It was succeeded by a ministry in which Hincks and Morin were the leaders. The new parliament included a new force in politics, George Brown, creator of the Globe newspaper. A Scot by birth, a Radical in politics, hard-headed, bitter of speech, a foe to compromise, with Caledonian fire and fondness for facts, he soon commanded a large following in the country and became a dreaded critic in the House. He had disapproved of the late ministry for its failure to carry out the programme approved by the Globe, especially the secularization of the Clergy Reserves. He became the Protestant champion, the denouncer of such acts as that of the Pope in dividing England into Roman Catholic sees and naming Cardinal Wiseman Archbishop of Westminster, and the pugnacious foe of 'French domination.' His activities did not tend to draw French and English closer together. He lacked the gift of his successful rival, John A. Macdonald, for making friends and inspiring personal loyalty.
The Hincks-Morin government was a business man's administration. It is noteworthy for its successful promotion of various railway, maritime, and commercial enterprises. It aided in the establishment of a line of steamers to Britain by offering a substantial subsidy for the carriage of mails, a policy which has continued, with the approval of the nation, to the present time. It was this ministry also which pushed the building of the Grand Trunk, and ultimately succeeded in creating a national highway from Rivière du Loup to Sarnia and Windsor. This was the era of reckless railway speculation. Municipalities were empowered to borrow money on debentures for railway building guaranteed by the provincial government. Unfortunately they borrowed extravagant sums and ran into debt, from which, at last, the province had to rescue them. But, unlike what happened in the case of some of the American states, there was no repudiation of debts by Canadian municipalities.
The year 1851 is likewise famous for the Great Exhibition. Britain had adopted free trade, to her great advantage. All the nations of the world were expected to follow her example and remove the barriers to commerce to the benefit of all. The freedom of intercourse between nation and nation was to slay the jealousy and suspicion which lead to war. To inaugurate the new era of peace and unfettered trade the Crystal Palace was reared in Hyde Park—'the palace made of windies,' as Thackeray calls it—and filled with the products of the world. The idea originated with the Prince Consort, and it was worthy of him. For the first time the various nations could compare their resources and manufactures with one another. Canada had her share in it. As a demonstration of general British superiority in manufactures the Great Exhibition was a great success; but as heralding an era of universal peace it was a mournful failure. Three years later England, France, and Sardinia were fighting Russia to prop the rotten empire of the Turk. Then came the Great Mutiny; then the four years of fratricidal strife between the Northern and Southern States; then the war of Prussia and Austria; then the overthrow of France by Germany. All these events had their influence on Canada. The 100th Regiment was raised in Canada for the Crimea. Joseph Howe went to New York on a desperate recruiting mission. Nova Scotia ordained a public fast on the news of the massacre of white women and children by the Sepoys. Thousands of Canadians enlisted in the Northern armies. The Papal Zouaves went from Quebec to the aid of the Pope against Garibaldi. All these were symptoms that Canadians were beginning to outgrow their narrow provincialism and to perceive their relations to the outer world, and especially towards Britain. The country was reaching out towards the rôle which in our own day she has played in the Great War.
Meanwhile Lord Elgin was playing his part as constitutional governor, standing by his principle of accepting democracy even when democracy went wrong. Though inconspicuous, he was always planning for the benefit of the country he had in charge. He had visions of an Imperial zollverein, but he perceived clearly the immense and immediate advantages of freer trade relations between the British American colonies and the United States. Those once attained, he thought the danger of Annexation past. His activities in his last year of office prove that a man of ability may be a strictly constitutional governor and yet preserve a power of initiative, of almost inestimable value. In 1853 Lord Elgin paid a visit to England, and while there obtained full powers to negotiate with the United States. For several years Hincks had been doing his best to induce the American government to consider the question of reciprocity in natural products with Canada, but without avail. Bills to this effect had even been introduced into Congress; but they never got beyond the preliminary stages. New England was inclined to favour the proposal, for agriculture was declining there before the growth of manufactures. The South favoured reciprocity rather than Annexation, for the 'irrepressible conflict' between the slave states and the free states was every day coming closer to observant eyes, and including Canada in the Union meant a great accession of strength to the already populous North. Opposition came from the farmers of the Northern states, who feared the competition of a country, as yet, almost entirely devoted to agriculture. General indifference, the opposition of a section, combined with the feeling that Canada had nothing adequate to offer in return for access to the huge American market, removed reciprocity from the domain of practical politics. The scale was turned by the codfish question.
