The Governors-general: Lord Elgin
The year which intervened between Metcalfe's departure and the arrival
of Lord Elgin at the beginning of 1847, may be disregarded in this
inquiry. Earl Cathcart, who held office in the interval, was chosen
because relations with the United States at that time were serious
enough to make it desirable to combine the civil and the military
headship in Canada in one person. In domestic politics the
governor-general was a
negligible quantity, as his successor confessed:
"Lord Cathcart, not very unreasonably perhaps, has allowed everything
that required thought to lie over for me."[1]
But the arrival of Elgin changed the whole aspect of affairs, and
introduced the most {188} important modification that was made in
Canadian government between 1791 and the year of Confederation. Since
1839, governors-general who took their instructions from Britain, and
who seldom allowed the Canadian point of view to have more than an
indirect influence on their administration, had introduced the most
unhappy complications into politics. Both they and the home government
were now reduced to the gloomiest speculations concerning the
permanence of the British connection. In place of the academic or
official view of colonial dependence which had hitherto dominated
Canadian administration, Elgin came to substitute a policy which
frankly accepted the Canadian position, and which as frankly trusted to
a loyalty dependent for none of its sanctions upon external coercion or
encouragement. With 1846, Great Britain entered on an era of which the
predominating principle was laissez faire, and within twelve months
of the concession of that principle in commerce, Elgin applied it with
even more astonishing results in the region of colonial Parliamentary
institutions.
The Canadian episode in Elgin's career furnishes the most perfect and
permanently useful service rendered by him to the Empire. Although he
{189} gathered laurels in China and India, and earned a notable place
among diplomatists, nothing that he did is so representative of the
whole man, so valuable, and so completely rounded and finished, as the
seven years of his work in Canada. Elsewhere he accomplished tasks,
which others had done, or might have done as well. But in the history
of the self-governing dominions of Britain, his name is almost the
first of those who assisted in creating an Empire, the secret of whose
strength was to be local autonomy.
He belonged to the most distinguished group of nineteenth century
politicians, for with Gladstone, Canning, Dalhousie, Herbert, and
others, he served his apprenticeship under Sir Robert Peel. All of
that younger generation reflected the sobriety, the love of hard fact,
the sound but progressive conservatism, and the high administrative
faculty of their great master. It was an epoch when changes were
inevitable; but the soundest minds tended, in spite of a powerful party
tradition, to view the work in front of them in a non-partizan spirit.
Gladstone himself, for long, seemed fated to repeat the party-breaking
record of Peel; and three great proconsuls of the group, Dalhousie,
Canning, and Elgin, found in imperial administration a more {190}
congenial task than Westminster could offer them. Elgin occupies a
mediate position between the administrative careers of Dalhousie and
Canning, and the parliamentary and constitutional labours of Gladstone.
He was that strange being, a constitutionalist proconsul; and his chief
work in administration lay in so altering the relation of his office to
Canadian popular government, as to take from the governor-generalship
much of its initiative, and to make a great surrender to popular
opinion. Between his arrival in Montreal at the end of January, 1847,
and the writing of his last official despatch on December 18th, 1854,
he had established on sure foundations the system of democratic
government in Canada.
Never was man better fitted for his work. He came, a Scotsman, to a
colony one-third Scottish, and the name of Bruce was itself soporific
to the opposition of a perfervid section of the reformers. His wife
was the daughter of Lord Durham, whom Canadians regarded as the
beginner of a new age of Canadian constitutionalism. He had been
appointed by a Whig Government, and Earl Grey, the new Colonial
Secretary, was already learned in liberal theory, both in politics and
economics, and understood that Britons, abroad as at home, {191} must
have liberty to misgovern themselves. Elgin's personal qualities were
precisely those best fitted to control a self-governing community. Not
only was he saved from extreme views by his caution and sense of
humour, but he had, to an extraordinary degree, the power of seeing
both sides, and more especially the other side, of any question. In
Canada too, as later in China and India, he exhibited qualities of
humanity which some might term quixotic;[2] and, as will be illustrated
very fully below, his gifts of tact and bonhomie made him a
singularly persuasive force in international affairs, and secured for
Britain at least one clear diplomatic victory over America.
Following on a succession of short-lived and troubled governorships,
under which, while the principle of government had remained constant,
nothing else had done so, Elgin had practically to begin Durham's work
afresh, and build without much regard for the foundations laid since
1841. The alternatives before him were a grant of really responsible
government, or a rebellion, with annexation to the United States as its
probable end. The {192} new Governor saw very clearly the dangers of
his predecessor's policy. "The distinction," he wrote at a later date,
"between Lord Metcalfe's policy and mine is twofold. In the first
place he profoundly distrusted the whole Liberal party in the
province--that great party which, excepting at extraordinary
conjunctures, has always carried with it the mass of the
constituencies. He believed its designs to be revolutionary, just as
the Tory party in England believed those of the Whigs and Reformers to
be in 1832. And, secondly, he imagined that when circumstances forced
the party upon him, he could check these revolutionary tendencies by
manifesting his distrust of them, more especially in the matter of the
distribution of patronage, thereby relieving them in a great measure
from that responsibility, which is in all free countries the most
effectual security against the abuse of power, and tempting them to
endeavour to combine the role of popular tribunes with the prestige of
ministers of the crown."[3]
The danger of a crisis was the greater because, as has been shown,
Metcalfe's anti-democratic policy had been more than the expression of
a personal {193} mood. It was the policy of the British government.
