Lord Durham in Canada

That ominous date, 1837, marks a certain climax or culmination in the political development of Canada. The constitution of the country now works with so little friction that those who have not read history assume that it must always have worked so. There is a real danger in forgetting that, not so very long ago, the whole machinery of government in one province broke down, that for months, if not for years, it looked as if civil government in Lower Canada had come to an end, as if the colonial system of Britain had failed beyond all hope. Deus nobis haec otia fecit. But Canada’s present tranquillity did not come about by miracle; it came about through the efforts of faulty men contending for political principles in which they believed and for which they were even ready to die. The rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada, and what led up to them, the origins and causes of these rebellions, must be understood if the subsequent warfare of parties and the evolution of the scattered colonies of British North America into the compact united Dominion of Canada are not to be a confused and meaningless tale. (The story of the rebellions will be found in two other volumes of the present Series, The Family Compact and The Patriotes of ’37, For earlier cognate history see The Father of British Canada and The United Empire Loyalists).

Futile and pitiful as were the rebellions, whether regarded as attempts to set up new government or as military adventures, they had widespread and most serious consequences within and without the country. In Britain the news caused consternation. Two more American colonies were in revolt. Battles had been fought and British troops had been defeated. These might prove, as thought Storrow Brown, one of the leaders of the ‘Sons of Liberty’ in Lower Canada, so many Lexingtons, with a Saratoga and a Yorktown to follow. Sir John Colborne, the commander-in-chief, was asking for reinforcements. In Lower Canada civil government was at an end. There was danger of international complications. For disorders almost without precedent the British parliament found an almost unprecedented remedy. It invested one man with extraordinary powers. He was to be captain-general and commander-in-chief over the provinces of British North America, and also ‘High Commissioner for the adjustment of certain important questions depending in the … Provinces of Lower and Upper Canada respecting the form and future government of the said Provinces.’ He was given ‘full power and authority … by all lawful ways and means, to inquire into, and, as far as may be possible, to adjust all questions … respecting the Form and Administration of the Civil Government’ of the provinces as aforesaid. These extraordinary powers were conferred upon a distinguished politician in the name of the young Queen Victoria and during her pleasure. The usual and formal language of the commission, ‘especial trust and confidence in the courage, prudence, and loyalty’ of the commissioner, has in this case deep meaning; for courage, prudence, and loyalty were all needed, and were all to be put to the test.

The man born for the crisis was a type of a class hardly to be understood by the Canadian democracy. He was an aristocratic radical. His recently acquired title, Lord Durham, must not be allowed to obscure the fact that he was a Lambton, the head of an old county family, which was entitled by its long descent to look down upon half the House of Peers as parvenus. At the family seat, Lambton Castle, in the county of Durham, Lambton after Lambton had lived and reigned like a petty prince. There John George was born in August 1792. His father had been a Whig, a consistent friend of Charles James Fox, at a time when opposition to the government, owing to the wars with France, meant social ostracism; and he had refused a peerage. The son had enjoyed the usual advantages of the young Englishman in his position. He had been educated at Eton and at the university of Cambridge. Three years in a crack cavalry regiment at a time when all England was under arms could have done little to lessen his feeling for his caste. A Gretna Green marriage with an heiress, while he was yet a minor, is characteristic of his impetuous temperament, as is also a duel which he fought with a Mr Beaumont in 1820 during the heat of an election contest. After the period of political reaction following Waterloo, reaction in which all Europe shared, England proceeded on the path of reform towards a modified democracy; and Lambton, entering parliament at the lucky moment, found himself on the crest of the wave.

His Whig principles had gained the victory; and his personal ability and energy set him among the leaders of the new reform movement. He was a son-in-law of Earl Grey, the author of the Reform Bill of 1832, and he became a member of the Grey Cabinet. Before the Canadian crisis he had shown his ability to cope with a difficult situation in a diplomatic mission to Russia, where he is said to have succeeded by the exercise of tact. He was nicknamed ‘Radical Jack,’ but any one less ‘democratic,’ as the term is commonly understood, it would be hard to find. He surrounded himself with almost regal state during his brief overlordship of Canada. In Quebec, at the Castle of St Louis, he lived like a prince. Many tales are told of his arrogant self-assertion and hauteur. In person he was strikingly handsome. Lawrence painted him when a boy. He was an able public speaker. He had a fiery temper which made co-operation with him almost impossible, and which his weak health no doubt aggravated. He was vain and ambitious. But he was gifted with powers of political insight. He possessed a febrile energy and an earnest desire to serve the common weal. Such was the physician chosen by the British government to cure the cankers of misrule and disaffection in the body politic of Canada. (…)

