Canada and the Canadian Question/Chapter 10/Dependence

No one can now take up a Canadian newspaper or listen to a group of Canadians talking about politics without being made aware that Canada has the problem of her future before her. It is idle to suppose that Canadians will be prevented from discussing that problem or from conferring freely with their neighbours across the Line on a subject of the highest practical interest to both communities. If it is lawful for an ex-Governor-General of Canada to write on the Canadian question in an American magazine, surely it is lawful for Canadians and Americans to interchange their thoughts in the way they find convenient. Nor will free discussion do any harm. Not a plough will be stopped on the farm, not a spindle will cease to turn in the factory, not a politician will pause in his hunt for a vote because this debate is going on. Statesmanship is not made more practical or in any way improved by blindness to the future. The fruits of Canadian industry are being lavished by scores of millions on political railways and other works, the object of which is to keep Canada for ever separate from her neighbour. If perpetual separation is impossible, justice to the people requires that this waste of their earnings shall cease.

​To answer at once the cries of treason which, as soon as the main question is approached, are raised by the official world and by the Protected Manufacturers, let us say that no Canadian, and so far as we are aware no American, has ever proposed that Canada should change her political relations to the mother country without the mother country's assent. If the Crown and Parliament of Great Britain sanction a change, the treason thenceforth will be in resistance. There must have been talk of the union between England and Scotland before it took place, and there has been talk of a union of Portugal with Spain; but so long as all was open and without prejudice to national duty on either side there could be no treason.

Let him who deals with the Canadian question first of all clear his mind of the confusion between a colony and a dependency. The proposal to put the coping-stone on colonial independence is branded as anti-colonial. Carthage was a colony but not a dependency of Tyre. The communities of Greater Greece were colonies, not dependencies of the Greece which sent them forth. The States of America are colonies of England, though they are dependencies no longer, and had they been let go in peace they would still be bound to the mother country by the filial tie. None are greater advocates of colonisation or cherish the link between the mother country and the colony more than those who are most opposed to the protraction of dependence. "Mother of free nations" is by all deemed the proudest title that England can bear, and a dependency is not a nation. The notion, peculiar to the moderns, that a colony ought to remain a dependency has its root not in any ground of reason or policy, but in the feudal doctrine of personal allegiance as an indefeasible bond between the liegeman and the lord. The founders of New ​England believed themselves, as their manifesto shows, to be indefeasibly liegemen of King James. But this fallacy has long been dead, and by the recent naturalisation treaties it has been buried. That the colonies in the early stage of their existence needed the protection of the mother country against the rival powers of Europe was a more substantial but still only a temporary reason for the connection. A better way was at one time opened. It was agreed by the Treaty of Neutrality between Louis XIV and James II (1686) that the colonies of England and France in America should remain at peace when the nations were at war. The Treaty came to nothing, but it pointed true.

Another fallacy to be shunned, especially when the horo-scope of Canada is being cast, is that of treating "the Empire" in the lump, assuming a vital connection between all its parts and taking it for granted that the destiny of all of them is the same. Mr. Freeman may be rather rigorous on the subject of political nomenclature, but he has done a service by showing that the term Empire has been greatly misapplied and that its misapplication leads to practical delusion. It applies only to India, the Crown Colonies, and the military stations, which alone are held by a tenure really imperial and governed with imperial sway. An Asiatic dominion extending over two hundred and fifty millions of Hindoos, a group of West Indian islands full of emancipated negro slaves, a Dutch settlement at the southern point of Africa, occupied to secure the old passage to India, a conquered colony of France in the Indian Ocean, a factory like Hong Kong, military or coaling stations like Gibraltar, Malta, and Aden—what have these. in common, or why are they likely to be for all time bound up with groups of self-governing British colonies in North America or Australia? Why again should Canada and ​Australia be treated as if their cases were identical, so that what is done with one must be done with the other, when Canada lies along the edge of a vast confederacy of kindred states with which are all her natural relations, diplomatic and commercial, while Australia lies in an ocean by herself, and such external relations as she has are with China? The real tie among the members of the motley group is England's command of the sea, which in successive wars has enabled her to pick off the transmarine possessions of her enemies. But the loud cries of high Imperialists for an increase of naval defences show that superior as Great Britain may still be in naval force to her rivals no single power any longer commands the seas. On the other hand, to fancy that because one possession or dependency is resigned all must go is surely a mere illusion, produced by the vague use of a common name for things which have nothing in common. Is England to be bound for ever, without any regard to change of circumstances, on penalty of the loss of her greatness and at the risk of all her general interests, to hold every sugar island taken in the days of slave-grown sugar, every coign of vantage occupied in the struggle against the continental system of Napoleon? When the cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece was proposed, the cry was raised that this would be the signal for general dissolution. Yet no dissolution ensued, nor was there any sign among the nations of diminished respect for Great Britain. She found herself all the stronger for being rid of a possession which in case of war must either have been garrisoned at a ruinous sacrifice or abandoned with disgrace, and the shrieks of dissolution were suspended, not to be raised again till the announcement of the cession of Heligoland. Let the Canadian question then be considered by itself and with reference to the circumstances of Canada, ​not to those of Jamaica, Malta, South Africa, or Hong Kong.

