British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

[[25]] Bagot Correspondence: Stanley to Bagot, 3 November and 3 December, 1842.

[[26]] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 October, 1842.

[[27]] Hincks, Reminiscences of his Public Life, p. 89.

[[28]] Kaye, Papers and Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe, p. 416.

CHAPTER V.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD METCALFE.

A surrender of the official Imperial position so unexpected and so contrary to the intentions of the Colonial Office, as that which Bagot had made, provoked a natural reaction. Bagot's successor was one of those men of principle who are continually revealing the flaws and limitations implicit in their principles by earnest over-insistence on them. It is unfortunate that Sir Charles Metcalfe should appear in Canadian history as the man whose errors almost precipitated another rebellion, for among his predecessors and successors few have equalled him, none has outstripped him, in public virtue or experience. He had earned, throughout thirty-seven years in India, a reputation for efficiency in every kind of administrative work. As a lad of little more than twenty he had negotiated with Ranjit Singh the treaty which, for a generation, kept Sikhs and British at peace. In the residency at Hyderabad he had fought, in the face of the governor-general's displeasure, a hard but ultimately successful battle for incorrupt administration. After Bentinck had resigned, Metcalfe had been appointed acting governor-general, and he might have risen even higher, had not the courageous act, by which he freed the press in India from its earlier disabilities, set the East India Company authorities against him. He was something more than what Macaulay called him—"the ablest civil servant I ever knew in India"; his faculty for recommending himself to Anglo-Indian society on its lighter side, and the princely generosity which bound his friends to him by a curious union of reverence and affection, combined with his genius for administration to make him an unusual and outstanding figure in that generation of the company officials in India. Led by the sense of duty which ever dominated him, he had passed from retirement in England to reconcile the warring elements in Jamaica to each other; and his success there had been as great as in India. In English politics, in which he had naturally played little part, he identified himself with the more liberal wing of the Whigs, although his long absence from the centre of affairs, and the inclination natural to an administrator, to think of liberalism rather as a thing of deeds and acts than of opinion, gave whatever radicalism he may have professed a bureaucratic character. He described himself not inaptly to a friend thus: "A man who is for the abolition of the corn laws, Vote by Ballot, Extension of the Suffrage, Amelioration of the Poor-laws for the benefit of the poor, equal rights to all sects of Christians in matters of religion, and equal rights to all men in civil matters...; and (who) at the same time, is totally disqualified to be a demagogue—shrinks like a sensitive plant from public meetings; and cannot bear to be drawn from close retirement, except by what comes in the shape of real or fancied duty to his country."[[1]] Outside of the greater figures of the time, he was one of the first citizens of the Empire, and Bagot, as he thought of possible successors, only dismissed the suggestion of Metcalfe's appointment because it seemed too good news to be true. Nevertheless Sir Charles Metcalfe had one great initial disadvantage for work in Canada. Distinguished as were his virtues, a very little discernment in the home government might have discovered the obstacles which must meet an absolutely efficient, liberal administrator in a country where democracy, the only possible principle of government for Canada, was still in its crude and repulsive stage. The delimitation of the frontier between Imperial control and Canadian self-government required a subtler and more flexible mind than Metcalfe's, and a longer practice than his in the ways of popular assemblies. Between March, 1843, when he assumed office, and the end of 1845, when he returned to die in England, Metcalfe's entire energy was spent in grappling with the problem of holding the balance level between local autonomy and British supremacy. His real contribution to the question was, in a sense, the confusion and failure with which his career ended; for his serious practical logic reduced to an absurdity, as nothing else could have done, the position stated so firmly by Russell in 1839.

Sir Charles Metcalfe came to Canada at a moment when responsible government in its most extended interpretation seemed to have triumphed. In Upper and Lower Canada the reforming party had accepted Bagot's action as the concession of their principle, and the two chief ministers, Baldwin and La Fontaine, were men resolute to endure no diminution of their share of responsibility. Bagot's illness had given additional strength to their authority, and Gibbon Wakefield, who was then a member of Assembly, believed that Baldwin had already taken too great a share of responsibility to be willing to occupy a secondary place under an energetic governor.[[2]] Indeed an unwillingness to allow the governor-general his former unlimited initiative becomes henceforth a mark of the leaders of the Reformers, and La Fontaine, who had resented Sydenham's activity as much as his anti-nationalist policy, protested against the suggestion that Charles Buller should be sent to Canada, because he "apprehended that Buller would be disposed to take an active part himself in our politics."[[3]] There seemed to be no obstacle in the way of a complete victory for reforming principles. The French remained as solidly as ever a unit, and under La Fontaine they were certain to continue to place their solidarity at the disposal of the Upper Canada reformers. The latter, ultras and moderates alike, were too adequately represented, in all their shades and aspects, in the cabinet, to be willing to shake its power; and the sympathetic co-operation between Irishmen in Canada, and those who at that time in Ireland were beginning another great democratic agitation, made the stream of Hibernian immigration a means of reinforcing the Canadian progressives. One of the best evidences of the growth of Reform was the persistent agitation of the Civil List question. Following up their action under Bagot, the reformers demanded the concession of a completer control than they seemed then to possess over their own finances, and a more economical administration of them. The inspector-general, in a report characterized by all his admirable clearness, stated the issue thus: "It is impossible for any government to support a Civil List to which objections are raised, and with justice, by the people at large; first, on the ground that its establishment was a violation of their constitutional rights; second, that the services provided for are more than ought to be placed on the permanent Civil List; third, on the ground that the salaries provided are higher than the province can afford to pay with a due regard to the public interests, and more especially to the maintenance of the public credit."[[4]]