANADA.

There is not in the world a n.o.bler outlook than that from off the terrace at Quebec. You stand upon a rock overhanging city and river, and look down upon the guardship's masts. Acre upon acre of timber comes floating down the stream above the city, the Canadian songs just reaching you upon the heights; and beneath you are fleets of great ships, English, German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber from the floating-docks. The Stars and Stripes are nowhere to be seen. Such are the distances in North America, that here, farther from the sea than is any city in Europe west of Moscow, we have a seaport town, with gunboats and three-decker; morning and evening guns, and bars of "G.o.d save the Queen," to mark the opening and closing of the port.

The St. Lawrence runs in a chasm in a flat table-land, through which some earlier Niagara seems to have cut for it a way. Some of the tributaries are in sight, all falling from a cliff into the deep still river. In the distance, seaward, a silver ribbon on the rock represents the grand falls of Montmorenci. Long villages of white tiny cots straggle along the roads that radiate from the city; the great black cross of the French parish church showing reverently from all.

On the north, the eye reaches to the rugged outlines of the Laurentian range, composed of the oldest mountains in the world, at the foot of which is Lake St. Charles, full of fiord-like northern beauty, where at a later time I learnt to paddle the Indian canoe of birch bark.

Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the European middle ages. Gates and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to lofty gabled houses, with sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like those of Liege; processions of the Host; altars decked with flowers; statues of the Virgin; sabots; blouses; and the scarlet of the British linesman,--all these are seen in narrow streets and markets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east Yankee State of Maine.

It is not far from New England to old France.

Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in Guernsey. Norman-French inhabitants, guarded by British troops, step-built streets, thronged fruit-market, and citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the quays, are alike in each. A slight knowledge of the Upper Normandy patois is not without its use; it procured me an offer of a pinch of snuff from an old _habitante_ on board one of the river boats. Her gesture was worthy of the _ancien regime_.

There has been no dying-out of the race among the French Canadians. They number twenty times the thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The American soil has left their physical type, religion, language, laws, and habits absolutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling villages, dance to the fiddle, after ma.s.s on Sundays, as gayly as once did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys and the memory of Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canadian _habitants_.

Not only here, but everywhere, a French "dependency" is France transported; not a double of the France of to-day, but a mummy of the France of the time of the "colony's" foundation. In Saigon, you find Imperial France; here the France of Louis Quatorze. The Englishman founds everywhere a New England--new in thought as in soil; the Frenchman carries with him to California, to j.a.pan, an undying recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives a great French capitalist, who, since 1849, has been the originator of every successful Californian speculation. He cannot speak a word of English, and his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine, is to bid his old French servant a.s.sure him, upon honor, that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France.

There is much in the colonizing instinct of our race, but something, perhaps, in the consideration that the English are hardly happy enough at home to be always looking back to what they have left in the old country.

There is about this old France something of Dutch sleepiness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market-place, where the grand old dames, in snowy caps, sit selling plums and pears; there is much singing made over the lading of the timber-ships; there are rafts in hundreds gliding down the river; old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing on their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of whips and clappering of wooden shoes. All these things there are, but then there are these and more in Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix--in all those towns which in Europe come nearest to old France. There is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity deep, not noisy; but the life is sleepy; the rafts float, and are not tugged nor rowed; the old Norman horses seem to draw the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply because they cannot help it.

In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British troops are here employed as guardians of the only true French colony in the world against the inroads of the English race. "Nos inst.i.tutions, notre langue, nos lois," is the motto of the _habitants_. Their newspapers are filled with church celebrations, village fetes, speeches of "M. le Cure"

at the harvest-home, announcements by the "scherif," speech of M.

Cartier at the consecration of Monseigneur Laroque, blessings of bells, of ships; but of life, nothing--of mention of what is pa.s.sing in America, not a word. One corner is given to the world outside America: "Emprunt Pontifical, Emission Americaine, quatre millions de piastres,"

heads a solid column of holy finance. The pulse-beat of the continent finds no echo here.

It is not only in political affairs that there is a want of energy in French or Lower Canada; in journeying from Portland to Quebec, the moment the frontier was pa.s.sed, we seemed to have come from a land of life to one of death. No more bustling villages, no more keen-eyed farmers: a fog of unenterprise hung over the land; roads were wanting, houses rude, swamps undrained, fields unweeded, plains untilled.

