Sir Charles Tupper, Bart.
From a photograph by Elliott and Fry, London.
The tactics pursued in Canada during these exciting months in the Maritime Provinces were those defined by a great historian, in dealing with a different convulsion, as 'masterly inactivity.' In that memorable speech of years afterwards when Macdonald, about to be overwhelmed by the Pacific Railway charges, appealed to his countrymen in words that came straight from the heart, he declared: 'I have fought the battle of union.' The events of 1866 are the key to this utterance. Parliament was not summoned until June; and meanwhile ministers said nothing. That this line of policy was deliberate, is set forth in a private letter from Macdonald to Tilley:
Had we met early in the year and before your elections, the greatest embarrassment and your probable defeat at the polls would have ensued. We should have been pressed by the Opposition to declare whether we adhered to the Quebec resolutions or not. Had we answered in the affirmative, you would have been defeated, as you were never in a position to go to the polls on those resolutions. Had we replied in the negative, and stated that it was an open question and that the resolutions were liable to alteration, Lower Canada would have arisen as one man, and good-bye to federation.
Thus was the situation saved; and, although the delegates from the Maritime Provinces were obliged to wait in London for some months for their Canadian colleagues, owing to the Fenian invasion of Canada and to a change of ministry in England, the body of delegates assembled in December at the Westminster Palace Hotel, in London, and sat down to frame the details of the bill for the union of British North America.
[[1]] Gordon's dispatches to the colonial secretary indicate that from the first he distrusted the Quebec scheme and that the overthrow of his ministers owing to it occasioned him no great grief. James Hannay, the historian, attributes his conduct to chagrin at the pushing aside of maritime union, as he had hoped to be the first governor of the smaller union.