British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

In most country districts, the settlers had to trust to luck both for teachers and for schoolhouses, and beginnings which promised better things too often ended in blank failure. There is both humour and romance in these early struggles after education. In Ekfried, by the Thames, in Western Canada, there had been no school, till the arrival of an honest Scot, Robert Campbell, and the backwardness of the season in 1842, gave the settlement a schoolmaster, and the new settler some ready money. "I get a dollar and a half, a quarter per scholar," he wrote to his friends in Scotland, "and seeing that the wheat did little, I am glad I did engage, for we got plenty of provisions."[[32]] In Perth, a more ambitious start met with a tragic end. The Scottish clergyman, appointed to the district by government, opened a school at the request of the inhabitants. All went well, and a generous government provided fifty pounds by way of annual stipend; until a licentiate of the Anglican Church arrived. By virtue of the standing of his church, the newcomer took precedence of the Scottish minister and displaced him as educational leader. But, says the Scot, with an irony, unchristian but excusable, "the school under the direction of my clerical successor, soon after died of a consumption, and the school-house has been for sometime empty."[[33]]

The main difficulty in education was to provide an adequate supply of competent teachers. Complaints against those who offered their services were almost universal. According to a Niagara witness, not more than one out of ten teachers in the district was competent to instruct his pupils even in the humblest learning,[[34]] and the commissioners who reported to the government of Upper Canada in 1839 both confirmed these complaints, and described the root of the offence when they said, "In this country, the wages of the working classes are so high, that few undertake the office of schoolmaster, except those who are unable to do anything else; and hence the important duties of education are often entrusted to incompetent and improper persons. The income of the schoolmaster should, at least, be equal to that of a common labourer."[[35]] In so precarious a position, it was unfortunate that sectarian and local feeling should have provoked a controversy at the capital of the western district. Much as the education of the province owed to John Strachan, he did infinite harm by involving the foundation of a great central school, Upper Canada College, and of the provincial university, in a bitter religious discussion. It was not until the public capacity and unsectarian enthusiasm of Egerton Ryerson were enlisted in the service of provincial education, that Upper Canada emerged from her period of failure and struggle.

Apart from provincial and governmental efforts, there were many voluntary experiments, of which Strachan's famous school at Cornwall, was perhaps the most notable. After all, the colonists were Britons, many of them trained in the Scottish system of national democratic education, and wherever the struggle for existence slackened down, they turned to plan a Canadian system as like as possible to that which they had left. Kingston was notably enterprising in this respect. Not only were there schools for the more prosperous classes, but attempts were made to provide cheap education for the poor, at first supported by the voluntary contributions of ladies, and then by a committee representative of the best Anglican and Presbyterian sentiment. Three of these schools were successfully conducted at very small charges, and, in certain cases, the poorest received education free.[[36]] In higher education the period of union in Canada exhibited great activity. The generous provision made for a King's College in Toronto had been for a long time stultified by the ill-timed sectarian spirit of the Bishop of Toronto; but a more reasonable temper prevailed after the Rebellion, and the second governor-general of the united provinces, Sir Charles Bagot, spent much of his short time of service in securing professors and seeing the provincial university launched.[[37]] At the same time, the two other Canadian colleges of note, M'Gill University and Queen's College, came into active existence. In October, 1839, after many years of delay, Montreal saw the corner-stone of the first English and Protestant College in Lower Canada laid,[[38]] and in the winter of 1841-2, Dr. Liddell sailed from Scotland to begin the history of struggle and gallant effort which has characterized Queen's College, Kingston, from first to last. It is perhaps the most interesting detail of early university education in Canada, that the Presbyterian College started in a frame house, with two professors, one representing Arts and one Theology, and with some twenty students, very few of whom, however, were "fitted to be matriculated."[[39]]

It is well to remember, in face of beginnings so irregular, and even squalid, that deficiencies in Canadian college education had been made good by the English and Scottish universities, and that Canadian higher education was from the outset assisted by the genuine culture and learning of the British colleges; for the main sources of university inspiration in British North America were Oxford and Cambridge, Glasgow and Edinburgh.[[40]]

There were, of course, other less formal modes of education. When once political agitation commenced, the press contributed not a little to the education of the nation, and must indeed be counted one of the chief agencies of information, if not of culture. Everywhere, from Quebec to Hamilton, enterprising politicians made their influence felt through newspapers. The period prior to the Rebellion had seen Mackenzie working through his Colonial Advocate; and the cause of responsible government soon found saner and abler exponents in Francis Hincks and George Brown. At every important centre, one, two, or even more news-sheets, not without merit, were maintained; and the secular press was reinforced by such educational enterprise as the Dougalls attempted in the Montreal Witness, or by church papers like the Methodist Christian Guardian.[[41]] Nothing, perhaps, is more characteristic of this phase of Canadian intellectual growth than the earlier volumes of the Witness, which played a part in Canada similar to that of the Chambers' publications in Scotland. The note struck was deeply sober and moral; the appeal was made to the working and middle classes who in Canada as in Scotland were coming into possession of their heritage; and if the intellectual level attained was never very high, an honest attempt was being made to educate the shop-keepers and farmers of Canada into wholesome national ideals.

