CHAPTER V
CANADA AND IRELAND
In comparing the history of Canada with the closely allied history of Ireland, we must bear in mind that in the last half of the eighteenth century the present British North America consisted of three distinct portions: Acadia, or the Maritime Provinces, which we now know as Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, colonized originally by a few Frenchmen and later by Scotch and Irish; Lower Canada, extensively colonized by the French, which we now know as the Province of Quebec; and Upper Canada, which we now know as Ontario, colonized last of all by Americans under circumstances to be described.
In 1763, before the repeal of any part of the Penal Code against Irish Roman Catholics, the French Catholic Colony of Lower Canada, with a population of about seventy thousand souls and the two small towns of Quebec and Montreal, passed definitely into British possession under the Treaty of Paris, which brought to a conclusion the Seven Years' War. Fortunately, there was no question, as in Ireland, of expropriating the owners of the soil in favour of State-aided British planters, and hence no question of a Penal Code, even on the moderate scale current in Great Britain at the same period. On the contrary, it became a matter of urgent practical expediency to conciliate the conquered Province in view of the growing disaffection of the American Colonies bordering it on the South. This disaffection, assuming ominous proportions on the enactment of the Stamp Act in 1765, was itself an indirect result of the conquest of Canada a few years before; for the claim to tax the Americans for Imperial purposes arose from the enormous expense of the war of conquest and of the subsequent charges for defence and upkeep. It was forgotten that American volunteers had captured Louisburg in 1745, and had borne a distinguished part in later operations, and that to lay a compulsory tax upon them would banish glorious memories common to America and Britain. Henceforward, conquered French Canada was made a political bulwark against rebellious America. The French colonists, a peaceable, primitive folk, as attached to their religion as the Irish, and devoted mainly to agriculture, retained, as long as they desired it, the old French system of law known as the Custom of Paris and the free exercise of their religion. Like the Irish, they were strongly monarchical and strongly conservative in feeling, and as impervious to the Republican propaganda emanating from their American neighbours as the Catholic Irish always at heart remained to the revolutionary principles of Wolfe Tone's school. Unmolested in their habits and possessions, they philosophically accepted the transference from the Bourbon to the Hanoverian dynasty, and became an indispensable source of strength to George III. when that monarch was using his German troops to coerce his American subjects and his British troops to overawe the Ulster Volunteers.
In 1774, immediately before the outbreak of a war against which Ireland was protesting, and in which, with the soundest justification, the Irish-Americans, Catholic and Protestant, took such a prominent part against the British arms, the Quebec Act was passed giving formal statutory sanction to the Catholic religion, and setting up a nominated legislative Council, whose members were subject to no religious test. In Ireland it was not till six years later, and, as we have seen, by means of precisely the same pressure—British fear of America—that the Irish Protestant Volunteers obtained the abolition of the test for Dissenters, while Catholics in Ireland were still little more than outlaws, and had to wait for nearly sixty years for complete emancipation. The result of the Quebec Act, together with the sympathetic administration of that great Irishman, Sir Guy Carleton, was the firm allegiance of the French Province in spite of an exceedingly formidable invasion, during the whole of the American War, and even after the intervention of European France. It is part of the dramatic irony of these occurrences that some of the invading army was composed of Morgan's Irish-American riflemen, and that one of the two joint leaders of the invasion was the Irish-American, General Richard Montgomery, who fell at the unsuccessful assault of Quebec on December 31, 1775.
In spite of Burke's noble appeal in the House of Commons, toleration in the abstract had nothing to do with the treatment of the French Catholics. British Catholics in the neighbouring Prince Edward Island were denied all civil rights in 1770, and only gained them in 1830. In England, the Quebec Act with difficulty survived a storm of indignation, in which even Chatham joined. The small minority of British settled in Quebec and Montreal made vehement protests, while the American Congress itself in 1774 committed the irreparable blunder of making the establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in Canada one of its formally published grievances against Great Britain. When war broke out, and the magnitude of the mistake was seen, efforts were made to seduce the Canadians by hints of a coming British tyranny, but the Canadians very naturally abode by their first impressions.
The peace of 1783 and the final recognition of American Independence led to results of far-reaching importance for the further development of the British Empire. Out of the loss of the American Colonies came the foundation of Australia and of British Canada. Before the war it had been the custom to send convicts from the United Kingdom to penal settlements in the American Colonies. The United States stopped this traffic. Pitt's Government decided, after several years of doubt and delay, to divert the stream of convicts to the newly acquired and still unpopulated territory of New South Wales, made known by the voyages of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks. At the same period a very different class of men, seeking a new home, were thrown upon the charity of the British Government. These were the "United Empire Loyalists," as they styled themselves, some 40,000 Americans, with a sprinkling of Irishmen among them, such as Luke Carscallion, Peter Daly, Willet Casey, and John Canniff,[20] who had fought on the Royalist side throughout the war, and at the end of it found their fortunes ruined and themselves the objects of keen resentment. Pitt, with a "total lack of Imperial imagination," as Mr. Holland Rose puts it,[21] does not seem to have considered the plan of colonizing Australia with a part of these men, 433 of whom were reported to be living in destitution in London three years after the war. No more alacrity was shown in relieving the distress of those still in America. In 1788, however, a million and a quarter pounds were voted by Parliament for relief, and large grants of land were made in Canada, whither most of the Loyalists had already begun to emigrate. Some went to the Maritime Provinces, notably to the region now known as New Brunswick; a few went to the towns of the Quebec Province, for the country lands on the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence were already monopolized by the French "habitants"; the rest, estimated at 10,000, to the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence and along the shores of the Lakes Ontario and Erie, in short, to what we now know as the Province of Ontario, and to what then became known as Upper Canada.
From this moment the three Canadas gain sharp definition. To the west Upper Canada, exclusively American or, as we must now say, British in character; next to the east, and cutting off its neighbour from the sea, the ancient Province of Lower Canada, predominantly French, with a minority of British traders in the two towns Quebec and Montreal; last of all the Maritime Provinces, small communities with an almost independent history of their own, although, like Upper and Lower Canada, they eventually presented a problem similar fundamentally to the Irish problem on the other side of the Atlantic. Prince Edward Island is the closest parallel, for, besides the Catholic disabilities of 1770, in 1767 the whole of its land had been granted away by ballot in a single day to a handful of absentee English proprietors, who sublet to occupiers without security of tenure, with the result that a land question similar to that of Ireland arose, which inflamed society and retarded the development of the island for a whole century. Ultimately, moreover, statesmen were driven to an even more drastic solution—compulsory and universal State-aided land purchase.[22] Before the period we have now reached, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, which was carved out of it, had been given rude systems of representative Government, and New Brunswick, also at one time a part of Nova Scotia, received a Constitution in 1784.
The great question after the American War was how to govern the two contiguous Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, the one newly settled by men of British race and Protestant faith, the other also under the British flag, but overwhelmingly French and Catholic, both, in the critical half-century to come, to be reinforced by immigrants from the Old World, and to a large extent from misgoverned Ireland. But let the reader once and for all grasp this point, that, once out of Ireland, there ceases, not immediately, but in course of time, to be any racial or political distinction between the different classes of Irishmen, whose antagonism at home, artificially provoked and fomented by the bad form of government under which they lived, so often made Ireland itself a very hell on earth. I want to dwell on this point in order to avoid confusion when I speak of the bi-racial conditions of Lower Canada and Ireland respectively.