The Winning of Popular Government Part 1

The Winning of Popular Government.

by Archibald Macmechan.

CHAPTER I

DURHAM THE DICTATOR

And let him be dictator For six months and no more.

The curious sightseer in modern Toronto, conducted through the well-kept, endless avenues of handsome dwellings which are that city's pride, might be surprised to learn that at the northern end of the street which cuts the city in two halves, east and west, bands of armed Canadians met in battle less than a century ago. If he continued his travels to Montreal, he might be told, at a certain point, 'Here stood the Parliament Buildings, when our city was the capital of the country; and here a governor-general of Canada was mobbed, pelted with rotten eggs and stones, and narrowly escaped with his life.' And if the intelligent traveller asked the reason for such scenes, where now all is peace, the answer might be given in one word--Politics.

To the young, politics seems rather a stupid {2} sort of game played by the bald and obese middle-aged, for very high stakes, and governed by no rules that any player is bound to respect. Between the rival teams no difference is observable, save that one enjoys the sweets of office and the mouth of the other is watering for them. But this is, of course, the hasty judgment of uncharitable youth. The struggle between political parties in Canada arose in the past from a difference in political principles. It was a difference that could be defined; it could be put into plain words. On the one side and the other the guiding ideas could be formulated; they could be defended and they could be attacked in logical debate. Sometimes it might pa.s.s the wit of man to explain the difference between the Ins and the Outs.

Sometimes politics may be a game; but often it has been a battle. In support of their political principles the strongest pa.s.sions of men have been aroused, and their deepest convictions of right and wrong.

The things by which men live, their religious creeds, their pride of race, have been enlisted on the one side and the other. This is true of Canadian politics.

That ominous date, 1837, marks a certain climax or culmination in the political {3} development of Canada. The const.i.tution of the country now works with so little friction that those who have not read history a.s.sume that it must always have worked so. There is a real danger in forgetting that, not so very long ago, the whole machinery of government in one province broke down, that for months, if not for years, it looked as if civil government in Lower Canada had come to an end, as if the colonial system of Britain had failed beyond all hope.

_Deus n.o.bis haec otia fecit_. But Canada's present tranquillity did not come about by miracle; it came about through the efforts of faulty men contending for political principles in which they believed and for which they were even ready to die. The rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada, and what led up to them, the origins and causes of these rebellions, must be understood if the subsequent warfare of parties and the evolution of the scattered colonies of British North America into the compact united Dominion of Canada are not to be a confused and meaningless tale.[1]

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Futile and pitiful as were the rebellions, whether regarded as attempts to set up new government or as military adventures, they had widespread and most serious consequences within and without the country. In Britain the news caused consternation. Two more American colonies were in revolt. Battles had been fought and British troops had been defeated. These might prove, as thought Storrow Brown, one of the leaders of the 'Sons of Liberty' in Lower Canada, so many Lexingtons, with a Saratoga and a Yorktown to follow. Sir John Colborne, the commander-in-chief, was asking for reinforcements. In Lower Canada civil government was at an end. There was danger of international complications. For disorders almost without precedent the British parliament found an almost unprecedented remedy. It invested one man with extraordinary powers. He was to be captain-general and commander-in-chief over the provinces of British North America, and also 'High Commissioner for the adjustment of certain important questions depending in the ... Provinces of Lower and Upper Canada respecting the form and future government of the said Provinces.' He was given 'full power and authority ... by {5} all lawful ways and means, to inquire into, and, as far as may be possible, to adjust all questions ... respecting the Form and Administration of the Civil Government' of the provinces as aforesaid. These extraordinary powers were conferred upon a distinguished politician in the name of the young Queen Victoria and during her pleasure. The usual and formal language of the commission, 'especial trust and confidence in the courage, prudence, and loyalty' of the commissioner, has in this case deep meaning; for courage, prudence, and loyalty were all needed, and were all to be put to the test.

The man born for the crisis was a type of a cla.s.s hardly to be understood by the Canadian democracy. He was an aristocratic radical.

His recently acquired t.i.tle, Lord Durham, must not be allowed to obscure the fact that he was a Lambton, the head of an old county family, which was ent.i.tled by its long descent to look down upon half the House of Peers as parvenus. At the family seat, Lambton Castle, in the county of Durham, Lambton after Lambton had lived and reigned like a petty prince. There John George was born in August 1792. His father had been a Whig, a consistent friend of Charles James {6} Fox, at a time when opposition to the government, owing to the wars with France, meant social ostracism; and he had refused a peerage. The son had enjoyed the usual advantages of the young Englishman in his position.

