Canada and the Canadian Question/Chapter 5

Quebec had been won. What was to be done with it? The highest wisdom said, "Add it to the New England Colonies by which it will soon be assimilated, and leave the whole independent, content with the Empire of British civilisation over the New World, and with the moral supremacy which the mother country, provided the is sure to retain." Cromwell had meditated giving the Colonies Jamaica. But such a policy was beyond the ken of the statesmen of that day, and few even among the calmest observers had any conception of it. We must re-member, moreover, that in times before Adam Smith a distant dependency seemed to everybody to have real value inasmuch as the Imperial country monopolised its trade. Still the question remained whether Quebec should be left French and governed as a conquest or made English. That question was settled by the American Revolution, which compelled the Imperial Government to court the French of Quebec and respect their nationality. That a revolt of the American colonies would follow when the curb of French rivalry had been removed was surmised by clear-sighted men at the time, albeit it would be hard to accuse England of blindness, because she failed to foresee that the requital ​of her supreme effort on behalf of her American colonists would be their secession. Mr. Samuel Adams and the rest of the Boston counterparts of Wilkes and Horne Tooke, who fomented the quarrel till it became revolution and civil war, should have had a little patience and waited till Quebec had been not only conquered but made English. To make her English as she then was would not have been hard. Her French inhabitants of the upper class, had, for the most part, quitted her after the conquest and sailed with their property for France. There remained only 70,000 peasants, to whom their language was not so dear as it was to a member of the Institute, who knew not the difference between codes so long as they got justice, and among whom, harsh and abrupt change being avoided, the British tongue and law might have been gradually and painlessly introduced.

While the war lasted, and for a short time afterwards, the government was military, and the ultimate policy of the British Government with regard to the conquered Province was in suspense. That the government should at first be military was inevitable, and French writers who speak of this with indignation must remember what was the conduct of the House of Bourbon or of the French Republic to countries overran by their armies. They should remember the plan which was sanctioned by Louis XIV for the treatment of New York in case it should be conquered, and according to which Protestantism would have been uprooted, all property confiscated, the inhabitants generally deported, and those who remained put to convict labour on the fortifications.

The Americans called upon the Canadians to join them in their revolt. But the Canadians had already begun to taste the fruits of the Conquest. They had been released from the vexations of constant military service and allowed ​to till their farms. Their religion had been respected to a greater extent even than was required by the terms of the Treaty of Cession. Not only were the parish clergy left in possession of their tithes, but the religious orders also, saving the anti-national Jesuits, had been left in possession of their estates. Bourbon despotism and corruption had departed. Instead of arbitrary tribunals, trial by jury had been introduced, though the habitant at first hardly understood the boon, while the Seignior thought it a derogation from his ragged dignity to be judged by shopkeepers and peasants. The Puritans, or rather ex-Puritans of New England, had made the retention of Roman Catholicism in Quebec one of the counts in their indictment of the British Government. In an address to the British people they spoke of the religion of the Canadians as one "that had drenched Great Britain in blood and disseminated impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world." Afterwards, calling the French Canadians to freedom, they treated the religious question in a different strain. "We are too well-acquainted," they said, "with the liberality of sentiment distinguishing your nation to imagine that difference of religion will prejudice you against a hearty amity with us. You know that the transcendent nature of freedom elevates the minds of those who unite in the cause above all such low-minded infirmities. The Swiss Cantons furnish a memorable proof of this truth; their union is composed of Catholic and Protestant States, living in the utmost concord and peace with each other; and they are thereby enabled, ever since they bravely vindicated their freedom, to defy and defeat every tyrant that has invaded them." The Quebec clergy, however, did not forget the former and as they probably thought more sincere manifesto. Their weight was cast into the other scale, and ​their chief, the Bishop of Quebec, exhorted his people to be true to British allegiance and repel the American invaders. To the blandishments of Franklin and his coadjutors the priests replied that Great Britain had kept her faith, preserved to the French people their laws and customs, shielded their religion, left the monasteries their estates, and even ordered the military authorities to pay honour to Catholic processions.^[1] Nor did the Seigniors like the look of revolution. The peasantry were slow to move, rejoicing to have got back to their homesteads and thinking that it was not their quarrel; the city of Quebec narrowly escaped capture by the Americans under Arnold and Montgomery; but the behaviour of the invaders helped to stir up the people against them, and the Province was saved. The Governor, Sir Guy Carleton, was a man worthy to command. Had he been in the place of the torpid Howe, the heavy Clinton, or the light Burgoyne, there might have been a different tale to tell.