If the Eastern Townships and country round Quebec are a wilderness, they are not a desert. The country on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in summer it is hot--mosquitoes are not unknown: even at Tadousac, where the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, there is sunlight as strong as that of Paris. Once in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic--no house, no boat, no sign of man's existence, no beasts, no birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck and loons. The river is a straight, cold, black fiord, walled in by tremendous cliffs, which go sheer down into depths to which their height above water is as nothing; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold, inky water. Fish there are, seal and salmon--that is all. The "whales and porpoises,"

which are advertised by the Tadousac folks as certain to "disport themselves daily in front of the hotel," are never to be seen in this earth-crack of the Saguenay.

The cold, for summer, was intense; nowhere in the world does the limit of ever-frozen ground come so far south as in the longitude of the Saguenay. At night we had a wonderful display of northern lights. A white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died away, and was succeeded by broad white clouds, stretching from east to west, and sending streamers northward. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery columns in the north, northwest, and northeast, on which all the colors of the rainbow danced and played. After moonrise, the whole seemed gradually to fade away.

At Ha Ha Bay, the head of navigation, I found a fur-buying station of the Hudson's Bay Company; but that a.s.sociation has enough to answer for without being charged with the desolation of the Saguenay. The company has not here, as upon the Red River, sacrificed colonists to minks and silver-foxes. There is something more blighting than a monopoly that oppresses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the boat that I was aboard touched at St. Paschal, now called Riviere du Loup, the St.

Lawrence terminus of the Grand Trunk line: we found there immense wharves, and plenty of bells and crosses, but not a single ship, great or small. Even in Virginia I had seen nothing more disheartening.

North of the St. Lawrence religion is made to play as active a part in politics as in the landscape. Lower Canada, as we have seen, is French and Catholic; Upper Canada is Scotch and Presbyterian, though the Episcopalians are strong in wealth and the Irish Catholics in numbers.

Had the Catholics been united, they might, since the fusion of the two Canadas, have governed the whole country: as it is, the Irish and French neither worship nor vote together, and of late the Scotch have had nearly their own way.

Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the French threw in their lot with the scheme for the confederation of the provinces, and their clergy took up the cause with a zeal which they justified to their flocks by pointing out that the alternative was annexation to America, and possible confiscation of the church lands.

Confederation of the provinces means separation of the Canadas, which regain each its Parliament; and the French Catholics begin to hope that the Irish of Upper Canada, now that they are less completely overshaded by the more numerous French, will again act with their co-religionists: the Catholic vote in the new confederation will be nearly half the whole. In Toronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in Montreal their presence is not unknown: it is a question whether the whole of the Canadian Irish are not disaffected. The Irish of the chief city have their Irish priests, their cathedral of St. Patrick, while the French have theirs upon the Place d'Armes. The want of union may save the dominion from the establishment of Catholicism as a State Church.

The confederation of our provinces was necessary, if British North America was to have a chance for life; but it cannot be said to be accomplished while British Columbia and the Red River tract are not included. To give Canada an outlet on one side is something, but communication with the Atlantic is a small matter by the side of communication at once with Atlantic and Pacific through British territory. We shall soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior, and thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that the line is far north, and exposed to heavy snows and bitter cold; but, on the other hand, it is well supplied with wood, and if it possess no such fertile tracts as that of Kansas and Colorado, it at least escapes the frightful wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains.

We are now even left in doubt how long we shall continue to possess so much as a route across the continent on paper. Since the cession of Russian America to the United States, a map of North America has been published in which the name of the Great Republic sprawls across the continent from Behring's Straits to Mexico, with the "E" in "United"

ominously near Vancouver's Island, and the "T" actually planted upon British territory. If we take up the _British Columbian_, we find the citizens of the mainland portion of the province proposing to sell the island for twenty million dollars to the States.

Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and California, and situated, for purposes of reinforcement, immigration, and supply, at a distance of not less than twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific colonies can hardly be considered strong in their allegiance to the crown: we have here the _reductio ad absurdum_ of home government.

Our hindering trade, by tolerating the presence of two sets of custom-houses and two sets of coins between Halifax and Lake Superior, was less absurd than our altogether preventing its extension now. Under a so-called confederation of our American possessions, we have left a country the size of civilized Europe, and nearly as large as the United States--lying too, upon the track of commerce and highroad to China--to be despotically governed by a company of traders in skins and peltries, and to remain as long as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and desertion needed to insure the presence of fur-bearing beasts.