What is gained by the present system of dependence or semi-dependence as applied to Canada? What would be lost if it were exchanged for the filial tie? That is a question which, as even Imperial Federationists proclaim, the course of events has practically raised. That the connection lays on Great Britain heavy responsibilities, both military and diplomatic, that it adds not a little to the burdens and perils of empire, is plain. Were England to withdraw politically from the American continent she would be quit not only of the diplomatic entanglements and disputes with the United States about boundaries and fisheries, but of the ill-feeling which her presence on the continent enables her enemies in the United States to keep up against her, and which is adding seriously to her embarrassments in dealing with the Irish question. Hardly could any fisher of Irish votes succeed in inflaming the American people against a nation in another hemisphere with which they would no longer be brought into contact. What are the compensating advantages? The exclusive command of colonial markets which formed at least a substantial ground for the old colonial system, England has no more. No longer can she in the interest of her manufactures forbid a colony to make a horseshoe or a nail. Instead of that the Dominion of Canada lays protective duties on her goods. The chief of that which calls itself the loyal party in Canada has asserted Canada's right to do this, whether Englishman, Scotchman, or Irishman likes it or not, in ringing and almost defiant tones. It is still held that the colony cannot in her tariff discriminate against the mother country's goods; this little more than sentimental privilege is all in the way of commercial advantage that England has ​now. It is said that trade follows the flag. It follows the flag at first to a new colony which has no manufactures of its own. But apart from this and from national tariffs commerce is no discerner of nationalities. If the trade of Canada with Great Britain has hitherto exceeded (though it no longer exceeds) her trade with the United States, it is not because the British market is maternal, but because it is free. Find the merchant who in making a purchase, even of the bunting for the flag itself, has asked on patriotic grounds where the goods were made, and you will have some ground for saying that trade follows the flag. Did not the trade of England with her American Colonies, instead of diminishing, increase from the time when the Union Jack was exchanged for the Stars and Stripes, evil as the day of separation had been? To take the book trade as an example. At the very time when, in consequence of the Trent affair, Canadian feeling was excited against the Americans, the vast bulk of that trade—prices then ruling low and copyrights of great popular works not having expired—was going to the United States. Patriotic or philanthropic movements in favour of particular markets have been often set on foot, and to what have they come?

As to Emigration, there went in the year 1888 of British emigrants to Canada 49,168, to the United States 293,099; while of those who went to Canada half at least passed on to the United States. What the emigrant wants is bread. That an Englishman in quest of employment will meet with a warmer welcome in Canada than in the United States is, as has already been said, a natural impression, but not the fact. There is nothing to make an emigrant prefer the British dependency to the Anglo-Saxon Colonies as his new home except the anti-British tone of American politics and of the American press; and on this probably few intending emi​grants bestow a thought. It suffices them to know that they are going where their friends have gone before them, and where they will be better off than they are at home. Besides, as we have seen, the emigration question has now entered on a new phase, and the people of whom the mother country wishes to be rid the colony is no longer inclined, or not so well inclined as it used to be, to receive. It looks as though England might have for the future to close her own ports against the influx of Polish Jews or foreigners of any race, and in this or other ways to set bounds to the growth of her own population and find means of feeding her offspring at home.

Of dominion over the Colony barely a rag remains to the mother country, and even that remnant is grudged, and is being constantly nibbled away. The appellate jurisdiction of the Privy Council has been narrowed by the interposition of the Canadian Supreme Court; there is a smouldering agitation for the transfer of the military command from a British to a Canadian officer, and with regard to commercial matters there is a gradual assertion of diplomatic independence. This we have seen. The appointment of a Governor-General is about all that remains; and it perhaps may not be long before the Colonies generally improve upon the example of Queensland, which asserted a veto, and, under some constitutional form of recommending a name to Her Majesty, take the appointment to themselves.

