Community

History

To understand the political evolution of Canada it is essential to begin with a study of the elements of Canadian society. Canadian constitutionalists would have written to better purpose, had they followed the example of the Earl of Durham, in whose Report the concluding practical suggestions develop naturally from the vivid social details which occupy its earlier pages, and raise it to the level of literature. In pioneering communities there is no such thing as the constitution, or politics, per se; and the relation between the facts, sordid and mean as they often are, of the life of the people, and the growth of institutions and political theories, is fundamental.

Canadian society, in 1839 and long afterwards, was dominated by the physical characteristics of the seven hundred miles of country which stretched from Quebec to the shores of Lake Huron, with {9} its long water-front and timid expansion, north and south; its forests stubbornly resisting the axes of the settlers; its severe extremities of heat and cold; the innumerable inconveniences inflicted by its uncultivated wastes on those who first invaded it; and the imperfect lines of land communication which multiplied all distances in Canada at least four-fold. It was perhaps this sense of distance, and difficulty of locomotion, which first impressed the settler and the visitor. To begin with, the colony was, for practical purposes, more than a month’s distance from the centre of government. (…)

Straggling along these 700 miles, although here and there concentrated into centres like Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto, was a population numbering well over a million, which from its internal divisions, its differences in origin and disposition, and its relation to the British government, constituted the central problem at the time in British colonial politics. The French population formed, naturally, the chief difficulty. Thanks to the terms of the surrender in 1763, and the policy of Dorchester, a unit which called itself la nation Canadienne had been formed, nationalité had become a force in Lower Canada, imperfectly appreciated even by the leaders of the progressive movement in England and Western Canada. In the Eastern townships, and in Quebec and Montreal, flourishing and highly organized British societies existed. The Rebellion had found sturdy opponents in the British militia from the townships, and the constitutional societies of Quebec and Montreal expressed, in innumerable resolutions and addresses, the British point of view. But Lower Canada was for practical purposes a French unit, Roman Catholic in religion, and, in structure, semifeudal.

In the cities, the national self-consciousness of the French was most conspicuously present; and leaders like Papineau, La Fontaine, and Cartier proved the reality of French culture and political skill. Below the higher classes, Durham and Metcalfe noticed that in Lower Canada the facilities given by the church for higher education produced a class of smaller professional men, from whose number the ordinary politicians and agitators were drawn. To the church they owed their entrance into the world of ideas; but apparently they were little more loyal to the clergy than they were to Britain. “I am led to believe,” wrote Metcalfe in 1845, “that the influence of the clergy is not predominant, among the French-Canadian people, and that the avocat, the notary, and the doctor, generally disposed to be political demagogues, and most of them hostile to the British government, are the parties who exercise the greatest influence. Whatever power the clergy might have acting along with these demagogues, it would, I fear, be slight when exercised in opposition to them.”

These active, critical, political groups were not, however, representative of French Canada. So long as their racial pride remained unhurt, the French community was profoundly conservative. It was noticed that the rebels of 1837 and 1838 had received no support from the Catholic priesthood; and in a country where the reverence for that ancient form of Christianity was, in spite of Metcalfe’s opinion to the contrary, profound, it was unlikely that any anti-religious political movement could make much permanent headway. Devoted to their religion, and controlled more especially in education by their priests, the habitants formed the peculiar people of the American continent. Education flourished not at all among the rank and file. Arthur Buller found the majority of those whom he met either not able to write, or able to write little more than their names. The women, he said, were the active, bustling portion of the habitants, thanks to the admirable and yet inexpensive training to be had in the nunneries. As for the men, they farmed and lived as their fathers had done before them. They cleared their land, or tilled it where it had been cleared, and thought little of improvement or change. M’Taggart, whose work on the Rideau Canal, made him an expert in Canadian labour, much preferred French Canadians to the Irish as labourers, and thought them “kind, tender-hearted, very social, no way very ambitious, nor industrious, rarely speculative.”

To the Canadian commonwealth, the French population furnished a few really admirable statesmen; a dominant and loyal church; some groups of professional men, disappointed and discontented sons of humble parents, too proud to sink to the level of their uninstructed youth, and without the opportunity of rising higher; and a great mass of men who hewed wood and drew water, not for a master, but for themselves, submissive to the church, and well-disposed, but ignorant, and at the mercy of any clever demagogue who might raise the cry of nationalism. Still, when nationality remained unchallenged, the French-Canadians were at least what, till recently, they remained, the most purely conservative element in Canada.

The second element, in point of stability and importance, in the Canadian population was that of the United Empire Loyalists, the remnants of a former British supremacy in the United States. They had proved their steadfastness and courage by their refusal to accept the rules of the new republic; and their arrival in Canada gave that country an aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon origin to counterbalance that of the seigneurs on the Lower St. Lawrence. The men had in many cases been trained to arms in the revolutionary war, and they served a second and perhaps a harder apprenticeship in the Canadian forests. They had formed the centre of resistance to American attacks in the war of 1812. Their sons and grandsons had once more exhibited the hereditary loyalty of the group, in resisting the rebels of 1837-38; and Metcalfe, who was their best friend among the governors of the United Provinces, justly {18} looked on them as the most conspicuous examples of devotion to connection with the British Empire, and loyal subjection to the Crown. Robinsons, Cartwrights, Ryersons, and a score of other well-known families, proved, generation after generation, by their sustained public capacity, how considerably the struggle for existence, operating on sound human material, may raise the average of talent and energy.

The tendency of the Loyalists to conservatism was, under the circumstances, only natural. Their possession, for a time, of all the places in Upper Canada which were worth holding, was the consequence of their priority in tenure, and of their conspicuous pre-eminence in political ingenuity. Critics of a later date forgot, and still forget, in their wholesale indictment of the Family Compact, that the Loyalist group called by that name had earned their places by genuine ability. If, like other aristocracies, they found it hard to mark the precise moment for retirement before the rise of democracy, their excuse must be found in their consciousness of high public spirit and their hereditary talents for administration. (…)

French Canadians and United Empire Loyalists constituted the stable factors in Canadian public life; but the process of immigration, which the years of rebellion checked only for a time, had by 1840 prepared another element, and that the most incalculable and disturbing both socially and politically. Indeed the real problem of Canadian public life lay simply in the influence of the humbler class of immigrants on existing administration and opinion. It was natural for the other settlers and the governing class to regard the larger part of the new population as beneath the political level. (…)

Three powerful influences helped to shape the young Canadian community and to give it some appearance of unity—education, religion, and politics. (…) (1)

Resources

Notes

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

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Law is our Passion

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This entry was last updated: October 29, 2016