Canada and the Canadian Question/Chapter 9

Among the ostensible objects of Confederation the most immediate perhaps were military strength and security against American aggression. Sceptics, among whom were two British officers,^[2] pointed out at the time that if the number of the militia would be increased by Confederation, the length of frontier to be defended would be much more increased, and that though a bundle of sticks might, as Federationists said, become stronger by union, the saying might not hold good with regard to a number of fishing-rods tied together by the ends. The Dominion since its extension to the Pacific has a frontier, for the most part perfectly open, of something like 4000 miles, while the garrison is broken into four sections, far beyond supporting distance of each other. The frontier of Manitoba and the North-West Territories, which for 800 miles is a political line, has to defend it the militia which can be furnished by a population of 150,000. In the ​days of her glorious defence against American invasion, Canada was comparatively compact. Moreover, she was a fastness of forest; she had no great cities on her frontier at the mercy of the invader; nor had the invader railroads to enable him to bring his superior forces to bear, though as we have seen they began to tell as the war went on. Neither was there then a great mass of French Canadians on the south side of the line in close connection, local and social, with their brethren on the north. The Canadians of that day as backwoodsmen were rough soldiers ready-made. They were less democratic than they are now, and followed more willingly perhaps than their descendants would the royal officers who were set over them, or their own gentry. They had in this respect the same sort of advantage over the Republicans at the beginning of the war as the Cavaliers had over the Roundheads and the Southerners over the North, till the Roundheads and the North learned the necessity of discipline. The regular force of the Dominion consists of schools of cavalry, infantry, and artillery, limited by law in the whole to a thousand men. The embodied Militia are in number 38,000, partly French. Half of this body is each year called out for a fortnight. City regiments voluntarily drill once a week during half the year. The enrolled Militia, comprising all men of military age, exists only on paper, though by Canadian politicians, speaking to the British public and anxious to please their hearers, it has been represented as an organised force ready at any moment to spring to arms. In the North-West there are a thousand Mounted Police, who, however, are confined by law to the Territories. There is a Military College at Kingston of high repute; but there is no army stall, commissariat, or provision for field hospitals. The men may be the worthy descendants ​of those who fought at Queenston Heights or Chateauguay, but supposing each of them to be a Paladin it must be left to soldiers to judge what force Canada would be able to put into the field within the time allowed by the swift march of modern war. The Duke of Wellington said that to defend herself successfully, Canada must command the Lakes, and in the War of 1812 loss of the command of the Lakes, after strenuous efforts to keep it, was at once followed by disaster. But Canada has no vessels of war on the Lakes; thanks to her commercial isolation, she has very little lake or river shipping of any kind. At sea she would have to trust entirely to the British fleet. It is true the American army is also very small, while the American militia is probably not better drilled than that of Canada. But it has been seen that money will buy men. The Americans have among them a good many immigrants trained under the military system of Europe, and they showed in their Civil War that they could quickly turn wealth into military power. In vain does Imperial eloquence appeal to an industrial community on this Continent to keep up a regular army. It is not solely or principally the dislike of expenditure that stands in the way; it is the whole character of the people; it is their character, political and social, as well as commercial; for they would fear that the army would become their master and that they would have an aristocracy of scarlet over their heads. That their fears would not be idle even the present bearing of some wearers of uniform shows. And who is the enemy? A community allied to the Canadians by blood, in which half of them have relatives, with which in all things saving government and the customs line they are one. Imperialist writers, while in trumpet tones they call Canada to arms, admit that the American Republic will in the natural course of events ​one day acquire the Protectorate of her Continent. Is the difference between tutelage and union so momentous that a people, who are or are destined to be under tutelage, can be expected to live armed to the teeth against their own sons, brothers, and cousins for the purpose of averting union? Might it not even occur to them when they were told to beat their ploughshares into swords that union was the higher condition of the two? "Only one absurdity can be greater—pardon me for saying so—than the absurdity of supposing that the British Parliament will pay £200,000 for Canadian fortifications; it is the absurdity of supposing that Canadians will pay it themselves. Two hundred thousand pounds for defences! and against whom? against the Americans? And who are the Americans? Your own kindred, a flourishing people, who are ready to make room for you at their own table, to give you a share of all they possess, of all their prosperity, and to guarantee you in all time to come against the risk of invasion or the need of defences if you will but speak the word." So, writing to the Colonial Secretary, said Lord Elgin, Governor-General of Canada, and an ardent upholder, if ever there was one, of British connection.

Unity of command the Provinces had before as British dependencies under the general whom the Home Government might send out. Perhaps they were more sure of having it in their former state than they are in a state in which jealousies and rivalries among themselves might possibly interfere with devotion to the common cause.

After Confederation the British troops were withdrawn. The flag of conquering England still floats over the citadel of Quebec, but it seems to wave a farewell to the scenes of its glory, the historic rock, the famous battlefield, the majestic river which bore the fleet of England to victory, the monu​ment on which the chivalry of the victor has inscribed together the names of Wolfe and Montcalm. For no British redcoats muster round it now. The only British redcoats left on the Continent are the reduced garrison of Halifax. The beat of England's morning drum will soon go round the world with the sun no more. But as its last throb dies away will be heard the voice of law, literature, and civilisation still speaking in the English tongue. The noblest of England's conquests is that which will last for ever.

Those who crow over what they imagine to be the collapse of the movement in favour of Colonial Emancipation and against Imperial aggrandisement which prevailed thirty years ago forget how much that movement effected. They forget that it brought about not only the cession of the Ionian Islands, which was its immediate fruit, but the withdrawal of the troops from the Colonies, the proclamation of the principle of Colonial self-defence, and a largely increased measure of self-government.