"Red River" should be a second Minnesota, Halifax a second Liverpool, Esquimault a second San Francisco; but double government has done its work, and the outposts of the line of trade are already in American, not British hands. The gold mines of Nova Scotia, the coal mines and forests of British Columbia, are owned in New England and New York, and the Californians are expecting the proclamation of an American territorial government in the capital of Vancouver's Island.

As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of the "colonization" of Red River by citizens of the United States, such as preceded the hoisting of the "lone star" in Texas, and the "bear flag" in California, by Fremont; and resistance by the Hudson's Bay Company will neither be possible, nor, in the interests of civilization, desirable.

Even supposing a great popular awakening upon colonial questions, and the destruction of the Hudson's Bay monopoly, we never could make the Canadian dominion strong. With the addition of Columbia and Red River, British America would hardly be as powerful or populous as the two Northwestern States of Ohio and Illinois, or the single State of New York--one out of forty-five. "Help us for ten years, and then we'll help ourselves," the Canadians say; "help us to become ten millions, and then we will stand alone;" but this becoming ten millions is not such an easy thing.

The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British territories are derived from maps of North America, made upon Mercator's projection, which are grossly out in high lat.i.tudes, though correct at the equator.

The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their proper size, and such gigantic proportions are given to the northern parts of the Hudson territory that we are tempted to believe that in a country so vast there must be some little value. The true size is no more shown upon the map than is the nine-months' winter.

To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is not for lack of asking that population fails to come. Admirably executed gazettes give the fullest information about the British possessions in the most glowing of terms; offices and agencies are established in Liverpool, London, Cork, Londonderry, and a dozen other cities; government immigration agents and information offices are to be found in every town in Canada; the government immigrant is looked after in health, comfort, and religion; directions of the fullest kind are given him in the matters of money, clothes, tools, luggage; Canada, he is told by the government papers, possesses perfect religious, political, and social freedom; British subjects step at once into the possession of political rights; the winter is but bracing, the climate the healthiest in the world. Millions of acres of surveyed crown lands are continually in the market. To one who knows what the northern forests are there is perhaps something of satire in the statement that "there is generally on crown lands an unlimited supply of the best fuel." What of that, however? The intending immigrant knows nothing of the struggle with the woods, and fuel is fuel in Old England. The mining of the precious metals, the fisheries, petroleum, all are open to the settler--let him but come. Reading these doc.u.ments, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how it is that human selfishness allows the Canadian officials to disclose the wonders of their El Dorado to the outer world, and invite all men to share blessings which we should have expected them to keep as a close preserve for themselves and their nearest and dearest friends. Taxation in the States, the immigrants are told, is five and a half times what it is in Canada, two and a half times the English rate. Laborers by the thousand, merchants and farmers by the score, are said to be flocking into Canada to avoid the taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life in Canada is 37 per cent. higher than in the States. Yet, in the face of all these facts, only twenty or two and twenty thousand immigrants come to Canada for three hundred thousand that flock annually to the States, and of the former many thousands do but pa.s.s through on their way to the Great West. Of the twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year, but four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada; and there are a quarter of a million of persons born in British America now naturalized in the United States.

The pa.s.sage of the immigrants to the Western States is not for want of warning. The Canadian government advertise every Coloradan duel, every lynching in Montana, every Opposition speech in Kansas, by way of teaching the immigrants to respect the country of which they are about to become free citizens.

It is an unfortunate fact, that these strange statements are not harmless--not harmless to Canada, I mean. The Provincial government by these publications seems to confess to the world that Canada can live only by running down the great republic. Canadian sympathy for the rebellion tends to make us think that these northern statesmen must not only share in our old-world confusion of the notions of right and wrong, but must be sadly short-sighted into the bargain. It is only by their position that they are blinded, for few countries have abler men than Sir James Macdonald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Galt; but, like men standing on the edge of a cliff, Canadian statesmen are always wanting to jump off. Had Great Britain left them to their own devices, we should have had war with America in the spring of 1866.

