British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

CHAPTER II.

THE CANADIAN COMMUNITY.

To understand the political evolution of Canada it is essential to begin with a study of the elements of Canadian society. Canadian constitutionalists would have written to better purpose, had they followed the example of the Earl of Durham, in whose Report the concluding practical suggestions develop naturally from the vivid social details which occupy its earlier pages, and raise it to the level of literature. In pioneering communities there is no such thing as the constitution, or politics, per se; and the relation between the facts, sordid and mean as they often are, of the life of the people, and the growth of institutions and political theories, is fundamental.

Canadian society, in 1839 and long afterwards, was dominated by the physical characteristics of the seven hundred miles of country which stretched from Quebec to the shores of Lake Huron, with its long water-front and timid expansion, north and south; its forests stubbornly resisting the axes of the settlers; its severe extremities of heat and cold; the innumerable inconveniences inflicted by its uncultivated wastes on those who first invaded it; and the imperfect lines of land communication which multiplied all distances in Canada at least four-fold. It was perhaps this sense of distance, and difficulty of locomotion, which first impressed the settler and the visitor. To begin with, the colony was, for practical purposes, more than a month's distance from the centre of government. Steam was gradually making its way, and the record passage by sailing ship, from Quebec to Portsmouth, had occupied only eighteen days and a half,[[1]] but sails were still the ordinary means of propulsion, and the average length of voyage of 237 vessels arriving at Quebec in 1840 was well over forty days.[[2]] To the immigrant, however, the voyage across the Atlantic was the least of his troubles; for the internal communications of Canada left much to be desired. The assistance of railway transportation might be entirely ignored,—as late as 1847 only twenty-two miles of railway lines had been laid and worked.[[3]] There was, of course, during the open season, the wonderful passage by river and lake into the heart of the continent; although the long winter months broke into the regularity of the traffic by water, and the St. Lawrence rapids added to the traveller's difficulties and expenses. Even the magic of a governor-general's wand could not dispel the inconveniences of this simplest of Canadian routes. "I arrived here on Thursday week," grumbled Poulett Thomson, writing from Toronto in 1839. "The journey was bad enough; a portage to Lachine; then the steamboat to the Cascades, twenty-four miles further; then road again (if road it can be called) for sixteen miles; then steam to Cornwall forty miles; then road, twelve miles; then, by a change of steamers on to Lake Ontario to Kingston, and thence here. I slept one night on the road, and two on board the steamers. Such, as I have described it, is the boasted navigation of the St. Lawrence!"[[4]] For military purposes there was the alternative route, up the Ottawa to Bytown, and thence by the Rideau military canal to Kingston and the Lakes. On land, progress was much more complicated, for even the main road along the river and lake front was in shamefully bad condition, more especially when autumn passed into winter, or when spring once more loosened up the roads. There is a quite unanimous chorus of condemnation from all—British, Americans, and Canadians. One lively traveller in 1840 protested that on his way from Montreal, he was compelled to walk at the carriage side for hours, ankle-deep in mud, with the reins in his hands, and that, with infinite fatigue to both man and beast, he accomplished sixty miles in two days—a wonderful performance.[[5]] In the very heart of the rebellion, W. L. Mackenzie seems to have found the roads fighting against him, for he speaks of the march along Yonge Street as over "thirty or forty miles of the worst roads in the world"; and attributes part of the disheartening of his men to what one may term mud-weariness.[[6]] Local tradition still remembers with a sense of wonder that Sydenham, eager to return to his work in Lower Canada, once travelled by sleigh the 360 miles from Toronto to Montreal in thirty-six hours.

Off the main routes, roads degenerated into corduroy roads, and these into tracks, and even "blazed trails "; while, as for bridges, cases were known where the want of them had kept settlers who were living within three miles of a principal town, from communicating with it for days at a time.[[7]] And, as the roads grew rougher, Canadian conditions seemed to the stranger to assert themselves more and more offensively, animate and inanimate nature thrusting man back on the bare elements of things. The early descriptions of the colony are crowded with pictures of wretched immigrants, mosquito-bitten, or, in winter, half dead with cold, struggling through mud and swamp, to find the land whither they had come to evade the miseries of civilization, confronting them with the squalor and pains of nature. Far into the Victorian era Canada, whether French or British, was a dislocated community, with settlements set apart from each other as much by mud, swamp, and wood-land, as by distance. Her population, more particularly in the west, was engaged not with political ideals, but in an incessant struggle with the forests; and the little jobs, which enabled the infant community to build a bridge or repair a road at the public expense, must naturally have seemed to the electors more important items of a political programme than responsible government or abolition of the clergy reserves. No doubt, in the older towns and cities, the efforts of the earlier settlers had gained for their sons leisure and a chance of culture; yet even in Toronto, the wild lands were but a few miles distant, and, as Richardson saw it, London was "literally a city of stumps, many of the houses being still surrounded by them."