After Metcalfe's departure, and Stanley's resignation of the Colonial
office, Gladstone, then for a few months Colonial Secretary, assured
Cathcart that "the favour of his Sovereign and the acknowledgment of
his country, have marked (Metcalfe's) administration as one which,
under the peculiar circumstances of the task he had to perform, may
justly be regarded as a model for his successors."[4] In truth, the
British Colonial office was not only wrong in its working theory, but
ignorant of the boiling tumult of Canadian opinion in those days;
ignorant of the steadily increasing vehemence of the demand for true
home rule, and of the possibility that French nationalism, Irish
nationalism, and American aggression, might unite in a great upheaval,
and the political tragedy find its consummation in another Declaration
of Independence.
But Elgin was allowed little leisure for general reflections; the
concrete details of the actual situation absorbed all his energies.
Since Metcalfe's resignation, matters had not improved. There was
still an uncertain majority in the House of Assembly, although, in the
eyes of probably a {194} majority of voters, the disorders of the late
election had discredited the whole Assembly. But the ministry had gone
on from weakness to further weakness. Draper, who did his best to
preserve the political decencies, had been forced to ask Cathcart to
assist him in removing certain of his colleagues. Viger had been a
complete failure as President of the Council, and performed none of the
duties of his department except that of signing his name to reports
prepared by others. Daly was of little use to him; and, as for the
solicitor-general for Upper Canada, Sherwood, "his repeated absence on
important divisions, his lukewarm support, and occasional (almost)
opposition, his habit of speaking of the Members of your Excellency's
Government and of the policy pursued by them, his more than suspected
intrigues to effect the removal of some members of the council, have
altogether destroyed all confidence in him."[5] Draper himself had
seemingly grown tired of the dust and heat of the struggle, and, soon
after Elgin's assumption of authority, resigned his premiership for a
legal position as honourable and more peaceful.
{195}
Elgin, then, found a distracted ministry, a doubtful Assembly, and an
irritated country. His ministers he thought lacking in pluck, and far
too willing to appeal to selfish and sordid motives in possible
supporters.[6] He was irritated by what seemed to him the petty and
inconsistent divisions of Canadian party life: "In a community like
this, where there is little, if anything, of public principle to divide
men, political parties will shape themselves under the influence of
circumstances, and of a great variety of affections and antipathies,
national, sectarian, and personal.... It is not even pretended that
the divisions of party represent corresponding divisions of sentiment
on questions which occupy the public mind, such as voluntaryism, Free
Trade, etc., etc. Responsible Government is the one subject on which
this coincidence is alleged to exist."[7] The French problem he found
peculiarly difficult. Metcalfe's policy had had results disconcerting
to the British authorities. Banishing, as he thought, sectarianism or
racial views, he had yet practically shut out French statesmen from
office so successfully, that, when Elgin, acting through Colonel Tache,
{196} attempted to approach them, he found in none of them any
disposition to enter into alliance with the existing ministry.[8]
Elgin, who was willing enough to give fair play to every political
section, could not but see the obvious fault of French Canadian
nationalism. "They seem incapable of comprehending that the principles
of constitutional government must be applied against them, as well as
for them," he wrote to Grey. "Whenever there appears to be a chance of
things taking this turn they revive the ancient cry of nationality, and
insist on their right to have a share in the administration, not
because the party with which they have chosen to connect themselves is
in the ascendant, but because they represent a people of distinct
origin."[9] Most serious of all, because it hampered his initiative,
he found every party except that in office suspicious of the governor's
authority, and newspapers like Hincks' Pilot grumbling over Imperial
interference.
One sweeping remedy, he had, within a few months of his arrival, laid
aside as impossible. Lord John Russell and Grey had discussed with
{197} him the possibility of raising Canadian politics out of their
pettiness by a federal union of all the British North American
colonies. But as early as May 1847, Elgin had come to doubt whether
the free and independent legislatures of the colonies would be willing
to delegate any of their authority to please a British ministry.[10]
It was necessary then to fall back on the unromantic alternative of
modifying the constitution of the ministry; and here French solidarity
had made his task difficult. Yet the amazing thing in Elgin was the
speed, the ease, and the accuracy, with which he saw what none of his
predecessors had seen--the need to concede, and the harmlessness of
conceding, responsible government in Baldwin's sense of the term.
Within two months of his accession to power, he declared, "I am
determined to do nothing which will put it out of my power to act with
the opposite party, if it is forced upon me by the representatives of
the people."[11] Two months later, sick of the struggles by which his
ministers were trying to gain here and there some trivial vote to keep
them in office, he recurred to the same idea as not merely harmless but
sound. That ministers {198} and opposition should occasionally change
places struck him not merely as constitutional, but as the most
conservative convention in the constitution; and in answer to the older
school to whom a change of ministers at the dictation of a majority in
the Assembly meant the degradation of the governor-generalship, he
hoped "to establish a moral influence in the province, which will go
far to compensate for the loss of power consequent on the surrender of
patronage to an executive responsible to the local parliament."[12]
To give his ministers a last fair chance of holding on to office, he
dissolved parliament at the end of 1847, recognizing that, in the event
of a victory, their credit would be immensely increased. The struggle
of December 1847, to January 1848, was decisive. While the French
constituencies maintained their former position, even in Upper Canada
the discredited ministry found few supporters. The only element in the
situation which disturbed Elgin was the news that Papineau, the
arch-rebel of 1837, had come back to public life with a flourish of
agitating declarations; and that the French people had not condemned
with sufficient decisiveness his seditious utterances. Yet he need
have {199} had no qualms. La Revue Canadienne in reviewing the
situation certainly refused to condemn Papineau's extravagances, but
its conclusion took the ground from under the agitator's feet, for it
declared that "cette moderation de nos chefs politiques a puissamment
contribue a placer notre parti dans la position avantageuse qu'il
occupe maintenant."[13] Now Papineau was incapable of political
moderation.