The framers of Confederation, however, promised themselves not only increase of military strength but a North-American empire to be formed by incorporating the North-West, British Columbia, and Newfoundland, so that their realm should stretch from sea to sea and over the great adjacent island on the east. As regards the North-West and British Columbia their hope was fulfilled. The Hudson's Bay Company found itself constrained by Imperial pressure and the precarious character of its chartered rights to sell in 1869 its almost measureless domain, much of which, however, is as hopelessly sterile as Sahara, for £300,000 and some reservations of good land. Possession was not taken without resistance. In the North-West was a population of French half-breeds belonging to the Catholic ​Church in whom their kinsmen and fellow-Catholics fondly saw the germ of a French and Catholic nation which should in time occupy that vast region to the exclusion of British and Protestant colonisation. Moreover the Half-breeds felt that their hunting and trapping-grounds would be threatened and their very primitive industries supplanted by the advance of the agricultural settler. Their leader, Louis Riel, upon the approach of the first Canadian governor of the territory called his people to arms, set up a provisional government, and put to death, with circumstances of great atrocity, Scott, a British Protestant and an Orangeman who resisted his assumption of power. At the approach of Sir Garnet Wolseley, Riel collapsed and presently fled, aided, as was afterwards discovered, with money for his flight by the Canadian Government, which, placed between the devil of Orange wrath and the deep sea of French sympathy with the leader of French race and religion, had no desire in deciding on the fate of the rebel chief to choose between two modes of destruction for itself. The struggle was renewed in 1885, when the Half-breeds, having been exasperated by the disregard of their prayers respecting some land claims, to which the Ottawa Government, absorbed in the party struggle, found no time to attend, and being also probably alarmed by the advance of an alien civilisation, welcomed back Riel as their chief and once more rose in arms. That he had been amnestied in the meanwhile did not prevent Riel from playing the same game over again. The rising of the Half-breeds was quelled, and Batoche, their hamlet-capital, was taken by a Canadian force under General Middleton, after a resistance which the candour of history must allow to have done credit to the valour of those poor people, considering that they could put into the field only a few hundred men of all ages, a man of ninety and ​a boy of sixteen being found among the slain, that only a part of them were armed with rifles, and that even these were short of ammunition. Riel suffered death and deserved little sympathy, since he had not only broken his amnesty but been willing to sell himself and his cause to the Government. Quebec, however, boiled over with sympathy for him, which would perhaps have proved more formidable had not he by playing the prophet given offence to the priesthood. The Liberal Opposition in the Dominion Parliament, misled by the temporary ferment, and thinking to gain the French vote, took up Riel's cause and pleaded for his exemption from punishment on the two grounds, not very consistent with each other, that he was insane and that his offence was political. That a man who had conducted with no small address an arduous enterprise and retained complete control over his followers was insane in such a sense as to make him irresponsible for his actions could be believed by no human being, even if there was a streak of madness in Riel's general character; while it was evident that if every offence which could be styled political was to go unpunished, society would be at the mercy of any brigand who chose to say that his object in filling it with blood and havoc was not booty but anarchy or usurpation. Some of the best men in the Opposition refused to vote with their leader, and the Government, standing to its guns, gained a well-merited victory. Among the troops sent to the North-West were two regiments of French militia. But these were not sent to the front. Of the two Colonels, one left the army in the field and went home, while the other telegraphed to the Minister of Militia his advice that the troops should be employed in guarding the forts and provisions, and that men fighting in the same way as the rebels should be sent to make the war. It is but fair ​to suppose that what these gallant officers wished to shun was not powder but political ruin. The suppression of this petty insurrection cost the Dominion $8,000,000, besides the loss of life, a fine paid for the supineness or the political distractions of the Government, which when the Rebellion had broken out issued a Commission to inquire into the Half-breed claims.

The French yet cling to the hope of making the North-West their own. Their Archbishop still reigns, not without opulence and state, in St. Boniface, the transriverine suburb of Winnipeg, and they have an immigration agency managed by priestly hands. But the balance of destiny has clearly turned against them; as pioneers they are no match for their rivals. The Legislature of Manitoba has passed an Act abolishing the official use of the French language and the Separate Schools for Catholics. The Half-breeds are not a strong race, nor is immigration doing much to recruit their numbers. The next generation will probably see their few thousands merged in a great inflow of English-speaking settlers.

When the North-West is peopled, and filled perhaps with a population partly drawn from the United States and other quarters not Canadian, it being locally far removed and commercially disunited from the eastern parts of the Dominion, what will be the effect on the cohesion and stability of Confederation? That is a question which the politicians of to-day have probably put off to the morrow.

Newfoundland, the oldest of British Colonies, has hitherto refused, in spite of all overtures, to come into Confederation, and her decision seems now to be final. The owners of her boats, who are the owners of her fishermen, probably think that their interest is better served by remaining apart; ​perhaps she also looks with alarm on the growth of Confederation debt. The Confederation, on the other hand, by taking her in would annex a very bitter local feud between Orangemen and Catholics, commit itself to the naval defence of an island, add to the Fisheries question with the United States a similar but more dangerous question with France, in which she would have her own French against her, and open a new field of political corruption.

To link together the widely-severed members of the Confederation two political and military railways were to be constructed by united effort as Federal works. The first was the Intercolonial, spanning the vast and irreclaimable wilderness which separates Halifax from Quebec. This has been constructed at a cost of $40,000,000, and is now being worked by the Government at an annual loss, the amount of which it is difficult to ascertain, but which is reckoned by an independent authority at $500,000. The Canadian Pacific has also been constructed at a cost to the Dominion in money, land grants, guarantees, completed works and surveys of something like $100,000,000, though it was promised by the original project that there should be no addition to taxation. Of the military value of these lines, and of their availability as a route for the transmission of troops from England to India, it is for military men to judge. At the time when the Intercolonial was projected, the two British officers of artillery, whose pamphlet has been already cited, pointed out that the line would be fatally liable to snow-blocks. It would be awkward if, at a crisis like that of the Great Mutiny or that of a Russian invasion in India, the reinforcements were blockaded by snow in the wilderness between Halifax and Quebec. We need hardly take into account such a chance as ​that of the closing of Halifax harbour by ice, which happens not more than once in thirteen or fourteen years. It is a more serious consideration that the line where it approaches the northern frontier of Maine runs, if the enemies are the Americans, within easy reach of a raid. Still more exposed to hostile attack is the Canadian Pacific, which runs along the northern shore of Lake Superior, the southern shore of which is in the hands of the Americans, and for 800 miles across the prairie country where the frontier is perfectly open. In the mountain region there are points at which, if an enemy could get at it with dynamite, it might, as the writer has been assured on competent authority, be blocked for months. Against snow-blocks and against avalanches, which are frequent, careful provision on a large scale is being made; but landslides also are frequent in that region, where it has been jocosely said "the work of creation is not quite finished." One of them blocked the course of the great Thompson River for forty-eight hours. But the fact is constantly overlooked in vaunting the importance of this line to the Empire that its eastern section passes through the State of Maine, and would, of course, be closed to troops in case of war with any power at peace with the United States.^[3] In sending troops to India there would be two transhipments, a consideration the importance of which again it is for the War Office to determine.

​As a commercial road the Intercolonial is a failure, for the simple reason that there is not, nor is there likely to be, any trade of the slightest importance between Canada and the Maritime Provinces of the Dominion. Small must be its receipts for local traffic between Quebec and Halifax or St. John. Its commercial usefulness will be reduced, if possible, still lower if not altogether destroyed, now that the Canadian Pacific, its reputed consort in the great Imperial scheme, cuts it out by taking the route, 200 miles shorter, through the State of Maine; nor can the condition to which it will probably be reduced by commercial depression fail to tell upon its efficiency even as a military road. What are the success and prospects of the Canadian Pacific as a commercial road we shall be better able to say when the earnings of the original and national line between Ottawa and the Pacific coast are distinguished from those of the Eastern and American extensions, which are no part of the original and national enterprise. So far as the profits of the Canadian Pacific Railway are made at the expense of the Grand Trunk they are made at the expense of a road which has done a great deal more for Canada than the Canadian Pacific Railway itself, and in which £12,000,000 sterling of British capital are invested. As a colonisation road its achievements are very doubtful. It has strung out the settlers along a line of 800 miles, carrying them far away from their markets and their centres of distribution, raising their freights, and, what is worst of all, depriving ​them of the advantages of close settlement which in a wintry climate are particularly great. Many emigrants it carries all down the line to British Columbia, whence, there being hardly any land for them to take up, they pass into the Pacific States of the Union. In one of the emigrant trains there were found ten persons bound for British Columbia and fifty-eight bound for places in the United States. Besides this, the monopoly granted to the Company in consideration of the sacrifice of commercial to military and political objects in the laying out of the line long weighed like lead upon the rising community. To this, in conjunction with the tariff and with some unfortunate land regulations made both by the Company and the Government, it is due that whereas Dakota and Manitoba started eighteen years ago on nearly equal terms, Dakota has a population of over 500,000, while that of Manitoba is about 150,000. At one time Manitoba was brought to the verge of despair: men who had been members of a Conservative Government were leaving her for the United States. Yet the Ottawa Government, in pursuance of its political aims obstinately maintained the monopoly by the exercise of its veto, and was supported in so doing by its compliant majority in the Dominion Parliament. Suddenly, on a transparently hollow pretext, it changed its course. The province petitioned the Crown for a hearing before the Privy Council, and it is commonly believed that the British Government then sent the Ottawa Government a hint, to which the Ottawa Government gave ear. Manitoba would otherwise have escaped ruin only by secession, and a Canadian Government which boasts that by its statesmanship the Confederation is held together, and excuses the most equivocal practices by that plea, would itself have been the immediate author of dissolution.