The danger, however, had determined the policy of the British Government and led to the practical abandonment, as it proved for ever, of the thought of Anglicising Quebec. The settlement embodied in the Quebec Act, framed by Lord North's government, not only secured to the French people the free exercise of their religion and to the priesthood its revenues, but established the French civil law and French procedure without juries. It put an end to the military dictatorship by giving the Province a governing Council which was to be partly composed of Catholics; an Elective Assembly could not have been safely given to people recently conquered, nor did the French themselves demand it; they had been accustomed only to obey, and were satisfied if their rulers were just. The Quebec Act was opposed as anti-​British by Chatham almost with his last breath. It was opposed also by Burke, but not on the ground of hostility to the Roman Catholic religion. "There is," said Burke, "but one healing, Catholic principle of toleration which ought to find favour in this House. It is wanted not only in our colonies, but here. The thirsty earth of our own country is gasping and gaping and crying out for that healing shower from heaven. The noble lord has told you of the right of those people by the Treaty; but I consider the right of conquest so little and the right of human nature so much that the former has very little consideration with me. I look upon the people of Canada as coming by the dispensation of God under the British government. I would have us govern it in the same manner as the all-wise disposition of Providence would govern it. We know He suffers the sun to shine upon the righteous and the unrighteous; and we ought to suffer all classes without distinction to enjoy equally the right of worshipping God according to the light He has been pleased to give them." The earth of England unhappily was to gasp and gape for the healing shower for another half-century. Burke's view as to the treatment of the conquered was noble, but it would have extinguished conquest altogether. Yet Burke himself was no enemy to aggrandisement by war.

By this time, however, it was not only with the French, or with the difficulty which their nationality presented, that the British Government had to deal. After the Conquest a number of British adventurers, for the most part it seems not of a high class, had settled in the Province and had at once got its commerce for which the French peasants had no turn-into their hands. Presently came a crowd of American Royalists, driven into exile by the Revolution, and full at once of extreme British feeling and of wounded pride. These ​men aspired to being an oligarchy of conquest. At the same time they thought that they ought to carry the British Constitution, with all the liberties and privileges which it gave them, on the soles of their feet. Both as a limit to their ascendency, and as a curtailment of their British freedom, the Quebec Act was hateful to them, and they laboured vehemently, with all the engines which they could command at home, for its repeal. So far they succeeded that Habeas Corpus was restored. The troubles which lasted till 1841 had now begun.

