The United States and Canada, a political study

Contents

PAGE

Introduction 7

Preface 11

Introduction

George Slocum Bennett, a graduate of Wesley an University in the class of 1864, showed his lifelong interest in the training of youth for the privileges and duties of citizenship by long periods of service as a member of the board of education of his home city, and as member of the boards of trustees of Wyoming Seminary and Wesley an University.

It was fitting, therefore, that, when the gifts made by himself and family to Wesleyan University were combined to form a fund whose income should be used "in defraying the expenses of providing for visiting lecturers, preachers, and other speakers supplemental to the college faculty," it should have been decided that the primary purpose should be to provide each year a

8 INTRODUCTION

course of lectures, by a distinguished speaker, "for the promotion of a better understanding of national problems and of a more perfect realization of the responsibilities of citizenship," and to provide for the publication of such lectures so that they might reach a larger public than the audience to which they should, in the first instance, be addressed.

To give the second course of lectures on this foundation, the joint committee for its administration, appointed by the board of trustees and by the faculty, selected George Mackinnon Wrong, professor of history in the University of Toronto. This choice was made in hearty recognition of the closer sympathy which had drawn the two sister nations of English speech on this continent to one another in the comradeship of arms, of ideals, and of losses in the World War.. It was also made in appreciation not merely of Professor Wrong's high scholarship as an historian, but also of the fine spirit in which he has

INTRODUCTION 9

ever exemplified his conviction that the English-speaking peoples, especially on this continent, should live together in friendship and work together for the advancement in the world of liberty, self-government, and peace. William Arnold Shanklin, Reuben Nelson Bennett, Albeet Wheelee Johnston, Frank Edgar Farley, George Matthew Dutcher,

Committee.

Preface

Lectures to a university audience should, of course, express the detached mind of a searcher after truth, and I have tried to maintain this attitude and to refrain from either praise or blame in discussing both the present and the past. My aim has been to explain, in no recondite or learned way, some of the things in which the United States and Canada are alike and also different.

Canada reads much more about the United States than the United States reads about Canada, just as Scotland reads more about England than England reads about Scotland. This condition is inevitable when a nation with a small population lies side by side with a greater neighbor speaking the same language. To the thought of the people of the United States, numbering a hundred millions, Canada, with its eight millions, does not loom large ; while the opposite condition is found in Canada. Many of the books and the newspapers which Canadians 11

12 PREFACE

read are impregnated with American thought, while Canada exercises practically no influence upon her neighbor.

It is chiefly due to this lack of reciprocity in thought that occasionally, in quarters generally well informed, discussions arise as to whether, to cancel her debt, Great Britain might not sell Canada to the United States. Such a proposal causes a pained smile on the faces of people on both sides of the frontier who really understand. England might as well propose to sell Scotland to France or Germany. Sometimes too a desire is expressed to help to liberate Canada. The only answer to such suggestions is to try to reach a better understanding of the relations of the two peoples and it was to aid, however slightly, in effecting this that these lectures were given.

I am greatly indebted to Professor George M. Dutcher, vice-president of Wesley an University, for many personal kindnesses and to my friend Professor W. Bennett Munro, of Harvard University, for helpful criticism.

LECTURE I

THE DOMINANCE OF THE ENG- LISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES IN AMERICA

Eras of excitement and passion are invariably followed by disillusion and reaction, and the days after the Great War have seen this inevitable result. Over the beautiful portal of a churchyard in England were written the words, *'This is none other than the Gate of Heaven." In a stormy season the custodian put on the gatepost the notice that "owing to the inclemency of the weather this gate is closed until further notice." This is our state of mind at the present time. During the days of peace the political weather has proved inclement and a good many people are wondering whether the sun will ever shine again. The joy of battle is exhilarating, even if the fight is exhausting. When peace with victory was still beyond reach we desired it with a great longing. Now it has come. The old stimulus is gone and not yet 13 have we been able to concentrate our thoughts upon that goal in the future which will inspire us to combined effort. Faintheart is tempted to be weary and depressed.

