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The period of Canadian history terminating with the Union of the Canadas presents a vivid contrast to the preceding period which ended with the Cession.

Through the French period there breathes the spirit of romance. The voyageur exploring unknown rivers and untracked forests, the heroic missionary facing death in its most fearful forms, the sturdy Norman peasant fighting the wilderness and having at the same time to keep watch and ward against the treacherous and crafty Indian, the newness and strangeness of existence in a world so little known, give to the early history of Canada a perennial fascination.

Even the country life of the more peaceful and settled days has a colour and character entirely its own. We see transplanted to the new world the system of feudalism, an institution so venerable and so penetrated with historical associations that to find it on the virgin soil of Canada strikes us with a shock of surprise such as one might feel at meeting a knight in chain armour on the banks of the St Lawrence.

It is true that the feudalism of Canada was of a very benignant type, and it is by no means unlikely that its transplantation into that country by the French statesmen of the time was the wisest thing that could have been done. For there was, in fact, in this new world a reproduction of some of the conditions out of which European feudalism had sprung.

In the early days of that great system in Europe it was because the tillers of the soil had to be ready at any moment to take arms against savage invaders in the defence of their homes that it was of prime importance to have in every community a leader to organize the little fighting force. There was the same vital need for such a lord and leader in the seventeenth century in Canada as in the seventh century in Gaul. And when the daily peril from the redskins had passed away, the seigniory was still a most useful bond to hold together the simple, easily contented habitants. The seigneur and the curé—natural and traditional allies—were the leaders, advisers and friends of the peasants grouped round the manoir.

The Cession inevitably struck a deadly blow at this system, though it actually lingered on until after the Union. Many of the seigniories had passed into English hands, and a Protestant seigneur, who probably knew little or no French, fitted very ill into the old scheme. He might be well disposed towards his feudal tenants, but between him and them there could hardly exist that happy and patriarchal relation born of mutual sympathy and intimate knowledge, of which we have such pleasant pictures under the ancien régime in Canada. One of the marked features of British rule between the Cession and the Union is the decay of the feudal system and its growing unpopularity.

In this period also Canadian affairs become detached from European politics. For many years before the Cession the main interest centred on the struggle between France and England for the new world. It was a great drama played on a great stage. The eyes of Europe were fixed on Canada because it was there that European history was being made. But when France, worn out and beaten, had at length withdrawn from the contest, continental Europe had no longer much concern with a remote wilderness like Canada. Nor was it to be expected, or indeed to be desired, that England—the new sovereign power—should take any very acute interest in Canadian affairs. She could know but little of their true meaning and purport, and interference, however well meant, was likely to do more harm than good.

That the chief officials of the colony should be appointed by the governor, and that he should receive their advice without being by any means bound to follow it, were things which at that time were taken for granted. The plain commonsense which has never been wanting in England told her statesmen that the wisest plan was to leave Canada alone as far as possible to work out for herself her own destinies, which, as it seemed then, were not likely to be of special importance to the world in general. In the eighteenth century no one foresaw, or was in the least likely to foresee, that Canada was ever going to be of much consequence except to Canadians, nor were these expected to become very numerous.

The great difficulty which beset the English governors of the early period was to induce Downing Street to take any interest in the petty contentions which arose between the governor and the governed in these distant settlements. If things came to a head it was necessary on general principles to back up the governor, but the constant prayer of those at the Colonial Office was that such intervention should not be necessary. To some extent this was due, no doubt, to the deep-grained unwillingness of government officials at all times to interfere in matters which may lead them into difficulty, and out of which, in any event, no political capital can be made. But deeper down there was also the instinctive feeling that all interference from such a distance was dangerous.

