British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

Elgin gave a rarer example of what fidelity to colonial constitutionalism meant. In these years of liberal success, "Old Toryism" faced a new strain, and faced it badly. The party had supported the empire, when that empire meant their supremacy. They had befriended the representative of the Crown, when they had all the places and profits. When the British connection took a liberal colour, when the governor-general acted constitutionally towards the undoubtedly progressive tone of popular opinion, some of the tories became annexationists. Many of them, as will be shown later, encouraged a dastardly assault on the person of their official head; and all of them, supported by gentlemen of Her Majesty's army, treated the representative of the Crown with the most obvious discourtesy.[[18]] Nevertheless, when opinion changed, and when a coalition attacked and unseated the Progressive ministry of 1848-1854, Elgin, without a moment's hesitation, turned to the men who had insulted him. "To the great astonishment of the public, as well as to his own," wrote Laurence Oliphant, who was then on Elgin's staff, "Sir Allan MacNab, who had been one of his bitterest opponents ever since the Montreal events, was sent for to form a ministry—Lord Elgin by this act satisfactorily disproving the charges of having either personal or political partialities in the selection of his ministers."[[19]]

But the first great constitutional governor-general of Canada had to interpret constitutionalism as something more than mere obedience to public dictation with regard to his councillors. He had to educate these councillors, and the public, into the niceties of British constitutional manners; and he had to create a new vocation for the governor-general, and to exchange dictation for rational influence. He had to teach his ministers moderation in their measures, and, indirectly, to show the opposition how to avoid crude and extreme methods in their fight for office. When his high political courage, in consenting to a bill very obnoxious to the opposition, forced them into violence, he kept his temper and his head, and the opposition leaders learned, not from punishment, but from quiet contempt, to express dissent in modes other than those of arson and sticks and stones. For seven years, by methods so restrained as to be hardly perceptible even in his private letters to Grey, he guided the first experimental cabinets into smooth water, and when he resigned, he left behind him politicians trained by his efforts to govern Canada according to British usage.

At the same time his influence on the British Cabinet was as quiet and certain. He was still responsible to the British Crown and Cabinet, and a weaker man would have forgotten the problems which the new Canadian constitutionalism was bound to create at the centre of authority. Two instances will illustrate the point, and Elgin's clear perception of his duty. They are both taken from the episode of the Rebellion Losses Bill, and the Montreal riots of 1849. The Bill which caused the trouble had been introduced to complete a scheme of compensation for all those who had suffered loss in the late Rebellion, whether French or English, and had been passed by majorities in both houses; but while there seemed no valid reason for disallowing it, Elgin suspected trouble—indeed, at first, he viewed the measure with personal disapproval.[[20]] He might have refused permission to bring in the bill; but the practical consequences of such a refusal were too serious to be accepted. "Only imagine," he wrote, "how difficult it would have been to discover a justification for my conduct, if at a moment when America was boiling over with bandits and desperadoes, and when the leaders of every faction in the Union, with the view of securing the Irish vote for the presidential election, were vying with each other in abuse of England, and subscribing funds for the Irish Republican Union, I had brought on such a crisis in Canada by refusing to allow my administration to bring in a bill to carry out the recommendation of Lord Metcalfe's commissioners."[[21]] He might have dissolved Parliament, but, as he rightly pointed out, "it would be rather a strong measure to have recourse to dissolution because a Parliament, elected one year ago under the auspices of the present opposition, passed by a majority of more than two to one a measure introduced by the Government." There remained only the possibility of reserving the bill for approval or rejection at home. A weaker man would have taken this easy and fatal way of evading responsibility; but Elgin rose to the height of his vocation, when he explained his reason for acting on his own initiative. "I should only throw upon her Majesty's Government, or (as it would appear to the popular eye here) on Her Majesty herself, a responsibility which rests, and ought I think to rest, on my own shoulders."[[22]] He gave his assent to the bill, suffered personal violence at the hands of the Montreal crowd and the opposition, but, since he stood firm, he triumphed, and saved both the dignity of the Crown and the friendship of the French for his government.

