In Canada much the same misconceptions prevailed, and promoted the acceptance of the Act by the supporters of the old ascendancies. The question of the Union and the question of responsible government, both raised by Lord Durham's Report, became inextricably confused, and the various petitions and resolutions of the time reflect this confusion. The French opposed the Union and supported responsible government on the same grounds, and in almost identical terms, as the Irish opposed, and still oppose, their Union with Great Britain, and ask for responsible government in Ireland. Moderate Britishers supported both proposals, but the extremists of the old ascendancy bitterly denounced the whole theory of responsible government, Union or no Union. Their views are ably and incisively set forth by a Committee of the old Legislative Council of Upper Canada, that is, by the members of the "family compact," in a protest signed and transmitted to London, where it was quoted with approval by Lord John Russell. It may be found, together with other petitions of the time, in the "Canadian Constitutional Development" of Messrs. Grant and Egerton. With a few unessential changes and modifications, the whole document might be signed to-day by a Committee of Ulster Unionists, and I heartily wish that every Ulsterman would read it in a spirit of reason and generosity, and observe how every line of it was falsified by history, before he declares that the situation of Ulster is peculiar, and sets his hand or gives his adhesion to a similar document. The signatories, who, it must be remembered, were a small ruling minority of the colonists, whose power was artificially sustained by the British Governor, claim that they alone, in glorifying and in battling for "colonial dependence," are the true Imperialists. They hold dear the "unity of the Empire." Responsible government within their own Colony would lead to the "overthrowal" of that Empire, and the reduction of Britain to a "second-rate Power." A colonial Cabinet is absurd; the local and sectional interests are too strong; the British Government must remain as "umpire" to keep the parties from flying at one another's throats. The majority, who are themselves a prey to divisions (and one thinks of Nationalist splits), are seeking only for illegitimate power; the minority are for "justice and protection, and impartial government." Yet in the same breath we are told that all is happy and peaceable as it is. Why subject the Colony to the dissensions of party? Why foster a spirit of undying enmity among a people disposed to dwell together in harmony? The signatories argue from the history of Ireland and Scotland, "which never had responsible government, yet government became impracticable the moment it approached to equal rights." Hence a Union, because "government must be conducted with a view to some supreme ruling power, which is not practicable with several independent Legislatures." Finally, Loyalists and Imperialists as they are, they are not going to stand an attempt to "force independence" on them. They will take the matter into their own hands, and, if necessary, call in the United States to "replace the British influence needlessly overthrown."
I do not quote this sort of thing in order to add any tinge of bitterness to present controversies. The signatories lived to see their errors and to be ashamed of what they wrote. They, like the Irish Unionist leaders of to-day, were able and sincere men, unconscious, we may assume, that their pessimism about the tendencies of their fellow-citizens was really due to the defective institutions which they themselves were upholding, and to the forcible suppression of the finer attributes of human nature; unconscious, we may also assume, of identifying loyalty with privilege, and "the supreme ruling power" with their own ruling power; unconscious that what they called "Imperial Unity" was in reality on the verge of producing Imperial disruption; and wholly unconscious, certainly, of the ghastly irony of their analogy drawn from the brutally misgoverned, job-ridden, tithe-ridden, rack-rented Ireland of their day, living, for no fault of its own, under a condition of intermittent martial law, and hurrying at that moment towards the agony of the famine years. Less severe in degree, analogous abuses perpetuated in their own interest existed in their own Colony, and were only abolished under the new régime which they attacked with such vehemence before it came, and which, because it transformed and elevated their own character and that of their fellow-citizens, while drawing them closer to the old country, they afterwards learned to regard with pride and thankfulness.
As an effective contrast to the mistaken views of the Upper Canadian statesmen, the reader cannot do better than study the letters of Joseph Howe, the brilliant Nova Scotia "agitator," to Lord John Russell, in answer to that statesman's speech of June 3, 1839, when he argued against responsible government, and quoted the Upper Canadian manifesto as his text. These letters make a wonderful piece of sustained and humorous satire, of which every word was true and every word applicable to Ireland. Howe's portrait, for example, of the average Colonial Governor applies line for line to the average Chief Secretary, coming at an hour's notice to a country he has never seen, and knows nothing of, vested with absolute powers of patronage, and often pledged to carry out a policy in direct conflict with the wishes of the vast majority of the people whose interests he is supposed to guard.
The Act of 1840 went through, but it had little to do with the regeneration and reconciliation of Canada. Poulett Thompson, the first Governor, peremptorily declined to admit the principle of Ministerial responsibility. Some good reforms were, indeed, made in the early years, but the Act was on the verge of breaking down when Lord Elgin, Durham's son-in-law, came to Canada as Governor-General in 1847. After many party changes and combinations, French influence was temporarily in the ascendant, and in 1849 a Bill was on the stocks for compensating French as well as British subjects for losses in the rebellion of 1837. Elgin, following the advice of his Ministers, of whom Baldwin was one, Lafontaine another, gave the Royal Assent to the Bill. The British, with the old cry of "loyalism," and with Orangemen in the van, rioted, mobbed the Governor, and burnt down the Parliament House at Montreal. Elgin, expostulating with Lord John Russell, who was as pessimistic as ever, and threatened with recall, stuck to his guns under fierce obloquy, and the principle of responsible government was definitely established. It was applied at about the same period to the other British Provinces of North America, with the ulterior results I have described, and in a few years to Australia.