At no time during the eighty years before the Union was there any approach to a good understanding between the two races in Canada, and about 1774, and again in 1837, the hostility between them was positively dangerous. In any judgment upon the disputes between them careful account must be taken of their respective numbers. According to such evidence as is available the French Canadians in 1760 were about 65,000, while the English were in all about 300. The population, except from 12,000 to 15,000, was all rural; Quebec had 6700 souls and Montreal 4000. After the Conquest the English population increased rather rapidly by the coming in of traders, but, although there has been some little dispute as to their numbers, it is safe to say that for many years the English formed less than five per cent of the population. In this state of matters, even if there had been no treaty obligations, the only sound policy was to conciliate the French population so far as was consistent with safety, and to make them feel that their customs and institutions would not be interfered with needlessly under British rule. But this was just the policy which the British settlers could not stomach. They demanded in season and out of season that the English laws and the English language ought to prevail in Canada, and that the government of the country should be entrusted to their hands. Forming not more than five per cent of the population, they clamoured for an assembly from which their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects—the vast majority of the people—would be excluded by their inability to take the oath renouncing the authority of the pope. General Murray, who had a low opinion of the English settlers which he expressed with remarkable freedom, described them as 'licentious fanatics,' and said, 'Nothing will satisfy them but the expulsion of the French Canadians.' Whether this absurd idea was ever seriously cherished may be doubted, but certainly the 'king's old subjects,' as they were fond of styling themselves, advanced claims which the home government was not at all disposed to recognize.

The Quebec Act of 1774 was the final answer to these extravagant pretensions. It was in a sense a formal disavowal by the British government of any desire to anglicize the Province of Quebec. It satisfied the reasonable demands of the French Canadians by declaring that all questions concerning property and civil rights should be decided by the French law, it left to the Roman Catholics the free exercise of their religion, gave the clergy the right to levy tithes on members of their communion, and amended the oath of allegiance so as to make it possible for a Roman Catholic to take it without doing violence to his conscience.

It is easy for people at the present day to say that all this was a fatal mistake and that the right course would have been to take measures to stamp out the French law and the French language. A careful study of the contemporary documents has convinced the writer, at any rate, that the result of such a policy would have been to drive the French Canadians into the arms of the American revolutionaries. Montreal would no doubt have spoken English, but if so, it would have been in the State instead of in the Province of Quebec. It was precisely because the French Canadians felt that they had been treated with justice and even with generosity by the British crown, that when the crisis came so soon afterwards they turned a deaf ear to the advances of the Americans. They were at that time almost entirely illiterate, and moved this way or that at the bidding of the priests and the seigneurs, who were their only leaders, and at this critical moment the whole influence of these leaders was exerted to restrain them, and they were threatened with excommunication if they joined the Americans. The priests and the seigneurs were strongly in favour of British connection because the Quebec Act had guaranteed to them the rights which they most valued. Any one who supposes that if the leaders had gone over to the side of the revolutionaries the people would have remained behind fails, in my judgment, to understand the conditions of society at that time in Canada.

The beginning of this first period of British rule saw Canada (omitting the Maritime Provinces) a colony of French habitants. Its close saw two flourishing provinces, which, in spite of civil dissensions and other adverse circumstances, had a number of large and prosperous cities, and more than the beginnings of great commercial interests. English, which in 1763 was spoken by a few hundreds of the people of Canada, was in 1837 the language of 550,000 out of the million inhabitants of the two provinces.

Adam Lymburner, who, as agent of the British part of the population, spoke at the bar of the Imperial House of Commons in 1791 against the formation of the new province of Upper Canada, said: 'What kind of a government must that upper part of the country form? It will be the very mockery of a province, three or four thousand families scattered over a country some hundred miles in length, not having a single town and scarcely a village in the whole extent; it is only making weakness more feeble and dividing the strength of the province to no purpose.' In 1837 Upper Canada had reached a population of 400,000, and to-day he would be a bold man who spoke of Ontario as the 'mockery of a province.'