The other instance of his skill in combining Canadian autonomy with British supremacy is less important, but, in a way, more extraordinary in its subtlety. As a servant of the Crown, he had to furnish despatches, which were liable to be published as parliamentary papers, and so to be perused by Canadian politicians. Elgin had therefore to reckon with two publics—the British Parliament, which desired information, and the Canadian Parliament, which desired to maintain its dignity and freedom. Before the Montreal outrage, and when it was extremely desirable to leave matters as vague as possible, Elgin simply refrained from giving details to the Colonial Office. "I could not have made my official communication to you in reference to this Bill, which you could have laid before Parliament, without stating or implying an irrevocable decision on this point. To this circumstance you must ascribe the fact that you have not heard from me officially."[[23]] With even greater shrewdness, at a later date, he made Grey expunge, in his book on Colonial Policy, details of the outrage which followed the passing of the Act; for, said he, "I am strongly of opinion that nothing but evil can result from the publication, at this period, of a detailed and circumstantial statement of the disgraceful proceedings which took place after the Bill passed.... The surest way to arrest a process of conversion is to dwell on the errors of the past, and to place in a broad light the contrast between present sentiments and those of an earlier date."[[24]] In constitutional affairs manners make, not merely the statesman, but the possibility of government; and Elgin's highest quality as a constitutionalist was, not so much his understanding of the machinery of government, as his knowledge of the constitutional temper, and the need within it of humanity and common-sense.

Great as was Elgin's achievement in rectifying Canadian constitutional practice, his solution of the nationalist difficulty in Lower Canada was possibly a greater triumph of statesmanship; for the present modus vivendi, which still shows no signs of breaking down, dates from the years of Elgin's governorship. The decade which included his rule in Canada was pre-eminently the epoch of nationalism. Italy, Germany, and Hungary, with Mazzini as their prophet, were all struggling for the acknowledgment of their national claims, and within the British Islands themselves, the Irish nationalists furnished, in Davis and the writers to The Nation, disciples and apostles of the new gospel. It is always dangerous to trace European influences across the Atlantic; but there is little doubt that as the French rebellion of 1837 owed something to Europe, so the arch-rebel Papineau's paper, L'Avenir, echoed in an empty blustering fashion, the cries of the nationalist revolution of 1848.[[25]]

Elgin found on his arrival that British administration had thrown every element in French-Canadian politics into headlong opposition to itself. How dangerous the situation was, one may infer from the disquieting rumours of the ambitions of the American Union, and from the passions and memories of injustice which floods of unkempt and wretched Irish immigrants were bringing with them to their new homes in America. In Elgin's second year of office, 1848, he had to face the possibility of a rising under the old leaders of 1837. His solution of the difficulty proceeded pari passu with his constitutional work. In the latter he had seen that he must remove the disquieting subject of "responsible government" from the party programme of the progressives, and the politic surrender of 1847 had gained his end. Towards French nationalism he acted in the same spirit. As has already been seen, he was conscious of the political shortcomings of the French. Yet there was nothing penal in his attitude towards them, and he saw, with a clearness to which Durham never attained, how idle all talk of anglicizing French Canada must be. "I for one," he said, "am deeply convinced of the impolicy of all such attempts to denationalize the French. Generally speaking, they produce the opposite effect from that intended, causing the flame of national prejudice and animosity to burn more fiercely."[[26]]

But how could the pathological phase of nationalism be ended? His first Tory advisers suggested the old trick of making converts, but the practice had long since been found useless. His next speculation was whether the French could be made to take sides as Liberals or Tories, apart altogether from nationalist considerations. But the political solidarity of the French had been a kind of trades-unionism, claiming to guard French interests against an actual menace to their very existence as a nation within the empire; and they were certain to act only with Baldwin and his friends, the one party which had regarded them as other than traitors or suspects, or at best tools.

No complete solution of the problem was possible; but when Elgin surrendered to the progressives, he was making concessions also to the French—by admitting them to a recognized place within the constitution, and doing so without reservation. The joint ministry of La Fontaine and Baldwin was, in a sense, the most satisfactory answer that could be made to the difficulty. From the moment of its creation Elgin and Canada were safe. He remained doubtful during part of 1848, for Papineau had been elected by acclamation to the Parliament which held its first session that year; and he "had searched in vain ... through the French organs of public opinion for a frank and decided expression of hostility to the anti-British sentiments propounded in Papineau's address."[[27]] He did not at first understand that La Fontaine, not Papineau, was the French leader, and that the latter represented only himself and a few Rouges of violent but unsubstantial revolutionary opinions. Nevertheless, he gave his French ministers his confidence, and he applied his singular powers of winning men to appeasing French discontent. As early as May, 1848, he saw how the land lay—that French Canada was fundamentally conservative, and that discontent was mainly a consequence of sheer stupidity and error on the part of England. "Who will venture to say," he asked, "that the last hand which waves the British flag on American ground may not be that of a French Canadian?"[[28]]