Little literary activity seems to have existed outside of politics and the newspapers. For a time cheap reprints from America assisted Britons in Canada with their forbidden fruits, but government at last intervened. It is a curious fact that this perfectly just and natural prohibition had a most unfortunate effect in checking the reading habits of the colony.[[42]] In the larger towns there were circulating libraries, and presumably immigrants occasionally brought books with them; but newspaper advertisements suggest that school books, and the like, formed almost the only stock-in-trade of the book-shop; and the mercurial Major Richardson, after agitating the chief book-sellers in Canada on behalf of one of his literary ventures, found that his total sales amounted to barely thirty copies, and even an auction sale at Kingston discovered only one purchaser, who limited his offer to sevenpence halfpenny. In speaking, then, of the Canadian political community in 1839, one cannot say, as Burke did of the Americans in 1775, that they were a highly educated or book-reading people. Their politicians, progressive and conservative alike, might have shortened, simplified, and civilized certain stages in their political agitations, had they been able more fully to draw on the authority of British political experience; and their provincialism would not have thrust itself so disagreeably on the modern student, had Locke, Rousseau, Burke, and the greater leaders in modern political science, been household names in early Victorian Canada.

As with other young communities, the church and religion had their part to play in the shaping of modern Canada. And yet it would be impossible to attribute to any of the Canadian churches an influence so decisive as that which religion exercised through Presbyterianism in the creation of the Scottish democracy, or through Independency in moulding the New England character. For while the question of a religious establishment proved one of the most exciting issues in politics, influences more truly religious suffered a natural degradation and diminution through their over-close association with secular affairs.

Once again the situation in Lower Canada was simplified by the conditions prevailing among the French Canadians. For Lower Canada was whole-heartedly Catholic, and the Canadian branch of the Roman Church had its eulogy pronounced in no uncertain fashion by the Earl of Durham, who, after praising its tolerant spirit, summed up the services of the priesthood in these terms: "The Catholic priesthood of this Province have, to a remarkable degree, conciliated the good-will of persons of all creeds; and I know of no parochial clergy in the world, whose practice of all the Christian virtues, and zealous discharge of their clerical duties, is more universally admired, and has been productive of more beneficial consequences. Possessed of incomes sufficient, and even large, according to the notions entertained in the country, and enjoying the advantage of education, they have lived on terms of equality and kindness with the humblest and least instructed inhabitants of the rural districts. Intimately acquainted with the wants and characters of their neighbours, they have been the promoters and dispensers of charity, and the effectual guardians of the morals of the people; and in the general absence of any permanent institutions of civil government, the Catholic Church has presented almost the only semblance of stability and organization, and furnished the only effectual support for civilization and order. The Catholic clergy of Lower Canada are entitled to this expression of my esteem, not only because it is founded on truth, but because a grateful recognition of their eminent services, in resisting the arts of the disaffected, is especially due to them from one who has administered the government of the Province in these troubled times."[[43]]

Upper Canada and the British community presented a somewhat different picture. Certain Roman Catholic elements among the Irish and the Scottish Highlanders reinforced the ranks of Catholicism, but for the greater part Anglicanism and Presbyterianism were the ecclesiastical guides of the settlers. At first, apart from official religion, the Church of England appeared in Canada in missionary form, and about 1820 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had fifteen missionaries in Lower Canada, and seventeen in Upper Canada. But under the fostering care of governors like Colborne, and the organizing genius of Dr. Strachan, Rector, Archdeacon, and latterly Bishop in Toronto, the Anglican Church in Canada became a self-dependent unit. The Bishop of Toronto was able to boast in 1842 that in his western visitation, which lasted from June till October, he had "consecrated two churches and one burial ground, confirmed 756 persons at twenty-four different stations, and travelled, including his journeys for the formation of District Branches of the Church Society, upwards of 2,500 miles."[[44]] In cities like Toronto and Kingston it was on the whole the church of the governing class, and shared in the culture and public qualities of that class. Nor was it negligent of the cure of poorer souls, for Anglicans co-operated with Presbyterians in the management of the poor schools in Kingston, and in that and the other more prominent towns of the province, the English parish church system seems to have been transplanted and worked most efficiently. Equal in importance, if not in numbers, Scottish Presbyterianism claimed its section of the community. Down to 1822, there were but six organized congregations in Upper and Lower Canada connected with the Church of Scotland,[[45]] but at the first Presbyterian Synod held in Canada, in 1831, fourteen ministers and five elders gathered at Kingston to represent the Church;[[46]] and by 1837 the number of congregations had grown to 37 in Upper Canada, and 14 in Lower Canada. Nor were these weak and struggling efforts. The Scottish Church at Kingston had in 1841 a membership of 350, and an average attendance of 800. Like its Anglican rival, it was simply a parish church, and its minister, trained in Edinburgh, as the Anglican cleric came naturally from an English college, visited, preached, and disciplined according to the rules of Knox and Melville, and maintained, perhaps more genuinely than either school or newspaper could, an educational influence on his flock not unworthy of the mother country. Here and there the ties, which still remained strong, between Canadian settlements and the districts in Scotland whence the settlers were drawn, proved useful aids in church extension. Lanark, in Upper Canada, owed its church to the efforts of friends in Lanarkshire, in Scotland, who collected no less a sum than £290 for the purpose.[[47]]

But the religious life of Canada was assisted by another less official force, the Methodist Church. Methodism in its earlier days incurred the reproach of being rather American than British, and, in one of his most unjustifiable perversions of the truth, Strachan tried to make the fact tell against the sect, in his notorious table of ecclesiastical statistics. Undoubtedly there was a stronger American element in the Methodist connection than in either of the other churches; and its spirit lent itself more readily to American innovations. Its fervent methods drew from the ranks of colder churches the more emotional, and being freer and homelier in its ritual, it appealed very directly to a rude and half-educated community. Thus the Methodist preachers made rapid headway, more especially in regions untouched by the official churches.