Of the War of 1812 and the circumstances connected with it nothing need here be said except that it illustrated again the wisdom of the policy embodied in the Quebec Act. The Americans reckoned that the French Canadians, if they did not actually join forces with them, would at the worst remain neutral. This, to a considerable extent, explains their absolute confidence in the success of the invasion. Thomas Jefferson in the spring of 1812 wrote: 'The acquisition of Canada this year as far as the neighbourhood of Quebec will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack upon Halifax and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.' The defeat they sustained at Châteauguay from the little force of French Canadians contributed in no small measure to the dispelling of these illusions as to the easy conquest of Canada.

The history of Lower Canada between the Constitutional Act and the Union Act is little more than that of the struggle between the two races for supremacy. The position of each of them is perfectly intelligible and natural, and it is not necessary to impute blame to either for striving to attain its own ends. As the two parties drew farther and farther apart, and as the issues became more sharply defined, it was evident that no reconciliation between the policies of the two races was feasible, and that Lower Canada left to herself could never work out her own salvation.

The English-speaking part of the population was mainly gathered together in the cities of Quebec and Montreal, except for the Eastern Townships, where considerable sections of the country had been settled by people of British stock, many of whom were from the United States. Partly owing to insufficient representation in the assembly, and partly to the want of roads, this group of farmers sparsely scattered over a large territory could not keep in touch with each other or with the cities, and was able to render but little assistance to their compatriots. In the main, therefore, we have to regard the British party as townsfolk. They were, with few exceptions, merchants with their families and dependants. Their main desire was to improve the means of communication by land and water and to develop the exchange of commodities with the United States, with England and with foreign countries. The trade with the other provinces was inconsiderable. They felt that Canada even then had great commercial possibilities, and that they themselves had the capital and energy to enable them to profit by these opportunities if they could be assisted by simple and just laws and by a good administration. They looked upon the French Canadians as a conquered people whose tenacity in clinging to their national customs and to the French laws and language deserved the utmost reprobation. Their dream was to make Canada a new England beyond the seas. It was not enough that the English flag floated over it. A country won by force of arms could not be allowed to perpetuate the speech and institutions of England's hereditary enemy. The French laws, to which they were subject, they regarded with distrust and dislike. Nor can any honest student deny that in this respect they had real and important grievances. In principle the body of the civil law was the French law as it had been received in Canada before the Quebec Act of 1774. But to persons unacquainted with the French language that law was totally inaccessible, and even the French-Canadian lawyer had to work with very unsatisfactory materials. In France the obscurity and confusion of the old law had been to a great extent cleared away by the Code Napoléon and by the admirable writings of the early commentators on that great monument of the French genius for lucidity. But the Code Napoléon was a very unsafe guide to the law of Lower Canada because it was not specially based on the Custom of Paris, and in innumerable matters of detail it had broken away from the old law. As regards the law of land tenure and succession the lawyer in Canada knew pretty well where he was. But other branches of the law, and more particularly the commercial law, with which the trading class was most concerned, were in a state of the greatest obscurity. Moreover the jury system, whether in criminal or in commercial matters, was singularly ill adapted to a country divided, as Lower Canada was, into two hostile camps. In criminal cases the juries were apt to show a strong bias in favour of the accused if he belonged to their race, and in commercial cases the British trader felt that the view of the facts which would be taken by the French members of the jury would inevitably be coloured by race prejudice.

In the neighbouring states roads and canals were being constructed, and the local governments were lending every aid to the commercial class in its efforts to develop the trade and resources of the country. In Lower Canada any proposal made by the British merchants for the expenditure of public money on schemes of this kind was sure to be blocked by the sullen opposition of a majority composed of little farmers incapable of any broad view. The English party hoped against hope that there would be such an immigration as would convert their minority into a majority, but as time went on the futility of these hopes became apparent. The separation of Upper Canada in 1791 was a severe blow, because it weakened the English party by taking away from them some ten thousand settlers whom they could ill spare, but the effect of the separation at the time was trifling compared with its consequences in the years which followed. The English in Lower Canada saw with something like dismay the tide of immigration flowing steadily past them. Settlers of English speech, whether coming from Great Britain or from the United States, were not likely to be attracted by the prospect of living in a French country whose backward condition and internal dissensions were notorious. With pardonable envy they saw Upper Canada growing and prospering with just the kind of population which they desired for their own province, the English speech spoken, the English law followed, the English Church honoured and favoured. The English mark was being set very deeply upon Upper Canada, and a naturalist in search of the typical John Bull would have been as likely to find a perfect specimen at York, Upper Canada, as at York in England.

