A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

We start then with colonies planted from a land which had no thought of systematic control over colonies or dependencies, whose government was at the time of colonization in a chaotic state, whose colonists went out in part, at any rate, intent on practical separation, and who all settled themselves or were settled in a remote region at a time when distance did not grow less.

The next point to notice is that it has always been held that, as between a mother country and its colonies, if they are colonies in the true sense and not merely tributary states, it is rather for the mother country to give and her colonies to take, than vice versa. This is a view which has been held at all times and among all races, but especially among members of the English race. Other nations and General view of the duty of a mother country towards its colonies. races have, it is true, felt as strongly as, or more strongly than, the English the duty of protecting their outlying possessions: they have in some cases lavished more money directly upon them at the expense of the taxpayers at home; but, on the other hand, they have almost invariably regarded their colonies as dependencies pure and simple, constrained to take the course of the dominant partner in preference to their own. The English alone in history have bred communities protected by, but in practice not subject to, the mother country. They have given, without exacting toll in return.

Adam Smith on the subject.

No writer has laid greater stress on this view of the relations between the mother country and the colonies than Adam Smith, who published the Wealth of Nations just as the American colonies were breaking away from Great Britain. ‘The English colonists,’ he wrote, ‘have never yet contributed anything towards the defence of the mother country, or towards the support of its civil government. They themselves, on the contrary, have hitherto been defended almost entirely at the expense of the mother country;’ and again, ‘Under the present system of management, Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she has assumed over her colonies.’ ‘Great Britain is, perhaps, since the world began, the only state which, as it has extended its empire, has only increased its expense without once augmenting its resources.’[23] His opinion would have been modified could he have foreseen the help given to the mother country in our own day by the self-governing colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in a war far removed from their shores; but even in our own day the old view, against which he contended, largely holds the field, that more is due from the mother country to the colonies than from the colonies to the mother country, that what the mother country spends on the Empire is payment of a debt, while what the colonies spend on the Empire is a free gift.

The mother country, being usually greater than the colony, is expected to give rather than to receive.

This view of the relations between a mother country and its colonies takes its ultimate source largely from the fact that the mother country is nearly always[24] greater and stronger than any one colony or group of colonies; and in the English mind the instinct of fair play invariably makes in favour of the party to a contract which is or appears to be the weaker party. It is in the light of the fact that the American colonies were numerically the weaker party in their contention with the mother country, and with the misleading deduction that any demand made upon them was therefore unjust, that the story of the War of Independence has over and over again been wrongly told. In one of the more recent books on the subject, Sir George Trevelyan’s American Revolution, it is stated that all the colonies asked of the King was to be let alone.[25] That is all that any man or any community asks, when called upon to pay a bill; and the question at issue between the mother country and the colonies in the eighteenth century was the eternal question, which vexes every community and every federation of communities, who ought to pay. The bill was one for defence purposes; but, when it was presented, the colonists’ answer was in effect, first, that it was the duty of the mother country to Contentions of the colonists. defend the colonies; secondly, that that duty had been neglected; and thirdly, that, assuming that it had been performed, it was for the colonies and not for the mother country to determine what proportion of the expense, if any, should be defrayed by the colonies.

(1) It was the duty of the mother country to bear the expense of defending the colonies.

The first of these three contentions may not have been fully avowed, but deep down in the minds of men there lay the conviction that the mother country ought to pay for defending the colonies, and there it has remained, more or less, ever since. It is true that the grant of self-government in its fullest sense to the present great provinces of the British Empire has been coupled with the withdrawal of the regular forces from all but a few points of selected Imperial vantage, and to that extent the colonies have taken up, This view still prevails. and well taken up, the duty of self-defence; but the burden of the fleet, the great defensive force of the Empire as a whole, is still borne in the main, and was till recently entirely borne, by the mother country. When colonies or foreign possessions are in a condition of complete political dependence upon the mother country, it may fairly be argued that the latter, in insisting upon dependence, should, as the price of supremacy, undertake to some extent the duty of defence. And yet a survey of the British Empire at the present day shows that no self-governing province of the Empire is so highly organized or so fully charged for the purposes of defence as is the great dependency of India.

Independence implies self-defence.

The first and most elementary duty of an independent community, the one condition without which it cannot be independent, is providing for its own defence. The American colonies claimed in reality political independence, at any rate as far as internal matters were concerned; but they did not admit, except to a limited extent, that it was their duty to provide against foreign invasion. That duty, in their eyes, devolved upon the mother country because it was the mother country; because it was held that the mother country derived more advantage from the colonies than—apart from defence—the colonies derived from her; and because the mother country dictated the foreign policy of the Empire; in common parlance, it called the tune and therefore, it was argued, should pay the piper.