That England can derive no military strength from a dependency 3000 miles away, without any army or navy of its own, and with an open frontier of 4000 miles, will surely be admitted by all, and is in effect proclaimed by Imperialists when they strive to goad Canadians into setting up a standing army. She cannot even derive that false show of strength solemnly styled "prestige": the weakness ​is too patent and too confessed to deceive even an opponent capable of taking pasteboard for a stone wall. Enlist soldiers in Canada England may, if she chooses to pay much higher wages than she pays her soldiers now, and perhaps bounties into the bargain; so, as the enlistments during the Civil War showed, can the American Government. The soldiers would no doubt be good, though British officers might have some trouble with democratic recruits not brought up like the British peasant to obey a gentleman. But Canada will never contribute to Imperial armaments at her own expense. Even Australia, which is more British than Canada, and has no New France in the heart of it, seems not likely to send another regiment at her own expense to an Imperial war; and when it was faintly proposed in Canada to emulate Australia in devotion there was a chorus of dissent, Conservative organs showing special anxiety to relieve their Government of the suspicion. The Conservative leader in Canada has intimated that the Colony will help the mother country only in case of defensive war; and he evidently did not regard as defensive the war in Afghanistan or that in Egypt. The mercantile marine of Canada claims the fourth place among those of the world. It is often spoken of as a nursery for the British navy. The mercantile marine of Great Britain can of course draw from it freely in case of need, as does the mercantile marine of the United States—for of those American fishermen about whose rights diplomatists contend the majority are said to be Canadians. But the new warships require seamen specially trained for the service. Besides, while people are dilating upon the military and naval resources of Canada as aids in time of need to the mother country, French Canada is left out of sight. Let the War Office ask the Canadian High Commissioner whether he thinks that Quebec would, under ​any conceivable circumstance, send contingents or subsidies to British armaments, or allow the Dominion, which is controlled by the French vote, to send them. The most likely antagonist of England is France, and in a war between France and England the hearts of the French Canadians, if not their arms, would be on the wrong side. There was no difficulty in raising Papal Zouaves.

"There are," says Sir George Cornewall Lewis,^[1] "supposed advantages flowing from the possession of dependencies which are expressed in terms so general and vague that they cannot be referred to any determinate head. Such, for example, is the glory which a country is supposed to derive from an extensive Colonial Empire. We will merely remark upon this imagined advantage that a nation derives no true glory from any possession which produces no assignable advantage to itself or to other communities. If a country possesses a dependency from which it derives no public revenue, no military or naval strength, and no commercial advantages or facilities for emigration which it would not equally enjoy though the dependency were independent . . . such a possession cannot justly be called glorious." These are the words of a Minister of the Crown and a colleague of Lord Palmerston.

Great Britain may need a coaling station on the Atlantic Coast of North America, not for the purposes of blockade, which could no longer have place when all danger of war was at an end, but for the general defence of her trade. Safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge, rather than territorial dependencies, are apparently what the great exporting country and the mistress of the carrying trade now wants. Newfoundland would be a safe and uninvidious possession, and it has coal, though bituminous and not yet worked. The Ameri​cans do not covet islands, for the defence of which they would have to keep up a navy. The island itself would be the gainer; there would be some chance of the development of its resources; with nothing but the fishery the condition of its people seems to be poor. Let England then keep Newfoundland. Cape Breton is rather too close to the coast, otherwise it has coal in itself, and Louisbourg might be restored.

The strength of England is and always has been in herself, not in her dependencies. Alone she fought and vanquished Louis XIV and Napoleon, as well as Philip II. Some sepoys sent to Egypt in the war with France, some sepoys brought to the Mediterranean fourteen years ago as a demonstration against Russia, the regiment raised by Australia for the campaign in the Soudan—these are about the total amount of military contribution ever drawn by the Imperial country from what is called the Empire. Black regiments were raised in the West Indies, and the 100th Regiment was originally raised in Canada, but at Imperial expense. On the other hand, one dependency at least has drawn heavily on Imperial resources in an hour of extreme peril. When Wellington faced Napoleon at Waterloo he must, as he looked on the raw levies or foreign auxiliaries around him, have thought with bitterness of his victorious veterans who were on the wrong side of the Atlantic, engaged in what, as the conquest of Canada was the American aim, was really a Colonial war. Had Canada then been in the American Union her friendly vote might have turned the scale of its councils generally in favour of England. The British in the United States have hitherto to a great extent declined naturalisation, repelled perhaps by the political feeling against their native country. But they have now been persuaded to take the wiser course, and are being naturalised in great ​numbers. As soon as their vote makes itself felt, the influence of the Irish vote and of the enemies of England on politics will decrease. The Nova-Scotian vote is said to have told the other day in Massachusetts. No other kind of aid will it be in Canada's power to lend. If this assertion is questioned, let the Canadian Government be called upon, while yet it is time, to say plainly what assistance, military or naval, it is able to afford, and in what contingency the assistance will be afforded.