In 1791 came, with the progress of the French Revolution, another crisis of opinion in England, and in connection with it a resettlement of Quebec. The political date of the discussion is marked by the quarrel between Burke and Fox. Pitt now laid his hand to the work. His plan for putting an end to the strife between the conquering and the conquered race was separation. He divided Canada into two provinces—Lower Canada for the French and Upper Canada for the British, many of whom had fled to those wilds from the United States after the revolutionary war. This policy was approved by Burke. "For us to attempt," said Burke, "to amalgamate two populations composed of races of men diverse in language, laws, and habitudes, is a complete absurdity. Let the proposed constitution be founded on man's nature, the only solid basis for an enduring government." Pitt was scarcely acting in harmony with this oracle when he bestowed on the French as well as on the British Province an exact counterpart, or what was supposed to be an exact counterpart, of the British Constitution. Each Province was to have, besides the Governor who represented the Crown, a legislative council nominated by the Crown to represent the House of Lords, and an Assembly elected by the people to represent ​the House of Commons. The Governor was furnished with an Executive Council, the counterpart of the Privy Council, at least as the Privy Council was in the days when it really advised the sovereign, not of the modern Cabinet. Of the extension of the Cabinet system to a dependency nobody then dreamed. It was assumed that the Crown would govern through its representative, and shape its own policy with the aid of ministers chosen by itself, much as it had in Tudor England, though with a general regard for the wants and wishes of the people signified through their representatives in an Assembly. The whole British polity, civil and ecclesiastical, was to be reproduced. Provision was made for an aristocracy by empowering the Crown to annex hereditary seats in the Upper House to titles of nobility. Provision was also made for a Church Establishment by setting apart an eighth, or, as the Church construed the Act, a seventh, of the Crown lands as Clergy Reserves. The genius of the New World repelled from the outset the attempt to introduce aristocracy made by Pitt, as it had, though not so decisively, repelled the similar attempt made by Louis XIV. The attempt to introduce a Church Establishment took more effect, and was destined to be the cause of much trouble. The Test Act being declared not to extend to Canada, both Houses of the Legislature and all the offices were thrown open to Roman Catholics. Pitt thus carried what it might have been hoped would prove the first instalment of Catholic Emancipation. Prejudice against the Roman Catholic Church had yielded, even in the breasts of British Tories, to the hatred of the common enemy, the Atheist Revolution, while to aristocracy the French signiories became more congenial than ever. In the British Province British law, both civil and criminal, was established; in the French Province was established the criminal law of England ​with the civil law of France, based on the custom of Paris. By giving up Lower Canada to the French and to French law, the Act of 1791 finally decided that French nationality should be preserved, and that British civilisation should not take its place. Thenceforth England brooded like a misguided mother-bird upon an egg from which, by a painful and dangerous process, she was to hatch a French Canadian nation. New France would soon have been cut off from her mother country by the Revolution and the war which followed. From the rest of the continent she was cut off by race, language, and religion. She would in all probability have come to naught had she not been placed under the ægis of conquerors powerful enough to protect her nationality and constrained to protect it by their fears.

Pitt's policy missed its mark. The two races were not separated by the division of the Province. The British still clung to the trade of Quebec, which their commercial energy had begun to develop, and still struggled to maintain their political ascendency over the conquered race. Their strongholds were in the Executive, in the Legislative Council appointed by the Crown, and in Downing Street, to which they had almost exclusive access. The stronghold of French patriotism was the elective Assembly, in which the French soon had a large majority. The French did not at first care for free institutions, nor were they fit for them: an autocratic governor ruling them justly, sympathetically, and economically, would have suited them much better than any parliament. Neither their priesthood nor their seigniors liked anything of a republican cast. But they grasped the votes which Imperial legislation had put into their hands as weapons to be used for the protection of their nationality and for the overthrow of the oligarchy of Conquest. The ​situation was much the same that it would have been in Ireland had the Catholic Celts been admitted to Parliament. and formed a majority of the popular House, while the House of Lords, the Castle, and the influence of the Imperial Government had remained in the hands of a Protestant minority. Had the demand of the French for an elective Upper House been conceded, the British minority would, as Lord John Russell said at the time, have been left absolutely at the mercy of the French. Patriot leaders soon appeared, and oratory could not fail in a community of Frenchmen. The English had brought with them the Press. To combat British journalism French journalism soon started into life, and, among the French who could read, became an organ of perpetual agitation. The battle-fields were the control of the revenue and the civil list, the composition of the Legislative Council (which the patriots desired to make elective that they might fill it with men of their own party), and the tenure of the judges, whom they wished to make irremovable, like the judges in England, in order to diminish the power of the Crown, besides minor and personal questions about which party feelings were aroused. Controversies about the land law also arose and set the seigniorial patriots among the French somewhat at cross purposes with the patriots pure and simple. The commercial interest, which was entirely British, clashed with the agricultural interest, which was mainly French. There was constant strife between the Upper Chamber, which was in the hands of the British, who filled it with placemen, and the Lower Chamber, which was in the hands of the French; the Upper Chamber perpetually putting its veto upon the legislation of the Lower Chamber. The French, untrained in English constitutional government, went beyond the bounds of con​stitutional opposition. Gallic temper often broke out, and governors, struggling painfully to maintain their authority, and at the same time to pour oil upon the waters, became the objects of fiery remonstrance, sometimes even of insult thinly veiled. The Home Government, looking on from afar, in the days before steam communication and ocean telegraphs, knew not what to make of the fray or how to deal with it. Its own policy was not clearly defined, nor did it know whether it meant really to bestow Parliamentary government on a dependency or not. So far was it from understanding the situation that in 1839 we find Lord Durham informing it, with the pomp of a momentous revelation, that the conflict in French Canada was one not of political opinion but of race. Moreover, power in Downing Street was always changing hands, and was wielded one day by a Tory and the next by a Liberal or a Tory of a more Liberal brand. Governors correspondingly different in character were sent out: now a military martinet like Haldimand, now a reactionary aristocrat like the Duke of Richmond, anon a conciliator like Prevost or Gosford. The governors who made themselves popular with the French were of course regarded as traitors and detested by the British. Sir James Craig, who is said to have usually addressed civilians as if they needed the cat-o'-nine tails, seemed to the British just the man for that country. There were still among the British political leaders some who clung desperately to the policy of ascendency, and contended that the Province ought to be Anglicised, and might be Anglicised if it were handled with resolution. Pre-eminent among them was Chief Justice Sewell, a sort of Canadian Fitzgibbon. These men often got the ear of the Governor, to whom their circle had almost exclusively social access, and, when the Home Government was Tory, the ear of the ​Home Government. As the net result, a loyal though liberal historian has to say that "the government of Canada was one continued blunder from the day in which Amherst signed the capitulation of Montreal to the union of the Provinces," and that it presented a painful contrast to the resolute treatment of Louisiana by the Americans, who had at once introduced their laws and language. It is doubtful whether his parallel is perfectly correct, but he is certainly right as to his facts.