If Durham had been slow in setting out for the scene of his labours, he wasted no time in attacking his problems upon his arrival in Canada. ‘Princely in his style of living, indefatigable in business, energetic and decided, though haughty in manner, and desirous to benefit the Canadas,’ is the judgment of a contemporary upon the new ruler. On the day he was sworn to office he issued his first proclamation. Its most significant statements are: ‘The honest and conscientious advocates of reform … will receive from me, without distinction of party, race, or politics, that assistance and encouragement which their patriotism has a right to command … but the disturbers of the public peace, the violators of the law, the enemies of the Crown and of the British Empire will find in me an uncompromising opponent, determined to put in force against them all the powers civil and military with which I have been invested.’ It was a policy of firmness united to conciliation that Durham announced. He came bearing the sheathed sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other. The proclamation was well received; the Canadians were ready to accept him as ‘a friend and arbitrator.’ He was to earn the right to both titles.

Durham was determined to begin with a clean slate. With a characteristic disregard for precedent, he dismissed the existing Executive Council as well as Colborne’s special band of advisers, and formed two new councils in their place, consisting of members of his personal staff, military officers, Canadian judges, the provincial secretary, and the commissary-general. Together they formed a committee of investigation and advice; and, being composed of both local and non-local elements, it was a committee specially fitted to supply the necessary information, and to judge all questions dispassionately from an outside point of view. This committee acting with the High Commissioner took the place of regular constitutional government in Lower Canada. It was an arbitrary makeshift adopted to meet a crisis. (…)

Durham took prompt action. He offered a reward of a thousand pounds for such information as should bring the guilty persons to trial in an American, not a Canadian, court. Thereby he said in effect, ‘This is not an international affair. It is a plain offence against the laws of the United States, and I am confident that the United States desires to prevent such outrages.’ He followed up this bold declaration of faith in American justice by sending his brother-in-law, Colonel Grey of the 71st Regiment, to Washington to lay the facts before President Van Buren and to remonstrate vigorously against the laxity which permitted an armed force to organize within the borders of the Republic for an attack upon its peaceful neighbour. Such laxity was against the law of nations. As a result of Durham’s spirited action, the military forces on both sides of the boundary-line worked in concert to put down such lawlessness. President Van Buren’s attitude, however, cost him his popularity in his own country.

The most pressing and most thorny question was how to deal with the hundreds of prisoners who, since the rebellion, had filled the Canadian jails. A large number of these were only suspected of treason; some had been taken in the act of rebellion; and some were confined as ringleaders, charged with crimes no government could overlook and hope to survive. In some countries the solution would have been a simple one: the prisoners would have been backed against the nearest wall and fusilladed in batches, as the Communists were dealt with in Paris in the red quarter of the year 1871. Even in Canada there were hideous cries for bloody reprisals. But the ingrained British habit of giving the worst criminal a fair trial blocked such a ready and easy way of restoring tranquillity. Still, a fair trial was impossible.

In the temper then prevailing in the province no French jury would condemn, no English jury would acquit, a Frenchman charged with treason, however great or slight his fault might prove to be. The process of trying so many hundreds of prisoners would be simply so many examples of the law’s burdensome delay. To leave them to rot in prison, as King Bomba left political offenders against his rule, was unthinkable. Durham met the difficulty in a bold and merciful way. The young Queen was crowned on June 28, 1838. Such an event is always a season of rejoicing and an opportunity for exercising the royal clemency in the liberation of captives. Following this excellent custom, Durham proclaimed on that day an amnesty in his sovereign’s name; and, in a month after his arrival, he gave freedom to hundreds of unfortunates, who had endured many hardships in the old, cruel jails of the time, in addition to the tortures of suspense as to their ultimate fate.

There were some who could not be so released. They were only eight in number, but they were such men as Wolfred Nelson and Robert Bouchette, whose treason was open and notorious. They knew, and Durham knew, that they could not obtain a fair trial. Therefore the High Commissioner overleapt the law, and by an ordinance banished these ringleaders to Bermuda during Her Majesty’s pleasure. Durham was much pleased at this happy solution of a difficult and delicate problem. He congratulated himself, as well he might, on having terminated a rebellion without shedding a drop of blood. ‘The guilty have received justice, the misguided, mercy,’ he wrote to the Queen, ‘but at the same time, security is afforded to the loyal and peaceable subjects of this hitherto distracted Province.’ Furthermore, his proceedings had been ‘approved by all parties—Sir J. Colborne and all the British party, the Canadians and all the French party.’ Durham fancied that this question was now settled, and that he could proceed unhampered with his main task of reconstruction. But his justifiable satisfaction was not to last long.

