The Canadian Dominion Part 4

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 a.s.sure Macdonald another five-year lease of power. Yet within a year the Pacific Scandal had driven him from office and overwhelmed him in disgrace.

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 time-a 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 company the contract was awarded.

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 sustained by a majority of two to one.

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 College-the 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 world-wide 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 self-sufficiency 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 while life lasted.

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 world-wide depression which had lasted since 1873 pa.s.sed away. Canada shared in the recovery and gave the credit to the well-advertised 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 vogue of a popular tonic.

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 appet.i.te 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 1882 and the contract held.

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 a.s.sets. 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, opposite Vancouver.

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 hard-won unity. Canada was pa.s.sing 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 federations-the 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 const.i.tutional 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 Const.i.tution, 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 half-breeds, had settled. The pa.s.sing 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 half-breeds. 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 natural-born general, and the half-breeds 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 gallant strokes and counterstrokes.

The racial pa.s.sions roused by this conflict, however, did not pa.s.s 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 French-Canadian heart for long years after; and in Ontario, where the Orange order was strongly entrenched, a faction threatened "to smash Confederation into its original fragments" rather than submit to "French domination."

Racial and religious pa.s.sions, 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 French-Canadian 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 school privileges. .h.i.therto enjoyed by the Roman Catholic minority.

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 compet.i.tion 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 one-third as many people of Canadian birth or descent as in Canada itself.

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 political union which would bring commercial advantages in its train.

The decade from 1885 to 1895 stands out in the record of the relations of the English-speaking peoples as a time of constant friction, of petty pin p.r.i.c.ks, of bl.u.s.ter 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 "spread-eagle" 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 Irish-American antagonism. The accession to power of Lord Salisbury, reputed to hold the United States in contempt, and later the foolish indiscretion of Sir Lionel Sackville-West, British Amba.s.sador at Washington, in intervening in a guileless way in the presidential election of 1888, did as much to nourish ill-will 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 att.i.tude 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 insh.o.r.e 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 ca.n.a.l 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 by taxing the baskets containing duty-free peaches.

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 insh.o.r.e fishing, and in addition denied port privileges to deep-sea fishing vessels and forbade American boats to enter Canadian ports for the purpose of trans-shipping 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 three-mile 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 well-considered 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 privileges as a makeweight, gradually eased the friction.

Yet if it was not the fishing question, there was sure to be some other issue-bonding privileges, Canadian Pacific interloping in western rail hauls, tariff rates, or ca.n.a.l tolls-to 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 G.o.d 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 English-speaking 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 ma.s.s 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 witness two experiments in democracy, not one unwieldy venture.

Commercial union was a half-way 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 drawn across the trail.

Yet the question would not down. The political parties were compelled to define their att.i.tude. 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 countries.

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 was increased in by-elections.

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 one-sided 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 Cleveland became "the hammer of the Canadians," welding them into unity.

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 be no mere turning back to the days of the old empire.

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 pa.s.sing through a reaction destined to lead to the earth-shaking catastrophe of 1914. The ideals of peace and free trade preached and to some degree practiced in the fifties and sixties were pa.s.sing 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 self-contained 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 means to this end.

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 a.s.surance 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 halt came.

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 self-governing colonies would consent to be subordinated to a Parliament in London in which each would have only a fragmentary representation.

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 a.s.sert and secure complete self-government 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 harmonious action.

It was chiefly in matters of trade and tariffs that progress was made in the direction of self-government. Galt had a.s.serted 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 treaty-making 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 att.i.tude. 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 a.s.sert with truth that "the self-governing colonies are recognized as possessing the right to define their respective fiscal relations to all countries." But Canada as yet took no step toward a.s.suming 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 self-governing states and then turning to closer and cooperative union with one another and with the mother country.

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 Governor-General 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 subordination.

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 self-governing 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 began to realize that it was making little progress and dissolved in 1893.

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 stumbling-block 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, a.s.suring 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 consumer.

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 Dominion realized at last that it must work out its own salvation.

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 const.i.tution, 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 break-up. 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 more dangerous to the Opposition than to the forces of the Government.

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 state-aided denominational schools had been established. In 1890 the Manitoba Government swept this system away and replaced it by a single system of non-sectarian and state-supported 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 pa.s.s the law but also that the Dominion Government had the const.i.tutional right to pa.s.s remedial legislation restoring in some measure the privileges taken away. The issue was thus forced into federal politics.

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 pa.s.s 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 decisive majority. The day of new leaders and anew policy had dawned at last.

CHAPTER V. THE YEARS OF FULFILMENT

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 long-deferred hopes, he was to guide the destinies of the nation.

Laurier began his work by calling to his Cabinet not merely the party leaders in the federal arena but four of the outstanding provincial Liberals-Oliver 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 French-Canadian Catholic. Such doubters were rea.s.sured 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 cover strength.

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 parochial schools were set up, it was accepted by the laity.

With this th.o.r.n.y 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 but a few had begun to lose faith in the promise of the West.

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 was in a ferment, and thousands were ready to swarm to new homes overseas.

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 a.s.similation 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 Pa.s.sover. Italian navvies came also by the thousands, but mainly as birds of pa.s.sage; 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 numerous.

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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 sub-agents 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 1902-03, 50,000; and in 1912-13, 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. Circ.u.mstances 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 1903-04, to 120,000 in 1907-08, and to 150,000 in 1912-13. 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 English-speaking 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 feeble-minded, 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 bars were raised higher.