The British minority was reinforced, its sense of superiority was increased, and the enmity between it and the French majority was aggravated by the settlement in the district south of the St. Lawrence, called the Eastern Townships, of a colony of English farmers whose improved and energetic cultivation presented a contrast to the slovenly agriculture of the French.^[2] Angry questions as to the representation of the Eastern Townships in the Assembly and as to the extension of the French civil law to that district were at the same time added to the budget of discord.

Nevertheless, compared with the rule of the Bourbons, the British rule was beneficent, and the Province, however discontented, had improved. M. Papineau, the rebel that was to be, drew the contrast at the hustings between the government under which he was living and that of former days. "Then," said he, "trade was monopolised by privileged companies, public and private property often pillaged, personal liberty daily violated, and the inhabitants dragged year after year from their homes and families to shed their blood from the shores of the great lakes, from the banks of the Mississippi and the Ohio to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Hudson's Bay. Now religious toleration, trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, afford legal and equal security to all, and we need submit to ​no laws but those of our own making. All these advantages have become our birthright, and will, I hope, be the lasting inheritance of our posterity. To secure them let us only act as British subjects and freemen." An eminent American judge avowed to the writer that he saw with pleasure the extension of the British Empire, because with British dominion went the reign of law under which no man could be deprived of property or right otherwise than by legal process. In the hearts of the upper and more Conservative classes the British Crown had perhaps taken the place of the French Crown as an object of loyalty, though of a loyalty far less intense. There had been for a time difficulties with the French Church. The ticklish question had been raised whether the King of Great Britain had not either stepped into the place of the King of France and inherited the French King's control over ecclesiastical appointments, or even become ecclesiastically supreme as he was in England. But the point had been waived by the prudence of a government which felt its need of clerical support, and the French clergy were pretty well contented with their relation to the State. They were more than contented with the conduct of England in waging war against the Revolutionary Atheism of France, and gave thanks to God for having snatched the people of Canada from dependence on an impious nation which had overturned the altars.^[3]