The fate of the ministry was quickly settled. Their candidate for the
speakership of the Lower House was defeated by 54 votes to 19; a vote
of no confidence was carried by 54 to 20; on March 23rd parliament was
prorogued and a new administration, the first truly popular ministry in
the history of Canada, accepted office, and the country, satisfied at
last, was promised "various measures for developing the resources of
the province, and promoting the social well-being of its
inhabitants."[14]
The change was the more decisive because it was made with the approval
of the Whig government in England. "I can have no doubt," Grey wrote
to Elgin on February 22nd, "that you must accept {200} such a council
as the newly elected parliament will support, and that however unwise
as relates to the real interests of Canada their measures may be, they
must be acquiesced in, until it shall pretty clearly appear that public
opinion will support a resistance to them. There is no middle course
between this line of policy, and that which involves in the last resort
an appeal to parliament to overrule the wishes of the Canadians, and
this I agree with Gladstone and Stanley in thinking impracticable."[15]
The only precaution he bade Elgin take was to register his dissent
carefully in cases of disagreement. Having conceded the essential, it
mattered little that Grey could not quite rid himself of doubts as to
the consequences of his previous daring. The concession had come most
opportunely, for Elgin, who feared greatly the disturbing influences of
European revolutionism, Irish discontent, and American democracy in its
cruder forms, believed that, had the change not taken place, "we should
by this hour (November 30th, 1848) either have been ignominiously
expelled from Canada, or our relations with the United States would
have been in a most precarious condition."
{201}
It is not necessary to follow Elgin through all the details of more
than seven busy years. It will suffice to watch him at work on the
three great allied problems which combined to form the constitutional
question in Canada; the character of the government to be conceded to,
and worked along with, the colonists; the recognition to be given to
French nationalist feeling; and the nature of the connection between
Britain and Canada which would exist after concessions had been made on
these points. The significance of his policy is the greater, because
the example of Canada was certain, mutatis mutandis, to be followed
by the other greater colonies. Elgin's solution of the question of
responsible government was so natural and easy that the reader of his
despatches forgets how completely his task had baffled all his
predecessors, and that several generations of colonial secretaries had
refused to admit what in his hands seemed a self-evident truth. At the
outset Elgin's own mind had not been free from serious doubt. He had
come to Canada with a traditional suspicion of the French Canadians and
the progressives of Upper Canada; yet within a year, since the country
so willed it, he had accepted a cabinet, composed entirely of these two
sections. On his {202} way to the formation of that cabinet he not
only brushed aside old suspicions, but he refused to surrender to the
seductions of the eclectic principle, which allowed his predecessors to
evade the force of popular opinion by selecting representatives of all
shades of that opinion. He saw the danger of allowing responsible
government to remain a party cry, and he removed "that most delicate
and debatable subject" from party politics by conceding the whole
position. The defects of the Canadian party system never found a
severer critic than Elgin, but he saw that by party Canada would be
ruled, and he could not, as Metcalfe had done, deceive himself into
thinking he had abolished it by governing in accordance with the least
popular party in the state. With the candour and the discriminating
judgment which so distinguished all his doings in Canada, he admitted
that, notwithstanding the high ground Lord Metcalfe had taken against
party patronage, the ministers favoured by that governor-general had
"used patronage for party purposes with quite as little scruple as his
first council."[16]
Since the first general election had proved beyond a doubt that
Canadians desired a {203} progressive ministry, he made the change with
perfect success, and remained a consistent guide and friend to his new
ministers.
There was something dramatic in the contrast between the possibilities
of trouble in the year when the concession was made, and the peace
which actually ensued. It was the year of revolution, and the men whom
he called to his assistance were "persons denounced very lately by the
Secretary of State to the Governor-General as impracticable and
disloyal";[17] but before the year was out he was able to boast that
when so many thrones were tottering and the allegiance of so many
people was waxing faint, there is less political disaffection in Canada
than there ever had been before. From 1848 until the year of his
recall, he remained in complete accord with his liberal administration,
and never was constitutional monarch more intimately and usefully
connected with his ministers than was Elgin, first with Baldwin and La
Fontaine, and then with Hincks and Morin.