It is probably true that the war would not have taken place if during the last ten years the English-speaking peoples had shown that they were united. Wisdom after the event is not of a very exacting or penetrating kind, and we need not lay too much emphasis upon what might have been. Clearly, however, if the vast array of power which is represented by the United States and the British Commonwealth had been used during the last ten years to say that there should be no war, its word might well have proved effective even to restrain Germany's lust for world power. In fact, as we know, Germany did not be- Keve that the nations within the British Commonwealth would unite to check her; and it would have required something very definite and precise to make her believe that the United States could be counted upon to act with them. It remains true, however, that voices speaking in English might have preserved the world which existed before 1914.

It may, indeed, be well that that world, sick as now we see it to have been, should go. Not always is it true that in the sunlight we see the truth most clearly. It is in the darkness of the night that the stars glow and the moon shines with a beauty which may not be seen at midday. In the darkness of sorrow and sacrifice men learn to know the mysteries of their own hearts. This appears to be an ultimate law of life, and it is vain to question the constitution of a world in which we ourselves play so feeble a part. The long darkness of more than four years of war revealed to us things which we did not see in the sunshine. Both evil and good have been made manifest — good perhaps more than evil, for the war brought out a heroism and a readiness for sacrifice in the heart of the common man which we had either never known or had forgotten.

Whatever might have been done before tIi/5 war, now at least we confront a realized situation unprecedented in character. As a result of the war the strongest nations left in the western world are the English-speaking nations. Possibly more even than Germany is France exhausted, with a grim strip of ruin three hundred and fifty miles long forming her northeastern frontier. Desolation reigns where once were fertile fields, prosperous villages, and ancient and beautiful towns and cities. Lille is maimed; Arras, Cambrai, and a dozen other cities are heaps of ruins; and hundreds of thousands of the best manhood of France he under the white crosses that mark the resting places of her multitudinous dead. Italy is impoverished; Austria and Hungary are prostrate ; and of all the states of continental Europe it is perhaps true that defeated Germany can look forward to the future with the greatest assurance. Were it not for the vigor and resources of the English-speaking world, we might see again what has happened before, that the vanquished, in the moment of his defeat, is the real conqueror. Long ago the energy of the English mastered the conquering Norman who ruled in England, just as Rome in her defeat became the schoolmaster of her barbarian masters and turned them into her servants.

The United States has now one hundred and five million people. As yet of some of the new-comers English is not the language of daily life, but it will certainly be the language of their children and of their children's children. Within the British Commonwealth there are some sixty-five million people who speak EngMsh. It is thus the tongue of one hundred and seventy million people, nearly two-thirds of them in the single contiguous area of the United States. Never before has the world seen such a condition — nearly two hundred million people who speak and write and think in English, who can exchange without misunderstanding the niceties of thought in a language simple in structure, with a great range in its vocabulary, and a literaturf' in patent and variety Hurpassirg any other m existence. The v/ar iias brought the unlooked-for result that two great conquering peoples with this wonderful speech are, if they choose so to be, the masters of the destinies of the world.

Goethe was wont to say that, had his native tongue been English, he would hardly have ventured to write poetry, since the long line of Enghsh poets had expressed already what would have come to his mind. A people with a noble hterature at their command have a great advantage among the nations. A generation without a hterature from the past and limited by its own thought is indeed poor. Society is too complex for us to estimate the effect upon the hfe of to-day of the background of thought from a nation's past, but it is undoubtedly very great. It is true, of course, that only a few read any books but those of the present ; but it is also true that in these very books is summed up the influence on the mind of the writers of all the past. Shakespeare and Milton speak through even the mediocre author of to-day. By schoolbook and newspaper, by quotation and proverb, the minds of great writers have helped to form present-day thought. A nation is what it reads more truly, perhaps, than it is what it eats.

