He found the "habitant" still unreconciled to the British rule; he found a condition of many little Pontiacs, all very much as was that famous village on the summer evening when Valmond threw the hot pennies to the children, as the auctioneer and monsieur le cure came down the street; he found another Canada of British colonists with so little sympathy for the habitant, that, he declared, the two never met save in the jury box, and there only to obstruct justice.
It was then that Lord Durham, by a great stroke of statesmanship, brought peace to Canada. A democratic form of representative government was bestowed on the people. The division of Quebec into two provinces, which the habitant had desired when they were one, and resented when they were two, was annulled, with the result that the ground was prepared for the union which was to come just thirty years later.
Lord Durham made history and made a nation, for the confederation, when it came, was the inevitable superstructure built upon the foundations of his laying, but he ruined a reputation. His contempt for the conventions of politics, the radicalism of his methods, his failure to make any obeisance to the governmental deities, official or ex-official, combined with his almost superhuman tactlessness, gave his enemies every opportunity they could desire.
He was viciously attacked, and finally throwing up his mission, returned to England and gave up politics.
REPORT NOT TO BE DISPOSED OF.
The good, however, men do lives after them. Lord Durham's report, drafted for him by two master hands, those of Charles Buller and Edward Wakefield, could not be disposed of by perfervid orators or ill-informed editors. It passes into the category of historic and illuminating state papers. And, though Lord Durham fell, when, on the first of July, 1867, the British North America Act became operative, it was the handle of his trowel that struck that great cornerstone of liberty and empire, and declared it well and truly laid: the first of the Dominions, now having a population of approximately 8,000,000.
Thrown upon their own resources, when Great Britain began to draw in its loans of 1911-12, the people of Canada were temporarily at a loss as to how to meet the situation; the hardships which followed, however, prepared them to meet, with resolute determination, the greater problems that crowded upon them in 1915-16. Canada, through all the past, had been a dependent and a debtor nation; the war made it self-reliant, spurred its people on to the development of natural resources, and assured them, not only that the Dominion could stand alone, but that, throughout all the future, it can be a pillar of strength to the Empire and to democracy.
There were times when she was threatened by more than the ordinary difficulties which come to a nation, as when it became necessary in 1917 to pass a Conscription Act, the Province of Quebec threatened to secede. Quebec is a French territory, and it was a matter of world-wide comment that the volunteer enlistments for the Canadian army from the province were insignificant.
While the French Canadians were proud of France and their cousins across the seas, they were opposed to being compelled to fight for England, and the proposal to secede was largely advocated by the French-Canadian clergy.