Elgin gave a rarer example of what fidelity to colonial
constitutionalism meant. In these years of liberal success, "Old
Toryism" faced a new strain, and faced it badly. The party had {204}
supported the empire, when that empire meant their supremacy. They had
befriended the representative of the Crown, when they had all the
places and profits. When the British connection took a liberal colour,
when the governor-general acted constitutionally towards the
undoubtedly progressive tone of popular opinion, some of the tories
became annexationists. Many of them, as will be shown later,
encouraged a dastardly assault on the person of their official head;
and all of them, supported by gentlemen of Her Majesty's army, treated
the representative of the Crown with the most obvious discourtesy.[18]
Nevertheless, when opinion changed, and when a coalition attacked and
unseated the Progressive ministry of 1848-1854, Elgin, without a
moment's hesitation, turned to the men who had insulted him. "To the
great astonishment of the public, as well as to his own," wrote
Laurence Oliphant, who was then on Elgin's staff, "Sir Allan MacNab,
who had been one of his bitterest opponents ever since the Montreal
events, was sent for to form a ministry--Lord Elgin by this act
satisfactorily disproving the charges of {205} having either personal
or political partialities in the selection of his ministers."[19]
But the first great constitutional governor-general of Canada had to
interpret constitutionalism as something more than mere obedience to
public dictation with regard to his councillors. He had to educate
these councillors, and the public, into the niceties of British
constitutional manners; and he had to create a new vocation for the
governor-general, and to exchange dictation for rational influence. He
had to teach his ministers moderation in their measures, and,
indirectly, to show the opposition how to avoid crude and extreme
methods in their fight for office. When his high political courage, in
consenting to a bill very obnoxious to the opposition, forced them into
violence, he kept his temper and his head, and the opposition leaders
learned, not from punishment, but from quiet contempt, to express
dissent in modes other than those of arson and sticks and stones. For
seven years, by methods so restrained as to be hardly perceptible even
in his private letters to Grey, he guided the first experimental
cabinets into smooth water, and when he resigned, he left behind him
politicians {206} trained by his efforts to govern Canada according to
British usage.
At the same time his influence on the British Cabinet was as quiet and
certain. He was still responsible to the British Crown and Cabinet,
and a weaker man would have forgotten the problems which the new
Canadian constitutionalism was bound to create at the centre of
authority. Two instances will illustrate the point, and Elgin's clear
perception of his duty. They are both taken from the episode of the
Rebellion Losses Bill, and the Montreal riots of 1849. The Bill which
caused the trouble had been introduced to complete a scheme of
compensation for all those who had suffered loss in the late Rebellion,
whether French or English, and had been passed by majorities in both
houses; but while there seemed no valid reason for disallowing it,
Elgin suspected trouble--indeed, at first, he viewed the measure with
personal disapproval.[20] He might have refused permission to bring in
the bill; but the practical consequences of such a refusal were too
serious to {207} be accepted. "Only imagine," he wrote, "how difficult
it would have been to discover a justification for my conduct, if at a
moment when America was boiling over with bandits and desperadoes, and
when the leaders of every faction in the Union, with the view of
securing the Irish vote for the presidential election, were vying with
each other in abuse of England, and subscribing funds for the Irish
Republican Union, I had brought on such a crisis in Canada by refusing
to allow my administration to bring in a bill to carry out the
recommendation of Lord Metcalfe's commissioners."[21] He might have
dissolved Parliament, but, as he rightly pointed out, "it would be
rather a strong measure to have recourse to dissolution because a
Parliament, elected one year ago under the auspices of the present
opposition, passed by a majority of more than two to one a measure
introduced by the Government." There remained only the possibility of
reserving the bill for approval or rejection at home. A weaker man
would have taken this easy and fatal way of evading responsibility; but
Elgin rose to the height of his vocation, when he explained his reason
for acting on his own {208} initiative. "I should only throw upon her
Majesty's Government, or (as it would appear to the popular eye here)
on Her Majesty herself, a responsibility which rests, and ought I think
to rest, on my own shoulders."[22] He gave his assent to the bill,
suffered personal violence at the hands of the Montreal crowd and the
opposition, but, since he stood firm, he triumphed, and saved both the
dignity of the Crown and the friendship of the French for his
government.
The other instance of his skill in combining Canadian autonomy with
British supremacy is less important, but, in a way, more extraordinary
in its subtlety. As a servant of the Crown, he had to furnish
despatches, which were liable to be published as parliamentary papers,
and so to be perused by Canadian politicians. Elgin had therefore to
reckon with two publics--the British Parliament, which desired
information, and the Canadian Parliament, which desired to maintain its
dignity and freedom. Before the Montreal outrage, and when it was
extremely desirable to leave matters as vague as possible, Elgin simply
refrained from giving details to the Colonial Office. "I could not
have made my official communication to {209} you in reference to this
Bill, which you could have laid before Parliament, without stating or
implying an irrevocable decision on this point. To this circumstance
you must ascribe the fact that you have not heard from me
officially."[23] With even greater shrewdness, at a later date, he
made Grey expunge, in his book on Colonial Policy, details of the
outrage which followed the passing of the Act; for, said he, "I am
strongly of opinion that nothing but evil can result from the
publication, at this period, of a detailed and circumstantial statement
of the disgraceful proceedings which took place after the Bill
passed.... The surest way to arrest a process of conversion is to
dwell on the errors of the past, and to place in a broad light the
contrast between present sentiments and those of an earlier date."[24]
In constitutional affairs manners make, not merely the statesman, but
the possibility of government; and Elgin's highest quality as a
constitutionalist was, not so much his understanding of the machinery
of government, as his knowledge of the constitutional temper, and the
need within it of humanity and common-sense.
{210}
Great as was Elgin's achievement in rectifying Canadian constitutional
practice, his solution of the nationalist difficulty in Lower Canada
was possibly a greater triumph of statesmanship; for the present modus
vivendi, which still shows no signs of breaking down, dates from the
years of Elgin's governorship. The decade which included his rule in
Canada was pre-eminently the epoch of nationalism. Italy, Germany, and
Hungary, with Mazzini as their prophet, were all struggling for the
acknowledgment of their national claims, and within the British Islands
themselves, the Irish nationalists furnished, in Davis and the writers
to The Nation, disciples and apostles of the new gospel. It is
always dangerous to trace European influences across the Atlantic; but
there is little doubt that as the French rebellion of 1837 owed
something to Europe, so the arch-rebel Papineau's paper, L'Avenir,
echoed in an empty blustering fashion, the cries of the nationalist
revolution of 1848.[25]
Elgin found on his arrival that British administration had thrown every
element in French-Canadian politics into headlong opposition to itself.