​There is one point of view in which the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway is most instructive. It was originally proclaimed as a purely national and imperial enterprise which was to assure the perpetual separation of Canada from the United States, frustrating for ever the designs of American ambition, and in which no Yankee was in any way whatever to take part. So everybody said and Sir George Cartier swore. An American firm was in the syndicate; an American, now Vice-President of the United States, was the first Vice-President of the Company; a genuine American was the first manager and is now President. The line runs through the State of Maine; it connects the Canadian with the American railway system not there only but at the Sault Ste. Marie and at its Pacific terminus. It is an applicant for bonding privileges at Washington, and in danger of being brought under the Inter-State Commerce Act. It is in fact, or soon will be, as much an American as a Canadian line. The C. P. R. even discriminates in its freights, involuntarily no doubt, against Canadians and in favour of Americans.^[4] Such is the outcome of designs for the suppression of geography and nature.

In opening a trade among the Provinces, a natural trade at least, these inter-provincial railroads have failed, for the ​simple reason that the Provinces have hardly any products to exchange with each other, and that means of conveyance are futile when there is nothing to be conveyed. "I take," says Mr. Longley, the Attorney-General of Nova Scotia, "the solid ground that naturally there is no trade between Ontario and the Maritime Provinces whatsoever. Without the aid or compulsion of tariffs scarcely a single article produced in Ontario would ever seek or find a market in Nova Scotia or the other Maritime Provinces. In like manner, unless under similar compulsion, not a product of the Maritime Provinces would ever go to Ontario. Twenty years of political union and nine years of an inexorable Protectionist policy designed to compel inter-provincial trade have been powerless to create any large trade between these two sections, and what it has created has been unnatural, unhealthy, and consequently profitless." As illustrations, Mr. Longley points out that Ontario sent to the United States $7,000,000 worth of barley, timber to the same value, and $4,000,000 worth of animals and their produce, but to the Maritime Provinces none; while, on the other hand, Nova Scotia sent to the United States also in spite of heavy duties $2,000,000 worth of fish, $600,000 worth of minerals, and $500,000 worth of farm products; sending none to Ontario. "Of the genuine natural products," continues Mr. Longley, "Nova Scotia sends practically nothing to Ontario. If the exports of Nova Scotia to Ontario are carefully studied, it will be found that they consist chiefly of refined sugar and manufactured cotton, the product of two mushroom industries called into existence by the Protective system, and which do not affect one way or another the interests of 500 individuals in the entire province of Nova Scotia." To any one who may ask why this state of things exists, "God and nature," ​he says, "never designed a trade between Ontario and the Maritime Provinces. If I have a barrel or ton of any com-modity produced in Nova Scotia, and I desired to send it to Toronto or Hamilton, the cost of sending it thither, unless it were gold, would probably be more than the value of the commodity. But I can at any moment put it on board of one of the numerous vessels or steamers which are daily leaving every port in Nova Scotia for Boston and send it to that city for twenty or thirty cents. If I desired to go to Toronto and Hamilton to sell it I should have to mortgage my farm to pay the cost of the trip, whereas I can go to Boston and back for a few dollars." Much more would he have to mortgage his farm if he carried his bales to Calgary or Vancouver. The moral drawn by Mr. Longley is, "that the Maritime Provinces have no natural or healthy trade with the Upper Provinces, but with the New England States; that the Upper Provinces have no natural trade with the Maritime Provinces, but with the Central and Western States adjoining them; that Manitoba has no natural trade with the larger provinces of Canada, but with the Western States to the south of her; that British Columbia has no trade with any part of Canada, but with California and the Pacific States. In other words, that inter-provincial trade is unnatural, forced, and profitless, while there is a natural and profitable trade at our very doors open and available to us." The harvests of the North-West, as they cannot be moved south, go along the Canadian Pacific Railway to the sea. If an Asiatic trade comes to Vancouver the tea will be carried across the Continent. But this is not inter-provincial trade, nor, being merely of a transitory kind, can it add much, beyond the railway freight, to the wealth of the Dominion. The French province, the people of which live on the ​produce of their own farms and clothe themselves with the produce of their own spinning, is uncommercial, and lies a non-conductor between the more commercial members of the Confederation.

To force trade into activity between the Provinces and turn it away from the United States, giving the Canadian farmer a home market, and consolidating Canadian nationality at the same time, were the ostensible objects of the adoption in 1879 of a Protective tariff. The real object perhaps was at least as much to capture the manufacturer's vote and his contributions to the election fund of the party in power. Protectionists boast and enlightened men speak sadly of the course which opinion has been taking on this subject. It is true that through the extension of the suffrage the world has passed from the hands of Turgot, Pitt, Peel, and Cavour into those of a multitude ignorant of economical questions, swayed by blind cupidity, the easy dupe of protectionist sophistry; and that fallacies which it was hoped had been for ever banished have thus regained their power. But in the United States and Canada it is less mistaken opinion that has been at work than the influence of sinister interest. The Canadian politicians who framed the Protective tariff were not and had never professed to be believers in Protection. If they had been identified with any fiscal policy it was that of Free Trade, at least between Canada and her own Continent. Their watchword had been reciprocity of trade or reciprocity of tariffs, in other words, the enforcement of Free Trade by Retaliation, which, though the purists of Free Trade may condemn it, is not protectionism but the reverse. If they had formed their design, they masked it till the election was over and declared that what they meant was not protection but readjustment, for which and for an increase of ​taxation to fill a deficit there were good grounds. They so far paid homage to their old principles as to keep in their Tariff Act a standing offer to the United States of reciprocity in natural products, though, as the Americans could not in common justice to their own interests allow their manufactures to be excluded, this was little better than a mockery. But even this they afterwards threw overboard, and one of them declared broadly that free trade even in farm products is an evil, so that Kent had better keep her hops and Worcestershire her apples all to herself; for this would not be more absurd than the refusal of Manitoba to sell hard wheat, or of Ontario to sell her superior barley across the Line, and take American products or manufactures in payment. The upshot is that on the neck of the Canadian as of the American Commonwealth now rides an association of protected manufacturers making the community and all the great interests of the country tributary to their gains. Before a general election the Prime Minister calls these men together in the parlour of a Toronto hotel, receives their contributions to his election fund, and pledges the commercial policy of the country. Then British journals in their simplicity advise Canada to meet the M'Kinley Act by a declaration of Free Trade.