Is it any wonder that the English in Lower Canada felt the iron entering into their souls? Swamped by a hostile majority of foreigners (for by a somewhat humorous exercise of imagination they regarded themselves and not the French Canadians as the true children of the soil), to whom could they turn for comfort and support but to England and to the governors who represented the crown? In their eyes the mission of the governor was to be their shield and buckler against their hereditary enemies, and, as a matter of fact, this was precisely the rôle that most of the governors were destined to play whether they liked it or not. They came out anxious to hold the balance true, to find a just mean between the two extremes, to try to reconcile conflicting views and to avoid committing themselves definitely to either side in this bitter and long-protracted struggle. The circumstances were too strong for them. Joseph Howe went so far as to say that most governors came out so ignorant of the colony that for the first six or twelve months they were like overgrown boys at school. The irresponsible executive councillors, the chief justice, the attorney-general and the rest were the schoolmasters. Howe says:

It is mere mockery to tell us that the Governor himself is responsible. He must carry on the government by and with the few officials whom he finds in possession when he arrives. He may flutter and struggle in the net, as some well-meaning Governors have done, but he must at last resign himself to his fate and like a snared bird be content with the narrow limits assigned him by his keepers. I have known a Governor bullied, sneered at, and almost shut out of society while his obstinate resistance to the system created a suspicion that he might not become its victim; but I never knew one who, even with the best intentions and the full concurrence and support of the representative branch, backed by the confidence of his Sovereign, was able to contend on anything like fair terms with the small knot of functionaries who form the Councils, fill the offices and wield the powers of the government.

The political creed of the English party, with a comparatively few striking exceptions, was simple enough. In its eyes the French were at bottom traitors, waiting for an opportunity to shake off their allegiance; generosity would be thrown away upon them, and any power which was placed in their hands would be used to further their nefarious designs. The governor may have doubted sometimes whether the French were as black as they were painted, but he ended by feeling that as the king's representative it was his duty to support those who, whatever their prejudices might be, were undeniably devoted heart and soul to the British connection.

To the English party the proposal for a reunion of the two Canadas was as welcome as the sight of a sail to a shipwrecked crew. It was true that, although a minority, it had always governed Lower Canada, but with what infinite pains had the machinery of government been made to work. Hampered and worried at every turn by the permanent opposition of the assembly, supported as it was by the vast majority of the voters, the mere work of carrying on the administration from day to day had absorbed the energies of the governing class. It had been hopeless to think of undertaking the public works, the legal reforms, and, in short, the many problems, executive and legislative, on the happy solution of which the progress of the country depended.

Now the English in Lower Canada would no longer be isolated. Their brethren in Upper Canada might be depended on to support those progressive measures which had fared so badly in the past, and in the new house they would have a majority. For though Upper Canada had only 465,000 persons against 691,000 in Lower Canada, each of the old provinces was to have an equal number of members in the new assembly. Lord Durham had made no secret of the fact that the main motive of the union which he recommended was to bring about the gradual anglicization of the whole country. This made the whole scheme, and Durham as its father, abhorrent to the French Canadians.