Ever since the success of the Revolution the fishermen of New England had a grievance against the British government and against the colonies which did not revolt. They thought it most unjust that, as successful rebels, they could not enjoy the fishing privileges of the North Atlantic which they had enjoyed as loyal subjects. They wanted to eat their cake and have their penny too. Of course no power on earth could exclude them from the Banks, the great shoals in the open sea, where fish feed by millions; but territorial waters were another matter. By the law of nations the power of a country extends over the waters which bound it for three miles, the range of a cannon shot, as the old phrase runs. Now it is precisely in the territorial waters of the British American provinces that the vast schools of mackerel and herring strike. To these waters American fishermen had not a shadow of a right; but Yankee ingenuity was equal to the difficulty and proposed the question, Where does the three-mile limit extend? The American jurists and diplomats insisted that it followed all the sinuosities of the shore. If admitted, this claim would give American fishermen the right of entrance to huge British bights and bays full of valuable fish. The Canadian contention was that the three-mile limit ran from headland to headland, thus excluding the Americans from fishing within the deeper indentations of the coast-line. By the treaty of 1818 the Americans were definitely excluded from the territorial waters, but still they poached on Canada's preserves. It was maddening to Nova Scotians to see aliens insolently hauling their nets within sight of shore and taking the bread from their mouths. The Americans applied the headland to headland rule to their own territorial waters; no 'Bluenose' fisherman could venture into the Chesapeake; but for the 'Britishers' to insist on the same rule was another matter. In 1852 the constant clash of interests almost led to war; for Britain backed up the just complaints of her colonies by detaching a force of six cruisers to protect our fisheries and stop the poachers, and the American government also sent ships to protect their fishermen. There was no further action, beyond a recommendation in the President's message to Congress that the whole matter should be settled by treaty.
Such was the situation when Lord Elgin arrived at Washington in May 1854. His suite included Hincks and Laurence Oliphant, the writer, whose humorous and satiric account of what he saw during the negotiations makes most amusing reading. The diplomats reached the American capital at one of the most dramatic moments of American history. On the very day of their arrival the Kansas-Nebraska Bill passed Congress. It meant the momentary triumph of the South and the extension of slavery into the great hinterland beyond the Mississippi. The passage of the bill was celebrated by the salute of a hundred guns; and, fearing trouble, legislators sat in the House armed to the teeth.
Lord Elgin at once began operations which can hardly be distinguished from an ordinary lobby. From Marcy, the secretary of state, he ascertained that the kernel of opposition to reciprocity was the Democratic majority in the Senate, and he set about cultivating the Democratic senators. There was a round of pleasant dinners and other entertainments, at which Lord Elgin shone. A British peer is always an object of interest in a democracy. This one possessed most agreeable manners, a charm to which Southerners are peculiarly susceptible, and also an unusual gift of oratory which won him favour with a public accustomed to the eloquence of Daniel Webster and Wendell Phillips. These things told with the Democratic majority. That the treaty 'was floated through on champagne' is an exaggeration; but there was undoubtedly much hospitality shown on both sides and much good fellowship. Ten days after his arrival at Washington Lord Elgin was able to tell Mr Marcy that the Democrats would not oppose the treaty, and on the fifth of June it was actually signed. Oliphant furnishes most amusing details of the actual ceremony of appending the signatures. It went into force only after it had been formally ratified by the legislatures of Great Britain and the United States. The most important provisions were as follows.
Natural products were to be admitted free of duty to both countries, the principal being grain, flour, lumber, bread-stuffs, animals, fresh, smoked and salted meats, lumber of all kinds, poultry, cotton, wool, hides, metallic ores, pitch, tar, ashes, flax, hemp, rice, and unmanufactured tobacco. In return the American fishermen obtained the coveted privilege of fishing within the territorial waters of the Maritime Provinces, without any restriction as to distance or headlands. Canadians were accorded the right to fish in the depleted American grounds, north of the 36th parallel N. latitude. Nova Scotians were not pleased at these concessions, especially as they were not allowed to share in the American coasting trade; but as trade grew up and prices rose, their discontent naturally vanished.
The benefits accruing to Canada from the treaty were immediate and plain to every eye. In the first year of its operation the value of commodities interchanged between the two countries rose from an annual average of fourteen million dollars to thirty-three millions, an increase of more than one hundred per cent. The volume of trade rose steadily at the rate of eight or nine millions per annum. When the war broke out between the North and the South, prices jumped, and, during the four years of the struggle, Canada had a greedy market for everything she could produce. The benefit to both countries was obvious. For the first time since the Revolution the currents of North American trade flowed unchecked in their natural channels. Canada had never known such a period of prosperity, and was never to know such another, until the great West was opened up by the railways and until immigrants began to flock in by hundreds of thousands, to draw from the rich loam of the prairies the bountiful harvests of man-sustaining wheat. Lord Elgin's pact held good for twelve years. In the last year the volume of trade was more than eighty-four millions. The agreement ended from a variety of causes, economic and political. Canada had raised the tariff on American manufactures in order to meet her increasing expenditure; and she tried to divert American commerce from its regular routes to a profitable transit through Canadian territory. But the chief cause was the bitterness of the United States at the attitude of Britain during the Civil War. The Trent affair, the ravages of the Alabama and other commerce destroyers, the open and avowed sympathy with the South expressed in British journals and elsewhere, convinced the American people that Britain would be glad to see the Republic broken up. That, with such provocation, the Americans should deprive a British colony of a commercial advantage was not unnatural. One statesman even proposed that the whole of Canada should be handed over to the United States in compensation for the Alabama claims. That the treaty was negotiated at all, and that the experiment in trade was so beneficial to both countries, has certain important lessons. The episode proves that a colonial governor, while governing in strict accordance with the constitution, can do for his government what no one else can do. Lord Elgin's success has never been repeated. Delegation after delegation of Canada's ablest politicians have pilgrimed from Ottawa to Washington, seeking better trade relations, with no result. The second lesson is the tendency of trade to mock at political boundaries and to wed geography. Even now, with high tariffs on both sides of the line, Canada spends fifty-one dollars in the United States for every thirty-three she spends in England.