How dangerous the situation was, one may infer from {211} the
disquieting rumours of the ambitions of the American Union, and from
the passions and memories of injustice which floods of unkempt and
wretched Irish immigrants were bringing with them to their new homes in
America. In Elgin's second year of office, 1848, he had to face the
possibility of a rising under the old leaders of 1837. His solution of
the difficulty proceeded pari passu with his constitutional work. In
the latter he had seen that he must remove the disquieting subject of
"responsible government" from the party programme of the progressives,
and the politic surrender of 1847 had gained his end. Towards French
nationalism he acted in the same spirit. As has already been seen, he
was conscious of the political shortcomings of the French. Yet there
was nothing penal in his attitude towards them, and he saw, with a
clearness to which Durham never attained, how idle all talk of
anglicizing French Canada must be. "I for one," he said, "am deeply
convinced of the impolicy of all such attempts to denationalize the
French. Generally speaking, they produce the opposite effect from that
intended, causing the flame of national prejudice and animosity to burn
more fiercely."[26]
{212}
But how could the pathological phase of nationalism be ended? His
first Tory advisers suggested the old trick of making converts, but the
practice had long since been found useless. His next speculation was
whether the French could be made to take sides as Liberals or Tories,
apart altogether from nationalist considerations. But the political
solidarity of the French had been a kind of trades-unionism, claiming
to guard French interests against an actual menace to their very
existence as a nation within the empire; and they were certain to act
only with Baldwin and his friends, the one party which had regarded
them as other than traitors or suspects, or at best tools.
No complete solution of the problem was possible; but when Elgin
surrendered to the progressives, he was making concessions also to the
French--by admitting them to a recognized place within the
constitution, and doing so without reservation. The joint ministry of
La Fontaine and Baldwin was, in a sense, the most satisfactory answer
that could be made to the difficulty. From the moment of its creation
Elgin and Canada were safe. He remained doubtful during part of 1848,
for Papineau had been elected by acclamation to the Parliament which
held its first session that year; and he "had {213} searched in vain
... through the French organs of public opinion for a frank and decided
expression of hostility to the anti-British sentiments propounded in
Papineau's address."[27] He did not at first understand that La
Fontaine, not Papineau, was the French leader, and that the latter
represented only himself and a few Rouges of violent but
unsubstantial revolutionary opinions. Nevertheless, he gave his French
ministers his confidence, and he applied his singular powers of winning
men to appeasing French discontent. As early as May, 1848, he saw how
the land lay--that French Canada was fundamentally conservative, and
that discontent was mainly a consequence of sheer stupidity and error
on the part of England. "Who will venture to say," he asked, "that the
last hand which waves the British flag on American ground may not be
that of a French Canadian?"[28]
His final settlement of the question came in 1849, and the introduction
of that Rebellion Losses Bill which has been already mentioned. The
measure was, in the main, an act of justice to French sufferers from
the disturbances created by the Rebellion; for they had naturally
shared but slightly {214} in earlier and partial schemes of
compensation; and the opposition to the bill was directed quite frankly
against the French inhabitants of Canada as traitors, who deserved, not
recompense, but punishment. Now there were many cases of real
hardship, like that of the inhabitants of St. Benoit, a village which
Sir John Colborne had pledged himself to protect when he occupied it
for military purposes, but which, in his absence, the loyalist
volunteers had set on fire and destroyed. The inhabitants might be
disloyal, but in the eyes of an equal justice a wrong had been done,
and must be righted. The idea of the bill was not new--it was not
Elgin's bill; and if his predecessors had been right, then the French
politicians were justified in claiming that the system of compensation
already initiated must be followed till all legitimate claims had been
met.
It would be disingenuous to deny that Elgin calculated on the pacific
influence which his support of the bill would exert in Lower Canada.
"I was aware of two facts," he told Grey in 1852: "Firstly, that M. La
Fontaine would be unable to retain the support of his countrymen if he
failed to introduce a measure of this description; and secondly, that
my refusal would be taken by him and his friends {215} as a proof that
they had not my confidence." But his chief concern was to hold the
balance level, to redress an actual grievance, and to repress the fury
of Canadian Tories whose unrestrained action would have flung Canada
into a new and complicated struggle of races and parties. "I am firmly
convinced," he told Grey in June, speaking of American election
movements at this time, "that the only thing which prevented an
invasion of Canada was the political contentment prevailing among the
French Canadians and Irish Catholics"; and that political contentment
was the result of Elgin's action in supporting his ministers. A happy
chance, utilized to the full by Elgin's cautious wisdom, had enabled
him to do the French what they counted a considerable service; and the
rage and disorder of the opposition only played the more surely into
the hands of the governor-general, and established, beyond any risk of
alteration, French loyalty to him personally.[29]
From that day, with trivial intervals or incidents of misunderstanding,
the British and the French in Canada have played the political game
together. It was in the La Fontaine-Baldwin ministry that {216} the
joint action, within the Canadian parties, of the two races had its
real beginning; and while the traditions and idiosyncrasies of Quebec
were too ingrained and fundamental to admit of modification beyond a
certain point, Canadian parliamentary life was henceforth based on the
free co-operation of French and English, in a party system which tried
to forget the distinction of race. From this time, too, Elgin began to
discern the conservative genius of the French people, and to prophesy
that, when Baldwin's moderate reforming influence should have been
withdrawn, the French would naturally incline to unite with the
moderate Conservatives--the combination on which, in actual fact, John
A. Macdonald based his long control of power in Canada.
The nationalist question is so intermingled with the constitutional
that it is not always easy to separate the two issues. The same
qualities which settled the latter difficulty ended also French
grievances--saving common-sense which did not refuse to do the obvious
thing; bonhomie which understood that a well-mannered people may be
wooed from its isolation by a little humouring; a mind resolute to
administer to every British subject equal rights; and an austere
refusal to let an {217} arrogant and narrow-minded minority claim to
itself a kind of oligarchic glory at the expense of citizens who did
not belong to the Anglo-Saxon stock.