It is now time to turn for a moment to the other side of the medal. The French had been in Quebec for a century and a half before the English came. The lives of countless brave men and women had been spent in laying the foundations of civilized life in this vast wilderness. Hardly was there a settlement the name of which was not associated with some story of heroic deeds, or whose soil was not hallowed by the blood of the saints. The Roman Catholic Church had watched over Canada from its early days with anxious solicitude, and nowhere in the world was there a people which clung more closely to the faith of their fathers. The French Canadians moreover had become truly Canadian. Even before the Conquest, in spite of the political tie which bound them to Old France, the mass of the people had lost all vital connection with the country from which they sprang. The peasants and fishermen of Normandy, transplanted to the woods of Canada, were little likely to keep up any correspondence with relations in France even if they had had time and ability to do so. But hardly any of them could write, and of those who possessed that capacity few could afford the expense of getting letters conveyed by such means as then existed. The French officers and gentlemen of family, who to a slight extent had kept in touch with their old home, had, with few exceptions, gone back to France after the Conquest. The priests and nuns who from time to time came over described France after the Revolution as a country smitten by Heaven for its offences and given over to destruction. For a brief space during the Napoleonic age, when it seemed as if the Corsican was to be the master of the world, it was natural that some Canadians should cherish vague hopes of being restored to their old allegiance. But the battle of Waterloo put an end to all dreams of this kind, and the French Canadians ceased to feel any keen interest in the politics of Europe.

For many years after the Conquest the French thought and cared little about political rights. They had been used to autocracy, and hardly understood the pother which the Americans made about the principle that taxation and representation must go together. The creation of the representative assembly under the Constitutional Act they regarded with suspicion, and the act as an instrument for laying upon them heavier burdens. They were determined, however, to maintain inviolate the rights guaranteed to them by the Quebec Act, namely, the free exercise of their religion and the French civil law. Nothing had been said at the Cession about the French language, for the idea of imposing on sixty-five thousand people the language of a minority of a few hundreds was too absurd to occur to any one. As time went on, and as the English population increased around them, the French Canadians came to regard the official recognition of the French language as a matter in which they were vitally interested. So long as their religion, their laws and their language were left undisturbed they were not much troubled by the fact that the governor and his little council of English officials managed the public business of the country. Nothing could have been more fortunate for England than this indifference in regard to politics, for it was out of the question at first to give political power into the hands of a people who had no historic reason for loving British connection and might be disposed to seek support in other quarters. But in the years which followed the War of 1812 the desire to get political power proportionate to their numbers gradually became stronger. Although the mass of the people was still largely illiterate, their leaders had not been blind to what was going on in other countries and even in the Maritime Provinces. The long struggle in England for parliamentary reform turned men's minds even in Canada to a consideration of the basis of government. The French Canadians felt keenly that though they had been conquered they were entitled to the same political rights as other British subjects. That they who had been in Canada a hundred and fifty years before the English should be characterized as foreigners and treated as an inferior race was not to be endured.

The final years of this period are memorable, not only in the history of Canada but in the history of liberty, as those in which the great struggle for responsible government took place. Unhappily in Lower Canada passion ran so high as to make the contest rather a smouldering war between the two races than a political fight between conservatives and reformers. The violence of Papineau and his inveterate hatred of English institutions prevented him drawing to his side those honest and loyal citizens who otherwise would gladly have helped in the cause of reform. Those who were fighting that battle in the other provinces were unwilling to associate themselves with men who made hardly any pretence of loyalty to the British crown. Joseph Howe, the most brilliant of them all, in his speech at Halifax in 1837 said: 'I wish to live and die a British subject, but not a Briton only in the name. Give me—give to my country the blessed privilege of her constitution and her laws; and as our earliest thoughts are trained to reverence the great principles of freedom and responsibility which have made her the wonder of the world, let us be contented with nothing less. Englishmen at home will despise us if we forget the lessons our common ancestors have bequeathed.' And in another speech in the same debate Howe referred to the possibility of his paying a visit to England, and said: 'I trust in God that when that day comes I shall not be compelled to look back with sorrow and degradation to the country I have left behind; that I shall not be forced to confess that, though the British name exists and her language is preserved, we have but a mockery of British institutions; that, when I clasp the hand of an Englishman on the shores of my fatherland he shall not thrill with the conviction that his descendant is little better than a slave.'

