Imperial Federation: The Problem of National Unity

by George R. Parkin

But Mr. Smith questions not merely our right, but our capacity.

We are told that however much steam and telegraph have annihilated distance 'they have not annihilated the parish steeple. They have not carried the thoughts of the ordinary citizen beyond the circle of his own life and work. They have not qualified a common farmer, tradesman, plough man, or artizan to direct the politics of a world-wide state[3].' Shall we {175} then give up all large statesmanship, and adopt the parish steeple as the measure of our political ideas? The parish steeple has its place and limiting power in England as elsewhere, but it has not prevented the creation of a great Empire, its successful administration and its retention. In the end it is the strongest men and the clearest minds of a country which give direction to its destiny, and nowhere is this more the case than among Anglo-Saxon people. The common farmer, tradesman, plough man, or artizan may not be able to direct the policy of a state, but he has a marvellous instinct for discovering and supporting the man who can, be he a Cromwell or a Cecil, a rail-splitter or a Hohenzollern. When he has made up his mind, moreover, we have more to fear, apparently, from a too complete surrender of his own judgment than from ignorant interference in matters which he does not fully comprehend. That the spread of modern democracy involves no necessity of abandoning large statesmanship the history of the colonies clearly proves. Canadians may not, as Mr. Smith suggests, know much of Australian or South African politics, but they have given themselves up with singular persistence to the guidance of a statesman with an imperial range of ideas and policy. In Australia the masses, however much they may be absorbed in their labour struggles and social problems, choose, as their leaders, with occasional change, but on the whole singular steadiness, men like Sir Henry Parkes, Mr. Service, Sir Samuel Griffiths, Mr. Gillies, or {176} Sir Henry Atkinson, every one of them men who, even when most absorbed with the affairs of their own colonies, are thinking constantly on national questions, and dreaming of some great British unity in the future, as their written and spoken thoughts fully testify. Even in South Africa, with its intensified localism, we see the reins of power committed to a man who stakes his political career equally upon working out a South African unity, and upon securing that it shall be consistent with the policy of a united Empire.

I fear that it is impossible to acquit Mr. Smith of at times making statements disingenuous in themselves and especially misleading to the English reader. Perhaps the peculiar animosity with which he has always regarded those Canadian Railways whose construction has falsified his prophecy that the Dominion could not be welded together, explains, if it does not excuse, a special recklessness of statement when he describes them to English people. Mr. Smith speaks of the Intercolonial Railway as 'spanning the vast and irreclaimable wilderness which separates Halifax from Quebec.' Again he says: 'The maritime Provinces are divided from Old Canada by the wilderness of many hundred miles, through which the Intercolonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a passenger or a bale of freight by the way.' Would the ordinary reader outside of Canada believe, after reading this description, that in the course of the 688 miles of rail between Halifax and Quebec the {177} Intercolonial traverses large counties like Cumberland and Westmorland, among the most fertile and productive in Canada; that though running through forest country in the immediate rear of the settled coast line it is closely connected by a score of short branches with the coal areas and all the thickly populated districts along the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that for 100 miles it follows the still more populous shores of the River St. Lawrence, and that the comparatively short distance, scarcely more than 100 miles, between the settlements at the head of Bay Chaleur and those of the St. Lawrence is alone responsible for the epithets 'vast and irreclaimable' which Mr. Smith applies to the whole length of the road? Would the reader believe that it is a railway which carries about a million passengers and more than a million tons of freight every year? That it has conferred the enormous advantage of swift communication with the outside world on some hundreds of thousands of people to whom its construction was an object of eager desire for years before it was accomplished? It is true that, worked as a State Railway for the good of the communities through which it passes, for the avowed purpose of uniting the provinces more closely, kept at a high state of efficiency, and under some unusual expense for clearing away snow in winter, a loss is at present annually incurred, but it is doubtful if any public expenditure made in the Dominion confers so great an advantage on so many people, while subserving great national purposes. {178} Not in Canada alone, but in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Russia and South America, railways, which do not directly pay, are for the public good, or for prospective and indirect advantage, constructed and worked to the content of those who pay for them. In Great Britain state subventions are given to steamship, postal, and cable lines which would not in themselves be at once commercially profitable. For many years a large deficit has been paid on the ordinary English telegraph system; a deficit which even last year amounted to no less than £190,000 sterling. The money has been paid cheerfully, because it gives to the mass of the people the advantages of the sixpenny telegram.

Why should all the vials of wrath, ridicule, and, we may now add, misrepresentation, be reserved for the one State Railway of Canada, because the people are willing to pay the deficiency of £50,000 or £100,000 involved in its operation, for the sake of the consolidation which it has given to the Dominion, and the unmeasured benefit which it confers on immense districts and large populations which would otherwise be singularly isolated, socially and commercially, from the rest of Canada and the rest of the world.

Once more, speaking in disparagement of the same railway as a military route, Mr. Smith says: 'At the time when the Intercolonial was projected, the two British officers of artillery, whose pamphlet has been already cited, pointed out that the line would be fatally liable to snow blocks. It would be awkward if, at a crisis {179} like that of the Great Mutiny, or that of a Russian invasion in India, the reinforcements were blockaded by snow in the wilderness between Halifax and Quebec.' What can we think of a writer who claims to be fair, and yet parades as authorities two young gentlemen whose haphazard forecast has been belied by twenty years of actual working experience? So far from being 'fatally' liable to snow block, the Intercolonial is operated during the two or three months of deep snow with less risk of delay than is incurred every day of the year by ships passing through the Suez Canal, the other most available route in an Indian Crisis. It has been my own lot to suffer a longer detention on a steamship at Ismailia, a detention accepted by the ship's officers as in the course of ordinary experience, than I can remember having met with in many years' experience of the Intercolonial.

