To return to the question of Government. The American Colonies were lost. Here in Canada was an opportunity for a new Imperial policy, better calculated to retain the affections of the colonists. Three distinct problems were involved:
1. Was French or Lower Canada, with its small minority of British, to be given representative Government at all?
2. If so, was it to be left as a separate unit, or was it to be amalgamated in a Union with its neighbour, Upper Canada?
3. Whichever course was taken, what was to be the relation between the Home Government and Canada?
All these questions arise in the case of Ireland itself, and the parallel in each case is interesting. In Canada they were determined for the space of half a century by the Constitutional Act of 1791, passed at the period when Grattan's unreformed Parliament was hastening to its fall, and Wolfe Tone was founding his Society of United Irishmen. Let us take in turn the three questions posed above.
1. The British minority in Lower Canada, supported by a corresponding school in England, were strong for an undisguised British ascendancy, without any recognition of the French. They urged, what was true, that the French were unaccustomed to representative government, and implied, what was neither true nor politic, that they could not, and ought not to, be educated to it. If there was to be an Assembly at all, it should, they claimed, be wholly British and Protestant, or, in the alternative, the Protestant minority only should be represented at Westminster. In other words, they wished either for the pre-Union Irish system or for the post-Union Irish system, both of them, as time was just beginning to prove, equally disastrous to the interests of Ireland. We are not surprised to find these ideas supported by the Irishman Burke, in whom horror of the French Revolution had destroyed the last particle of Liberalism. If Pitt lacked "Imperial imagination," he knew more than most of his contemporaries about the elementary principles of governing white men. It was only a few years before that he had urged upon his Irish Viceroy, Rutland, a reform of the Irish Parliament which might have united the races and averted all the disasters to come, and in this very year (1791) he was pressing forward the Catholic franchise in Ireland. The French in Canada must, he said, be represented in a popular Assembly equally with the British, and on the broadest possible franchise, and they were.
2. The next question was that of the union or separation of Upper and Lower Canada. Here, and from the same underlying motive, the British minority in Lower Canada were for the Union, partly on commercial grounds, but mainly as a step in the direction of overcoming French influence. Upper Canada, wholly British, was, on the whole, neutral. Pitt, on high principle, again took correct ground. He did not, indeed, foresee that separation, for geographical reasons, would cause certain inconveniences; but he did understand—and experience in both Provinces ultimately proved him right—that it was absolutely hopeless to try and avert social and racial discord by artificially swamping the French element. He declared, then, for the separation of the two Canadas into two distinct Provinces. Note the beginnings of another, though a distant, analogy with the relations of Ireland and Great Britain, distant because the French at this time largely outnumbered the British of both Provinces, and in after-years maintained something very near a numerical equality. But the same underlying principle was involved. Pitt, in the Legislative Union of Ireland and Great Britain nine years later, constructed without geographical necessity, indeed, in defiance of geography and humanity, the very system which, in a form by comparison almost innocuous, he had condemned for Canada; but not, we must in fairness remember, before doing his part at an earlier date to arrive at a solution which, given a fair chance, would have rendered the Union of Ireland and England unnecessary.
3. So far, good. But there still remained a further question far transcending the other in importance—What was to be the relation between the Home Government and the new Colonies? Here all British intellects, that of Fox alone excepted, were as much at a loss as ever. One simple deduction was made from what had happened in America, namely, that the new Colonies must not be forced to contribute to Imperial funds by taxes levied from London. That claim had already been abandoned in 1778 by the Colonial Tax Repeal Act, which nevertheless expressly reserved the King's right to levy "such duties as it may be expedient to impose for the regulation of commerce," the sum so raised to be retained for the use of the Colony. No one made the more comprehensive deduction, even in the case of wholly British Upper Canada, that Colonial affairs should be controlled by Colonial opinion, constitutionally ascertained, and that the British Governor should act primarily through advisers chosen by the majority of the people under his rule. We must bear in mind that, had Grattan's Parliament been reformed, and the warring races in Ireland been brought into harmony, it would still have had to pass through the crucial phase of establishing its right to choose Ministers by whose advice the Lord-Lieutenant should be guided, that is, if it were to become a true Home Rule Parliament of the kind we aim at to-day.
From the date of the Constitutional Act passed for Canada in 1791, it took fifty-six troubled years and an armed rebellion in each Province to establish the principle of what we call "responsible Government" for Canada, and, through Canada, for the rest of the white Colonies of the Empire. During these fifty-six years, which correspond in Irish history to a period dating from the middle of Grattan's Parliament down to the great Famine, ascendancies, with the symptoms of disease which always attended ascendancies, grew up in Canada, as they had in Ireland, in spite of conditions which were far more favourable in Canada to healthy political growth. Canada started with this great advantage over Ireland, that instead of a corrupt parody of a Parliament, each of her Provinces, under the Constitutional Act of 1791, had a real popular Assembly, elected without regard to race or religion. It was the Upper House or Legislative Council, as it was called, that interposed the first obstacle to the free working of popular institutions. In both Provinces this Council was nominated by the Governor, and could be used, and was naturally used, to represent minority interests and obstruct the popular assembly. Fox had correctly prophesied that it would soon come "to inspire hatred and contempt." But he did not mean that such a chamber was in itself an insuperable bar to harmony. Nominated or hereditary second chambers are not necessarily inconsistent with popular government, provided that the Executive Government itself possesses the confidence of the representative Assembly. Under that lever, obstruction eventually gives way. But this idea of a tie of confidence between the Governors and the governed was exactly what was lacking.
The Executive Council in each Province was also chosen by the British Governor or Lieutenant-Governor, generally a military man, from persons representing either his own purely British policy or the ideas of a privileged colonial minority, and without regard to the wishes or opinions of the Colonial Assembly, just as the Executive officers in Ireland, both before and after the Union, were chosen out of corresponding elements by the Lord-Lieutenant or Chief Secretary, acting under the orders of the British Government, and without any regard to the wishes or opinions of the majority of Irishmen. Behind all, in remote Downing Street stood the British Government, in the shape of the Colonial Office for Canada and the Irish Office for Ireland, both working in dense ignorance of the real needs of the countries for which they were responsible, and permeated with prejudice and pedantry. To complete the parallel, there was now a foreign Power in the close neighbourhood of each dependency, the United States in the case of Canada, France in the case of Ireland, both of them Republican Powers, and both able and willing to take advantage of disaffection in the dependencies in order to further a quarrel with the Mother Country. We have seen the results in Ireland. Let us now observe the results in Canada, taking especial care to notice that an ascendancy Government gives rise to the same type of evil in a uni-racial as in a bi-racial community.