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The period 1840-67 saw the working out of responsible government and full liberty given to Canada to commit her own mistakes. In this period was laid the foundation of a new system of colonial policy to which federation added the superstructure. In Lord Durham’s great Report were combined both elements of the eventual solution, responsible government and federation, for it must not be forgotten that responsible government alone proved inadequate, and worked in its fulness only when to it federation was added.

The history of United Canada begins with Sydenham and ends with Macdonald, between whom there is a strong resemblance; each a mixture, in what proportions we must agree to differ, of parliamentary strategist and statesman. The London of the Regency and of George IV differed widely from the rough pioneer life of the Bay of Quinte and the whiskified gaieties of early Kingston; but the men who formed and worked the first cabinets after the Union and after Confederation are essentially the same: autocrats both, veiling the autocracy behind a smile and a jest; constructive opportunists, who did not worry overmuch about principles, but carried on Her Majesty’s government, and slowly developed a little state into a great one. Neither was squeamish; Sydenham gerrymandered Montreal, and Macdonald gerrymandered Ontario; if an opponent had his price and was worth buying, bought he was; if the one had ‘a dangling after an old London harridan,’ all Canada knew of the early amours of the other. But in a time of doubt and uncertainty and faintness of heart they never despaired of Canada or of the Empire; their follies and their weaknesses are buried with them; their nobler part lives. The difference between them, to Canadians all-important, is that Sydenham was an Englishman, Macdonald a Canadian; at the beginning Canada was still under tutors and governors, at the end she had developed an ‘old parliamentary hand’ of her own. This development is traced in this volume by Professor Morison in a chapter at once original and sane. Professor Morison has strong views, and expresses them with a clearness which does not stop to regard established reputations. In his desire to avoid the falsehood of extremes he does not spare those two very typical Scots, George Brown and Bishop Strachan, and probably more than one lance will be broken in their defence. Strachan’s multifarious and, on the whole, beneficent activities as teacher and churchman are treated elsewhere,^[1] and Professor Morison would be the first to acknowledge that his portrait of the Aberdeen bull-dog needs to be supplemented. Of one of his criticisms of Brown a word must be said later on. But that the general development is rightly and wisely sketched, few will deny.

Our period opens with Lord Sydenham. Under him Canadian parties begin to assume coherence; gradually an administration, with separate heads of departments, takes the place of the chaotic council of pre-Rebellion days. But a cabinet must consist not merely of heads of departments, but of heads of departments working together in unity, carrying out a systematic policy. ‘It doesn’t matter a damn what we think, gentlemen,’ said Lord Melbourne on a famous occasion, ‘but we must all say the same thing.’ A cabinet requires a leader, and alike in Canada and in Great Britain history proves the necessity of a prime minister. To give this keystone to the arch, Sydenham was forced to become his own prime minister, and we thus have the paradox that the governor who introduced responsible government is also the governor whose personal interference was most marked, whose personal predominance was most absolute.

Sydenham was followed by Bagot, who had the absence of strong convictions natural to a diplomat, and whose admission into the cabinet of the reform leaders paved the way for a Canadian prime minister; for although the cabinet was a coalition, Baldwin and La Fontaine were its strongest members, and the illness of Bagot threw power more and more into their hands. Then came the famous quarrel with Lord Metcalfe, in which the very worth of the tory leader made the downfall, when it came, the more complete. If Canada could not be trusted to look after herself, she could have found no better guides than Metcalfe and his chief Canadian adviser, William Draper, afterwards the much-loved Chief Justice of Upper Canada. When the system broke down under such men, it was useless for blunderers like Sir Allan MacNab to try to work it. It is significant of the distance travelled from the days of Dalhousie and Bond Head that Metcalfe acknowledged himself bound by the resolutions of September 3, 1841, which the reformers had won from Sydenham. But Canada would not remain in a half-way house; the governor’s personal triumph in the elections of 1844 brightened his death-bed, but did not retard for more than a year or two the triumph of Canadian autonomy.

Under Durham’s son-in-law, Lord Elgin, the more obvious half of the views of the master are worked out to their logical conclusion. When Elgin gave the royal assent to the Rebellion Losses Bill, on the ground that it was supported by a majority of the representatives from both parts of the united province, the battle of responsible government was won. Confederation was for the time in abeyance, and necessarily remained so till the carrying out of the policy of material development begun under Elgin.

