Читать книгу The Canadian Commonwealth - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 5

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But Destiny plays us strange tricks. When Quebec fell in 1759, New France passed under the rule of that English and Protestant race which she had been fighting for two centuries; and when the American colonies won their independence twenty years later and the ultra-English Loyalists trekked in thousands across the boundary to what are now Montreal and Toronto and Cobourg, there came under one government two races that had fought each other in raid and counter-raid for two centuries—alien and antagonistic in religion and speech. It is only in recent years under the guiding hand of Sir Wilfred Laurier that the ancient antagonism has been pushed off the boards.

The War of 1812 probably helped Canada’s national spirit more than it hurt it. It tested the French Canadian and found him loyal to the core; loyal, to be sure, not because he loved England more but rather because he loved the Americans less. He felt surer of religious freedom under English rule, which guaranteed it to him, than under the rule of the new republic, which he had harried and which had harried him in border raid for two centuries. The War of 1812 left Canada crippled financially but stronger in national spirit because she had tested her strength and repelled invasion.

If mountain pines strike strong roots into the eternal rocks because they are tempest-tossed by the wildest winds of heaven, then the next twenty years were destined to test the very fiber of Canada’s national spirit. All that was weak snapped and went down. The dry rot of political theory was flung to dust. Special interests, pampered privileges, the claims of the few to exploit the many, the claims of the many to rule wisely as the few—the shibboleth of theorists, the fine spun cobwebs of the doctrinaires, governmental ideals of brotherhood that were mostly sawdust and governmental practices that were mostly theft under privilege—all went down in the smash of the next twenty years’ tempest. All that was left was what was real; what would hold water and work out in fact.

It is curious how completely all records slur over the significance of the Rebellion of 1837. Canada is sensitive over the facts of the case to this day. Only a few years ago a book dealing with the unvarnished facts of the period was suppressed by a suit in court. As a rebellion, 1837 was an insignificant fracas. The rebels both in Ontario and Quebec were hopelessly outnumbered and defeated. William Lyon MacKenzie, the leader in Ontario, and Louis Papineau, the leader in Quebec, both had to flee for their lives. It is a question if a hundred people all told were killed. Probably a score in all were executed; as many again were sent to penal servitude; and several hundreds escaped punishment by fleeing across the boundary and joining in the famous night raids of Hunters’ Lodges. Within a few years both the leaders and exiles were permitted to return to Canada, where they lived honored lives. It was not as a rebellion that 1837 was epoch-making. It was in the clarifying of Canada’s national consciousness as to how she was to be governed.

Having migrated from the revolting colonies of New England and the South, the ultra-patriotic United Empire Loyalists unconsciously felt themselves more British than the French of Quebec. Canada was governed direct from Downing Street. There were local councils in both Toronto and Quebec—or Upper and Lower Canada, as they were called—and there were local legislatures; but the governing cliques were appointed by the Royal Governor, which meant that whatever little clique gained the Governor’s ear had its little compact or junta of friends and relatives in power indefinitely. There were elections, but the legislature had no control over the purse strings of the government. Such a close corporation of special interests did the governing clique become that the administration was known in both provinces as a “Family Compact.” Administrative abuses flourished in a rank growth. Judges owing their appointment to the Crown exercised the most arbitrary tyranny against patriots raising their voices against government by special interests. Vast land grants were voted away to favorites of the Compact. Public moneys were misused and neither account given nor restitution demanded from the culprit. Ultra-loyalty became a fashionable pose. When strolling actors played American airs in a Toronto theater they were hissed; and when a Canadian stood up to those airs, he was hissed. Special interests became intrenched behind a triple rampart of fashion and administration and loyalty. Details of the revolt need not be given here. A great love is always the best cure for a puny affection—a Juliet for a Rosalind; and when a pure patriotism arose to oust this spurious lip-loyalty, there resulted the Rebellion of 1837.

The point is—when the rebellion had passed, Canada had overthrown a system of government by oligarchy. She had ousted special interests forever from her legislative halls. In a blood and sweat of agony, on the scaffold, in the chain gang, penniless, naked, hungry and in exile, her patriots had fought the dragon of privilege, cast out the accursed thing and founded national life on the eternal rocks of justice to all, special privileges to none. Her patriots had themselves learned on the scaffold that law must be as sacredly observed by the good as by the evil, by the great as by the small. From the death scaffolds of these patriots sprang that part of Canada’s national consciousness that reveres law next to God. Canada passed through the throes of purging her national consciousness from 1815 to 1840, as the United States passed through the same throes in the sixties, but the process cost her half a century of delay in growth and development.

While the union of Upper and Lower Canada put an end to the evils of special privileges in government, events had been moving apace in the far West, where roving traders and settlers were a law unto themselves. Red River settlers of the region now known as Manitoba were clamoring for an end to the monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company over all that region inland from the Great Northern Sea. The discovery of gold had brought hordes of adventurers pouring into Cariboo, or what is now known as British Columbia. Both Red River and British Columbia demanded self-government. Partly because England had delayed granting Oregon self-government, the settlers of the Columbia had set up their own provisional government and turned that region over to the United States. We are surely far enough away from the episodes to state frankly the facts that similar underground intrigue was at work in both Red River and British Columbia, fostered, much of it, by Irish malcontents of the old Fenian raids. Once more Canada’s national consciousness roused itself to a bigger problem and wider outlook. Either the far-flung Canadian provinces must be bound together in some sort of national unity or—the Canadian mind did not let itself contemplate that “or.” The provinces must be confederated to be held. Hence confederation in 1867 under the British North American Act, which is to Canada what the Constitution is to the United States. It happened that Sir John Macdonald, the future premier of the Dominion, had been in Washington during one period of the Civil War. He noted what he thought was the great defect of the American system, and he attributed the Civil War to that defect—namely, that all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government were supposed to rest with the states. Therefore, when Canada formed her federation of isolated provinces, Sir John and the other famous Fathers of Confederation reversed the American system. All power not specifically delegated to the provinces was supposed to rest with the Dominion. Only strictly local affairs were left with the provinces. Trade, commerce, justice, lands, agriculture, labor, marriage laws, waterways, harbors, railways were specifically put under Dominion control.