A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

The religious question.

It was the honest desire of the British Government to give liberty to Canada, to treat it, not as a conquered country, but as a British colony. Liberty, as the English understand it, has connoted three things, representative institutions, British law and justice, including especially trial by jury and the Habeas Corpus Act, and freedom of conscience. But in past times to Protestants freedom of conscience meant practical exclusion from the political sphere of those, like Roman Catholics, whose creed was in principle an exclusive creed; and therefore, in a Roman Catholic country under Protestant supremacy, like Ireland or Canada in the eighteenth century, representative institutions from the strong Protestant point of view meant institutions which did not represent the bulk of the population. In this matter, as in others, in the case of Canada, English statesmen and English governors, though not at once prepared to dispense with religious tests, were more liberally inclined towards the ‘new subjects’, the French Canadians, than were the English colonists in America; and the soldier Murray had far more breadth of mind than the local lawyers and politicians who prated of liberties which they had no intention of granting to others.

Murray’s letter to Lord Shelburne.

Shortly after his return to England, in 1766, Murray expressed his views as to the small Protestant minority in Canada in plain outspoken terms. In a letter addressed to Lord Shelburne on the 20th of August in that year, His opinion of the Protestant minority in Canada. he wrote, ‘most of them were followers of the army, of mean education, or soldiers disbanded at the reduction of the troops. All have their fortunes to make, and I fear few of them are solicitous about the means when the end can be obtained. I report them to be in general the most immoral collection of men I ever knew, of course little calculated to make the new subjects enamoured with our laws, religion, and customs, far less adapted to enforce these laws and to govern.’ As the Canadian peasantry, he continued, ‘have been taught to respect their superiors and not get intoxicated with the abuse of liberty, they are shocked at the insults which their noblesse and the King’s officers have received from the English traders and lawyers, since the civil government took place.... Magistrates were to be made and juries to be composed from four hundred and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders ... the Canadian noblesse were hated because their birth and behaviour entitled them to respect, and the peasants were abhorred because they were saved from the oppression they were threatened with.’ Equally severe was his judgement on ‘the improper choice and the number of the civil officers sent out from England’, ignorant of the law and language, rapacious, and lowering the dignity of government. In short his letter[42] was a wholesale condemnation of the representatives of the party which claimed to represent British civic life in a newly-acquired possession.

These men had bitterly attacked Murray, and no doubt Murray was bitter in turn; but his strictures were largely justified. He had lived for some years among the Canadians; he had commanded the King’s troops; himself a man of high principle and good breeding, he resented the mischief wrought by a low class of domineering interlopers who, in the name of freedom, meant to oppress, and painted as tyranny the policy which prevented oppression. A continuance of military rule, which the Canadians understood, would have been infinitely preferable to representative institutions in which the overwhelming majority of the population would have had no share.

Carleton’s view was much the same as Murray’s. His sympathies too were with Canada and the Canadians, and yet the forces and the instincts on the other side are at least intelligible. It was natural that, when war was over, in the train of the conquering army there should drift into the conquered country a certain number of adventurers, eager for official and professional gain, exploiting the land and the people, indifferent to higher objects, for they had not known them. They were an inevitable evil, such as must be reckoned with in similar circumstances at all times and in all places. It was natural too that Protestantism, when ascendant, should be aggressive; Character of American Protestantism. and Protestantism in Canada was borrowed from the New England States; it was the Puritanism of past days, hardened by memories of the evil wrought by Roman Catholic teaching among the natives of North America, the fruits of which had been, times without number, a series of savage crusades against the border villages of the British colonies. But the British Government, with all its kindly intentions, was at fault too; and the fault was the same evil which was poisoning political life at home. Unfit men were being sent out from home, Unfit men sent out from England. and the subordinate instruments for carrying out a new policy, and making a new régime congenial to those who were to live under it, were not well chosen. Men were wanted at first rather than institutions. The soldier governors were good, but the same could not be said of the civilians and lawyers.

Pouring new wine into old bottles.

Once more, too, it must be noticed that the actual merits of British statesmanship and policy militated against its success. It was so keenly desired to give the new subjects all the privileges enjoyed by the old, that too little account was taken of the training, the wishes, and the present needs of the new subjects. The Canadians were politically children. They had never known even the semblance of representative institutions. They had from all time been born and bred under authority—under the King, under the Church, under the seigniors. They had learnt unquestioning obedience, and could not at once be re-cast in a democratic mould. The printing press, the Assembly for law-making and debate, the standing quarrels with governors, the withholding of supplies, the aggressive freedom in every form which characterized the English communities in North America, all were alien to the French Canadian. The wine might be good, but it was new, and pouring it into old bottles could only have one result, the loss of the wine and the bursting of the bottles. So also with British law and justice: that too was new and largely unintelligible; the language puzzled and confused, and the lawyers who came in found the confusion profitable. Premature attempts or proposals to assimilate only served to emphasize differences, and for the moment good intentions paved the way to something like anarchy.

Presentment of the Grand Jury in October, 1764.

In September, 1764, the ordinance constituting courts of justice was promulgated, and in the following month the Grand Jury at Quebec made a presentment, enumerating a number of alleged grievances, concerned not merely with the administration of justice, but also with various matters which lay wholly outside their sphere. ‘We represent,’ so the framers of the presentment wrote, ‘that as the Grand Jury must be considered at present as the only body representative of the colony, they, as British subjects, have a right to be consulted, before any ordinance that may affect the body that they represent be passed into a law.’ It was an impertinent document, a kind of manifesto against the Government; and, taken by itself alone, gave ample evidence of the class and the temper of the men who were determined to make trouble in Canada. It was signed by some French jurors as well as English, but a supplement to it, signed by the English, or, at any rate, by the Protestant members alone, protested against Roman Catholics being admitted as jurors, and it soon appeared that the French jurors had signed the main document in ignorance of its contents.[43] ‘Little, very little,’ wrote Murray, ‘will content the new subjects, but nothing will satisfy the licentious fanatics trading here, but the expulsion of the Canadians who are perhaps the bravest and the best race upon the globe, a race who, could they be indulged with a few privileges which the laws of England deny to Roman Catholics at home, would soon get the better of every national antipathy to their conquerors and become the most faithful and most useful set of men in this American Empire.’[44]