When two peoples speak in the same language, this common influence must tend to make them alike. What is said in New York on one day may be circulated in the same form in London on the day following, and will carry with it whatever strength its inherent truth commands. It falls upon soil already prepared by a long succession of similar happenings in the past. To every point where the English tongue is spoken the thought may be carried. Be it radical or conservative, it conveys its message, and the men who read it tend to grow together in mental outlook. Counteracting influences there are, of course; contrasts of tradition and environment which involve differing emphasis upon the same thoughts ; but the common language is a mighty power for similarity of outlook. The people who read both Emerson and Mill, by so much tend to come together; and when the people are those of the far-flung states of the British Commonwealth and the American Union the influence soon becomes world-wide.

In some such way we may believe was Greek thought carried from one Greekspeaking community to another. The chief endowment which the Greeks took from the home land was that of its language and its Hterature. The insight and the vivacity of the Greek mind working in the scene of the coasts and islands of the eastern Mediterranean were suited to the creation of small states, with no political tie other than the Greek spirit. Greece produced Plato and Aristotle, men who pondered deeply, in an environment compact enough to be understood, the problems of human hfe and especially those of the organization of man in society. The Republic of Plato and the Politics of Aristotle are treatises on man living under the influence of political ties with his fellows. Expressed in the vigorous and lucid language of Greece, they were carried far. They survived the ruin of the Roman Empire, they were debated with awe and reverence by the later philosophy of the Middle Ages, and they play still their vital part in the discussions of our own day. Such was the triumph of a literatm^e in a language fitted for the expression of rich thought.

We can hardly doubt that English is the successor of Greek as the chief tongue of political theory. The most vital thought in modern political society comes from sources in the English tongue. The eternal glory of England in the world of poHtics is that the island state, secure in its frontiers, was able, first of European nations, to shake off the sway of the despot and to secure for its people real political power. It was England who gave to the world representative institutions, that type of political society in which authority is yielded to persons chosen by the people ruled, to control Liid in time to administer their government. It was England's daughter who added to this the principle which has borne the test of experience, that free states, while retaining their local liberties, might unite for common purposes and carry representative institutions into a union of states in a wider nation. Successful federalism is the achievement of America. The principle made only dim gropings in political society until the thirteen colonies brought it into the full light of the world.

Language is the expression of the spirit of a people and in a subtle way carries with it some suggestion of their outlook on national hfe. The phases of society which a writer chooses to emphasize reveal some measure of its moral tone, its intellectual outlook and its political condition. Fogazzaro's Saint, haunted by the problems of asceticism.

22 THE UXITED STATES

shows us the attitude of the clerical mind of Italy with which that of England has, we see at once, very little in common. Victor Hugo reveals, half unconsciously to himself, the crude and unstable despotism of the Second Empire in France which he assailed. Dickens lays bare the mind of the bourgeoisie and the lower orders in England. It is said that translations of the works of Dickens are popular in China and the explanation is offered that it is because of a subtle affinity of English with Chinese political thought, the dislike of militarism and absolutism, and with this a certain humorous decency congenial to Chinese readers. English is at least simple and direct. One of its greatest recent triumphs is the use of the word "tank" to describe a complicated mechanism of modern war. It is impossible to imagine the English calling a great avenue the "Champs Elysees" or naming a thoroughfare the "Street of the Twentieth of September."

There is no better evidence of the virihty of the Enghsh speech than its changes in America. The language was matured in the settled environment of England, and it expresses the social relations of a graded society". The owner of land let to tenants is still the landlord, though for the most part there is little left in the relation which is lordly. In Northumberland the women who work in the fields are still called bondagers, but no trace remains of such a relation in their demeanor nor in their money wage of four shillings a day. On the other hand the free, new life of western America knows nothing of lords or bondage and has no need for such terms. It matures for the use of a changed society a language which, at any rate, never lacks vigor and is Enghsh in structure if hardly so in vocabulary. The educated classes in New England cultivate a precision of speech more exacting in its standards than is the language of the same class in the mother land. In all fields alike the English tongue is the medium. The most violent assailant of England, to make himself understood with effect, must in the greater part of the world denounce her in her own language.

