The second cause to which Milnes attributed the weakness of the government was ‘the prevalence of the Roman Catholic religion and the independence of the Independence of the Roman Catholic Church. priesthood’. The Royal Instructions were that no one should be admitted to Holy Orders or have the Cure of Souls without first obtaining a licence from the governor; but the instructions had not been enforced, and the whole patronage of the Roman Catholic Church had passed into the hands of the bishops, with the result that the power of the priests over the people was entirely independent of the government. This evil Milnes proposed to remedy by increasing the emoluments which the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada received from government funds, on condition that the rule requiring the governor’s licences for the parish priests was strictly observed in future.
The third cause which was mentioned as tending to lessen the influence of the government, was the practical disembodiment of the militia since Canada had passed Disuse of the militia. under British rule. Under the old French dominion the government had made itself felt in the various parishes through the captains of militia and the parish priests, and the captains of militia had been employed to issue and enforce the public ordinances. They were, Milnes wrote, chosen from among the most respectable of the habitants; and though the militia had not been called out for years past and he did not propose to call it out, the captains of militia were still in existence and the government availed itself of their honorary services on public occasions. He suggested that they should be given some salary or distinction so that they might consider themselves to be ‘the immediate officers of the Crown’; and thus he hoped to keep up the spirit of loyalty among the Canadian people, which ‘for want of an immediate class to whom they can look up, and from their having no immediate connexion with the Executive power, is in danger of becoming extinct’.[213] By attaching to the government the parish priests and the captains of militia, it might be possible to ensure a government majority in the House of Assembly and to secure the election of educated and businesslike representatives, whereas the main body of the Canadian habitants were, ‘from their want of education and extreme simplicity, liable to be misled by designing and artful men’.
The Crown Lands.
These proposals the Lieutenant-Governor regarded as temporary remedies. For the future, he looked to increasing the influence of the Crown by means of the revenue from waste lands, and the settlement of those lands by ‘a body of people of the Protestant religion that will naturally feel themselves more immediately connected with the English Government’. In the mind of Milnes, as in that of Dorchester, there was a fixed conviction that matters were tending to democracy, as democracy had shown itself in the adjoining republic; that such democracy meant disintegration; that the influence of the Crown and of the Executive Government was declining and would continue to decline, unless measures were taken to counteract the evil. He held to the doctrine that well-wishers of the government should think it matter for congratulation that there was an annual deficit on the budget of Lower Canada,[214] which made the province dependent upon the Imperial Government.
The records of the time show that in every respect the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the The close of the eighteenth century was for Canada a time of transition and division. nineteenth century was for Canada a time of division and a time of change, though not yet of dangerous bitterness. There were two provinces instead of one. There were two Lieutenant-Governors, independent of each other, while the Governor-in-Chief, recalled to England, was still holding his post and drawing his pay. There were elected Assemblies, to which the Executive was not responsible, and the new century opened in Upper Canada with a complaint that the Lieutenant-Governor had spent money raised from the taxes without previously obtaining a vote of the Legislature. There was a suggestion of difficulties arising from the fact that military and civil authority for the time was divided. An interesting anonymous letter written from Quebec on the 28th of July, 1806, and signed ‘Mercator’, called attention to this point, alleging that, since Prescott’s recall in 1799, Lower Canada had languished owing to the fact that civil and military powers were not in the same hands. The result, in the writer’s opinion, was jealousy between the civil and military departments, weakening of the energy of government and loss of dignity. ‘The Canadians’ he wrote, ‘a military people and always accustomed to a military government, hold not in sufficient estimation a person placed at the head of affairs who does not at the same time command the troops.’[215]
There was again undoubted division between the Judicial and the Executive power. Chief Justice Osgoode in Lower Canada was not at one with either Dorchester, Prescott, or Milnes; while in Upper Canada, in the years 1806-7, a judge of the name of Thorpe became a member of the elected Assembly and was so outrageous in his opposition to the government that he was by Lord Castlereagh’s instructions suspended from his office. The Church of England bishop found cause to deplore the overshadowing pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic dignitaries, on the other hand, asked for formal recognition of their position by the civil government. There was a movement, strongly advocated by the Church of England bishop, for more and better education, both primary and secondary, so that the French Canadian children might learn English, and the children of the upper classes might be educated without being sent to Europe or to the United States. The Secretary of State authorized free schools on the express condition that English should be taught in them, and directed that part of the Crown Lands revenues should be set aside for the purpose. There was also a strong feeling that the Jesuit estates, which long ago had been granted by the King to Lord Amherst but had never been handed over to him, should be applied to education. But no general system of state education was established—probably owing to Roman Catholic feeling; and, as against the proposal to teach English to the coming generation, there came into being in 1806 a French Canadian newspaper, Le Canadien, with the motto, ‘Nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois.’ Nothing in short was settled in Canada. Once more it was to be shown that pressure from without was necessary to produce full co-operation within; and, badly equipped as the two provinces were with means of defence, war was yet to be to them a blessing in disguise, as bringing them a step further on the path of national development.
FOOTNOTES:
[189] In the interval the government was administered (i) from the date of Haldimand’s departure till November 2, 1785, by Henry Hamilton; (ii) from the latter date till Dorchester’s arrival, by Colonel Hope. The command of the troops was at first separated from the acting governorship, and placed in the hands of St. Leger. Hamilton, who during the war had come into notice as having been in command of the expedition to the Illinois posts in 1779, when he was taken prisoner by George Rogers Clark, subsequently proved to be unfit to act as governor, and was summarily recalled.
[190] The Commission given to Carleton as Governor-in-Chief of Nova Scotia constituted him also Governor-in-Chief of the islands of St. John (now Prince Edward Island) and Cape Breton; but, though the terms of the Commission are not very clear, those two islands were at the time separate both from Nova Scotia and from each other.
[191] See the Parliamentary History, vol. xxvi, pp. 190-5.