Sir Henry Taylor cannot be said to have forfeited his character as a patriotic Englishman when he wrote, as Under-Secretary for the Colonies, to Lord Grey: "I cannot but regard the North-American Provinces as a most dangerous possession for this country, whether as likely to breed a war with the United States or to make a war otherwise generated more grievous and disastrous. I do not suppose the Provinces to be useless to us at present, but I regard any present uses not obtainable from them as independent nations as no more than the dust in the balance compared with the evil contingencies." It may be said that this was written in 1852, and that since that time we have had new lights. Some persons may have had new lights; but those who have not are no more unpatriotic in saying that the possession and that its uses are as dust in the balance compared with its evil contingencies than was Sir Henry Taylor.

Now on the side of the Colony. The disadvantages of dependence stare us in the face. If to be a nation is strength, energy, and grandeur, to be less than a nation is to have less than a full measure of all these. Nor can any one who has lived in a dependency fail to see that the high spirit of independence is not there. Its absence is marked by restless and uneasy self-assertion, by a misgiving which sometimes lurks ​under an outward boastfulness, by a constant craving for the notice of the Imperial country, coupled with a jealousy of her superiority and of the supposed pretensions of those who belong to her. To live not to yourself but to another man, said the philosopher of old, is moral slavery, and a dependency lives to the Imperial country, not to herself. The full pride of country cannot have place, nor can the full attachment to country. The social centre of the rich and eminent is in the Imperial capital, and in their social centre are their aspirations and their hearts. There is not found in Canada the same public munificence which there is in the United States; nor are there found, as in the United States, great citizens who, without going into public life, without coveting its prizes, recoiling perhaps from it altogether, as it is under the party system—still take an active interest in all questions which deeply concern the welfare of the community, head movements of reform, political as well as social, throw themselves even into the political conflict when the salvation of the State hangs in the balance, and in a measure neutralise the evil influence of faction and its retainers. The dependency shares, it may be replied, the greatness of the Imperial nation. It does; but only as a dependent; it bears the train, not wears the royal robe.

Military and naval protection Canada may be said to receive; but it is protection of a very precarious kind. It is not pretended that the arm of England would save Canada from invasion: the most that is alleged is, that when Canada had suffered all the evils of invasion she would be redeemed by the pressure which the English navy would put upon the seaboard cities of the enemy. What amount of naval force Great Britain would be able to spare for the defence of colonial trade in case of a war between her and any other ​maritime power is a question which must be answered by the Admiralty, whose utterances on the subject hitherto have not been comforting. But it could hardly be such as to prevent a rise in the rate of insurance such as, the market of the United States being half closed by the tariff, would ruinously reduce Canadian trade. The saving to Canada of military and naval expense is one of the great inducements always held out to her for adhering to the connection. The ohter is the saving of diplomatic expense, which, however, will not be complete if the proposal to have residents at seats of commerce, in addition to the High Commissioner at London, is carried out. Diplomatic expense is not found intolerable by Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, or Sweden, although they are mixed up with European diplomacy, of which Canada would be clear.

In the balance against this claim to protection and this saving of expense must be laid the heavy weight of a constant liability to entanglements in the quarrels of England all over the world, with which Canada has nothing to do, and about which nothing is known by her people. Her commerce may any day be cut up, and want brought into her homes by a war about the frontier of Afghanistan, about the treatment of Armenia or Crete by the Turks, about the relations of the Danubian principalities to Russia, or about the balance of power in Europe. No one in Canada who forms his estimate of public sentiment through his senses and not through his fancy can doubt what the result would be.

