CHAPTER VI
SIR JAMES CRAIG
As has been told in the last chapter, Milnes and Hunter, Lieutenant-Governors of Lower and Upper Canada respectively, took up their appointments in the summer of 1799 when the Governor-General Prescott was recalled Changes in administration. to England. General Hunter was not only Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada but also Commander of the Forces in both provinces. These two men held their appointments for six years, until August, 1805. On the 5th of that month Milnes, who was by this time a baronet, Sir Robert Shore Milnes,[216] left for England on leave of absence, and on the 21st of the month General Hunter died at Quebec. For the time being, two civilians acted as Lieutenant-Governors, Thomas Dunn, senior Executive Councillor at Quebec, acting in Lower Canada, and Alexander Grant acting in Upper Canada. Milnes remained on leave of absence in England and drew his salary for over three years. A new Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada was then appointed, who in his turn also remained in England for many years and received pay in respect of an office the duties of which he did not perform.[217]
Evils of absenteeism.
Thus it resulted that, at a very critical time, two provinces of the British Empire, whose conditions were specially critical, were left without a Governor-General, without Lieutenant-Governors, and without a regular Commander of the Forces, while two men, one holding the office of Governor-General of the two Canadas and the other holding the office of Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, were spending their time and drawing their pay in England. We have learnt something in the last hundred years, in regard to colonial administration, and it is now difficult to appreciate a state of public morality which showed so much indifference to the interests of the colonies, so much acquiescence in sinecures, and so much readiness on the part of capable and honourable public officers to take pay without doing the work to which the pay was nominally attached. But the fact that such things took place, affords a very simple explanation of the difficulties which had already arisen and which subsequently arose in the history of European colonization between a mother country and her colonies. Men could put two and two together in those days as in ours. If colonists saw the rulers of the ruling land treating high offices in the colony as a matter of individual profit and public indifference, they could only come to the conclusion that they had better take care of themselves; and if the answer came that governors and lieutenant-governors were paid not by the colony but by the mother country, then the colonists must needs have concluded that they themselves would prefer to find the money and to have the money’s worth. This may well have been in the minds of the members of the elected Assembly in Lower Canada when, at a little later date, in 1810, they passed uninvited a resolution that the province shall pay the cost of the civil government, a resolution of which more was heard in the course of the long constitutional struggle.
What made for keeping up the connexion with the mother country was not so much what the mother country did for the colonies in peace, as the need which the colonies had for the mother country in case of war. An attempt has been made in the preceding chapters of this book to show that good fortune has attended Canada in her development into a nation. The conquest by Great Britain tended to this end, so did the loss by Great Britain of the provinces which now form the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the cloud of war hung over Canada, but still her good fortune did not desert her. There was perpetual External dangers which threatened Canada at the beginning of the nineteenth century. danger from two quarters, from France and from the United States. With France Canada, as being part of the British Empire, was nominally at open war throughout the closing years of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century, except for the very short interval which followed the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens in 1802; but it is noteworthy how the political complications inured to the preservation of Canada as Hostility of France to Great Britain. a British possession. France and the United States had strong bonds of sympathy. To French intervention the United States largely owed their independence. Having parted with their monarchy, the French were more attractive than before to the citizens of the American republic; and in the days of the American revolutionary war Congress had pledged itself to defend for ever the French possessions in America. The bulk of the Canadians, French in race, tradition, language and religion, might well be expected to be French in sympathies. How great then might have seemed the probability that England in war with France would lose Canada? It was no wonder that such incidents as a visit of Jerome Bonaparte to the United States caused uneasiness, or again that a report was spread that Moreau, the French republican general then living in exile in America, was likely to lead an invasion of Canada.
French Canadians not in sympathy with the French Revolution.
But, as a matter of fact, neither were the Canadians inclined to return to their French allegiance nor were the people of the United States in the least likely to permit France to regain Canada. The Canadians had known forty years of British rule, clean and just in comparison with what had gone before, and the France which would reclaim them was widely different from the France to which they had once belonged. The King was gone; religion was at a discount; Canadian sympathies, at any rate in the earlier years of the revolutionary wars, were rather with Royalist emigrés than with the national armies who went on from victory to victory. Above all antipathy to the United States, without whose abetting or connivance, no French projects for regaining Canada could have effect, tended to keep the Canadians firm in their British allegiance. Thus the news of the victory of Trafalgar was welcomed in Canada.
The United States not disposed to allow the French to regain Canada.
Nor again were the Americans, however well disposed to France, in any way or at any time minded to enable her to regain her lost possessions in North America. A Canadian who had left Canada for France when Canada was annexed by Great Britain, wrote, before the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens, expressing the hope that Canada would be regained by France. He regarded Canada, from the French point of view, ‘as a colony essential to trade and as an outlet for merchandize and men’; and he wrote that, if restored to France, it ‘would constantly furnish the means of speculation which would improve the future of the citizens whom war and revolution have reduced to wretchedness’.[218] The words read as those of a man who had known and still sighed for the days of the old French régime in Canada, when men grew rich by illicit traffic; but, apart from the views of individuals, there is no doubt that, as the eighteenth century closed, France and the French people, after the wars of the Revolution, with their power consolidated at home, were in the stage of development favourable to colonial expansion, and mindful of possessions beyond the seas which had once been French but were French no longer.