There is a third aspect of Elgin's work in Canada of wider scope than
either of those already mentioned, and one in which his claims to
distinction have been almost forgotten--his contribution to the working
theory of the British Empire. Elgin was one of those earlier sane
imperialists whose achievements it is very easy to forget. It is not
too much to say that, when Elgin came to Canada, the future of the
British colonial empire was at best gloomy. Politicians at home had
placed in front of themselves an awkward dilemma. According to the
stiffer Tories, the colonies must be held in with a firm hand--how
firm, Stanley had illustrated in his administration of Canada. Yet
Tory stiffness produced colonial discontent, and colonial discontent
bred very natural doubts at home as to the possibility of holding the
colonies by the old methods. On the other hand, there were those, like
Cobden, who, while they believed with the Tories that colonial
home-rule was certain to result in colonial independence, were
nevertheless too loyal to their doctrine of political liberty to resist
colonial claims. They looked to an immediate but {218} peaceful
dissolution of the empire. It seemed never to strike anyone but a few
radicals, like Durham and Buller, that Britons still held British
sentiments, even across the seas, and that they desired to combine a
continuance of the British connection with the retention of all those
popular rights in government which they had possessed at home. A
Canadian governor-general, then, had to deal with British Cabinets
which alternated between foolish rigour and foolish slackness, and with
politicians who reflected little on the responsibilities of empire,
when they flung before careless British audiences irresponsible
discussions on colonial independence--as if it were an academic subject
and not a critical issue.
Elgin had imperial difficulties, all his own, to make his task more
complicated. Not only were there French and Irish nationalists ready
for agitation, but the United States lay across the southern border;
and annexation to that mighty and flourishing republic seemed to many
the natural euthanasia of British rule in North America. Peel's
sweeping reforms in the tariff had rekindled annexationist talk; for
while Lord Stanley's bill of 1843 had attracted all the produce of the
west to the St. Lawrence by its grant of preference to the {219}
colony, "Peel's bill of 1846 drives the whole of the produce down the
New York channels of communication ... ruining at once mill-owners,
forwarders and merchants."[30] And every petty and personal
disappointment, every error in colonial office administration, raised a
new group to cry down the British system, and to call for a peaceful
junction with the United States.
Elgin had not been long in Canada before he saw one important
fact--that the real annexationist feeling had commercial, not political
roots. Without diminishing the seriousness of the situation, the
discovery made it more susceptible of rational treatment. A colony
suffering a severe set-back in trade found the precise remedy it looked
for in transference of its allegiance. "The remedy offered them,"
wrote Elgin, "is perfectly definite and intelligible. They are invited
to form part of a community which is neither suffering nor free-trading
... a community, the members of which have been within the last few
weeks pouring into their multifarious places of worship, to thank God
that they are exempt from the ills which affect other men, from those
more especially which affect their despised neighbours, the inhabitants
of North {220} America, who have remained faithful to the country which
planted them."[31] With free-trade in the ascendant, and, to the
maturest minds of the time, unanswerably sound in theory, Elgin had to
dismiss schemes of British preference from his mind; and, towards the
end of his rule, when American policy was irritating Canada, he had
even to restrict the scope within which Canadian retaliation might be
practised. There could be no imperial Zollverein. But he saw that a
measure of reciprocity might give the Canadians all the economic
benefits they sought, and yet leave to them the allegiance and the
government which, in their hearts, they preferred. The annexationist
clamour fell and rose, mounting highest in Montreal, and reaching a
crisis in the year of the Rebellion Losses disturbance; but Elgin,
while sometimes he grew despondent, always kept his head, and never
ceased to hope for the reciprocity which would at once bring back
prosperity and still the disloyal murmurs. Once or twice, when the
annexationists were at their worst, and when his Tory opponents chose
support of that disloyal movement as the means of insulting their
governor, he took stern measures for repressing an unnatural evil. "We
intend," {221} he wrote in November, 1849, after an annexation meeting
at which servants of the State had been present, "to dismiss the
militia officers and magistrates who have taken part in these affairs,
and to deprive the two Queen's Counsels of their silk gowns." But he
relied mainly on the positive side of his policy, and few statesmen
have given Canada a more substantial boon than did Elgin when, just
before his recall, he went to Washington on that mission which Laurence
Oliphant has made classic by his description, and concluded by far the
most favourable commercial treaty ever negotiated by Britain with the
United States.
