British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

Such, then, was the imperial policy of Britain under the man who carried it farthest forward, before the great renaissance at the end of Queen Victoria's reign. To Grey, Canada was all that it had meant to Durham—a province peopled by subjects of the Queen, and one destined by providence to have a great future—a fundamental part of the Empire, and one without which the imperial whole must be something meaner and less glorious. Like Durham he planned for it a constitution on the most generous lines, and conferred great gifts upon it. And, in exchange, he claimed a loyalty proportionate to the generosity of the Crown, and a propriety of political behaviour worthy of citizens of so great a state. In the last resort he held that in abnormal crises, or in response to great and beneficial policies, Canadians must forget their provincial outlook, or, if they could not, at least accept the ruling of an imperial parliament and a crown more enlightened and authoritative on these matters than a colonial ministry or people could be. Having conceded all the rights essential to a free existence, he mentioned duties, and called the sum of these duties Empire.

The concluding stage in the evolution of mid-Victorian opinion concerning Canada, which must now be described, differs essentially from the earlier stages, although, as it seems to me, the chief factor in the development is still Durham and his group. It is the period of separatism.

One thing has appeared very prominently in the foregoing argument—the prevalence of a fear, or even a fixed belief, that the connection between Britain and Canada must soon cease. Excluding, for the present, the entire group of extreme radicals, there was hardly a statesman of the earlier years of Victoria, who had not confessed that Canada must soon leave England, or be left. Many instances have been already cited. Among the Tories, Stanley thought that Bagot had already begun the process of separation, and that Metcalfe's failure would involve the end of the connection. Peel, ever judicial, gave his verdict in favour of separation, should Canadians persist in resenting imperial action. As Lord John Russell's view of autonomy expanded, his hopes for continued British supremacy contracted; and, on the evidence of a letter from Grey quoted above, Russell was not alone among the Whigs in his opinion, nor Peel among his immediate followers. The reckless and partizan use of the term Little-Englander has largely concealed the fact that apart from Durham, whose faith was not called upon to bear the test of experience, and Buller, Grey, and Elgin, who had special grounds for their confidence, all the responsible politicians of the years between 1840 and 1860 moved steadily towards a "Little England" position. The reasons for that movement are worthy of examination.

So far as the Tories were concerned, the change, already traced in detail, was not unnatural. In the eighteenth century, the colonies, possessed of just that responsible government for which Canadian reformers were clamouring, had with one accord left the Empire. The earlier nineteenth century had witnessed in the British American colonies a steadily increasing demand for the liberties, formerly possessed by the New England states. Representative assemblies had been granted; then a modified form of responsibility of the executive to these assemblies; then the complete surrender of executive to legislature. Attempts had been made to gain some countervailing powers by bargain; but, in Canada, the civil list had now been surrendered to local control, the endowment of the Church of England was practically at an end, patronage was in the hands of the provincial ministry, and all the exceptions which the central authority had claimed as essential to its continued existence followed in the wake of the lost executive supremacy. Neither Whigs nor Tories quite understood how an Empire was possible, in which there was no definite federating principle; or, if there were, where the federating principle existed only to be neutralized as, one by one, the restrictions imposed by it were felt by the colonists to be annoying to their sense of freedom. Empire on these terms seemed to mean simply a capacity in the mother country for indefinite surrender. The accomplishment of the purpose proclaimed by Durham, Russell, and Grey, would, to a Tory even less peremptory than the Duke of Wellington, mean the end of the connection; and as they felt, so they spoke and acted. They were separatists, not of good-will, but from necessity and the nature of things.