He had been educated at Eton and at the university of Cambridge. Three years in a crack cavalry regiment at a time when all England was under arms could have done little to lessen his feeling for his caste. A Gretna Green marriage with an heiress, while he was yet a minor, is characteristic of his impetuous temperament, as is also a duel which he fought with a Mr Beaumont in 1820 during the heat of an election contest. After the period of political reaction following Waterloo, reaction in which all Europe shared, England proceeded on the path of reform towards a modified democracy; and Lambton, entering parliament at the lucky moment, found himself on the crest of the wave. His Whig principles had gained the victory; and his personal ability and energy set him among the leaders of the new reform movement. He was a son-in-law of Earl Grey, the author of the Reform Bill of 1832, and he became a member of the Grey Cabinet. Before the Canadian crisis he had shown his {7} ability to cope with a difficult situation in a diplomatic mission to Russia, where he is said to have succeeded by the exercise of tact. He was nicknamed 'Radical Jack,' but any one less 'democratic,' as the term is commonly understood, it would be hard to find. He surrounded himself with almost regal state during his brief overlordship of Canada. In Quebec, at the Castle of St Louis, he lived like a prince. Many tales are told of his arrogant self-a.s.sertion and hauteur. In person he was strikingly handsome. Lawrence painted him when a boy. He was an able public speaker. He had a fiery temper which made co-operation with him almost impossible, and which his weak health no doubt aggravated. He was vain and ambitious. But he was gifted with powers of political insight. He possessed a febrile energy and an earnest desire to serve the common weal. Such was the physician chosen by the British government to cure the cankers of misrule and disaffection in the body politic of Canada.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Earl of Durham. After the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence.]

Lord Durham received his commission in March 1838. But, though the need was urgent for prompt action, he did not immediately set out for Canada. For the delay {8} he was criticized by his political opponents, particularly by Lord Brougham, once his friend, but now his bitterest enemy. On the twenty-fourth of April, however, Durham sailed from Plymouth in H.M.S. _Hastings_ with a party of twenty-two persons.

Besides his military aides for decorative purposes, he brought in his suite some of the best brains of the time, Thomas Turton, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and Carlyle's gigantic pupil, Charles Buller. It is characteristic of Durham that he should bring a band of music with him and that he should work his secretaries hard all the way across the Atlantic. On the twenty-ninth of May the _Hastings_ was at Quebec.

Lord Durham was received by the acting administrator, Sir John Colborne, and conducted through the crowded streets between a double hedge of soldiery to the Castle of St Louis, the vice-regal residence.

If Durham had been slow in setting out for the scene of his labours, he wasted no time in attacking his problems upon his arrival in Canada.

'Princely in his style of living, indefatigable in business, energetic and decided, though haughty in manner, and desirous to benefit the Canadas,' is the {9} judgment of a contemporary upon the new ruler. On the day he was sworn to office he issued his first proclamation. Its most significant statements are: 'The honest and conscientious advocates of reform ... will receive from me, without distinction of party, race, or politics, that a.s.sistance and encouragement which their patriotism has a right to command ... but the disturbers of the public peace, the violators of the law, the enemies of the Crown and of the British Empire will find in me an uncompromising opponent, determined to put in force against them all the powers civil and military with which I have been invested.' It was a policy of firmness united to conciliation that Durham announced. He came bearing the sheathed sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other. The proclamation was well received; the Canadians were ready to accept him as 'a friend and arbitrator.' He was to earn the right to both t.i.tles.

Durham was determined to begin with a clean slate. With a characteristic disregard for precedent, he dismissed the existing Executive Council as well as Colborne's special band of advisers, and formed two new councils in their place, consisting of {10} members of his personal staff, military officers, Canadian judges, the provincial secretary, and the commissary-general. Together they formed a committee of investigation and advice; and, being composed of both local and non-local elements, it was a committee specially fitted to supply the necessary information, and to judge all questions dispa.s.sionately from an outside point of view. This committee acting with the High Commissioner took the place of regular const.i.tutional government in Lower Canada. It was an arbitrary makeshift adopted to meet a crisis.