There is perhaps a tendency to underestimate the work of his
predecessors and assistants in preparing the way, but no one can doubt
that it was Elgin's persistence in urging the treaty on the home
Cabinet, and his wonderful diplomatic gifts, which ultimately won the
day. Oliphant, certainly, had no doubt as to his chief's share in the
matter. "He is the most thorough diplomat possible--never loses sight
for a moment of his object, and while he is chaffing Yankees, and
slapping them on the back, he is systematically pursuing that
object";[32] and again, "There was concluded in {222} exactly a
fortnight a treaty, to negotiate which had taxed the inventive genius
of the Foreign Office, and all the conventional methods of diplomacy,
for the previous seven years."[33]
It was a long, slow process by which Elgin restored the tone of
Canadian loyalty. Frenchmen who had dreamed of renouncing allegiance
he won by his obvious fairness, and the recognition accorded by him to
their leaders. He took the heart out of Irish disaffection by his
popular methods and love of liberty. Tory dissentients fell slowly in
to heel, as they found their governor no lath painted to look like
iron, but very steel. To desponding Montreal merchants his reciprocity
treaty yielded naturally all they had expected from a more drastic
change. It is true that, owing to untoward circumstances, the treaty
lasted only for the limited period prescribed by Elgin; but it tided
over an awkward interval of disaffection and disappointment.
He did more, however, than cure definite phases of Canadian
disaffection; his influence through Earl Grey told powerfully for a
fuller and more optimistic conception of empire. With all its virtues,
the bureaucracy of the Colonial Office did not understand the
government of colonies such {223} as Canada; and where colonial
secretaries had the ability and will, they had not knowledge sufficient
to lead them into paths at once democratic and imperial. Even Grey
relapsed on occasion from the optimism which empire demands of its
statesmen. It was not simply that he emphasized the wrong
points--military and diplomatic issues, which in Canada were minor and
even negligible matters; but at times he seemed prepared to believe
that the days of the connection were numbered.[34]
In 1848 he had impaled himself on the horns of one of those dilemmas
which present themselves so frequently to absentee governments and
secretaries of state--either reciprocity and an Americanized colony, or
a new rebellion as the consequence of a refusal in Britain to consent
to a reciprocity treaty.[35] In 1849, "looking at these indications of
the state of feeling in Canada, and at the equally significant
indications as to the feeling of the House of Commons respecting the
value of our colonies," he had begun to despair of their retention.[36]
But there were greater sinners than those of the Colonial Office.
While Elgin {224} was painfully removing all the causes of trouble in
Canada, and proving without argument, but in deeds, that the British
connection represented normal conditions for both England and Canada,
politicians insisted on making foolish speeches. At last, an offence
by the Prime Minister himself drove Elgin into a passion unusual in so
equable a mind, and which, happily, he expressed in the best of all his
letters. "I have never been able to comprehend why, elastic as our
constitutional system is, we should not be able, now more especially
when we have ceased to control the trade of our colonies, to render the
links which bind them to the British Crown at least as lasting as those
which unite the component parts of the Union.... You must renounce the
habit of telling the colonies that the colonial is a provisional
existence.... Is the Queen of England to be the sovereign of an
empire, growing, expanding, strengthening itself from age to age,
striking its roots deep into fresh earth and drawing new supplies of
vitality from virgin soils? Or is she to be for all essential purposes
of might and power monarch of Great Britain and Ireland merely, her
place and that of her land in the world's history determined by the
productiveness of 12,000 square miles of a coal {225} formation which
is being rapidly exhausted, and the duration of the social and
political organization over which she presides dependent on the annual
expatriation, with a view to its eventual alienization, of the surplus
swarm of her born subjects?"[37] That is the final question of
imperialism; and Elgin had earned the right not only to put it to the
home government with emphasis, but also to answer it in an affirmative
and constructive sense.
The argument forbids any mention of the less public episodes in Elgin's
Canadian adventure; his whimsical capacity for getting on with men,
French, British, and American; the sly humour of his correspondence
with his official chief; the searching comments made by him on men and
manners in America; the charm of such social and diplomatic incidents
as Laurence Oliphant has related in his letters and his Episodes in a
Life of Adventure. But it may be permitted to sum up his qualities as
governor, and to connect his work with the general movement towards
self-government which had been proceeding so rapidly since 1839.
He was too human, easy, unclassical, and, on {226} the other hand, too
little touched with Byronic or revolutionary feeling, even to suggest
the age of Pitt, Napoleon, Canning; he was too sensible, too orthodox,
too firmly based on fact and on the past, to have any affinity with our
own transitionary politics. Like Peel, although in a less degree, he
had at once a firm body of opinions, a keen eye for new facts, and a
sure, slow capacity for bringing the new material to bear on old
opinion.
He was able, as few have been, to set the personal equation aside in
his political plans, holding the balance between friends and foes with
almost uncanny fairness, and astonishing his petty enemies by his
moderation. His mind could regard not merely Canada but also Britain,
as it reflected on future policy; and, in his letters, he sometimes
seems the one man in the empire at the time who understood the true
relation of colonial autonomy to British supremacy. Not even his most
foolish eulogist will attribute anything romantic to his character.
There was nothing of Disraeli's "glitter of dubious gems" about the
honest phrases in which he bade Russell think imperially. Unlike
Mazzini, it was his business to destroy false nationalism, not to exalt
that which was true, and {227} for that cool business the glow and
fervour of prophecy were not required. We like to see our leaders
standing rampant, and with sulphurous, or at least thundery,
backgrounds. But Elgin's ironic Scottish humour forbade any pose, and
it was his business to keep the cannon quiet, and to draw the lightning
harmless to the ground. The most heroic thing he did in Canada was to
refrain from entering Montreal at a time when his entrance must have
meant insult, resistance, and bloodshed, and he bore quietly the taunts
of cowardice which his enemies flung at his head.