Straggling along these 700 miles, although here and there concentrated into centres like Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto, was a population numbering well over a million, which from its internal divisions, its differences in origin and disposition, and its relation to the British government, constituted the central problem at the time in British colonial politics. The French population formed, naturally, the chief difficulty. Thanks to the terms of the surrender in 1763, and the policy of Dorchester, a unit which called itself la nation Canadienne had been formed, nationalité had become a force in Lower Canada, imperfectly appreciated even by the leaders of the progressive movement in England and Western Canada. In the Eastern townships, and in Quebec and Montreal, flourishing and highly organized British societies existed. The Rebellion had found sturdy opponents in the British militia from the townships, and the constitutional societies of Quebec and Montreal expressed, in innumerable resolutions and addresses, the British point of view. But Lower Canada was for practical purposes a French unit, Roman Catholic in religion, and, in structure, semifeudal. In the cities, the national self-consciousness of the French was most conspicuously present; and leaders like Papineau, La Fontaine, and Cartier proved the reality of French culture and political skill. Below the higher classes, Durham and Metcalfe noticed that in Lower Canada the facilities given by the church for higher education produced a class of smaller professional men, from whose number the ordinary politicians and agitators were drawn. To the church they owed their entrance into the world of ideas; but apparently they were little more loyal to the clergy than they were to Britain. "I am led to believe," wrote Metcalfe in 1845, "that the influence of the clergy is not predominant, among the French-Canadian people, and that the avocat, the notary, and the doctor, generally disposed to be political demagogues, and most of them hostile to the British government, are the parties who exercise the greatest influence. Whatever power the clergy might have acting along with these demagogues, it would, I fear, be slight when exercised in opposition to them."[[8]]

These active, critical, political groups were not, however, representative of French Canada. So long as their racial pride remained unhurt, the French community was profoundly conservative. It was noticed that the rebels of 1837 and 1838 had received no support from the Catholic priesthood; and in a country where the reverence for that ancient form of Christianity was, in spite of Metcalfe's opinion to the contrary, profound, it was unlikely that any anti-religious political movement could make much permanent headway. Devoted to their religion, and controlled more especially in education by their priests,[[9]] the habitants formed the peculiar people of the American continent. Education flourished not at all among the rank and file. Arthur Buller found the majority of those whom he met either not able to write, or able to write little more than their names.[[10]] The women, he said, were the active, bustling portion of the habitants, thanks to the admirable and yet inexpensive training to be had in the nunneries. As for the men, they farmed and lived as their fathers had done before them. They cleared their land, or tilled it where it had been cleared, and thought little of improvement or change. M'Taggart, whose work on the Rideau Canal, made him an expert in Canadian labour, much preferred French Canadians to the Irish as labourers, and thought them "kind, tender-hearted, very social, no way very ambitious, nor industrious, rarely speculative."[[11]] To the Canadian commonwealth, the French population furnished a few really admirable statesmen; a dominant and loyal church; some groups of professional men, disappointed and discontented sons of humble parents, too proud to sink to the level of their uninstructed youth, and without the opportunity of rising higher; and a great mass of men who hewed wood and drew water, not for a master, but for themselves, submissive to the church, and well-disposed, but ignorant, and at the mercy of any clever demagogue who might raise the cry of nationalism. Still, when nationality remained unchallenged, the French-Canadians were at least what, till recently, they remained, the most purely conservative element in Canada.

The second element, in point of stability and importance, in the Canadian population was that of the United Empire Loyalists, the remnants of a former British supremacy in the United States. They had proved their steadfastness and courage by their refusal to accept the rules of the new republic; and their arrival in Canada gave that country an aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon origin to counterbalance that of the seigneurs on the Lower St. Lawrence. The men had in many cases been trained to arms in the revolutionary war, and they served a second and perhaps a harder apprenticeship in the Canadian forests. They had formed the centre of resistance to American attacks in the war of 1812. Their sons and grandsons had once more exhibited the hereditary loyalty of the group, in resisting the rebels of 1837-38; and Metcalfe, who was their best friend among the governors of the United Provinces, justly looked on them as the most conspicuous examples of devotion to connection with the British Empire, and loyal subjection to the Crown.[[12]] Robinsons, Cartwrights, Ryersons, and a score of other well-known families, proved, generation after generation, by their sustained public capacity, how considerably the struggle for existence, operating on sound human material, may raise the average of talent and energy. The tendency of the Loyalists to conservatism was, under the circumstances, only natural. Their possession, for a time, of all the places in Upper Canada which were worth holding, was the consequence of their priority in tenure, and of their conspicuous pre-eminence in political ingenuity. Critics of a later date forgot, and still forget, in their wholesale indictment of the Family Compact, that the Loyalist group called by that name had earned their places by genuine ability. If, like other aristocracies, they found it hard to mark the precise moment for retirement before the rise of democracy, their excuse must be found in their consciousness of high public spirit and their hereditary talents for administration.