During the long, tedious voyage of the _Hastings_ the High Commissioner had not been idle. He had worked steadily for many hours a day at the knotty Canadian question, studying papers, drafting plans, discussing point after point with his secretaries. Once in the country, he set to work in the most thoroughgoing and systematic way to gather further knowledge. He appointed commissions to report on all special problems of government--education, immigration, munic.i.p.al government, the management of the crown lands. He obtained reports from all sources; he conferred with men of all shades {11} of political opinion; he called representative deputations from the uttermost regions under his sway; he made a flying visit to Niagara in order to see the country with his own eyes and to study conditions. Such labours were beyond the capacity of any one man; but Durham was ably supported by his band of loyal helpers and a public eager to co-operate. The result of all this activity was the ama.s.sing of the priceless data from which was formed the great doc.u.ment known as Lord Durham's Report.

It is generally overlooked that at this period Canada stood in danger from external as well as internal enemies. Hardly had Durham landed at Quebec when there occurred a series of incidents which might have led to war between Great Britain and the United States. A Canadian pa.s.senger steamer, the _Sir Robert Peel_, sailing from Prescott to Kingston, was boarded at Wells Island by one 'Bill' Johnson and a band of armed men with blackened faces. The pa.s.sengers and crew were put ash.o.r.e without their effects, and the steamer was set on fire and destroyed. Very soon afterwards an American pa.s.senger steamer was fired on by over-zealous sentries at Brockville. Together {12} the twin outrages were almost enough, in the state of feeling on both sides, to set the Empire and the Republic by the ears.

The significance of these and other similar incidents can only be understood by recalling the mental att.i.tude of Americans of the day.

They had a robust detestation of everything British. It is not grossly exaggerated by d.i.c.kens in Martin Chuzzlewit. And that att.i.tude was entirely natural. The Americans had, or thought they had, beaten the British in two wars. The very reason for the existence of their nation was their opposition to British tyranny. They saw that tyranny in all its balefulness blighting the two Canadas. They saw those oppressed colonies rising, as they themselves had risen, against their oppressors. To make the danger all the more acute, the exiled Canadians, notably William Lyon Mackenzie, went from place to place in the United States inciting the freeborn citizens of the Republic to aid the cause of freedom across the line. There was precedent for intervention. Just a year before the fight at St Charles, an American hero, Sam Houston, had wrested the huge state of Texas from the misrule of Mexico and founded a new and independent republic. {13} Hence arose the huge conspiracy of the 'Hunters' Lodges' all along the northern border of the United States, of which more in the next chapter.

Durham took prompt action. He offered a reward of a thousand pounds for such information as should bring the guilty persons to trial in an American, not a Canadian, court. Thereby he said in effect, 'This is not an international affair. It is a plain offence against the laws of the United States, and I am confident that the United States desires to prevent such outrages.' He followed up this bold declaration of faith in American justice by sending his brother-in-law, Colonel Grey of the 71st Regiment, to Washington to lay the facts before President Van Buren and to remonstrate vigorously against the laxity which permitted an armed force to organize within the borders of the Republic for an attack upon its peaceful neighbour. Such laxity was against the law of nations. As a result of Durham's spirited action, the military forces on both sides of the boundary-line worked in concert to put down such lawlessness. President Van Buren's att.i.tude, however, cost him his popularity in his own country.

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The most pressing and most th.o.r.n.y question was how to deal with the hundreds of prisoners who, since the rebellion, had filled the Canadian jails. A large number of these were only suspected of treason; some had been taken in the act of rebellion; and some were confined as ringleaders, charged with crimes no government could overlook and hope to survive. In some countries the solution would have been a simple one: the prisoners would have been backed against the nearest wall and fusilladed in batches, as the Communists were dealt with in Paris in the red quarter of the year 1871. Even in Canada there were hideous cries for b.l.o.o.d.y reprisals. But the ingrained British habit of giving the worst criminal a fair trial blocked such a ready and easy way of restoring tranquillity. Still, a fair trial was impossible. In the temper then prevailing in the province no French jury would condemn, no English jury would acquit, a Frenchman charged with treason, however great or slight his fault might prove to be. The process of trying so many hundreds of prisoners would be simply so many examples of the law's burdensome delay. To leave them to rot in prison, as King Bomba left political offenders {15} against his rule, was unthinkable.

Durham met the difficulty in a bold and merciful way. The young Queen was crowned on June 28, 1838. Such an event is always a season of rejoicing and an opportunity for exercising the royal clemency in the liberation of captives. Following this excellent custom, Durham proclaimed on that day an amnesty in his sovereign's name; and, in a month after his arrival, he gave freedom to hundreds of unfortunates, who had endured many hardships in the old, cruel jails of the time, in addition to the tortures of suspense as to their ultimate fate.

