British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

CHAPTER VI.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD ELGIN.

The year which intervened between Metcalfe's departure and the arrival of Lord Elgin at the beginning of 1847, may be disregarded in this inquiry. Earl Cathcart, who held office in the interval, was chosen because relations with the United States at that time were serious enough to make it desirable to combine the civil and the military headship in Canada in one person. In domestic politics the governor-general was a negligible quantity, as his successor confessed: "Lord Cathcart, not very unreasonably perhaps, has allowed everything that required thought to lie over for me."[[1]]

But the arrival of Elgin changed the whole aspect of affairs, and introduced the most important modification that was made in Canadian government between 1791 and the year of Confederation. Since 1839, governors-general who took their instructions from Britain, and who seldom allowed the Canadian point of view to have more than an indirect influence on their administration, had introduced the most unhappy complications into politics. Both they and the home government were now reduced to the gloomiest speculations concerning the permanence of the British connection. In place of the academic or official view of colonial dependence which had hitherto dominated Canadian administration, Elgin came to substitute a policy which frankly accepted the Canadian position, and which as frankly trusted to a loyalty dependent for none of its sanctions upon external coercion or encouragement. With 1846, Great Britain entered on an era of which the predominating principle was laissez faire, and within twelve months of the concession of that principle in commerce, Elgin applied it with even more astonishing results in the region of colonial Parliamentary institutions.

The Canadian episode in Elgin's career furnishes the most perfect and permanently useful service rendered by him to the Empire. Although he gathered laurels in China and India, and earned a notable place among diplomatists, nothing that he did is so representative of the whole man, so valuable, and so completely rounded and finished, as the seven years of his work in Canada. Elsewhere he accomplished tasks, which others had done, or might have done as well. But in the history of the self-governing dominions of Britain, his name is almost the first of those who assisted in creating an Empire, the secret of whose strength was to be local autonomy.

He belonged to the most distinguished group of nineteenth century politicians, for with Gladstone, Canning, Dalhousie, Herbert, and others, he served his apprenticeship under Sir Robert Peel. All of that younger generation reflected the sobriety, the love of hard fact, the sound but progressive conservatism, and the high administrative faculty of their great master. It was an epoch when changes were inevitable; but the soundest minds tended, in spite of a powerful party tradition, to view the work in front of them in a non-partizan spirit. Gladstone himself, for long, seemed fated to repeat the party-breaking record of Peel; and three great proconsuls of the group, Dalhousie, Canning, and Elgin, found in imperial administration a more congenial task than Westminster could offer them. Elgin occupies a mediate position between the administrative careers of Dalhousie and Canning, and the parliamentary and constitutional labours of Gladstone. He was that strange being, a constitutionalist proconsul; and his chief work in administration lay in so altering the relation of his office to Canadian popular government, as to take from the governor-generalship much of its initiative, and to make a great surrender to popular opinion. Between his arrival in Montreal at the end of January, 1847, and the writing of his last official despatch on December 18th, 1854, he had established on sure foundations the system of democratic government in Canada.

Never was man better fitted for his work. He came, a Scotsman, to a colony one-third Scottish, and the name of Bruce was itself soporific to the opposition of a perfervid section of the reformers. His wife was the daughter of Lord Durham, whom Canadians regarded as the beginner of a new age of Canadian constitutionalism. He had been appointed by a Whig Government, and Earl Grey, the new Colonial Secretary, was already learned in liberal theory, both in politics and economics, and understood that Britons, abroad as at home, must have liberty to misgovern themselves. Elgin's personal qualities were precisely those best fitted to control a self-governing community. Not only was he saved from extreme views by his caution and sense of humour, but he had, to an extraordinary degree, the power of seeing both sides, and more especially the other side, of any question. In Canada too, as later in China and India, he exhibited qualities of humanity which some might term quixotic;[[2]] and, as will be illustrated very fully below, his gifts of tact and bonhomie made him a singularly persuasive force in international affairs, and secured for Britain at least one clear diplomatic victory over America.

Following on a succession of short-lived and troubled governorships, under which, while the principle of government had remained constant, nothing else had done so, Elgin had practically to begin Durham's work afresh, and build without much regard for the foundations laid since 1841. The alternatives before him were a grant of really responsible government, or a rebellion, with annexation to the United States as its probable end. The new Governor saw very clearly the dangers of his predecessor's policy. "The distinction," he wrote at a later date, "between Lord Metcalfe's policy and mine is twofold. In the first place he profoundly distrusted the whole Liberal party in the province—that great party which, excepting at extraordinary conjunctures, has always carried with it the mass of the constituencies. He believed its designs to be revolutionary, just as the Tory party in England believed those of the Whigs and Reformers to be in 1832. And, secondly, he imagined that when circumstances forced the party upon him, he could check these revolutionary tendencies by manifesting his distrust of them, more especially in the matter of the distribution of patronage, thereby relieving them in a great measure from that responsibility, which is in all free countries the most effectual security against the abuse of power, and tempting them to endeavour to combine the role of popular tribunes with the prestige of ministers of the crown."[[3]]

The danger of a crisis was the greater because, as has been shown, Metcalfe's anti-democratic policy had been more than the expression of a personal mood. It was the policy of the British government. After Metcalfe's departure, and Stanley's resignation of the Colonial office, Gladstone, then for a few months Colonial Secretary, assured Cathcart that "the favour of his Sovereign and the acknowledgment of his country, have marked (Metcalfe's) administration as one which, under the peculiar circumstances of the task he had to perform, may justly be regarded as a model for his successors."[[4]] In truth, the British Colonial office was not only wrong in its working theory, but ignorant of the boiling tumult of Canadian opinion in those days; ignorant of the steadily increasing vehemence of the demand for true home rule, and of the possibility that French nationalism, Irish nationalism, and American aggression, might unite in a great upheaval, and the political tragedy find its consummation in another Declaration of Independence.

But Elgin was allowed little leisure for general reflections; the concrete details of the actual situation absorbed all his energies. Since Metcalfe's resignation, matters had not improved. There was still an uncertain majority in the House of Assembly, although, in the eyes of probably a majority of voters, the disorders of the late election had discredited the whole Assembly. But the ministry had gone on from weakness to further weakness. Draper, who did his best to preserve the political decencies, had been forced to ask Cathcart to assist him in removing certain of his colleagues. Viger had been a complete failure as President of the Council, and performed none of the duties of his department except that of signing his name to reports prepared by others. Daly was of little use to him; and, as for the solicitor-general for Upper Canada, Sherwood, "his repeated absence on important divisions, his lukewarm support, and occasional (almost) opposition, his habit of speaking of the Members of your Excellency's Government and of the policy pursued by them, his more than suspected intrigues to effect the removal of some members of the council, have altogether destroyed all confidence in him."[[5]] Draper himself had seemingly grown tired of the dust and heat of the struggle, and, soon after Elgin's assumption of authority, resigned his premiership for a legal position as honourable and more peaceful.