Politically and socially one may include among the Loyalists the half-pay officers, from both navy and army, whom the great peace after Waterloo sent to Canada, as to the other colonies; and certain men of good family, Talbots or Stricklands, who held fast by English conservative tradition, played, where they could, the English gentleman abroad, and incidentally exhibited no mean amount of public spirit. Conspicuous among these was Colonel Talbot, who had come to Upper Canada with Simcoe in 1793, and became there an erratic but energetic instrument of empire. "For sixteen years," says Mrs. Jameson, writing with a pardonably feminine thrill after a visit to the great man, "he saw scarce a human being, except a few boors and blacks employed in clearing and logging his land; he himself assumed the blanket coat and axe, slept upon the bare earth, cooked three meals a day for twenty woodsmen, cleaned his own boots, washed his own linen, milked his cows, churned the butter, and made and baked the bread."[[13]] Yet, as Strickland confesses, in his Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West, there were few Talbots. "Many high-spirited gentlemen," he says, "were tempted by the grants of land bestowed on them by the government, which made actual settlement one of the conditions of the grant. It followed, as a matter of course, that the majority of these persons were physically disqualified for such an undertaking, a fact which many deserted farms in the rear townships of the county in which I reside painfully indicate."[[14]]

French Canadians and United Empire Loyalists constituted the stable factors in Canadian public life; but the process of immigration, which the years of rebellion checked only for a time, had by 1840 prepared another element, and that the most incalculable and disturbing both socially and politically. Indeed the real problem of Canadian public life lay simply in the influence of the humbler class of immigrants on existing administration and opinion. It was natural for the other settlers and the governing class to regard the larger part of the new population as beneath the political level. The very circumstances of the emigrating process carried with them a suggestion of degradation. Durham had embodied in his Report the more flagrant examples of the horrors of emigration;[[15]] but a later review, written in 1841, proves that many of the worst features of the old system still continued. There were still the privations, the filth and the diseases of this northern "middle passage," the epidemics and disorders inflicted on the Canadian community as ship-load after ship-load of poor wretches passed ashore at Quebec. On land their sorrows were renewed, for many of them were paupers, and there was still no organized effort to introduce the labourer to those who required his labour. More than one half of the 12,000 who, according to the report of 1841, passed in that year through Bytown locks, were considered objects of charity. Many of them were common labourers with families, men who had little but their physical strength as capital for the new venture; and cholera, typhus, or smallpox had in many cases reduced even that to the vanishing point. More especially among the Irish settlers, who, in these years and later, fled in dismay from the distresses of Ireland, the misery continued long after the first struggle. M'Taggart, who had his prejudices, but who had unusually good opportunities for observation, thought that a tenth of the poorer Irish settlers died during their first two years in the country. He found them clumsy at their work, accustomed to the spade and shovel, not to the axe, and maiming themselves most fearfully, or even killing themselves, in their experiments in clearing the ground.[[16]] Of all who came, the immigration agents thought the Lowland Scots and the Ulster Irishmen the best, and while the poorer class of settler lagged behind in the cities of Lower Canada, these others generally pushed on to find a hard earned living among the British settlers in the Upper Province. Some of them found their way to the United States. Others, faced with the intolerable delays of the land administration, took the risk of "squatting," that is, settling on wild land without securing a right to it—often to find themselves dislodged by a legal owner at the moment when their possession de facto seemed established. The majority settled as small farmers in the more frequented districts, or became shop-keepers and artisans in the towns. Politically their position was curious. The Reform Act of 1832 had extended the British franchise, but the majority had still no votes; and the immigrants belonged to the unenfranchised classes. The Irish had the additional disability of being reckoned disloyal, followers of the great Irish demagogue, and disorderly persons until proved otherwise.[[17]] To government servants and the older settlers alike, it seemed perilous to the community to share political power with them. Yet they were British citizens; many of them at once became active members of the community through their standing as freeholders; the democratic influence of the United States told everywhere on their behalf; and even where hard work left little time for political discussion, the fact that local needs might be assisted by political discussion, and the stout individualism bred by the life of struggle in village, town, and country, forced the new settlers to interest themselves in politics. Many of the new arrivals had some pretensions to education—more especially those from Scotland. Indeed it is worthy of note that from the Scottish stream of immigration there came not only the earlier agitators, Gourlay and Mackenzie, but, at a later date, George Brown, the first great political journalist in Canada, Alexander Mackenzie and Oliver Mowat, future leaders of Canadian liberalism, and John A. Macdonald, whose imperialism never lacked a tincture of traditional Scottish caution. The new immigrants were unlikely to challenge the social supremacy of the old aristocracy, but they formed so large an accession to the population that they could not long remain without political power. They must either be granted the rights of numerical majority or be exasperated into destructive agitation.