While the High Commissioner was labouring in Canada, as few officials have ever laboured, for the good of the Empire, his enemies and his lukewarm friends in England were between them preparing his downfall. Of his foes, the most bitter and unscrupulous was Brougham, a political Ishmael, a curious compound of malignity and versatile intellectual power. He had criticized Durham’s delay in starting for Canada; and he was only too glad of the handle which the autocratic, czar-like ordinance of banishment to Bermuda offered him against his enemy. It is nearly always in the power of a party politician to distort and misrepresent the act of an opponent, however just or blameless that act may be. Brougham made a great pother about the rights of freemen, usurpation, dictatorship. As a lawyer he raised the legal point, that Durham could not banish offenders from Canada to a colony over which he had no jurisdiction. He enlisted other lawyers on his side to attack the composition of Durham’s council.

The storm Brougham raised might have done no harm, if Durham’s political allies had stood by him like men. But the prime minister Melbourne, always a timorous friend, bent before the blast, and Durham’s ordinance was disallowed. The High Commissioner, who had been granted such great powers, was held to have exceeded those powers. Durham belonged to the caste which felt a stain upon its honour like a wound. The disallowance of his ordinance by the home authorities was a blow fair in the face. It put an end to his career in Canada, by undermining his authority. In those days of slow communication the news of the disallowance reached him tardily. By a side wind, from an American newspaper, he first learned the fact on the twenty-fifth of September. He at once sent in his resignation, told the people of Canada the reason why in a proclamation, and as soon as possible left the country for ever. Brougham was burned in effigy at Quebec. The lucky eight, already in Bermuda, were speedily released. Never did leaders of an unsuccessful rebellion suffer less for their indiscretion. From Bermuda they proceeded to New York to renew their agitation. On the first of November Durham left Quebec, as he had entered that city, with all the pomp of military pageantry and in a universal display of public interest. He came in a crisis; he left amid a crisis. He had spent five months in office, almost the exact term for which the Romans chose their chief magistrate in a national emergency and named him dictator. (…)

In Upper Canada Durham found a different situation. There the people were not ‘slavish tools of a narrow official clique or a few purse-proud merchants,’ but ‘hardy farmers and humble mechanics composing a very independent, not very manageable, and sometimes a rather turbulent democracy.’ The trouble was that a small party had secured a monopoly of power and resisted the lawful efforts of moderate reformers to establish a truly democratic form of government. Ill-balanced extremists had taken up arms; but the sound political instinct of the vast majority was against them. Here, too, the original difficulties had been complicated by official ignorance in England and the unwisdom of authorities on the spot. The result was that these ‘ample and fertile territories’ were in a backward, almost desperate, condition. Their poverty and stagnation were a depressing contrast to the prosperity and exhilarating stir of the great American democracy.

The other outlying provinces presented no such serious problems. There were various anomalies and difficulties; but they were on their way to removal.

The ‘evils which no civilized community could bear’ were to be cured by a legislative union of the Canadas. The time had gone by for a federal union. A door must be either open or shut; the French province must become definitely a British province and find its place in the Empire. To end the everlasting deadlock between the governor and the representatives of the people, the Executive should be made responsible to the Assembly; and, in order to bring the scattered provinces closer together, an inter-colonial railway should be built. In other words, the obsolete, bad system of colonial government must undergo radical reform, both within and without, because ‘while the present state of things is allowed to last, the actual inhabitants of these provinces have no security for person or property, no enjoyment of what they possess, no stimulus to industry.’

The story of how this reform was undertaken, and of how, in spite of many obstacles, it was brought to a triumphant success, must always remain one of the most important chapters in the political history of Canada. (1)

Resources

Notes

1. Archibald MacMechan, “Popular Govrerment. A Chronicle of the Union of 1841” (1916), Toronto, Glasgow, Brook and Company

Lord Elgin in Canada

Life and Work

(T)he 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. (…)

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 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. (…)

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, must have liberty to misgovern themselves. (…)

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 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.”

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.” 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. (…)

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. (…) 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.

Elgin, then, found a distracted ministry, a doubtful Assembly, and an irritated country. (…) 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 Taché, attempted to approach them, he found in none of them any disposition to enter into alliance with the existing ministry. 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. (…)

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.” 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 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.”

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 modération de nos chefs politiques a puissamment contribué à placer notre parti dans la position avantageuse qu’il occupe maintenant.” 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.”

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 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.” 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.”

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. (…)

Since the first general election had proved beyond a doubt that Canadians desired a progressive ministry, he made the change with perfect success, and remained a consistent guide and friend to his new ministers. (…)

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. 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.”

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 (see the Rebellion Losses Bill) (…)

. 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.” 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.

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.

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.”

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 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. (…) 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 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.” 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.” 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 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”; and again, “There was concluded in 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.”

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. (…)

(A)n 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 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. (…)

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.” 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 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. (…)

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)

Resources

Notes

1. J. L. Morison, “British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government 1839-1854” (1919), Toronto, S. B. Gundy

See Also