He was far too clear-sighted to think that statesmanship consists in
decisions between very definitely stated alternatives of right and
wrong. "My choice," he wrote in characteristic words, "was not between
a clearly right and clearly wrong course--how easy is it to deal with
such cases, and how rare are they in life--but between several
difficulties. I think I chose the least."[38] His kindly, shrewd, and
honest countenance looks at us from his portraits with no appeal of
sentiment or pathos. He asked of men that which they find it most
difficult to give--moderation, common-sense, a willingness to look at
both sides, and to {228} subordinate their egoisms to a wider good; and
he was content to do without their worship.
It is now possible to summarize the movement towards autonomy so far as
it was affected by the governors-general of the transition period.
The characteristic note in the earlier stages had been the domination
of the governor-general's mind by a clear-cut theory--that of Lord John
Russell. That theory was in itself consistent, and of a piece with the
rest of the constitution; and its merits stood out more clearly because
Canadian progressives had an unfortunate faculty for setting themselves
in the wrong--making party really appear as faction, investing
self-government with something of the menace of independence, and
treating the responsibility they sought in the most irresponsible way.
The British theory, too, as guaranteeing a definitely British
predominance in Canada, brought into rather lurid relief the mistaken
fervour of French-Canadian nationalism.
Yet Sydenham, who never consciously, or at least openly, surrendered
one detail of the system entrusted to him by Russell, found events too
much for him; and that which conquered Sydenham's resolution made short
work of any resistance Bagot may have dreamed of offering. Metcalfe
was wrong {229} in suspecting a conscious intention in Sydenham's later
measures, but he was absolutely right when he wrote, "Lord Sydenham,
whether intending it or not, did concede Responsible Government
practically, by the arrangements which he adopted, although the full
extent of the concession was not so glaringly manifested during his
administration as in that of his successor."[39]
Canadian conditions were, in fact, evolving for themselves a new
system--Home Rule with its limits and conditions left as vague as
possible--and that new system contradicted the very postulates of
Russell's doctrine. It was only when the system of Russell became
incarnate in a governor, Lord Metcalfe, and when the opposing facts
also took personal form in the La Fontaine-Baldwin ministry, that both
in Canada and Britain men came to see that two contradictory policies
faced each other, and that one or other alternative must be chosen. To
Elgin fell the honour not merely of seeing the need to choose the
Canadian alternative, but also of recognizing the conditions under
which the new plan would bring a deeper loyalty, and a more lasting
union with Britain, as well as political content to Canada.
[1] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 24 February, 1847. It
would be wrong to call Cathcart the "acting governor-general"; yet
apart from military matters that term describes his position in civil
matters not inadequately.
[2] Walrond, Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin, p. 424. "During a
public service of twenty-five years I have always sided with the weaker
party."
[3] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey on Grey's Colonial Policy,
8 October, 1852.
[4] Gladstone to Cathcart, 3 February, 1846. The italics are my own.
[5] W. H. Draper to the Earl Cathcart, in Pope, Life of Sir John
Macdonald, i. pp. 43-4.
[6] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 24 February, 1847.
[7] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 26 April, 1847.
[8] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, enclosing a note from
Col. Tache, 27 February, 1847.
[9] Ibid.: Elgin to Grey, 28 June, 1847.
[10] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 7 May, 1847.
[11] Ibid.: Elgin to Grey, 27 March, 1847.
[12] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 13 July, 1847.
[13] La Revue Canadienne, 21 December, 1847.
[14] The speech of the governor-general in proroguing Parliament, 1848.
[15] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 22 February, 1848.
[16] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 17 March, 1848.
[17] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 5 February, 1848.
[18] Elgin refers (11 June, 1849) to "military men, most of whom, I
regret to say, consider my ministers and myself little better than
rebels."
[19] Episodes in a Life of Adventure, p. 57.
[20] The obvious point, made by the Tories in Canada, and by Gladstone
in England, was that the new scheme of compensation was certain to
recompense many who had actually been in arms in the Rebellion,
although their guilt might not be provable in a court of law. See
Gladstone in Hansard, 14 June, 1849.
[21] Elgin to Grey, concerning Grey's Colonial Policy, 8 October,
1852. Metcalfe's policy in the matter had really forced Elgin's hand.
[22] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 14 March, 1849.
[23] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 12 April, 1849.
[24] Elgin's letter of 8 October, 1852, criticizing Grey's book. The
italics are my own.
[25] Elgin kept very closely in touch with the sentiments of the
Canadian press, French and English. See his letters passim.
[26] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 4 May, 1848.
[27] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 7 January, 1848.
[28] Ibid.: Elgin to Grey, 4 May, 1848.
[29] See an interesting reference in a letter to Sir Charles Wood,
written from India. Walrond, op. cit. pp. 419-20.
[30] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 16 November, 1848.
[31] Walrond, p. 105.
[32] Mrs. Oliphant, Life of Laurence Oliphant, i. p. 120.
[33] L. Oliphant, Episodes in a Life of Adventure, p. 56.
[34] For Grey's mature position, see below, in Chapter VII.
[35] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Grey to Elgin, 27 July, 1848.
[36] Ibid.: Grey to Elgin, 20 July, 1849.
[37] The letter, which may be found in Walrond's Life of Lord Elgin,
pp. 115-20, ought to be read from its first word to its last.
[38] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 7 October, 1849.
[39] Kaye, Papers and Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe, p. 414.