From this point of view transportation^[2] has great constitutional importance, for the history of the Confederation movement in Canada cannot be understood save in connection with that of railway development. Constitutional changes are conditioned by mechanical advances. Just as the building of good roads made possible the real union of England and Scotland; just as the lack of roads in Wales before the days of the Tudors and the width of the Irish Sea are responsible for much of the present misery of Ireland; so the union of British North America would have been a farce till the success of railways was an economic fact. This also Lord Durham had seen. It is a good instance of the difference between a great statesman and a mere administrator that in the Government of Dependencies, written by Sir George Cornewall Lewis in 1841, railways are only mentioned once, and then in a footnote; whereas in Lord Durham’s Report, published in February 1839, the eye of imagination sees what they may do to solve Canadian difficulties, and the building of a railway from Quebec to Halifax is advocated not as an economic measure, but as the real solution of the chief constitutional problem. Under Elgin began an era of railway building, accompanied, as all eras of material expansion must be, with not a little jobbery and corruption, and such unfortunate financial experiments as the Upper Canada Municipal Loan Fund; but bringing happiness and increase of comfort to thousands, making life endurable to the farmer’s wife, and, above all, making possible the expansion of two riverine provinces into the Dominion of to-day. Before Lord Elgin left Canada, the Grand Trunk Railway was an established fact; and, in a far nobler sense than Dorion dreamed when he sneered at Confederation as a Grand Trunk job, the father of Confederation was the Grand Trunk Railway.

Yet though Confederation did not come till railways had made it possible, that it came when it did is due to the self-sacrifice and statesmanship of a few great men. In his account of the coalition of 1864 Professor Morison seems to me to over-emphasize the initiative of Macdonald. His later services at Quebec and at Westminster cannot be over-estimated; once committed to the policy he took the lead. But for the coalition the chief credit is due to Brown and Cartier. The breadth of mind of the latter made it possible to persuade Lower Canada that in union with British North America lay not the destruction but the salvation of her cherished liberties. Equal praise is due to Brown’s splendid leap in the dark. It is true that the first ministry to give federal union a place in its programme was the conservative administration of 1858; but that was almost entirely to win the support of Galt, and when Galt’s hopes seemed to come to nothing, he had scanty sympathy from his colleagues. If the conservatives were the first to offer the maiden their somewhat Platonic affection, it was the perfervid Scottish ardour of Brown which in 1864 seized her in his arms. The testimony of Lord Blachford, who as permanent undersecretary of state for the Colonies was present at all the discussions in London in 1866, is that ‘Macdonald was the ruling genius and spokesman’; but the coalition, consummated in 1864, gave him his chief strength.

From this point of view the chapters by Mr Smith on the Post Office and by Mr Scott on Indian Affairs have a constitutional importance, showing that the grant of responsible government in these departments increased not only content but efficiency. From a wider point of view, in setting aside a whole chapter for what at first sight may seem the mere details of postal administration, the truth is emphasized that constitutional arrangements, however perfect, remain mere dry bones unless upon the various parts of the province, the country, or the empire, there blows a great wind of common knowledge. When the annals of the British Empire come to be written, it will probably be found that till 1912 the greatest steps in imperial development were those taken by Cecil Rhodes, when he sent the picked youth of the British Empire to mix with each other at Oxford, and by Sir William Mulock, when he forced the hands of the permanent officials of the British Post Office and inaugurated interimperial penny postage. Similarly, Sir Hugh Allan is too much remembered as the corrupter of Canadian statesmen, of whose connection with the Pacific Scandal it may be said, that whatever record leap to light he never shall be cleared Mr Smith shows his place as the founder of the ocean-going marine, who made Canadian steamers the fastest on the Western Ocean, and who, when the Nova Scotian Cunard left Halifax for Boston, was true to Montreal and the flag of the triple crosses.