Thus it came to pass that, in 1812, when war broke out between England and the United States, the French Canadians were once more true to England. The seigniors were as much opposed as ever to Republicanism. The priests, though they might have less reason than before to dread the intolerance of Puritanism, had been set more than ever against ​democracy by its alliance with Atheism in their mother country, while the national aspirations which had now become strong in the French breast recoiled from the prospect of absorption in the population of the United States. In the person of De Salaberry, a brilliant captain appeared of the French race, but trained in the British service. His victory at Chateauguay over a vastly superior force was among the most famous exploits of the war. French Canada, the Americans probably expected, would fall at once into their arms. But they had overrated the attractiveness of Republican institutions to the Frenchman, and had falsely assumed that the British and their rule were as odious in the French Canadian's eye as in their own. Americans are fond of dilating on the harsh features of the English character, which they say make England hateful to all men of other races, and from which they flatter themselves that their own character has become in three generations entirely free. But they have twice offered French Canada liberation from the yoke, welcoming her at the same time to their own arms, and twice she has answered them with bullets. It was the saying of an eminent French Canadian that the last gun in defence of British dominion on this continent would be fired by a Frenchman. True, the saying was expressive less of loyalty to Great Britain than of desire to preserve under her protection a nationality separate from the United States, and perhaps a theocracy untouched by Republican influence; yet it could hardly have been uttered if England had been hateful. About British unsociability too much has been said. It is true that such characters as are suited for command are generally less amiable than strong. But in India, saving the sympathetic disturbance set up in Oude by the Sepoy mutiny, there has not been a political insurrection since the ​formation of the British Empire, and when Russian invasion threatened, all the feudatories came forward of their own accord with contributions to the defence. England was right in ceding the Ionian Isles, but no bitter recollection of her rule, it is believed, lingers there. The Corsicans put themselves into her hands, and the Sicilians after 1815 would gladly have remained under her protectorate. The Egyptians do not want to be rid of the British, though France wants to see them out of Egypt. How did France, the reputed paragon of sociability, get on with the Sicilians in the days of the Sicilian Vespers, with the Germans at a later date, or with the nations whose territories her armies occupied under Napoleon? How does she get on with the Algerian tribes? The Americans, happily for themselves, have not yet been tried in this way.

The war with the Americans over, civil strife began again. This is the proper phrase. The French, the mass of them at least, were not fighting against British government or connection, but against the ascendency of the other race in office and in the Legislative Council. Their feeling towards the British government was rather that of disappointed and weary suitors than of rebels; they mistrusted its knowledge more than its intentions. They cried like their forbears in France, "Ah, si le Roi le savait!" Matters, however, went from bad to worse. For four successive years the Assembly stopped the supplies, so far at least as lay in its power; for the Crown had a fixed civil list and certain revenues of its own, besides the privilege, in extreme need, of falling back on the Imperial treasury; it could even turn the tables on the Members of the Assembly by causing the Legislative Council to throw out the Bill for their pay.

Since the year 1830 revolution had once more broken ​loose in France, and the infection had spread to some of the French leaders and to some active spirits among the young lawyers and journalists. A few of the British in Lower Canada were also touched by it and joined the French patriots against their own race. Though there had been a good deal of talk about popular education, the French people were still very ignorant; out of eighty-seven thousand of them whose names were affixed to a petition only nine thousand could write; and their minds were thus open to any delusions which the leaders chose to propagate. Just at this time civil discord was approaching the revolutionary point in Upper Canada, and though the two movements were distinct and had different sources, there was a sympathy between them, and the leaders were in close communication. Papineau, a great popular orator, put himself at the head of the French malcontents, and Nelson at the head of the British. When the crisis was approaching the Home Government became alive to the danger. The tocsin, in fact, was rung in ninety-two resolutions passed by the Canadian Assembly, and demanding, under the guise of a series of reforms, a practical revolution, Lord Gosford was then sent out with two other commissioners to inquire and advise. He preached concord with much unction but with little success. He reported in favour of some practical reforms, but against the change which would have made the Assembly master of the Government, and on which that body had set its heart. To make the Assembly master of the Government would have been not only tantamount to abdication on the part of the Crown, but would have entailed the abandonment of the British minority to the mercy of the exasperated French. Resolutions in the sense of the Report were moved by Lord John Russell in the House of Commons and carried in spite of the opposition of ​Roebuck, Molesworth, and other Radicals who had espoused the cause of the Canadian patriots. This was the signal for insurrection. The French clergy either were off their guard, or, there being on this occasion no danger to their religion from New England Puritans or French Atheists, wavered between their love of order and their patriotism as Frenchmen. At all events, they interfered too late to prevent the rising, though in time to render it if possible more hopeless. All the British and even the Irish rallied at once round the Government. Nelson proved himself a man of leading if not of light, and, though untrained to arms, repulsed a British detachment which attacked a hamlet in which he was entrenched. Papineau ran away. Sir John Colborne, a resolute veteran of Wellington's school, who was in command, soon swept the rebellion out of existence, and flung the American desperadoes who had come to join it over the border. Some of the leaders were hanged; martial law reigned, and the Constitution of French Canada came to a disastrous end. The next stage in the political history of the Province is its union with British Canada, of which we shall presently take up the thread.