But when Howe was invited to lend his moral support to Papineau and his party and to send a consignment of Nova Scotia grievances to be tacked on to the ninety-two which they had enumerated, he stated his misgivings as to the attitude of the French party in Lower Canada with the most perfect frankness, saying indeed that he was convinced 'that an independent existence or a place in the American Confederation is the great object which at least some of the most able and influential of the Papineau party have in view.' And of the ninety-two resolutions, an incredibly verbose and weak composition, Howe says: 'I have rarely seen a more unstatesmanlike and discreditable paper from any legislative body than were the famous ninety-two resolutions. I do not speak so much of their substance as of their style and of there being ninety-two of them.'

Durham was too clear-sighted not to see that much of the strong language of Papineau and his friends was mere claptrap and not to be taken too seriously. Having no chance of getting into power, when promises, even political promises, are said to come home to roost, the members of the assembly were not in the habit of weighing their words very carefully. As Durham put it, 'the colonial demagogue bids high for popularity without the fear of future exposure.' Durham's policy, so amply justified by its success, was to remove the real grievances, and in this way deprive the hot-headed malcontents of any colour of right.

It is the fashion to belittle the Whig statesmen in England for their want of faith in the permanence of the tie between Canada and England, and for supposing that the grant of colonial self-government was but a half-way house to the complete independence of the colonies. This criticism is, on the whole, hardly deserved. Why should we expect them to be wiser on this matter than the Canadians themselves? No Canadian could be more loyal than Howe and no part of Canada more devoted to the British connection than Nova Scotia, yet Howe in various places speaks of the possibility of independence, though he hopes it will not be in his time. And the legislative council of Upper Canada, adopting the report of the Select Committee to which Durham's Report had been referred, expressed the clear opinion that the adoption of 'his lordship's great panacea for all political disorders, "Responsible Government" ... must lead to the overthrow of the great colonial empire of England.' Is it surprising that with such a warning British statesmen should be in no hurry to take a step so hazardous? The men who had fought the battle of reform in England were not the men to suppose that Canada could be kept in the Empire by main force, and when, largely through the dogged pertinacity of Baldwin, it became necessary to grant self-government, they realized how serious an experiment they were making. It would not be possible to produce more weighty testimony for the Whig view of the colonial question in the forties than that of the third Lord Grey, and it would be hard to find a clearer exposition of sane and moderate imperialism than that which is given in the preliminary remarks to his essay on the 'Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell's Administration':

I consider then that the British Colonial Empire ought to be maintained principally because I do not consider that the nation would be justified in throwing off the responsibility it has incurred by the acquisition of this dominion, and because I believe that much of the power and influence of this Country depends upon its having large colonial possessions in different parts of the world. The possession of a number of steady and faithful allies, in various quarters of the globe, will surely be admitted to add greatly to the strength of any nation; while no alliance between independent states can be so close and intimate as the connection which unites the Colonies to the United Kingdom as parts of the Great British Empire ... the tie which binds together all the different and distant portions of the British Empire so that their united strength may be wielded for their common protection must be regarded as an object of extreme importance to the interests of the Mother country and her dependencies. To the latter it is no doubt of far greater importance than to the former, because, while still forming comparatively small and weak communities, they enjoy, in return for their allegiance to the British Crown, all the security and consideration which belong to them as members of one of the most powerful States in the world.

It is round the theory of responsible government, so new and daring an experiment, that the great interest of this period of Canadian history must always centre. The actual application of the theory was, it is true, postponed for a few years beyond the Union. It was left for Robert Baldwin and for Lord Elgin to complete the work of Joseph Howe and of Lord Durham. But the battle had really been won. No one can read Durham's Report or Howe's Letters without feeling that the policy they laid down was in the long run as inevitable as it was just.

Home Rule has long converted the French of Lower Canada into peaceable and law-abiding British subjects, and we have recently seen in South Africa that Lord Durham's 'panacea for all political disorders,' as it was contemptuously styled by the Legislative Council of Upper Canada, has not lost its efficacy.