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 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 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 passed 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 petition 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 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 coxcomb, 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 dispassionate examination of the document 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.'
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 hitherto 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 assemblage of data. On this he reasoned with admirable results.
The Report consists of four parts. The 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. 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 such serious problems. There were various anomalies and difficulties; but they were on their way to removal.