The great year, then, was 1847, the year of the Irish famine, and the year before the pitiful rebellion of Smith O'Brien, surrendering in the historic cabbage-garden. Our thoughts go back sixty-four years to 1783, when the American War of Independence ended; when, as a result of that war, British Canada and Australia were founded, and when, at the crisis—premature, alas!—of Ireland's fortunes, the Volunteers in vain demanded the Reform which might have saved their country. Look into historical details, read contemporary debates, and watch the contrast. Within five years of responsible government Canada solved all the great questions which had been convulsing society for so long, and turned her liberated energies towards economic development. In Ireland the abuses of ages lingered to a point which seems incredible. The Church was not disestablished, amid outcries of imminent ruin and threats of a Protestant rebellion, till 1869, when Canada had already become a Federated Dominion. The Irish land question, dating from the seventeenth century, was not seriously tackled until 1881, not drastically and on the right lines till 1903. Education languishes at the present day. Canada started an excellent system of municipal and local government in the forties. In Ireland, while the minority, in Greville's words, were "bellowing spoliation and revolution," an Act was passed in 1840 with the utmost difficulty, removing an infinitesimal part of the gross abuses of municipal government under the ascendancy system, and it was not till 1898 that the people at large are admitted to a full share in county and town government. Even this step inverted the natural order of things, for the new authorities are hampered in their work by the incessant political agitation for the Home Rule which should have preceded their establishment, as it preceded it in Great Britain and Canada. Home Rule, the tried specific, was resisted, as those who read the debates of 1886 and 1893 will recognize, on the same grounds as Canadian Home Rule, in the same spirit, and often in terms absolutely identical.
Was it because Ireland, unlike Canada, was "so near"? Let us reflect. Did Durham advocate Canadian Home Rule because Canada was "so far"? On the contrary, it was a superficial inference, drawn not merely from Ireland, but from Scotland, and since proved to be false both in Canada and South Africa, that made him shrink from the full application of a philosophy which was already far in advance of the political thought and morality of his day. Is it to be conceived that if he had lived to see the Canadian Federation, the domestic and Imperial results of South African Home Rule, and the consequences of seventy more years of coercive government in Ireland, he would still have regarded the United Kingdom in the light of a successful expedient for "compelling the obedience of refractory populations"? In truth, Durham, like ninety-nine out of a hundred Englishmen of his day, knew nothing of Ireland, not even that her political system differed, as it still differs, toto coelo from that of Scotland, and came into being under circumstances which had not the smallest analogy in Scotland. So far as his knowledge went, he was a student of human nature as affected by political institutions. Wakefield, who advised him, was a doctrinaire theorist who put his preconceived principles into highly successful practice both in Australia and Canada. They said: "Your coercive system degrades and estranges your own fellow-citizens. Change it, and you will make them friendly, manly, and prosperous." They were right, and one reflects once more on the terrible significance of Mr. Chamberlain's admission in 1893, that "if Ireland had been a thousand miles away, she would have what Canada had had for fifty years."
CHAPTER VI
AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND
I have described the Canadian crisis at considerable length because it was the turning-point in Imperial policy. Yet policy is scarcely the right word. The Colonists themselves wrenched the right to self-government from a reluctant Mother Country, and the Mother Country herself was hardly conscious of the loss of her prerogatives until it was too late to regret or recall them. The men who on principle believed in and laboured for Home Rule for Canada were a mere unconsidered handful in the country, while most of those who voted for the Act of 1840 thought that it killed Home Rule. No general election was held to obtain the "verdict of the predominant partner" on the real question at issue, with the cry of "American dollars" (which had, in fact, been paid); with lurid portraits of Papineau and Mackenzie levying black-mail on the Prime Minister, and quotations from their old speeches to show that they were traitors to the Empire; with jeremiads about the terrors of Rome, the abandonment of the loyal minority, and the dismemberment of the Empire, to shake the nerves and stimulate the slothful conscience of an ignorant electorate. Had there been any such opportunity we know it would have been used, and we can guess what the result would have been; for nothing is easier, alas! than to spur on a democracy with such cries as these to the exercise of the one function it should refrain from—interference with another democracy, be it in Ireland or anywhere else. As it was, a merciful veil fell over Canada; Lord Elgin's action in 1849 passed with little notice, and a mood of weary indifference to colonial affairs, for which, in default of any Imperial idealism, we cannot be too thankful, took possession of Parliament and the nation.