CHAPTER II
CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE QUEBEC ACT
It was said of the Spartans that warring was their salvation and ruling was their ruin. The saying holds true of various peoples and races in history. A militant race has often proved to be deficient in the qualities which ensure stable, just, and permanent government; and in such cases, when peace supervenes on war, an era of decline and fall begins for those whom fighting has made great. But even when a conquering race has capacity for government, there come times in its career when Aristotle’s dictum in part holds good. It applied, to some extent, to the English in North America. As long as they were faced by the French on the western continent, common danger and common effort held the mother country and the colonies together. Security against a foreign foe brought difficulties which ended in civil war, and the Peace of 1763 was the beginning of dissolution.
In the present chapter, which covers the history of Canada from the Peace of Paris to the outbreak of the War of Independence, it is proposed, from the point of view of colonization, to examine the ultimate rather than the immediate causes which led to England losing her old North American colonies, while she retained her new possession of Canada.
Prophecies that the British conquest of Canada would be followed by the loss of the North American colonies. Peter Kalm.
It had been abundantly prophesied that the outcome of British conquest of Canada would be colonial independence in British North America. In the years 1748-50 the Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, travelled through the British North American colonies and Canada, and left on record his impressions of the feeling towards the mother country which existed at the time in the British provinces. Noting the great increase in these colonies of riches and population, and the growing coolness towards Great Britain, produced at once by commercial restrictions and by the presence among the English colonists of German, Dutch, and French settlers, he arrived at the conclusion that the proximity of a rival and hostile power in Canada was the main factor in keeping the British colonies under the British Crown. ‘The English Government,’ he wrote, ‘has therefore sufficient reason to consider the French in North America as the best means of keeping the colonies in their due submission.’[16]
Others wrote or spoke to the same effect. Montcalm was credited with having prophesied the future before he shared the fall of Canada,[17] and another prophet was the French minister Choiseul, when negotiating the Peace of Paris. To keen, though not always unprejudiced, observers the signs of the times betokened coming conflicts between Great Britain and her colonies; and to us now looking back on history, wise after the event, it is evident that the end of foreign war in North America meant the beginning of troubles within what was then the circle of the British Empire.
Incorrect view of the conflict between Great Britain and her colonies in North America.
Until recent years most Englishmen were taught to believe that the victory of the American colonists and the defeat of the mother country was a striking instance of the power of right over might, of liberty over oppression; that the severance of the American colonies was a net gain to them, and a net loss to England; that Englishmen did right to stand in a white sheet when reflecting on these times and events, as being citizens of a country which grievously sinned and was as grievously punished. All this was pure assumption. The war was one in which there were rights and wrongs on both sides, but, whereas America had in George Washington a leader of the noblest and most effective type, England was for the moment in want both of statesmen and of generals, and had her hands tied by foreign complications. We can recognize that Providence shaped the ends, without going beyond the limits of human common sense. Had Pitt been what he Great Britain failed for want of leaders. was in the years preceding the Peace of Paris, had Wolfe and the eldest of the brothers Howe not been cut off in early manhood, the war might have been averted, or its issue might have been other than it was. One of Wolfe’s best subordinates, Carleton, survived, and Carleton saved Canada; there was no human reason why men of the same stamp, had they been found, should not have kept for England her heritage. The main reason why she lost her North American colonies was not the badness of her cause, but rather want of the right men when the crisis came.
The result of the War of Independence was not wholly a loss to Great Britain nor wholly a gain to the United States.
Equally fallacious with the view that England failed because wrong-doing never prospers, is, or was, the view that the independence of the United States was wholly a loss to England and wholly a gain to the colonists. What would have happened if the revolting provinces had not made good their revolt must be matter of speculation, but it is difficult to believe that, if the United States had remained under the British flag, Australia would ever have become a British colony. There is a limit to every political system and every empire, and, with the whole of North America east of the Mississippi for her own, it is not likely that England would have taken in hand the exploiting of a new continent. At any rate it is significant that, within four years of the date of the treaty which recognized the independence of the United States, the first English colonists were sent to Australia. The success or failure of a nation or a race in the field of colonization must not be measured by the number of square miles of the earth’s surface which the home government owns or claims at any given time. To judge aright, we must revert to the older and truer view of colonizing as a planting process, replenishing the earth and subduing it. If the result of the severance of the United States from their mother country was to sow the English seed in other lands, then it may be argued that the defeat of England by her own children was not wholly a loss to the mother country.