It will be admitted that the experience of Sir John Macdonald in dealing with the French Canadian people, and his knowledge of French Canadian sentiment towards the Empire and the Dominion were unique. As a statesman he had every reason to consider and conciliate the French vote, by which his parliamentary majority was in part maintained throughout his career. Yet he never saw in French Canadian feeling any bar to a united Empire. In 1889, at a time when certain Quebec politicians, and even members of his own Cabinet, were declaiming {161} rather vigorously against the idea of Imperial Federation, I had an opportunity of asking his opinion as to the ultimate attitude which Quebec was likely to take towards the question. His reply, given without reserve or hesitation, was marked by a decision which was manifestly the outcome of much thought upon the question. I try to reproduce this opinion, not so much to attach to it the weight of his great name, as because it bears upon the face of it the recommendation of reason and truth. 'The relation of Quebec towards the Empire is fixed,' said he, 'by the facts of history and the aspirations of the people themselves. The controlling idea of the French Canadian is to retain his language, religion and civil institutions, necessarily held under a critical tenure on a continent in the main Anglo-Saxon. But he has in the treaty of 1763 and the Quebec Act founded upon it a Magna Charta as dear to him as is to an Englishman that won from King John. By that treaty the honour of England was pledged to France that the Frenchmen of Quebec who then became British subjects should be continued in the enjoyment of their religious and civil institutions. In annexation to the United States or in Canadian independence this guarantee would be given up. In the Great Republic the French Canadian would run the risk of being blotted out as was the Frenchman of Louisiana. In an independent Canada he would hold his own with difficulty. He must in the long run vote to follow the Empire in whatever {162} direction its development may lead. This condition is permanent; all others are temporary. The interest of the French Canadian will lie in resisting separation, whether in the direction of independence or annexation.'
{163}
CHAPTER VII
MR. GOLDWIN SMITH.
No discussion of the relation of Canada to the Empire, much less any more general discussion of British unity, would be complete which omits special reference to Mr. Goldwin Smith and the views on national questions which he has for many years persistently and strenuously advocated. To these views he has challenged attention anew in his latest volume, Canada and the Canadian Question, which may fairly be supposed to condense all that can be said in favour of the separation of Canada from the Empire, and generally in support of that form of national disintegration which is involved in the great colonies becoming separate states or annexing themselves to other nations. Very considerable interest is given to this latest utterance of Mr. Smith from the fact that he is almost the last conspicuous representative of a school of thinkers which twenty-five or thirty years ago appeared likely to dominate English opinion on colonial affairs.
To these men the United Kingdom was, and was to be, sufficient unto itself; the outlying portions of the Empire were but incidental and temporary {164} connections; the greater colonies were to be voluntarily dropped when they had developed strength to stand alone, or as convenient opportunities to get rid of them arose.
The splendid edifice of Empire built up by the toil and statesmanship of generations was an illusion which gave nothing more than a false prestige; its dissolution was to herald the dawn of a better day.
It will be generally admitted that in England this school of thought is practically dead. In his vigorous and persistent attempt to revive it in Canada Mr. Smith has met with little success. That one of the most brilliant writers and masters of style in the English world should in a distant colony have devoted well-nigh twenty years of his life to weakening the political bond between Britain and that colony with practically no visible result, is of itself a phenomenon which indicates the true tendency of national life. But that in the pursuit of his fixed idea Mr. Smith has done much harm is, I think, scarcely open to doubt. Both in Britain and the United States he has produced false impressions on Canadian affairs. The useful efforts which he has made for the elevation of journalism and for the purification of public life in Canada, the greater service which he might have done in giving high ideals to the Young Dominion, have been neutralized or made impossible by his intellectual slavery to a set of ideas which rendered him incapable of entering into or sympathizing with the deeper motives of {165} Canadian life. A great contemporary thinker and satirist, James Russell Lowell, made the 'barbed arrows of his indignant wit' the terror of corrupt politicians, while still retaining the love of the people whom he served. This he did in virtue of his constant sympathy with national aspirations and the firm faith in his country's future which shines through every page of his bitterest criticisms. In a similar sphere of effort Goldwin Smith has failed, because he has permitted an atrabilious and pessimistic temperament, a preference of epigram to accuracy, and an impatience at the non-fulfilment of his own political prophecies to distort his studies of Canadian problems, and to take away much of their value.
For those many Canadians who welcomed his coming to Canada, as one of the happiest omens for the political and intellectual life of the country, in whom even yet admiration struggles with disappointment, the duty of pointing out his unfitness to interpret the political history and actual position of Canada, is as painful as it is imperative.
Mr. Smith's book on Canada is manifestly intended primarily for readers in England. It is to his English audience that he appeals when he says that 'he does not think that the honour or true interest of his native country can for a moment be absent from his breast.' Of this, Englishmen must judge; Canadians, who respect patriotic sentiment, only ask of Mr. Smith (and they have some reason for emphasizing the request) that they may be credited with sincerity {166} when they claim that the honour and true interests of their native country compel them to dispute his arguments and repudiate the main conclusions about Canada's destiny which he outlines for his English readers. Unfortunately they must do no more than this. Mr. Smith claims 'that he has done his best to take his readers to the heart of it (the Canadian question) by setting the whole case before them: that his opinions have not been hastily formed: that they have not, so far as he is aware, been biassed by personal motives of any kind.' This is a pledge of fairness and impartiality in discussion. It is a pledge which, in Canadian opinion, is not fulfilled. No man in Canada speaks or writes with a deeper sense of responsibility than Principal Grant, as a clergyman, as the head of an important university, and as one of the most active moral forces in the Dominion. He knows Canada, too, from end to end, better than any living man. Yet in a formal review of Canada and the Canadian Question Principal Grant endorses the opinion of another writer that Mr. Smith's book is 'so brilliant, so inaccurate, so malicious even, that it is enough to make one weep.' The criticism does not seem to me too strong. Nor must Mr. Smith think that it is only upon super-sensitive Canadian minds that this impression is left. One of the closest thinkers and most brilliant writers on political subjects in England, a man of cool judgment, who has observed Canadian institutions on the spot, said to me after perusing Canada and the Canadian Question that he considered {167} it the most unfair book he had ever read. At the high table of an Oxford college a Canadian ventured to deprecate the acceptance by English people of Mr. Smith's brilliant and epigrammatic statement of half-truths as truths upon Dominion affairs. The reply of one of the clearest thinkers in the University was not unsatisfactory to the colonist. 'We in England know Mr. Smith well, and we know that, where every sentence has to be so sharply pointed as his, a liberal allowance must be made for accuracy. Canadians need have no fear that his views are accepted without question here.'