There were some who could not be so released. They were only eight in number, but they were such men as Wolfred Nelson and Robert Bouchette, whose treason was open and notorious. They knew, and Durham knew, that they could not obtain a fair trial. Therefore the High Commissioner overleapt the law, and by an ordinance banished these ringleaders to Bermuda during Her Majesty's pleasure. Durham was much pleased at this happy solution of a difficult and delicate problem. He congratulated himself, as well he might, on having terminated a rebellion without shedding a drop of blood. 'The {16} guilty have received justice, the misguided, mercy,' he wrote to the Queen, 'but at the same time, security is afforded to the loyal and peaceable subjects of this. .h.i.therto distracted Province.' Furthermore, his proceedings had been 'approved by all parties--Sir J. Colborne and all the British party, the Canadians and all the French party.' Durham fancied that this question was now settled, and that he could proceed unhampered with his main task of reconstruction. But his justifiable satisfaction was not to last long.

While the High Commissioner was labouring in Canada, as few officials have ever laboured, for the good of the Empire, his enemies and his lukewarm friends in England were between them preparing his downfall.

Of his foes, the most bitter and unscrupulous was Brougham, a political Ishmael, a curious compound of malignity and versatile intellectual power. He had criticized Durham's delay in starting for Canada; and he was only too glad of the handle which the autocratic, czar-like ordinance of banishment to Bermuda offered him against his enemy. It is nearly always in the power of a party politician to distort and misrepresent the act {17} of an opponent, however just or blameless that act may be. Brougham made a great pother about the rights of freemen, usurpation, dictatorship. As a lawyer he raised the legal point, that Durham could not banish offenders from Canada to a colony over which he had no jurisdiction. He enlisted other lawyers on his side to attack the composition of Durham's council. The storm Brougham raised might have done no harm, if Durham's political allies had stood by him like men. But the prime minister Melbourne, always a timorous friend, bent before the blast, and Durham's ordinance was disallowed.

The High Commissioner, who had been granted such great powers, was held to have exceeded those powers. Durham belonged to the caste which felt a stain upon its honour like a wound. The disallowance of his ordinance by the home authorities was a blow fair in the face. It put an end to his career in Canada, by undermining his authority. In those days of slow communication the news of the disallowance reached him tardily. By a side wind, from an American newspaper, he first learned the fact on the twenty-fifth of September. He at once sent in his resignation, told the {18} people of Canada the reason why in a proclamation, and as soon as possible left the country for ever.

Brougham was burned in effigy at Quebec. The lucky eight, already in Bermuda, were speedily released. Never did leaders of an unsuccessful rebellion suffer less for their indiscretion. From Bermuda they proceeded to New York to renew their agitation. On the first of November Durham left Quebec, as he had entered that city, with all the pomp of military pageantry and in a universal display of public interest. He came in a crisis; he left amid a crisis. He had spent five months in office, almost the exact term for which the Romans chose their chief magistrate in a national emergency and named him dictator.

In the eyes of Durham's enemies his ordinance of banishment was a ukase; and, at first blush, it looks like an unwarrantable stretching of his powers. But Durham was on the ground and must necessarily have known the conditions prevailing much better than his critics three thousand miles away. Desperate diseases need desperate remedies. The presumption is always that the man on the ground will be right; and posterity has {19} pa.s.sed a final judgment of approval on Durham's bold slashing of the Gordian knot. New facts have set the whole matter in a new light. A paper of Buller's,[2] hitherto unpublished, shows that the ordinance was promulgated _only after consultation with the prisoners_. 'The prisoners who expected the government to avail itself of its power of packing a jury were very ready to pet.i.tion to be disposed of without trial, and as I had in the meantime ascertained that the proposed mode of dealing with them would not be condemned by the leading men of the British party, Lord Durham adopted the plan proposed.' They regarded banishment as an unexpected mercy, as well they might. The only alternative was the dock, the condemned cell, and the gallows.

On the thirtieth of November Durham landed at Plymouth, and by the middle of the following January he had finished his Report. Early in February it was printed and laid before the House of Commons. The {20} curious legend which credits Buller with the authorship is traceable to Brougham's spite. Macaulay and Brougham met in a London street. The great Whig historian praised the Report. Brougham belittled it. 'The matter,' he averred, 'came from a felon, the style from a c.o.xcomb, and the Dictator furnished only six letters, D-u-r-h-a-m.' The whole question has been carefully discussed by Stuart J. Reid in his _Life and Letters of the First Earl of Durham_, and the myth has been given its quietus. Even if direct external evidence were lacking, a dispa.s.sionate examination of the doc.u.ment itself would dispose of the legend. In style, temper, and method it is in the closest agreement with Durham's public dispatches and private letters.