The breakdown of paternalism in Canada coincided with the triumph of free trade in England. This great change in policy necessarily involved that to the gift to Canada of political liberty that of economic liberty was added. To take away the preference on Canadian grain and timber, as was done in 1846-49, while forcing that grain and timber to come solely in British ships, was manifestly unfair, and in 1849 the historic Navigation Acts, so long considered the corner-stone of the British colonial system, were finally abolished. Canada accepted the gift of economic liberty with reluctance. Some despaired and issued the Annexation Manifesto; but the mass of the Canadian people had too much self-respect to whimper at being thrown on their own resources, and with the aid of Lord Elgin found in the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 the economic benefits of annexation without its spiritual stultification. Soon the rising spirit of Canadian nationalism led to a desire for economic self-sufficiency, and to the growth of a protective spirit which was one of the causes which led the United States to denounce the treaty, whereupon nationalism combined with the desire for wider markets to promote Confederation. The economic development of the period, told by Professor Shortt, should therefore be read in close connection with the political and constitutional.

The Dominion of 1867 stopped at the Great Lakes, so that while in the period from 1841 to 1867 the union of Eastern Canada was accomplished, the winning of the West was reserved for a later date. But to this two qualifications must be made. Though the West was won later, it was won under the constitution framed by the Fathers. In a sense it is true, as Professor Kylie says, that ‘Confederation was an awkward compromise.’ But it is far more true that in that compromise was the root of the matter. The constitution of Canada is as superior to that of Australia as an instrument of government as it is inferior as a work of draftsmanship. Ambiguities in the preambles to certain clauses have led to concurrent jurisdiction; it is easy to be merry at the expense of an act which puts ‘marriage’ under the Dominion and ‘solemnization of matrimony’ under the provinces. A deeper wisdom sees that in giving to the Dominion the residue of power, Canada went to the root of the matter. If East and West are ever rent in twain, rebellion will be able to find no such specious cloak of constitutionalism as it found in the United States. It was this provision which, among a hundred other benefits, made possible the creation of the North-West Mounted Police under federal control, with all the regard for law which from the banks of the South Saskatchewan to the Yukon differentiates the Canadian from the American West.

The second qualification is, that though during this period the West was neither peopled nor brought under Canadian government, it is in some ways the halcyon period of exploration. England has had a noble record ever since Drake went round by the Horn. From Mackenzie Bay to Hudson Strait there is hardly a name of cape or inlet or island but recalls some deed of heroism; Davis and Frobisher in the sixteenth century, Hudson and Foxe in the seventeenth, Mackenzie at the end of the eighteenth, and then in the nineteenth the names come as thick and fast as those of the heroes in Homer. None of them glow with a purer radiance than those of the British seamen who sailed with Franklin, or in search of him. Was there ever a finer heroism than that of Franklin, leaving at the call of the Arctic his quiet colonial governorship in the southern seas, and faring forth again to die within a few miles of victory? Who of British blood can read unmoved the dry statement of facts cited by Mr Burpee, written by the men who with Crozier and FitzJames abandoned their ships and their dead leader, and set off on that long hopeless journey to Back’s Great Fish River, of which all that we know is summed up in the sentence of the old Eskimo woman to M^cClintock that ‘they fell down and died as they walked.’ Most of them must have known, as they put that scanty record under the cairn, that the end was near, but no whimper breaks through the official phraseology. Theirs was no self-conscious heroism, such as that which moved Sir Humphrey Gilbert to disdain change or fear; they went forward, the leaders at the lure of the northland, the followers because it was an order; they tramped on till agony gave place to weakness, and at last they lay down and died in the snow; but theirs was as high a daring and as enduring a heart as that of any conquistador who sailed with Cortez or Pizarro, and when Franklin and his men went ‘to join the lost adventurers his peers,’ they proved that there was as good blood in the English race as any that ever glowed in the veins of the lordliest Elizabethan. The age of Victoria is the golden age of exploration, and its most crowded years are those from 1845, when Franklin set sail, to 1859, when M^cClintock brought back such scanty record as remains.

Stat sua cuique dies; breve et irreparabile tempus

Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis

Hoc virtutis opus.

Alike to Brown and Macdonald, to Franklin and M^cClintock the epitaph is due; one star differeth from another star in glory; it is not for the historian to determine whether to the dauntless explorer or the nation-building statesman shall be given the higher meed of praise.

[1]	See ‘History of Secondary and Higher Education’ in section ix.

[2]	See ‘National Highways Overland’ in section v.