Perhaps the most pregnant fact in modern political life is that the Enghsh-speaking peoples have become dominant in North America. Colmnbus was the servant of Spain, and she was resolved to have the greater part of both North and South America for herself and to permit no neighbors. Her claim to rule alone meant that any triimiph of a rival would be to her own complete exclusion. Spain asked the protection of the church for her rights, and England, when she defied the church, aimed to make herself a terror to Spain in America. England's ships haunted the Spanish Main. In 1607 bhc pL'intrd her foot in Virginia and there remained. She too was resolved to have no neighbor, and when Catholic France occupied the valley of the Saint Lawrence, it was the fixed resolve of English policy for a hundred and fifty years to drive her out. I have sometimes wondered what would to-day be the condition of society in New England had Spain or France, and not England, finally held its coasts. There may be some doubt as to whether man is stronger than his environment ; as to whether, no matter what the race, nature would not have determined the physical type. But it is quite certain that England gave to her colonies something that has made this land to-day mentally different from what France or Spain would have made it. The language, the reUgion, the manners of the masses, the education of a New England town, would have been other than they are had Spain or France planted here a new society. Because the English race secured final possession the traditions which go with English rule and English speech here took root, and the very spires of the churches proclaim to the air that the English seed has grown to a great tree.

America brought her own special gifts to the civilization of the world. Old things and new America offered to Europe. There were the coveted gold and silver of her mines to increase stores in Europe which had, so far as we know, received but slight additions since the days of the Roman Empire. While this was not in reality America's most precious store of wealth, it was the most alluring; and Spain, the first discoverer, spent her energies in search for the precious metals. She had no labor to export from Spain, and so she enslaved the helpless natives to do her work, and she thought she was growing rich because her ships carried across the sea cargoes of metal which in themselves would save no starving man. England was more fortunate. Her first seamen, such as Drake and Hawkins, thought, indeed, that to rob Spain's treasure ships was to touch the mainsprings of well-being. The real sources of wealth are to be found, however, in those things which feed and clothe the human body and stir to its best efforts the human mind. The English settled where there was no gold, but where nature invited to the hard toil which develops character and to the adventurous efforts of those who go down to the sea in ships. Spain found her wealth ready-made in gold. England had to produce hers, and perhaps that is why the English speech is dominant to-day in North America. Three staples of commerce new to Europe America gave to the world — tobacco, Indian corn, and the potato. Without them our present-day civilization would indeed be poorer. Columbus found the natives of the West Indies smoking and chewing tobacco

— a habit which was quickly carried to remote parts of the earth. The effect upon society of a single natural product is sometimes far-reaching. It was upon tobacco that was founded Virginia, the first Enghsh colony in North America, and from this cultivation of tobacco and later of cotton came the enslaving by the English of the Negro, which has resulted in so appalling a racial problem of to-day. Indian corn, or maize, a native American product, is now one of the most important articles of food. It is the great crop of the warm, dry, rich soil of the Mississippi valley, and it is also the chief source of human food in great regions of South Africa and Austraha. The stalk of the plant furnishes, besides, an amazingly rich food for cattle. The potato, which Sir Walter Raleigh took from America to Ireland, has played since that day its striking part in human history. It too became a staple food. The failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1846 caused famine and rebelHon and ministered to hot racial passions which still burn. It caused also the first great migration of Irish to America. Not less in her natural products than in her pohtical institutions has America spread far-reaching influences over the world.