The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous: of the two chief sections of our race--that in Britain and that in America--the latter is again split in twain, and one division governed from across the Atlantic. For such government there is no pretext, except the wishes of the governed, who gain by the connection men for their defense, and the opportunity of gratifying their spite for their neighbors at our expense. Those who ask why a connection so one-sided, so opposed to the best interests of our race, should be suffered to continue, are answered, now that the argument of "prestige" is given up, that the Canadians are loyal, and that they hate the Americans, to whom, were it not for us, they must inevitably fall. That the Canadians hate the Americans can be no reason why we should spend blood and treasure in protecting them against the consequences of their hate. The world should have pa.s.sed the time when local dislikes can be suffered to affect our policy toward the other sections of our race; but even were it otherwise, it is hard to see how twelve thousand British troops, or a royal standard hoisted at Ottawa, can protect a frontier of two thousand miles in length from a nation of five and thirty millions. Canada, perhaps, can defend herself, but we most certainly cannot defend her; we provoke much more than we a.s.sist.

As for Canadian "loyalty," it appears to consist merely of hatred toward America, for while we were fighting China and conquering j.a.pan, that we might spread free trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set upon our goods protective duties of 20 per cent, which they have now in some degree removed, only that they may get into their hands the smuggling trade carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, their neighbor. We might, at least, fairly insist that the connection should cease, unless Canada will entirely remove her duties.

At bottom, it would seem as though no one gained by the retention of our hold on Canada. Were she independent, her borders would never again be wasted by Fenian hordes, and she would escape the terrible danger of being the battle-field in which European quarrels are fought out. Canada once republican, the Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most violent partisans would cease to advocate the adoption of other than moral means to merge her territories in the Union. An independent Canada would not long delay the railway across the continent to Puget Sound, which a British bureau calls impossible. England would be relieved from the fear of a certain defeat by America in the event of war--a fear always harmful, even when war seems most unlikely; relieved, too, from the cost of such panics as those of 1861 and 1866.

Did Canada stand alone, no offense that she could give America would be likely to unite all sections of that country in an attempt to conquer her; while, on the other hand, such an attempt would be resisted to the death by an armed and brave people, four millions strong. As it is, any offense toward America committed by our agents, at any place or time, or arising out of the continual changes of policy and of ministry in Great Britain, united to the standing offense of maintaining the monarchical principle in North America, will bring upon unhappy Canada the whole American nation, indignant in some cause, just, or seeming just, and to be met by a people deceived into putting their trust in a few regiments of British troops, sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to be backed by reinforcements which could never come in time, did public opinion in Great Britain so much as permit their sailing. In all history there is nothing stranger than the narrowness of mind that has led us to see in Canada a piece of England, and in America a hostile country.

There are more sons of British subjects in America than in Canada, by far; and the American looks upon the old country with a pride that cannot be shared by a man who looks to her to pay his soldiers.

The independence of Canada would put an immediate end to much of the American jealousy of Great Britain--a consideration which of itself should outweigh any claim to protection which the Canadians can have on us. The position which we have to set before us in our external dealings is, that we are no more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the Americans of the North or West.

The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa, known as "Hole in the Woods" among the friends of Toronto and Montreal, and once called Bytown. It consists of the huge Parliament-house, the government printing-office, some houseless wildernesses meant for streets, and the hotel where the members of the legislature "board." Such was the senatorial throng at the moment of my visit, that we were thrust into a detached building made of half-inch planks, with wide openings between the boards; and as the French Canadian members were excited about the resignation of Mr. Galt, indescribable chattering and bawling filled the house.

The view from the Parliament-house is even more thoroughly Canadian than that from the terrace at Quebec--a view of a land of rapids, of pine forests, and of lumberers' homes, full of character, but somewhat bleak and dreary; even on the hottest summer's day, it tells of winter storms past and to come. On the far left are the island-filled reaches of the Upper Ottawa; nearer, the roaring Chaudiere Falls, a mile across--a mile of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of jets, of spray. From the "caldron" itself, into which we can hardly see, rises a column of rainbow-tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now fast falling before the settler's axe. Below you is the river, swift, and covered with cream-like foam; on the right, a gorge--the mouth of the Rideau Ca.n.a.l.

When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudiere is but little behind Niagara; but it may be doubted whether in any fall there is that which can be called sublimity. Natural causes are too evident; water, rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. How different from a storm upon the coast, or from a September sunset, where the natural causes are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to see the immediate hand of G.o.d! It is excusable in Americans, who have no sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as the perfection of the sublime; but it is strange that a people who have Birling Gap and Bantry Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a cry.

Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the great Chaudiere: the awesome slowness with which the deep-green flood, in the center of the Horseshoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf.