Читать книгу The Clash! A Study in Nationalities - William Henry Moore - Страница 4

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There are English, French, Germans, Italians, Russians, Turks—and the census officials alone know how many other kinds of men in Canada. All cannot have their languages recognised in law. Multi-lingualism is impossible; we should be repeating the embarrassing experience of Babel. From that sound conclusion, the unsound deduction has been made that multi-lingualism is the natural consequence of bi-lingualism. Admitting the existence of French-Canadian nationality, men have argued that its culture and individuality cannot be recognised without creating chaos. With equal force it might be argued that if I pay interest to the man who has a lien on my land, I shall some day have to pay interest to men who have advanced nothing on my land; if I give up my one-horse buggy for a two-horse democrat, some day I shall, like the drivers in a circus procession, be handling a six-in-hand.

We have found the French-Canadians in possession of all the attributes of nationality, including the all-important “will to preserve.” We shall now find that the French-Canadians, in addition, have the rights of a people conquered by Great Britain; and under British ideals the national interests of the conquered are sacred. The French-Canadians are not to be dealt with as immigrants who come to a new country, ready and willing to throw off the old and take on the new—not in Ontario and Manitoba, for the country within these provinces was once theirs. That is British doctrine expressed in the often-used, much-abused words, “national freedom.” Only a few generations ago our ancestors—English and French—disagreed over certain matters, principally the claims of a lady named Maria Theresa to a European throne, and when the war was over, English suzerainty had supplanted French in Canada. The fortunes of Maria are inconsequential when compared with those of the French-Canadians who had, as a result of the dispute, come under a state organisation new and strange.

Much of our argument will surround the question which naturally arises: “To what rights are a conquered people entitled?” No one will suggest that they are not entitled, as individuals, to life. Not even barbarians will attempt to justify the wholesale slaughter of those who lose out in the fortunes of war; but are a conquered people entitled to continue life as a people in the land which has been ceded?—are they entitled to continue the culture of their forefathers?—entitled to maintain, in fact, a national existence?

There are two distinct views on the subject which, for want of better nomenclature, we may call “Britain’s Way” and “The Other.” I name the one Britain’s way, because Britain has stood for it more than any other nation. Within it has lain her genius for empire. “Its 433 million inhabitants from Great Britain to Polynesia, from India and Egypt to Central Africa, are drawn from every division of the human race. Cut a section through mankind, and in every layer there will be a British citizen, living under the jurisdiction of British law.” So writes Alfred E. Zimmern, one of England’s foremost students of politics. Britain’s success of Empire has been in proportion to Britain’s preservation of the freedom of the nationalities within the Empire. Britain’s treatment of the Canadians after the conquest will serve to illustrate the application of this doctrine, and besides, it has a specific bearing upon the case in hand.

The Quebec Act and the debates in the Imperial Parliament in the days of its passing, set forth many of the principles which the British Government declared ought to prevail in the government of Canada. Sir Edward Thurlow was the Attorney-General of Great Britain at the passing of the Quebec Act and upon his words we may safely—but need not solely—rely as to Britain’s intention towards the French-Canadians after the Conquest. “You ought to change those laws only which relate to the French sovereignty, and in their place substitute laws which should relate to the new sovereign,” he said from his place in Parliament; “but with respect to all other laws, all other customs and institutions whatever, which are indifferent to the state of subjects and sovereign, humanity, justice and wisdom equally conspire to advise you to leave to the people just as they were.” These are plain words which should leave no misunderstanding in the minds of men. And they ought to remain fixed in the memories of men who believe that national understandings ought to be kept.

There was no question about the legal right of Great Britain to limit the use of the French language and French culture in the colony that had become British, and if it be possible for a conqueror to force an alien tongue upon a conquered people, there was little doubt as to Great Britain’s ability, since the French-Canadians had been abandoned by the then decrepit government at Versailles. The issue was a moral one, and as such it was decided. “I consider the right of conquest so little, and the right of human nature so much, that the former has little consideration with me,” said the great Edmund Burke when debating the Quebec Bill. “I look upon the people of Canada as coming, by the dispensation of God, under the British Government. I would have us govern it in the same manner as the all-wise disposition of Providence would govern it.” No piece of Canadian legislation received the care of greater statesmen than the Quebec Act, and throughout the debate over its provisions, the constant thought expressed was care for the interests of the French-Canadians. That was the first consideration.

Two ways in the Canadian question were open to Great Britain at the time: freedom for a continuance of French culture and all that is implied in nationality; or a suppression—at least an attempt at it—and in its place a substitution of Anglicism. The way towards suppression lay ready at hand, namely, incorporation of the newly-acquired territory in one of the longer-held, nearby, American colonies. They were all English-speaking and it was only reasonable to assume that in time the French would learn not only to speak English, but would acquire an English mentality. And Britain did not take that course. After reciting what might have been done, A. Wyatt Tilby, an English historian, tells us what actually was done. “Happily for the Empire, the British Government decided to act generously,” he says. “They made no attempt to overwhelm the French by planting British settlers in Quebec; on the contrary, the absurd arrogance displayed by the few hundred English immigrants who entered the colony of their own accord was frequently restrained by the Imperial authorities... Nor were the old French customs and laws of the province changed or interfered with more than was absolutely necessary; and the advice of those enthusiasts who believed that every British institution was of inestimable benefit and of universal application was sensibly rejected.”

Sentences were not incorporated into the Quebec Bill specifically granting the freedom of the French language; nor, for that matter, were there specific sentences granting the freedom of air. Without air, there could have been no continued life for the individual, and without language no continued life for the nationality.

For several years after the Conquest all Canada remained French. The old inhabitants retained throughout the country, in what is now Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba, which were practically the Quebec of that day, their language, and all that went to make up their nationality. They paid allegiance to a British sovereign instead of to a French sovereign; that was the principal change wrought in their condition by the Conquest. Britain secured sovereignty; the French retained cultural freedom; and the two were compatible.

Such was Britain’s spirit in the days of the Quebec Act; such her application of it to an alien nationality. Has Britain grown less generous in her maturity? Can English-Canadians afford to be less generous in these days when freedom has become the watchword of civilisation? The answer to these questions brings us plumb against the underlying causes of the war.

In 1918 Canada is fighting for freedom. All the doing, dying, suffering, mourning, all the soul-stirring tragedies of the war, the Great War itself, are only means to an end—freedom. “Win the War,” has become the spiritual injunction of Canadians, but winning the war merely for the sake of a win, would be poor consolation. It is the cause for which the war is being fought that alone makes the sacrifices endurable, makes winning worth while. It is the idea behind the war, which makes a decisive issue imperative and makes peace upon compromise equivalent to defeat. As well might men have talked of peace parleys in the days of the American Civil War, while men and women were still slave-bound in the cotton-fields of the South. Great Britain seeks not territorial expansion, nor commercial advantage, nor military prestige in the war; her stand is for freedom, unequivocally for freedom, and it is the definiteness of the position which makes plain the path of British duty. But we are told by the Germans, by the Austrians, by the whole group of Central Powers, that they, too, are fighting for freedom, which reminds us that seldom, if ever, have men consciously fought against freedom. Even the Confederate States were fighting for freedom—their own—in the Civil War.

Clearly this word, freedom, needs to be defined; its application to the war issues requires analysis and explanation. We must know the nature of the freedom that has been denied, must know to whom and by what right it belongs; otherwise, it is a mere catch-word which does not grip reality. There has been a sad lack of education in Canada as to the underlying causes of the war. Our publicists seem to have assumed that Canadians would intuitively understand. But we Canadians cannot be expected to possess greater powers of intuition than Englishmen, and in England scores of books have been written because it was found that large sections of the community failed to realize “the true inner significance of the struggle.”

“The political causes of the present war,” say the editors of “The War and Democracy,” (the most influential of English war books) “and of the half century of Armed Peace which preceded it are to be found, not in the particular schemes and ambitions of any of the governments of Europe, nor in their secret diplomacy, nor in the machinations of the great armament interests allied to them, sinister though all these may have been, but in the nature of some of those governments themselves, and in their relation to the people over whom they rule.” Thus we are told to look for the main cause of the war in the relations which some of the warring governments bear “to the people over whom they rule.” To bring the matter squarely before the British people, the editors of “War and Democracy” quote the following paragraph from “Imperial Germany,” a book written by Prince Bernhard von Bülow, who directed German policy as Imperial Chancellor from 1900 to 1909:

“If it were possible for members of different nationalities, with different language and customs, and an intellectual life of a different kind, to live side by side in one and the same State, without succumbing to the temptation of each trying to force his own nationality on the other, things on earth would look a good deal more peaceful. But it is a law of life and development in history that where two national civilisations meet they fight for ascendancy. In the struggle between nationalities one nation is the hammer and the other the anvil; one is the victor, and the other the vanquished.”

Here we have the pith of the issue. It is the opinion of the editors of “War and Democracy” that “no words could indicate more clearly the cause that is at stake in the present war” than those which Prince von Bülow has written in this paragraph. Many reasons—most of them very good ones—have been given why Great Britain is in the war. But this is the central idea. Prince von Bülow’s words, say the editors of “War and Democracy,” “show us that there are still governments in Europe so ignorant as to believe that the different nationalities of mankind are necessarily hostile to one another, and so foolish and brutal as to think that national civilisation, or, as the German Professors call it, ‘kultur,’ can and indeed must be propagated by the sword.”

Great Britain is fighting to stay the hand that wields the hammer—and necessarily Canada, too, is fighting to stay the hand that wields the hammer upon the minor nationalities within the Central Powers. That, then, is the freedom for which we sacrifice.

It must be remembered that “War and Democracy” is not merely one author’s view. It is the well-thought-out opinion of a group of England’s best educationists—R. W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern, Arthur Greenwood; it was written for the use of the Workers’ Educational Association of the United Kingdom. In other words, the book is authoritative.