When Mr. Smith turns from the Intercolonial, which does not pay, to the Canada Pacific, which does, we find no improvement in fairness of statement. Of the Canada Pacific he says: 'The fact is constantly overlooked in vaunting the importance of this line to the Empire, that its Eastern section passes through the State of Maine, and would, of course, be closed to troops in case of war with any power at peace with the United States.' In a note it is added: 'The Quarterly Review, for example, spoke of the Canadian Pacific Railway as running from "start to finish" over British ground, though the line was at that very moment applying for bonding privileges to the Government of {180} the United States.' This is evidently a deliberate statement. What are the facts? During the months of open navigation Montreal is the water terminus of the Canada Pacific Railway, and the only point from which transfers would be made across the continent. From Montreal to Vancouver, that is, from ocean to ocean, from 'start to finish,' the line is entirely on British soil. Connection further east with the winter ports of Halifax and St. John, has from the first been made by means of the Grand Trunk and Intercolonial lines, the route yet from 'start to finish' running over British territory alone. From the St. Lawrence there is even the alternative of a double route to the sea coast, one down the St. John valley, chiefly owned and controlled, I think, by the Canada Pacific, the other along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, while a third has been projected by the Grand Trunk, the rival of the Canada Pacific, through the heart of New Brunswick. Only a year and a half ago the Canada Pacific, to save distance, built still another line from Montreal eastward to make connection with the Intercolonial, and it is on the ground that a portion of this third line passes through the State of Maine that Mr. Smith informs English people that Canada's trans-continental railway 'would, of course, be closed to troops in case of war with any power at peace with the United States.' Whether this statement, made in a very critical point of Mr. Smith's argument, is a suppressio veri or suggestio falsi, I leave others to decide. On which side is the correct statement of {181} facts I can safely leave to the adjudication of the Canadian reader, the Canadian press, or of any person who has access to a good railway map of the Dominion. So flagrant seems to me the distortion of fact that I have sometimes wondered whether Mr. Smith was not testing the limits of that English ignorance of colonial matters of which he makes much in another part of his volume.

I must quote once more: 'In opening a trade among the provinces, a natural trade at least, these inter-provincial railroads have failed, for the simple reason that the provinces have hardly any products to exchange with each other, and that means of conveyance are futile where there is nothing to be conveyed.' The answer to this may be put into a question which business men will appreciate even if an author in his study at Toronto does not. Why is it, if there is nothing to be conveyed between the provinces, that, in addition to the Intercolonial, two competing lines have already been constructed and a third projected, all on purely business principles, to unite the maritime provinces to those of the St. Lawrence?

In his excessive eagerness to make points, Mr. Smith exposes himself to no slight suspicion of a willingness to open up unnecessarily, if not maliciously, old sores between the mother-land and the colony. He says: 'That in all diplomatic questions with the United States the interest of Canada has been sacrificed to the Imperial exigency of keeping peace with {182} the Americans is the constant theme of Canadian complaint. … By the treaty of 1783, confirming the independence of the United States, England not only resigned the territory claimed by each State of the Union severally, but abandoned to the general government immense territories "unsettled, unexplored, and unknown."' After explaining that this was partly due to ignorance, he continues: 'This is the beginning of a long and uniform story, in the course of which not only great tracts of territory, but geographical unity has been lost. To understand how deeply this iron has entered into the Canadian soul, the Englishman must turn to his map and mark out how much of geographical compactness, of military security, and of commercial convenience was lost when Britain gave up Maine. … A large portion of Minnesota, Dakota, Montana, and Washington, Canada also thinks she has wrongfully lost. These are causes of discontent; discontent may one day breed disaffection; disaffection may lead to another calamitous rupture; and instead of going forth into the world when the hour of maturity has arrived with the parent's blessing, the child may turn in anger from the parental door.'

To conjure up these historic mistakes as the cause of a possible national rupture will only raise a smile in Canada; upon readers outside of Canada who do not understand the circumstances the passage leaves a false impression. That mistakes were made most people agree; that they were partly due to the ignorance {183} of English diplomatists is true; but Canadians must admit that they were due to Canadian ignorance as well. As late as 1874 a Cabinet Minister of the Dominion on a public platform described the splendid wheat areas of the North-West as a country only fitted to be the home of the wolf and the bear. Among the separate and unsympathetic provinces, prior to confederation, there were ignorance and indifference as well as among English statesmen. 'Every intelligent Canadian now knows that most of these mistakes were far more due to the want of a nexus between the Colony and the Empire which would have brought colonial knowledge and experience to the assistance of British diplomacy. He knows that since the acceptance of this assistance as a part of the public policy of Britain, such mistakes can no longer occur, as the Fishery Award at Halifax and the Fishery Treaty at Washington, when Canadian interests were represented by Canadians, sufficiently testify; as the Behring Sea negotiations testify, in which, acting upon the information supplied by the Dominion Government, and recognizing the justice of the case, Lord Salisbury did not hesitate to say the final word which made aggressive diplomacy pause and submit to impartial arbitration.

'Disintegration, surely, is on the point of being complete,' and 'the last strand of political connection is worn almost to the last thread,' Mr. Smith exclaims, using as the illustration of his point Newfoundland's claim to make a commercial treaty of her own independently {184} of Canada. He refuses to see what others see, that the invitation to Newfoundland to have her interests directly represented in the arbitration with France; the fact that Canada has been thus represented at Halifax, at Washington, in the Behring Sea difficulties; the formal introduction, in short, of colonial opinion and knowledge into national diplomacy, marks the creation of new threads of connection, new bonds of union, which promise to be permanent, because constructed on true and primary political principles.