It would be waste of words to argue over again to any intelligent reader the questions whether Canada, or any other country, can be enriched by taxation, and whether natural or forced industries are the best. That to which attention should be called is the difference between the case of Canada and that of the United States, the example of which Canada follows. The United States are a continent extending from regions almost arctic to regions almost tropical, embracing an immense variety of production, producing nearly every​thing in short, except tea and spices, with a market of 63,000,000. The largest measure of Free Trade ever passed was the American Constitution, which forbade a customs line to be erected between States. This it is—not the protective tariff on the seaboard—that has been the source of American prosperity. In like manner it was not Napoleon's continental system that gave his Empire such a measure of prosperity as it enjoyed, but the large area which it included, and over which there was Free Trade. The Canadian Dominion lies all in a high latitude, and its range of production is limited. The market, instead of being 63,000,000, is under 5,000,000, and these 5,000,000 are divided into four or five markets widely distant from each other, and most of them sparse in themselves. The effect might have been easily foretold. A number of factories have been forced into existence, and have prospered as forced industries prosper. Of the cotton mills only one or two, it is believed, have paid dividends, several are in liquidation, and the owners of others have been trying to find English purchasers at a discount of 50 per cent. The loyal attempt to foster the iron and steel industry of Canada, by a duty excluding British manfactures, for which a Canadian Finance Minister was rewarded with a baronetcy, has totally failed. Of course there is continual running to Ottawa for larger draughts of the fatal stimulant, when the first draught has failed. "The imposts," says an ex-President of the Toronto Board of Trade, "are a mass of incongruous absurdities; the duties on raw materials are now as high in some cases as those on the manufactured articles. In attempting to extend to all industries the benefits of protection, the height of the ridiculous was reached when the duty was largely increased upon umbrellas and parasols for the special behoof of one small concern ​which failed within the year." A patriot writes to the Minister of Finance to say that he proposes to foster home industries and consolidate the nation by starting a canned-soup factory, but he must have a duty of 20 per cent on canned-soup, and a protective duty on tomatoes. About the stomachs of the consumers nothing is said. Combines are now being formed to keep up prices. A spasmodic demand for labour and an artificial rise in wages have been followed by short time. In the first days of the system the Minister of Finance made a triumphal progress through the factories to witness and glorify the work of his own hands; he has not repeated his tour. What are the fruits of the policy to the public need hardly be told. A great wholesale dealer in woollens and cottons, in a debate at the Toronto Board of Trade, deprecating free trade with the United States, said that if American goods were admitted free, the capital invested in Canadian manufactories under the protective tariff would not be worth more than a third of its face value; the inference from which was that the interest on the other two-thirds, if paid at all, must be paid by the community. This, however, applies only to the forced industries. Those of the Canadian manufacturers who feel that their industries have a natural and sound basis disclaim the desire of protection, and ask only a fair field. In no trade probably would American competition be keener than in the manufacture of agricultural implements. Yet the other day a firm of large manufacturers in that line declared for free trade with the United States. The agricultural implement business, they said, had been overdone, they wanted more people to whom to sell, and they would not be afraid of American competition. Another large manufacturer in the same line, spoke to the same effect, pointing out, by the way, that the immense ​territory which in Canada had to be covered in order to embrace a sufficient market, was a heavy addition to the manufacturer's expense. These are not by any means the only firms which take that view. It is the hothouse plants. that shrink from the open air; and while all possible consideration is due to those who have been induced by Parliament to invest, it is hard that the community should be required for ever to expiate the mistake.

The isolation of the different Canadian markets from each other, and the incompatibility of their interests, add in their case to the evils and absurdities of the protective system. What is meat to one Province is, even on the protectionist hypothesis, poison to another. Ontario was to be forced to manufacture; she has no coal; yet to reconcile Nova Scotia to the tariff a coal duty was imposed; in vain, for Ontario after all continued to import her coal from Pennsylvania. Manitoba and the North-West produce no fruit; yet they were compelled to pay a duty in order to protect the fruit-grower of Ontario 1500 miles away. Hardest of all was the lot of the North-West farmer. His natural market, wherein to buy farm implements, was in the neighbouring cities of the United States, where, moreover, implements were made most suitable to the prairie. But to force him to buy in Eastern Canada 25 per cent was laid on farm implements. As he still bought in the States, the 25 per cent was made 35 per cent. Handicapped with 35 per cent on his implements, and at the same time with railway monopoly, as well as with the general imposts of the tariff, he has to compete with the farmer of Minnesota or Dakota, buying in a free market, and enjoying freedom of railway accommodation. An attempt was made to show that manufactories had been called into ​existence in Manitoba, and that she was exporting their products; but the list was found to embrace the work of lime kilns, blacksmiths' forges, photography, and re-shipments of old railway engines.

The British reader will not be surprised to hear that the arguments used by the defenders of the system are only such as have been a hundred times confuted. In the case of Canada, as in other cases, the protectionist makes no attempt to lay down his principle by defining native industries, or to say what is the proper area for its application; why Ontario should not benefit by protection against New Brunswick, as well as against New York, or New York benefit by protection against her sister States. The statement that England nursed her manufactures by protection is still repeated, and so is the plea for infant industries, babes who, when they come to manhood, instead of giving up their pap and swaddling-clothes, take you by the throat and demand more. The protectionists loudly profess loyalty, which with them means high duties on American goods. Their organs labour to keep up hatred of the people of the United States, just as the organs of protectionism in the United States labour to keep up hatred of England. But the main strength of protectionism in Canada, as in the United States, lies in its Lobby and in the money which it subscribes for elections. International hatred, directed in Canada against her American neighbours, and political corruption, are two inseparable companions of the system. A third is smuggling, which is rife all along the Canadian border, to the detriment of lawful trade, and with the usual effect on the morality of the people.

For the fusion of population between the Provinces Confederation seems to have done as little as for the creation ​of inter-Provincial trade. Reciprocal trade indeed is almost necessary to fusion. In the census return for 1881, which is the last, it appears that in that year there were of natives in Ontario, 105 settled in Prince Edward Island, 310 in New Brunswick, and 333 in Nova Scotia; in all, 748 natives of Ontario settled in the Maritime Provinces. Much the same state of things is found in Quebec, with the exception of two counties which border on a district of New Brunswick, with an identical population. On the same day there were of persons of United States birth, 609 in Prince Edward Island, 5108 in New Brunswick, 3004 in Nova Scotia; or, roughly speaking, thirteen times as many natives of the United States in the Maritime Provinces as there were natives of Ontario. It is found, moreover, that in 1861, before Confederation, and when there was no Intercolonial railway, there were 6700 natives of the Maritime Provinces in Ontario; twenty years afterwards there were only 7200. In Quebec, among the people of eight or ten populous counties, not a man from the Maritime Provinces was to be found, immigration had actually declined in spite of the official connection. Meantime it appears that there are 1,000,000 immigrants from Canada in the United States.

Without commercial intercourse or fusion of population, the unity produced by a mere political arrangement can hardly be strong or deep. It will, for the most part, be confined to the politicians, or to those directly interested in the work of Dominion parties. No inhabitant of Nova Scotia or New Brunswick calls himself a Canadian. The people of British Columbia, priding themselves on their English character, almost disdain the name. Manitoba and the North-West have been largely colonised from Ontario, yet Manitobans tell you that though their personal and family ​connections are cherished, as a community they are severed from Eastern Canada. All the Provinces are under the British flag. All are united by the sentiments common to British Colonies and by historical associations. This they were before Confederation. That Confederation has as yet increased the community of feeling or strengthened the moral bond there is nothing in the attitude of the Provinces towards each other, political or general, to prove.