The drafting of this most notable of state papers was the last of Durham's services to the Empire. A little more than a year later he was dead and laid to rest in his own county. Fifty thousand people attended his funeral. A mausoleum in the form of a Greek temple marks his grave. The funds for this monument were raised by public subscription, such was the force of popular esteem. His dying words were prophetic: 'Canada will one day do justice to my memory.'

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The Report was Durham's legacy to his country. It defined once for all the principles that should govern the relations of the colony with the mother country, and laid the foundations of the present Canadian unity.

It did not please the factions in Canada; it was too plain-spoken.

Exception may be taken, even at the present day, to some of its recommendations and conclusions. But its faithful pictures of 'this. .h.i.therto turbulent colony' enable the historical student and the honest patriot to measure the progress the country has since made on the road to nationhood. If unpleasant, it is very easy reading. Few parliamentary reports are closer packed with vital facts or couched in clearer language. To the task of its composition the author brought energy, insight, a sense of public duty, a desire to be fair, and, best of all, an open mind, a perfect readiness to relinquish prepossessions or prejudices in the face of fresh facts. His ample scheme of investigation, as carried out by himself and his corps of able helpers, had put him in control of a huge a.s.semblage of data. On this he reasoned with admirable results.

The Report consists of four parts. The {22} first, and by far the largest, portion deals with Lower Canada, as the main storm centre.

The second is concerned with Upper Canada; the third, with the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland. Having diagnosed the disease in the body politic, Durham proposes a remedy. The fourth part is an outline of the curative process suggested.

'I expected to find a contest between a government and a people; I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.' In that one sentence Durham precises the situation in Lower Canada. Nothing will surprise the Canadian of to-day more than the evidence adduced of 'the deadly animosity' which then existed between the two races. The very children in the streets fought, French against English. Social intercourse between the two was impossible. The Report shows the historical origin and carefully traces the course of this 'deadly animosity.' It finds much to admire in the character of the French habitant, but spares neither his faults nor the shortcomings of his political leaders. It shows that the original racial quarrel was aggravated by the conduct of the governing officials, both at home and in Canada, until the French took up arms. {23} The consequences were 'evils which no civilized community can long continue to bear.' There must be a 'decision'; and it must be 'prompt and final.'

In Upper Canada Durham found a different situation. There the people were not 'slavish tools of a narrow official clique or a few purse-proud merchants,' but 'hardy farmers and humble mechanics composing a very independent, not very manageable, and sometimes a rather turbulent democracy.' The trouble was that a small party had secured a monopoly of power and resisted the lawful efforts of moderate reformers to establish a truly democratic form of government.

Ill-balanced extremists had taken up arms; but the sound political instinct of the vast majority was against them. Here, too, the original difficulties had been complicated by official ignorance in England and the unwisdom of authorities on the spot. The result was that these 'ample and fertile territories' were in a backward, almost desperate, condition. Their poverty and stagnation were a depressing contrast to the prosperity and exhilarating stir of the great American democracy.

The other outlying provinces presented no {24} such serious problems.

There were various anomalies and difficulties; but they were on their way to removal.

The 'evils which no civilized community could bear' were to be cured by a legislative union of the Canadas. The time had gone by for a federal union. A door must be either open or shut; the French province must become definitely a British province and find its place in the Empire.

To end the everlasting deadlock between the governor and the representatives of the people, the Executive should be made responsible to the a.s.sembly; and, in order to bring the scattered provinces closer together, an inter-colonial railway should be built. In other words, the obsolete, bad system of colonial government must undergo radical reform, both within and without, because 'while the present state of things is allowed to last, the actual inhabitants of these provinces have no security for person or property, no enjoyment of what they possess, no stimulus to industry.'

The story of how this reform was undertaken, and of how, in spite of many obstacles, it was brought to a triumphant success, must always remain one of the most important chapters in the political history of Canada.

[1] The story of the rebellions will be found in two other volumes of the present Series, _The Family Compact_ and _The Patriotes of '37_, For earlier cognate history see _The Father of British Canada_ and _The United Empire Loyalists_.

[2] A sketch of Lord Durham's mission to Canada in 1838, by Charles Buller. See the edition of Lord Durham's Report edited, with an introduction, by Sir C. P. Lucas: Oxford, 1912. The original doc.u.ment was given to Dr Arthur G. Doughty, Dominion Archivist, by the present Earl of Durham.

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