Let us seek further clarity on this important question, let us attempt to have the principle which it outlines definitely fixed in our minds—surely there is nothing in Canada worth more pains! By force of circumstances, usually conquest, groups of people, once freely developing towards common ideals, have come under the government of an alien nationality. That is true of the Slavs in Poland, the Danes in Holstein, and the French in Alsace-Lorraine. Germany maintains that these minor nationalities must be made subject to her culture and may at her will be limited in their own. Great Britain declares that to be a violation of the legitimate freedom of nationality, and asserts that this suppression, the most prolific source of wars, shall be ended once for all. With true pacifism, she sees in armaments only the means, in the clashing of nationalities a potent cause, of war, which must be uprooted. To quote again from “War and Democracy”: “So long as there are peoples in Europe under alien governments, curtailed in the use of their own language, in the propagation of their literature and ideas, in their social intercourse, in their corporate life, in all that we in Great Britain understand by civil liberty, so long will there be men who will mock at the very idea of international peace, and look forward to war, not as an out-worn instrument of a barbarous age, but as a means to national freedom and self-expression.”

It is a splendid cause; but—surely we cannot refuse to apply to ourselves the principles which we seek by arms to force upon others. There is, in the Province of Ontario, a minor nationality the people of which say to the dominant English-Canadian nationality: You have curtailed us in the use of our language; you have restricted us in the education which is necessary for the propagation of our literature and ideas; you have taken away our national freedom and self-expression; and this in a land which was ours before it was yours and ours.

That accusation cannot be dismissed with the simple denial that the parallel between the minor nationalities of Germany and the minor nationality of Ontario does not run true. For we shall find the comparisons startlingly true, and we must squarely face the evidence. We can no longer use the old arguments of the “necessities of the State,” “commercial advantages of homogeneity,” “handiwork of agitators,” “superiority of culture”; we can no longer appeal to the essentialness of the common school crucible; for as we shall find, Germany has advanced all these things in her self-defence, and they have been rejected as insufficient, rejected by Greater Britain, rejected by what we believe to be best in civilisation. We simply cannot be Germanlike, we must, as Britain’s ally, as an integral part of Great Britain itself, be unequivocally and splendidly unlike the Germans.

We believe in freedom; for that matter we believe in generosity. But we may talk of generosity as much as we please, extol it to the skies, and yet if we give not generously we merely prate. We may extol the cause of freedom, we may shed our blood for it; but the true measure of our adherence to its cause is the extent to which we give freedom. As Lord Acton has said: “The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free, is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.”

It is not denied by the English publicists who have laid bare the relations of nationalities, that in the past France and Great Britain have been guilty of fighting for causes which were not essentially on behalf of freedom—security for minorities. But it is argued that while men cannot be held responsible for all the acts of their ancestors, they can and must be held responsible for their own acts. Mr. J. M. Robertson, writing of France and Britain, puts it this way; “Simple common sense, priming common honesty, has dictated the avowal by rational men that the honors are substantially even, that folly and sin played their part in both polities, and that the sane course is for the self-governing communities of to-day to live a better life, whatever their forefathers may have done.”

We as Canadians must live that better life. But—and I have in mind the words of a friend, the head of an Ontario College—the minor nationality within Canada has not contributed its share of men and support to the present war; has not shouldered its full part of Canada’s responsibility; in a word, “the French-Canadians have not been patriotic.” My friend’s opinion may be taken as illustrative of a large section of English-Canadian sentiment. It is De Tocqueville who points out that there are two kinds of patriotism, that of instinct and that of reason; the former, which is disinterested, indefinable, but associating the affections with the place of birth, the French-Canadians have lavished wholly upon this country; but the latter, that of reason, which is due to the personal interest of the citizen, and depends on his having a sense of security under the State, the French-Canadians have not in full measure. Let us frankly accept that many French-Canadians have not felt their responsibility to the State as have most English-Canadians in this war. Let us agree that their attitude is a disease of the body politic and then—what shall we do? It is vain to regret the disease, a waste of precious time to speculate on its serious outcome. Our prime duty is to get at the cause, to diagnose the seat of the trouble. And if we English-Canadians find the disease is mainly of our own making, then it naturally follows it ought to be of our own curing.

In our diagnosis we may again turn with advantage to “War and Democracy”; for this clashing of nationalities and its causes are of a common origin the world over. The editors say: “There are governments in Europe so foolish as to think that men and women deprived of their national institutions, humiliated in their deepest feelings, and forced into an alien mould, can make good citizens, trustworthy soldiers, or even obedient subjects.”

Have we been violating the principles which British men say ought to regulate the relations of nationalities within a common state? Have we been out of harmony with the essence of national freedom, and foolish enough to think that we could escape the consequence?

Books of Reference

H. E. Egerton and W. L. Grant, Canadian Constitutional Development.Musson.

Alfred E. Zimmern and Others, War and Democracy.Macmillan.

Lord Acton, The History of Freedom.Macmillan.

A. Wyatt Tilby, British North America, 1763-1867.Constable.