Among the Whigs, an even more important process was at work. By 1850 the disintegration of the Whig party was already far advanced. Finality in reform had already been found impossible, and Russell and the advanced men were slowly drawing ahead of conservatives like Melbourne and Palmerston. After 1846, the liberalizing power of Peel's steady scientific intelligence was at work, transforming the ideas of his allies, as he had formerly shattered those of his old friends, and, of Peel's followers, Gladstone at least seemed to be looking in the same direction as his master—towards administrative liberalism. The Whig creed and programme were in the melting pot. Now, what made the final product not Whig, but Liberal, was on the whole the increasing influence of the parliamentary Radicals; and in colonial matters the Radicals, who told on the revived and quickened Whig party, were pronouncedly in favour of separation. It is too often assumed that the imperial creed of Durham and Buller was shared in by their fellow Radicals. That is a grave mistake. One may trace a descent towards separatism from Molesworth to Roebuck and Brougham. In Molesworth, the tendency was comparatively slight. No doubt in 1837, under the stress of the news of rebellion, he had proclaimed the end of the British dominion in America as his sincere desire.[[52]] But he believed in a colonial empire, if England would only guarantee good government. "The emancipation of colonies," he said, in a cooler mood, "must be a question of time and a question, in each case, of special expediency ... a question which would seldom or never arise between a colony and its mother country if all colonies were well governed"; and he explained his language about Canada on grounds of bad government. "I hope that the people of that country (Lower Canada) will either recover the constitution which we have violated, or become wholly independent of us."[[53]] It is not necessary to quote Hume's confused but well-intentioned wanderings—views sharing with those of the people whom Hume represented, their crude philanthropy and imperfect clearness. But Roebuck marked a definite stage in advance; for, while he was willing to keep "the connexion," where it could be kept with honour, he seems to have regarded separation as inevitable—"come it must," he said—and his best hopes were that the separation might take place in amity and that a British North American federation might counterbalance the Union to the south.[[54]] Grote's placid and facile radicalism accepted the growing breach with Canada as the most desirable thing which could happen both to the mother country and the colony; and Brougham directed all his eccentric and ill-ordered energy and eloquence, not only to denounce the Whig leaders, but to proclaim the necessity of the new Canadian republic. "Not only do I consider the possession as worth no breach of the Constitution ... but in a national view I really hold those colonies to be worth nothing. I am well assured that we shall find them very little worth the cost they have entailed on us, in men, in money, and in injuries to our trade; nay, that their separation will be even now a positive gain, so it be effected on friendly terms, and succeeded by an amicable intercourse."[[55]]

Separation was indubitably a dogma of philosophic radicalism; and yet it was not so much the influence of this metaphysical and doctrinaire belief which moved Whig opinion. It was rather the plain business-like and matter-of-fact radicalism of the economist statesmen, led by Bright and Cobden. Of the two forces represented by Peel and by Cobden, which completed the formation of a modern Liberal party, the latter was on the whole the stronger; and Bright and Cobden took the views of their Radical predecessors, and out of airy and ineffectual longings created solid political facts. "I cannot disguise from myself," wrote Grey to Elgin in 1850, "that opinion in this country is tending more and more to the rejection of any burden whatever, on account of our colonies"; and the reason for the tendency was certainly the purely economic views to which Cobden was accustoming Britain, and the cogency of the arguments by which he was driving amateur politicians from their earlier indefensible positions. That trade was all-important, and that the operations of trade disregarded the irrelevant facts of nationality and race; that no one community could interfere in the social and political life of another without disaster to both; that the defence of colonies was not only dangerous to peace as provoking suspicious neighbours, but needless expense to the mother country; in short that laissez-faire was the dominating principle in politics, and that laissez-faire shattered the earlier dreams of imperial supremacy and colonial dependency—these were the views introduced by Cobden and Bright into a newly awakened and imperfectly educated England; and they played just such havoc with earlier political ideas, as Darwin and evolution did with pre-existing theological orthodoxy.[[56]]

It was hardly wonderful then that the Whigs moved steadily onward until they almost acquiesced in the idea of imperial disruption; and, since Peel had left his party moved almost wholly by Cobden's economic propaganda, it was not unnatural that the Peelites should share the views of their Whig allies. It is indeed possible to find some cold consolation in Gladstone's Chester speech in 1855, when he predicted that if only the colonies were left freedom of judgment, it would be hard to say when the day of separation might come.[[57]] But Grey had already suspected Gladstone of pessimism on the point, and we now know that as an imperialist Gladstone's course from 1855 had a downward tendency. He could not resist the arguments of his Radical friends and teachers.

Almost all the important relevant facts and events which concerned the connection after 1846 assisted these party movements towards belief in separation.