So much as to the British Provinces. Of Quebec something has been already said. If there is a word hateful to French ears it is amalgamation. Not only has New France shown no increase of tendency to merge her nationality in that of the Dominion; her tendency has been directly the other way. She has recently, as we have seen, unfurled her national flag, and at the same time placed herself as the French Canadian nation, under the special protection of the Pope, who accepts the position of her ecclesiastical lord. At her head, and to all appearances firmly seated in power, is the chief of the Nationalist and Papal party, who bids Blue and Red blend themselves in the tricolor and restores to the Jesuits their estates. The old Bleu or Conservative party, associated with the clergy of the Gallican school, which by its union with the Tories in the British Provinces linked Quebec politically to the Dominion, has fallen, as it seems, to rise no more. What life is left in it is sustained largely by Dominion subsidies of which the Ottawa Government makes it the accredited channel. "The complete autonomy of the French Canadian nationality and the foundation of a French Canadian and Catholic state, having for its mission to continue in America the glorious work of our ancestors," are the avowed aims of the Nationalist and Ultramontane press. Greybeards of the old Conservative school protest that all ​this means nothing, that no design of autonomy has been formed, and that it is unjust to speak of French nationality and theocracy as dangers to Confederation. Whether the design has been distinctly formed or not matters little if the tendency is manifestly there and is gaining strength every day. Let those who prophesy to us smooth things take stock of the facts. When one community differs from another in race, language, religion, character, spirit, social structure, aspirations, occupying also a territory apart, it is a separate nation, and is morally certain to pursue a different course, let it designate itself as it can. French Canada may be ultimately absorbed in the English-speaking population of a vast Continent; amalgamate with British Canada so as to form a united nation it apparently never can. In the Swiss Confederation there are diversities of race, language, and religion, but the union is immemorial; it was formed and is held together by the most cogent pressure from without; its territory is compact and surrounded by a mountain wall; the races and religions are interlocked, not confronted like two cliffs, and the division into small cantons tends to avert a broad antagonism of forces. After all, Switzerland has had its Sonderbund, and the Jesuit, whose intrigues gave birth to the Sonderbund, is now dominant in Quebec. Quebec sends her representatives to the Federal Parliament. But their mission is not to take counsel with the other representatives of the nation so much as to look to the separate interest of Quebec, and above all to draw from the treasury of the Dominion all that can be drawn in aid of her empty chest. They let pass no opportunity of doing their duty to her in that line. On one occasion they stayed out of the House haggling with the Government till the bell had rung for a division, when the Government gave way. Quebec, as revelations going on at ​this moment show, is politically corrupt, and by her corruption she may be held in the Union, but of what benefit the Union will be to her partners, or how they will be indemnified for the expense, it is not easy to see. Her people, saving the Protestant traders of Montreal and the remnant of British commerce at Quebec, being very poor, their contribution to the common revenues is small. The creative genius of Lord Lorne, besides a Royal Society and a Royal Academy, bestowed on Canada a National hymn. The hymn should have been written in alternate stanzas of French and English.

The beauty of the French language, the brilliancy of French literature, the graces of French character, the value of the contributions made by France to the common treasure of civilisation, on which Governors-General preaching harmony dilate, are by nobody denied. But supposing Quebec to be the depositary of all French gifts, mere vicinity to them is little worth when the separation in all other respects is as complete as if seas rolled or Alps rose between. France may enrich the store of humanity, but the store of the Dominion, material or moral, is not enriched by simple want of homogeneity and harmony among its members.

The last deliverance on this subject from the French side is La Question du Jour, by M. Faucher de Saint-Maurice. The author puts the question, "Shall we remain French?" and answers it with a thundering "Yes," hurling his anathemas at all whom he suspects of a desire to bring about denationalisation. A curious and instructive part of the pamphlet is that which, in portraying the emotions of Quebec on the occasion of the Franco-German war, displays the passionate attachment of New France to her own mother country. "At the thought of the struggle in which the land ​of our fathers is engaged the French blood stirred in our veins, as though it had never been chilled, and we shouted for the flag of our mother country as if it had never ceased to wave over our heads." "We admire the United States, whose prosperity dazzles us, but France alone is the object of our passionate love." "Our thoughts and our hearts belong to our mother country." We have seen that Sir George Cartier, of all Frenchmen the most British, spoke in a similar strain. In the event of a war between Great Britain and her most probable enemy, on which side are we to suppose that the hearts of the French Canadians would be? After reckoning up all the elements of French population and strength, including 108,605 "Acadians" in the Maritime Provinces, M. Faucher de Saint-Maurice concludes by saying, "With courage, with perseverance, with union, with effort, and above all with a constant devotion to our religion and our language, the future must be ours. Sooner or later, marching on together, we shall arrive at the position of a great nation. The logical conclusion of my work can only be this—One day we shall be Catholic France in America." This writer, at all events, has formed his design.

The coping-stone and the symbol of nationality in the Constitution, it has been already said, was the national veto on Provincial legislation, that vast power, as Sir Alexander Galt,^[5] one of the Fathers of Confederation, called it, and that palladium, as he deemed it, of Protestant and civil rights in Quebec, which might otherwise be exposed without defence to Ultramontane aggression. Yet this coping-stone of nationality, this palladium of civil right, both the parties have abandoned or reduced to nullity under the pressure of the French-Catholic vote. In the transfer of Quebec from France ​to Britain the revenues of the parish clergy were secured with the religion of the people, but the estates of the religious orders were left to the pleasure of the Crown, and the Solicitor-General Wedderburn advised that while the other religious orders might be allowed to exist, that of the Jesuits, on account of its anti-national character, could not. The Crown, as a matter of humanity, allowed the remaining Jesuits subsistence on the estates for their lives. In 1773 the Order was suppressed by the Pope. The estates then, at all events, fell to the Crown, which held them for the purposes of education, and ultimately transmitted them to the Province impressed with that trust. But the restored Order laid claim to the estates. The claim would have been met by any Government in Europe with derision. But Quebec had fallen under Jesuit influence. An Act was passed (1888) by the Provincial Legislature in which Protestantism has a merely nominal representation, assigning to the Jesuits the sum of $400,000 by way of compensation for the estates. To give colour to the transaction the sum of $60,000 was assigned to Protestant education. The Pope's name was introduced in the Act as arbiter of the arrangement. Apologists in Parliament pretended that this was a mere expedient of conveyancing; but if it had been nothing else it would most certainly have been avoided. There could be no doubt about the spirit and intention of the Act; had there been any it would have been set at rest when Mr. Mercier, as we have already said, before an assembly of Roman Catholic Bishops and Clergy, boasted that he had emulated the glorious deeds of the American Revolutionists by undoing the wrong done by George III. The Act was a rampant assertion of Roman Catholic ascendancy by the endowment out of a public fund of an Order formed specially for the ​subversion of Protestantism, and at the same time a recognition of the Pope as the ecclesiastical sovereign of Quebec. Morally, if not legally, it was an excess of jurisdiction, since religion is not in the list of subjects with which the Provincial Legislatures are authorised by the Constitution to deal, while the endowment out of the public treasury of a professedly propagandist Order was certainly a religious measure and one of an extreme kind, as we should soon have been made to understand had the Legislature of Ontario endowed a Protestant mission for the subversion of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet such is the power of the French vote that both parties fell on their faces before it. The position of the Government was the worst, since the hollowness of its affected respect for Provincial self-government was betrayed by its own recent conduct in vetoing a Railway Act of the Manitoba Legislature, the legality of which could not be questioned, in the interest of its auxiliary, the Canadian Pacific Railway. But a Liberal party, voting for the public endowment of Jesuitism, also cut a strange figure. Only thirteen members out of a total of 215 in the Dominion House, however, dared to uphold the national character of Confederation, British ascendancy, the rights of the Civil Power, and the separation of the Church from the State. After the division, the members who had voted for the endowment of Jesuitism lulled their consciences, as they sometimes do, by singing "God save the Queen." Indignation, however, was aroused, great meetings were held at Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario to protest against the Act, and the most powerful movement that has yet been witnessed outside the party machines was organised under the name of Equal Right, and is still on foot. It aims at the repression of priestly influence in politics, and of French encroachment at the same time; ​and its first fruits have been the abolition of Separate Schools and the discontinuance of French as an official language in Manitoba. It is not religious or directed in any way against the faith or worship of the Roman Catholics, but political and purely defensive. It is religious at least only in so far as the Church, not less than the State, has an interest in that entire freedom of each from the interference of the other which is a great organic principle of society in the New World.