Among the documents in Christie's History of Lower Canada (vol vi), is a paper on the troubled state of French Canada, by a military man, whether Sir John Harvey, successively governor of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, or by Lieut.-General Evans, is uncertain. The writer speaks with the frankness of his profession. "To a people," he says, "in no respect identified with their rulers, French in their origin, their language, their habits, their sentiments, their religion,—English in nothing but in the glorious Constitution which that too liberal country has conferred upon them,—the sole effect of this boon has ​been to enable them to display in a constitutional manner those feelings of suspicion, distrust, and dislike by which the conduct of their representatives would warrant us in believing them to be animated towards their benefactors. The House of Assembly of Lower Canada has not ceased to manifest inveterate hostility to the interests of the Crown, it has withheld its confidence from the local government, and has through this blind and illiberal policy neutralised, as far as it could, every benefit which that government has wished to confer upon the people; and that the popular representatives have acted in unison with the feelings of their constituents the fact of their having invariably sent back those members whose opposition to the government has been most marked may be thought sufficiently to prove. Ought not such a people to be left to themselves, to the tender mercies of their gigantic neighbours, whose hewers of wood and drawers of water they would inevitably become in six months after the protection of the British fleets and armies had been withdrawn from them? The possession of this dreary corner of the world is productive of nothing to Great Britain but expense. I repeat that the occupation of Canada is in no respect compensated by any solid advantage. Nevertheless, it pleases the people of England to keep it much for the same reason that it pleases a mastiff or a bull-dog to keep possession of a bare and marrowless bone towards which he sees the eye of another dog directed. And a fruitful bone of contention has it proved, and will it prove, betwixt Great Britain and the United States before Canada is merged in one of the divisions of that Empire, an event, however, which will not happen until blood and treasure have been profusely lavished in the attempts to defend what is indefensible, and to retain what is not worth having."

​"This dreary corner of the world" may be relegated to oblivion with Voltaire's quelques arpents de neige. The rest of the quotation will provoke dissent. But the soldier has hit the mark by saying that the only use which the French-Canadians had made of the Constitution given them by Great Britain was to renew in a constitutional form their struggle against the power which had conquered them with the sword. Not only were they enabled to renew the struggle but to renew it with success; for the rebellion in both provinces, though vanquished in the field of war, was victorious in the political field and ended in the complete surrender of Imperial power. It is the height either of generosity or of folly when you have beaten people with arms to bestow on them the means of beating you with votes.

The French are not to be blamed in the slightest degree for what they have done. Rather they are to be admired for their patriotic constancy and the steadiness with which their aim has been pursued. A British colony conquered by France would have acted just as they have acted it would have used any political power which the conqueror gave it or which it had extorted from his fears as an instrument for breaking his yoke. The fact with which statesmen have to deal is that the power has been so used by the people of New France under the guidance of their clergy, and that Quebec at the present day, though kindly enough in its feelings towards Great Britain, is not a British colony, but a little French nation.