Grey, whose confidence in the beneficial results of free trade challenged that of Cobden himself, believed that with Protection there vanished an awkward enemy of the connection between Canada and Britain.[[58]] But Grey was unmistakably doctrinaire on the point. Elgin warned him, again and again, of "the uneasy feeling which the free-trade policy of the mother country ... has tended to produce in the colonial mind,"[[59]] and that uneasiness passed gradually over to Britain. It would be to trespass unduly beyond the limits prescribed in this essay to deal with the introduction of the Canadian tariff in 1858 and 1859; yet the statements of Galt who introduced the budget in the latter year strike the reader now, as they must have struck the British reader then, with a sense that the connection was practically at an end: "The government of Canada cannot, through those feelings of deference which they owe to the Imperial authorities, in any measure waive or diminish the right of the people of Canada to decide for themselves both as to the mode and extent to which taxation shall be imposed.... The Imperial government are not responsible for the debts and engagements of Canada. They do not maintain its judicial, educational, or civil service. They contribute nothing to the internal government of the country; and the Provincial Legislature, acting through a ministry directly responsible to it, has to make provision for all these wants. They must necessarily claim and exercise the widest latitude, as to the nature, and the extent of the burdens, to be placed upon the industry of the people."[[60]] There was almost everything to be said in favour of this enlightened selfishness; and yet a growing coolness on the part of British legislators was, under the circumstances, very comprehensible. It was all the more so, because the innovations in Canada influenced British diplomacy in its relations with the United States; and between 1854, the date of Elgin's Reciprocity Treaty, and 1867, British statesmen learned some of the curious ramifications of their original gift of autonomy to Canada. In diplomacy as in economic relations, their appreciation of the value of the connection did not increase.

Parallel with this disruptive tendency in the new economic policy, another in military matters began to make itself felt. As Canada received her successive grants of liberties, and ever new liberties, the imperial authorities began to consider the advisability of withdrawing imperial troops by degrees, and of leaving Canada to meet the ordinary demands of her own defence. Grey and Elgin had corresponded largely on the point; and the result had been a very general reduction of British troops in Canada, the assumption being that Canada would look to her own protection. To discover the character of the change thus introduced, and its bearing on imperial politics, it again becomes necessary to travel beyond the limit set, and to examine its results between 1860 and 1867. In these years the military situation developed new and alarming possibilities for Canada. The re-organization of the Canadian tariff excited much ill-feeling in the United States, for it seemed an infringement of the arrangements made by Elgin in 1854.[[61]] Then followed the Trent episode, the destruction created by the Alabama, the questionable policy both of England and of Canada in taking sides, no matter how informally, in the war. In addition, the Irish-American section of the population, which had furnished its share, both of rank and file, and of leaders, to the war, was in those years bitterly hostile to the British Empire, and plotted incessantly some secret stroke which should wound Britain through Canada. The gravest danger threatening British peace and supremacy at that time lay, not in Europe, but along the Canadian frontier, nor would it be fair to say that Britain alone, not Canada, had helped to provoke the threatened American attack. Under these circumstances, partly because of the expense, but partly also through factiousness and provincial shortsightedness, the Canadian assembly rejected a scheme for providing an adequate militia, and left a situation quite impossible from the military point of view. Instantly a storm of criticism broke over the heads of the colonies, so bitter and unqualified that there are those who believe that to this day the mutual relations of Britain and Canada have never quite recovered their old sincerity.[[62]] A member of the Canadian parliament, who was travelling at the time in England, found the country in arms against his province: "You have no idea of the feeling that exists here about the Militia Bill, and the defences of Canada generally. No one will believe that there is not a want of loyalty among the Canadians, and whenever I try to defend Canada, the answer is always the same, that 'the English look for actions not assertions'; many hard and unjust things are now said about the country, all of which add strength to the Goldwin Smith party, which, after all, is not a very small one; and the Derbyites make no secret of what they would do if they were in power,—let Canada take her chance."[[63]] Even Earl Grey was prepared, at that crisis, to submit to the British and Canadian parliaments a clear issue, calling on the latter to afford adequate support to the British forces left in British North America, or to permit the last of them to leave a country heedless of its own safety.[[64]] From that time forth, more especially after Lee, Jackson, Grant, and Sherman had revealed the military possibilities of the American Republic, even military men began to accept the strategic arguments against the retention of Canada as unanswerable, and joined the ranks of those who called for separation. Richard Cartwright, who had opportunities for testing British opinion, more especially among military officers, found a universal agreement that Canada was indefensible, and that separation had better take place, before rather than after war.[[65]] So John Bright and the leaders of the British army had at last found a point in diplomacy and strategy on which they might agree.