The Maritime Provinces and those of the West have been imperfectly incorporated, if they can be said to have been incorporated at all, into the old political parties which have their basis in the two Canadas, and were formed before Confederation upon questions and in interests with which the other Provinces had no concern; the Conservative party being a combination of the reactionary clericism of Quebec with the Toryism and Orangeism of Ontario, the Liberal party being a counter-combination of the Liberals of Ontario with the misnamed Parti Rouge of Quebec. It can hardly be said that in the remoter Provinces a Dominion party, otherwise than as a combination for securing local advantages through the Dominion Government, exists. When the writer asked a denizen of the Pacific Coast what were the politics of his Province, the answer was, Government appropriations. Once more let Australians who propose to follow the example of the British North-American Provinces by forming an Australian federation remark that this, under our present system, means the creation of Federal parties, and that unless a basis of principle for Federal parties can be assigned, Government appropriations will be the basis. "There is a perfect scramble among the whole body to get as much as possible of this fund for their respective constituents; cabals ​are formed by which the different members mutually play into each other's hands; general politics are made to bear on private business, and private business on general politics; and at the close of the Parliament the member who has succeeded in securing the largest portion of the prize for his constituents renders an easy account of his stewardship, with confident assurance of re-election." This picture, though drawn by Lord Durham of the legislature of a single colony, would be found to be heightened in its colours as well as extended in its scale when the constituencies were Provinces, and the members were the representatives of Provincial interests. It would be so at least unless such momentous issues and such a pervading spirit of Federal patriotism were awakened as have not yet been witnessed in the Canadian Confederation.

In the want of a real bond among the members of Confederation, the anti-national attitude of Quebec, the absence of real Dominion parties, and the consequent difficulty of holding the Dominion together and finding a basis for the administration must be found the excuse, if any excuse can be found, for the system of political corruption which during the last twenty years has prevailed. "Better Terms," that is, increased subsidies to Provinces from the Dominion treasury, Dominion grants for local railways and other local works and concessions to contractors, together with the patronage, including, as we have seen, appointments to the Senate, have been familiar engines of government. It was a Conservative member of the Senate who the other day, when the usual batch of railway grants was pushed through at the end of the Session, could not refrain from protesting against a vast system of bribery. Post offices and local works of all kinds are held out by Government candidates as bribes to ​constituencies with an openness which would almost have scandalised a French constituency under the Second Empire, and it is painful to see how paltry an inducement of this kind will prevail. "The people of ——— County want railways and other public works, and they all know that the policy of the Government regarding railways is liberal. If a Government supporter is elected, any reasonable request will be granted. It rests entirely with the Government candidate what will be done." Such is the language held. The result of an election won by the Protectionist Government the other day in Victoria County, was reported to the English Press as highly significant, and as showing that the people were against Reciprocity; but the fact was apparent from the returns that the Government had gained its majority of 133 by two subsidies to local railways.^[6] Nova Scotia and New ​Brunswick, as they suffer particularly from the commercial atrophy produced by severance from their natural markets, are specially open to the influence of the Treasury, and before an election a Nova Scotian, who is master of such arts, is actually ​brought over from England, and put for the time into the Ministry, that he may secure to the Government the votes of his Province. This he does by promises the fulfilment of which, it was reckoned at the time, would cost several millions. If you express surprise at the result of an election in one of the Maritime Provinces, the explanation which you get is four Government grants or promises of grants for piers, wharves, or local works of some kind. The Government, which, it is justly said, ought in the matter of public works to act as trustee for the whole people, in effect proclaims that public works will be regulated by the interest of constituencies whose support it receives. That "the whole North-West of Canada has been used as one vast bribery fund" is a statement just made by a leading member of the Opposition, who can point to at least one recent and most flagrant instance in proof of his sweeping accusation. But what corruption can be more pestilential or more dangerous to the commonwealth than the surrender of the commercial policy of the country to private interests, in return for their votes and the support of their money in elections? No president of the United States, being a candidate for election, could without total wreck of his character and prospects, assemble the protected manufacturers in a room at an hotel and receive their contributions to his election fund.

In Quebec it is an eminent Conservative journalist and politician of that Province who says that the electors are wholly demoralised; that if all the constituencies are not equally rotten, the symptoms of the evil are everywhere to be seen; that the electors, those who are well off not less than the poor, compel the candidates to bribe them; that the franchise is a merchantable commodity; that many will not go to the polls without a bribe. The clergy denounce the ​practice from the altar, but in vain. In truth the priests, who, instead of leaving the voter free, and bidding him make an independent use of his vote, coerce him in their own interest, are not in the best position for reading him homilies on electoral duty. The truth is, that under a theocracy the people are not citizens: they do not understand the political franchise or value it; and when you preach to them about its responsibilities, you preach in vain. They not unnaturally regard it as a thing to be used in their own interest, and if they like, to be sold. The Conservative politician just cited is now producing in a series of papers startling proofs in support of his allegation.