That in all diplomatic questions with the United States the interest of Canada has been sacrificed to the Imperial exigency of keeping the peace with the Americans is the constant theme of Canadian complaint. "I do not think "—these are the words of a Canadian knight—"that we are under any deep debt of gratitude to English statesmen, that ​we owe them much, unless, perchance, it may be the duty as Christian men to forgive them for the atrocious blunders which have marked every treaty, transaction, or negotiation which they have ever had with the United States where the interests of Canada were concerned, from the days of Benjamin Franklin to this hour, not excepting their first or second treaty of Washington." By the Treaty of 1783, confirming the independence of the United States, England not only resigned the territory claimed by each State of the Union severally, but abandoned to the general government immense territories "unsettled, unexplored, and unknown" That this was done partly through ignorance appears from the fact that in the Treaty the north-western angle of demarcation was fixed at the north-west corner of the Lake of the Woods, from which point of departure it was to run due west to the sources of the Mississippi; whereas the sources of the Mississippi were afterwards found many hundred miles to the south, so that the line prescribed was impracticable.^[2] This is the beginning of a long and uniform story, in the course of which not only great tracts of territory but geographical unity has been lost. To understand how deeply this iron has entered into the Canadian soul the Englishman must turn to his map and mark how much of geographical compactness, of military security, and of commercial convenience was lost when Great Britain gave up Maine. The British statesman would with truth reply that he had done all that diplomacy could do, that he had gone to the very verge of war with the United States, and that with a world-wide empire and world-wide enmities on his hands he could not afford to go beyond. The Canadian, if he were ​reasonable, would acquiesce, but he would feel that the sincerest wish to protect without the power was not protection. A large portion of Minnesota, Dakota, Montana, and Washington, Canada also thinks she has wrongfully lost. These are causes of discontent; discontent may one day breed disaffection; disaffection may lead to another calamitous rupture; and instead of going forth into the world when the hour of maturity has arrived with the parent's blessing, the child may turn in anger from the paternal door.

About the advantages of political tutelage hardly a word need be said. Practically the idea has been abandoned. How could a democracy in Europe regulate, to any good purpose, the progress of a democracy in America about the concerns of which it knows almost nothing, and which is superior to itself in average education and intelligence? British democracy has enough to do in regulating itself. In former days, when the British Government consisted of the chief men of the nation exercising real power the illusion of tutelage was possible; but who can believe that a colony is the better for being guided by the delegates of an English caucus? Even the best informed in England are still too uninstructed about Canada to interfere usefully in her affairs? If the days are gone by when the Admiralty could send out sentry-boxes for the troops, water-casks for a flotilla on Canadian lakes, and spars for the use of vessels in a land of pine, the writer has seen posted in England a proclamation of the Privy Council in which Ontario was called "that town," and he has heard a well-educated Englishman congratulate a Canadian on the removal by the settlement of the Alabama question of all causes of enmity between Canada and Great Britain. The House of Commons notoriously cannot be got to attend to colonial questions. In the debate ​on the Quebec Act it was near being counted out, and in the division which was to decide the constitution and laws of the dependency only seventy-two members took part. An Act relating to the South-African Confederation was passed in an all-night sitting held to beat obstruction. Nobody blames people for knowing or caring little about matters with which they have nothing to do. Canadians care and know little about Australia or the Cape of Good Hope. But to talk of tutelage is absurd. If British monarchists have continued to cherish the hope of establishing through the agency of Canada hereditary monarchy and aristocracy on this Continent, and thus wresting from democracy a part of its dominion, let that hope be for ever laid aside. The structure and spirit of Canadian as well as American society, it must be repeated, are thoroughly democratic. The homage paid to titled visitors from the old country and the social worship of the Governor-General are indications merely of personal habit, not of any political return to the past. Americans and Canadians are in this respect the same. In the hereditary principle there is not on the American Continent a spark of life. The abdication of the Brazilian dynasty was the knell. That democracy on the American continent and elsewhere may some day pass through faction into anarchy, and that out of the anarchy a strong government may arise, is among those possibilities in the womb of the future which no external power can help to the birth; but on the soil of the New World hereditary monarchy and aristocracy can never grow.

Canada has received, it is true, large advances of British capital. Her debt to England has been reckoned at $650,000,000, though of the portion invested in the construction of Canadian railways most may be practically written off. How far facility of borrowing is really a blessing to any ​country is a question which need not be discussed. English capital is now pouring into the United States; it has poured into the Argentine Republic, Spain, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, Mexico, and every country in which it appeared that profitable investments could be found. Investment is as cosmopolitan as trade. Let Canada keep up her credit and the British investor will not curiously inquire whether the Governor-General is sent out from England or elected by the Canadians themselves.

Sentiment then, apparently, is the sole life of the present connection. Of sentiment no one wishes to speak irreverently. But to be sound, it must after all have its root in some kind of utility, and when the root is dead the days of the flower are numbered. Besides it is but the exchange of one sentiment for another which is more certain to endure. Why is the filial sentiment of less value than the sentiment of dependence? It is surely rather the nobler of the two. The Greek colony which kept the fire taken from the mother country's altar always burning on its sacred hearth and assigned to the representatives of the mother country places of honour, effectively preserved, in its classic fashion, the bond of the heart; and why should not the same thing be done in forms suited to our time by a Colony at the present day? Protracted dependence may imperil the filial tie if resentment is caused on either side by the failure to render services which can no longer be rendered, and perform duties which can no longer be performed.