Once the character of the means by which Government is maintained appeared too plainly, with a result fatal for a time to the Ministry by which the system was being carried on. This was in the case of the Pacific Railway Scandal, the echoes of which reached as far as England. The Prime Minister and two of his colleagues were convicted of having received from the grantee of a railway charter, whose position was virtually that of a contractor, a large sum of money to be used in elections. It was pretended by the Ministers that the money was a political subscription to the Party fund; but it was well known that the commercial gentleman from whom it was received took no interest in politics, and could have had only his commercial object in view. It was also pleaded that there was nothing wrong in the charter granted him, and this was true; but it was evident that the Government, when it had taken his money, would be in his hands. Public indignation was strongly aroused, and for the moment overcame party feeling; the Government, deserted by its majority, fell; and the country, on an appeal being made to it, emphatically ratified the verdict of the House of ​Commons. The conduct of the Governor-General was, in his own opinion at least, and in that of the courtly pundits of Ottawa, constitutional in the highest degree. He continued to treat the accused Ministers as his constitutional advisers. At their instance, when Parliament had become completely seized of the question, he prorogued it on what were thought at the time factitious grounds, and relegated the inquiry to a Commission named by the Ministers themselves. He allowed letters written by himself to the Colonial Secretary, when the case was incomplete, to be laid before the House, for the purpose of influencing its judgment. It did not occur to him, nor does it occur to the constitutional writers who applaud him for continuing to give his confidence to his Ministers, that this was not a case of confidence in Ministers, nor a political question at all, but a State trial, with which he had no more business to interfere than he had to interfere with the course of justice in a court of law. It is true the tribunal in this case was equivocal and unsatisfactory, the question as to the retention of office by the Ministers being mixed up with the criminal indictment. There ought to be, though there is not at present, a regular process of impeachment, with a regular tribunal, and political corruption, whether in a Minister or any one else, ought to be made a distinct offence; it would seem. to be as capable of definition as other breaches of trust, and it certainly is not less heinous. One of the convicted Ministers was afterwards made a knight. Nobody, it is right to say, suspected the Prime Minister on this or any other occasion of taking anything for himself. In that sense he certainly spoke the truth when, at the beginning of the affair, he declared to the Governor-General upon his honour as a Privy Councillor that he was innocent of the charge. The case of the Onderdonk contract, on the western portion of the ​same line, which was afterwards brought forward in Parliament, wore a very sinister aspect. But the Government had an overwhelming majority at its command.^[7]

Strong evidences have unhappily been produced to show that by Government advertising and printing contracts, the system of corruption has been extended to the Press. What influences are behind the Press has become for all commonwealths alike one of the most serious questions of the day.

It is a comfort in speaking of these unsavoury matters to be able to reflect once more that Canadian society in general is sound, and that power in regard to the ordinary concerns of life is in the hands not of politicians but of the chiefs of commerce and industry, of judges and lawyers, of the clergy, and of the leaders of public opinion. Yet the character of the people cannot fail to be affected by familiarity with political corruption. Their political character, at all events, cannot escape the taint. A member of a local legislature is convicted, after investigation by a committee, of having on more than one occasion taken money corruptly. He nevertheless retains the support of his constituents. He is elected to the Dominion Parliament. The Prime Minister, whose henchman he is, makes him Chairman of the Finance Committee, and is prevented from making him Deputy Speaker only by the threat of an appeal to the record. The man is on the point, as is generally believed, of being made a Senator when another transaction comes to light, so foul in itself and in all its circumstances, that the Government is obliged with apparent reluctance to abandon its supporter to justice, and ​consent to the verdict of a committee pronouncing his conduct "discreditable, corrupt, and scandalous." Thereupon he resigns his seat, appeals to his constituents, pleading that he is no worse than the rest, and is re-elected. It has been asserted, on the strength it would seem of some highly official information, that in Canada scandals of corruption are almost unknown. If by this it is meant that few Canadian politicians take money for themselves, and that wealth amassed by corruption is rare among them, the statement is perfectly true, and it is equally true of the politicians in the United States, about whose illicit gains very exaggerated notions prevail. As a rule, politicians in both countries live and die poor; and, considering what they have to go through, it is wonderful that the attraction of politics should be so strong But otherwise it is from the scandal, not from the corruption, that we are free. The pity is the greater because if ever a community was by its national character qualified for elective institutions it was that of the farmers of Canada. Political morality, and to some extent general morality with it, have been sacrificed to the exigencies of an artificial combination of provinces, and of an isolation of those provinces from their continent, which is equally artificial.

Nor are the sectional interests of Quebec and the other Provinces the only sectional interests, or the only interests of an anti-national character, with which the head of a Canadian Government has had to deal. He has had to propitiate with seats in the Cabinet and doles of patronage churches—above all the Roman Catholic Church—political combinations, such as Orangeism, and even a philanthropic combination like Prohibitionism, which at present has a seat in the Cabinet. The Roman Catholic vote is so well in hand that it is cast almost solid for one party in the Provincial ​elections of Ontario and at once transferred to the other in the Dominion elections, good consideration being received from both sides. The Premier of Ontario, though a zealous Presbyterian, finds himself compelled by the influence of the hierarchy not only to uphold the system of Separate Schools for Roman Catholics in the face of his own recorded protest against it, but to deny Roman Catholics the ballot in the election of School Trustees, which the more liberal of them demand, but to which the hierarchy object, because their control over the elections would thereby be impaired. The Irish vote is of course to a great extent identical with the Roman Catholic vote, yet as a political force it is distinct, and its power is inordinate. The lower are the political qualities of any body of men, and the less fit it is to guide the State, the more sure are its members politically to hold together, and the greater its influence will be. This is one of the banes of all elective government, and how it is we are to get rid of it or prevent it from growing, it is not easy to see. The abasement of American politicians and the American Press before the Irish vote is one of the most ignominious and disheartening passages in the history of free institutions. It reached its extreme point when, in miserable fear of the Irish groggeries of New York, the Senate of the United States refused to do honour to the memory of the great Englishman whose voice of power, in the darkest day of their fortunes, had triumphantly pleaded their cause before his country and the world. The motive for the resolutions passed by American Legislatures of sympathy with disunionism in Ireland, as well as the breach of international propriety which they involve, is freely admitted by American politicians. Similar resolutions from the same motive were passed by Canadian Legislatures, both Federal and Provincial, the Con​servative Premier of the Dominion, with the Grand Cross of the Bath upon his breast, leading the way. Let Englishmen, before they welcome as the sincere expression of Canadian opinion, such manifestoes as the Loyalty Resolution passed by the Dominion Parliament of last session on the motion of Mr. Mulock, call to mind the fact that the same Assembly had before passed what was virtually a resolution in favour of the dismemberment of the United Kingdom. When Mr. William O'Brien came over to Canada with the avowed purpose of insulting, and if possible expelling from the country, Her Majesty's representative, those who, like the present writer, took an active part in opposing his irruption had the opportunity of seeing what the real influence of loyalty was among Canadian politicians compared with that of the Irish vote. That colonies would allow themselves to be used by Irish disaffection as levers for the disruption of the mother country was hardly foreseen as an incident of the system of dependence either by the opponents of the system or by its defenders. Unhappily, England herself is in no position to cast a stone either at Canada or at the United States, for subserviency to the Irish, nor has there been anything in the conduct of the lowest of Canadian or American vote-hunters to match with the conduct of British statesmen who have leagued with the foreign enemies of their country and accepted aid from the Clan-na-Gael for the subversion of the Union. That the Irish should thus have been able by acting on the balance of parties to put the heads of the Anglo-Saxon commonwealths under their feet is surely a tremendous comment on the system of universal suffrage with government by faction.

What has been said will serve to explain two things apparently enigmatic. One of these is the stability of the Canadian government, which, saving one interruption, has ​remained unchanged for more than twenty years, while in Australia the changes of government have been prodigiously rapid. There having been really no Dominion parties, none, at least, united by any great principle or important issue, the Opposition has hitherto had no ground of attack or battle-cry, while the Government, resting on its patronage and its bribery-fund has been always becoming more strongly entrenched, and has been able to carry the elections, at which no great question was presented, by dangling before the eyes of constituencies the Federal purse. Its election fund has also been much better supplied than that of the Opposition, which has had no corps of protected manufacturers to which to appeal, and no senatorships to hold out as prizes to the aspiring millionaire. The adverse influences which now threaten it, Nationalism in Quebec, by which its chief pillar is shaken, and the movement in favour of a reform in the tariff, which is evidently gaining strength, are of recent growth, and have never before had a chance of showing their force in a general election. The other phenomenon to be explained is the singular division of the power, the Dominion government being in the hands of the Conservative party, while the governments of the Provinces, saving the two least important of them, are in the hands of the Liberals. This has been supposed to prove that the people of the Dominion, whatever may be their local leanings, are all united in favour of the fiscal system or "National policy," as it is called, of Sir John Macdonald. What it really proves is that the Dominion bribery-fund is used in Dominion, not in Provincial, elections, and used with the more effect because a great many of the people, especially in the newly annexed Provinces, are comparatively apathetic about the affairs of the Dominion, while they feel a lively interest in their own. The truth of this ​solution is clearly shown in the case of Manitoba. To that Province, which has no manufactures, the tariff is an unmixed evil; it is an evil of the most oppressive kind, and, could it be submitted to the votes of the people, there would be an overwhelming majority in favour of its repeal. Yet Manitoba, while in her local legislature out of thirty-eight members four only are Conservatives, sends to Ottawa a Conservative delegation which supports the tariff, and not only the tariff but railway monopoly, against which the Province is a unit. When the election comes round, the government secures the seats by petty bribes and by promises. This, new settlements being for the most part needy, it is too easy to do, the more so as the principal settlers, who would be likely to be independent and patriotic, are too much occupied with their own affairs to go to Ottawa, while for a government to find "heelers" is never difficult.

We cannot help once more warning the Australians that Federation under the elective system involves not merely the union of the several States under a central government with powers superior to them all; but the creation of Federal parties with all the faction, demagogism, and corruption which party contests involve over a new field and on a vastly extended scale. It is surprising how little this obvious and momentous consideration appears to be present to the minds of statesmen when the question of Federation is discussed.

It is a strong comment on the Protection system that since its inauguration there has not only been no abatement, but apparently an increase of the exodus from Canada to the United States. It is reckoned that there are now on the south of the Line a million of emigrants from Canada and half a million of their children. A local journal finds that it has 300 subscribers in the United States, and believes ​that in fifteen years it must have lost a thousand in that way; and from another journal, issued in one of the choicest districts of Ontario, we learn that the population there has been almost at a standstill. In one week 300 persons went from St. John and 400 from Montreal. The Americans may say with truth that if they do not annex Canada, they are annexing the Canadians. They are annexing the very flower of the Canadian population, and in the way most costly to the country from which it is drawn, since the men whom that country has been at the expense of breeding leave it just as they arrive at manhood and begin to produce. The value of farm property has declined in Ontario, according to the current estimate, 30 per cent, and good authorities hold that this estimate is within the mark. It would be wrong to ascribe either the exodus or the decline in the value of land directly and wholly to the fiscal system. There is a natural flow of population to the great centres of employment in the United States, and there is no real barrier of a national or sentimental kind to check the current, the two communities being, in all save political arrangements, one. The depression of agriculture and the fall in the value of farms are common in a measure to the whole continent, and are consequent on the depreciation of farm produce, perhaps also, so far as the United States are concerned, on a change in the once frugal habits of the farmer. But if Canada had fair play, if she were within the commercial pale of the Continent, by admission to a free market, combined with freedom of importing machinery, her minerals and other resources could be turned to the best account, she would have more centres of employment in herself, and her farmers would have more mouths to feed. There is a shifting of the agricultural population in the United States as well as in Canada, ​and many farms have been deserted in Massachusetts and Vermont. But these people are not lost to their country: those who emigrate from Canada to the States are. The promise of the Protectionist legislator to the farmer that he would give him a rich home market has at all events been signally belied. Nor is the wisdom of the policy demonstrated by a great decline in the value of that kind of property for which a special benefit was designed and the produce of which is the staple of the community. If the M'Kinley Act remains in force, the consequence will probably be an increase of the exodus. Especially, there is likely to be a largely increased exodus from Quebec, the agricultural products of which are not of a kind suitable for exportation to a distant market, so that, the near market being closed, the people will have to suffer or to depart.

Strange to say, the exodus has told in favour of the stability of government; not only because it forms a vent but because the emigrants, as a rule, are the most active-minded, and there are probably among them at least two Liberals for one Conservative.

Government by subsidies and grants cannot be economically carried on. Nor is the Canadian form of government in itself simple or inexpensive. Eight Constitutional Monarchies with as many Parliaments, four of the Parliaments having two Chambers, and the members of all being paid, are a considerable burden for a population under five millions and by no means wealthy. It is commonly said in Canada that we are "too much governed." Political architects in framing their Constitutions should have some regard for the cost of working among people whose wealth is not boundless. The work done by the eight Parliaments in the way of real legislation, apart from mere faction-fighting, would, if summed up, ​cut a poor figure in comparison with the expense. The eight Constitutional Monarchies have cost fully four millions of dollars since Confederation without doing any work at all. Hence, while the American debt, to which everybody pointed as a bugbear at the time of Confederation, has, notwithstanding the enormous squandering of public money by the tariff men, been rapidly decreasing, the Canadian debt has been almost as rapidly increasing, and now amounts to two hundred and forty millions net, or $50 per head of the whole population. The gross debt is two hundred and eighty millions, while of the securities some are very doubtful. If the demand for subsidies continues, the Canadian question may be settled by finance.

The Dominion has been immensely extended in territory since Confederation by the accession of the North-West and British Columbia. This extension has necessarily brought with it an addition of population and wealth, irrespectively of any stimulus given by institutions or political relations, though as we have seen, the growth of population in Manitoba and the rest of that region has been slow compared with its growth in the new States of the Union. But in Old Canada the growth of population and wealth is far from having kept pace with their growth within the commercial pale of the continent. In the six years, 1880–86, the natural growth of population in Ontario would have been 250,000, the actual growth was only 128,000. There is no estimate of the aggregate wealth, nor any means of distinguishing the savings of the people from the large amount of capital borrowed from England, but the visitor who crosses from the American to the Canadian side of the Line and compares the cities and towns on one side with those on the other can feel no doubt as to the effect of exclusion from the commercial pale.

​The Canadian people are industrious, energetic, and thrifty; their country is rich in resources. The political institutions or relations must be bad indeed which could altogether arrest their progress. But this does not prove that an ill-cemented Confederation is or can be well cemented, that figureheads are useful, that a Senate which does nothing is worth the expense, that a fiscal policy of the Dark Ages promotes industry and commerce, or that it is a good thing to be governed by corruption.

Nor is there any pessimism in saying that the qualities and energies which in spite of an evil policy have done what we see, would under improved conditions do more. When Jingoism conspires with the party of commercial monopoly in the United States to bring on a tariff war, Canada is exhorted to show her fortitude, and told that if she does she will survive. No doubt she will survive; but like her neighbour across the Line and England herself she wants not only to live but to live well.