The real struggle for North America lay between France and England. France was happy in her first stroke, for, as early as in 1534, nearly a hundred years before the founding of Massachusetts, she was exploring in the valley of the Saint Lawrence. No doubt the climate was harsh, and by so much was France handicapped. But harsh also was the cHmate of New England, and it had no river hke the Saint Lawrence reaching far into the interior. There are four great rivers in North America draining vast areas. The Mississippi hes now wholly within the United States and became important only when an English-speaking people held both its banks. The Mackenzie and the Saskatchewan, Canadian rivers in the far north, both flow through inhospitable regions, as yet but .scantily affected by the labor of man. The fourth great river, the Saint Lawrence, is the river of North America which has played the most striking part in its history. In all the world there is no other river and lake system so fruitful in its rewards to man's effort. It is the only great river of North America flowing into the Atlantic. It drains Great Lakes which are among the wonders of the world. Populous cities have grown up on the shores of the inland seas where the volume of fresh waters gather for that tm^bulent journey to the ocean in which they thunder over the cataract of Niagara. ^Vhere else can be found such masses of human beings on a single river and lake system? Here are Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, and many other centers of wealth and influence. And at the portal, from the middle of the sixteenth century, stood France on guard for the ownership of a continent. By way of the waters of the Saint Lawrence she reached the flood of the Mississippi and claimed that too as her own. In the cities lying at the mouth of both rivers, in Quebec and in New Orleans, her language is still to be heard in the streets, the influence of her culture is apparent, though her political authority is gone.

America was brought into touch with the thought of Europe just when Europe itself was experiencing perhaps the greatest upheaval in all its history. In 1492, when Columbus was penetrating into the unknown across the stormy Atlantic, Erasmus, a young man of twenty-six, was wrestling with grim poverty at Paris and spending the uncomfortable hours in searching another unknown, the unknown of man's past struggles to emancipate his own mind. If Columbus discovered America, Erasmus helped to rediscover antiquity and to open its treasures to an eager world. Two years after the first voyage of Columbus a conquering French army marched across the Alps into Italy and began that mastery by the alien conqueror which if, for the time, it ruined Italy, helped to expand the minds of the invaders. At the same time far away in the north a peasant boy with a quick mind and an inquiring faith was growing into the maturity which made Martin Luther a disturbing but vital force in the life of the age. Germany and France and England were shaken by the explosion of new forces, and just when the fight was keenest in Europe Jacques Cartier was raising on the Saint Lawrence the fleurs-delis of France.

It was a great era. Its controversies haunt still our society and have played their part in the hardening processes which have formed our modern national and racial types. There were those who believed that its revived interest in art and learning and religion meant the dawn of a golden age. Thus it is that in all periods of high emotion men have consoled themselves for the imperfections of the present by the promise of the future. The day of disillusion came quickly. Before the end of the century Montaigne had described human life in its true tints of gray and brown, with high lights of radiant sunshine and also deep shadows of suffering and sorrow. By the beginning of the seventeenth century America was to Europe a solid reality, only half known, it is true, but already the scene in which national and religious passions had aroused the fiercest activities of war. Europe was torn by the bitter antagonisms of Catholic and Protestant. Spain and Portugal had succeeded in holding all of South America and some of North

America for the Catholic faith alone. English Protestants who founded Virginia in 1607 were in a sense between the two jaws of the Catholic nut-cracker with France in the Saint Lawrence valley and Spain in Mexico. By this time, however, Spain was weak for aggressive purposes and the struggle for North America lay between Catholic France and Protestant England.

As a colonizing power in America France showed what marks some of her best minds to this day, her passionate belief in a religious system based upon authority and her love of romantic adventure. In genius for trade France has never greatly excelled. The English, seeking overseas new means of living or new foundations of society which should not involve acceptance of the dogmas of the Church of England, were severely practical as colonizers. They tilled the soil, they built ships and sailed away to trade in other lands, they trafficked with the natives for furs ; and wherever they settled they made themselves masters. There was little of the glow of romance in their prosaic doings. This, on the other hand, stirred many of the French, men in some cases scions of noble houses, who chafed at the slow activities of the farm or the shop. The life of the forest fascinated them. They became coureurs de hois, runners of the woods. Past their doors at Quebec arid Montreal flowed the great tide of the Saint Lawrence coming from out Jthe far interior. Little wonder that the mystery of its sources haunted them. Step by step they explored the interior. They discovered one by one the Great Lakes; they reached the Mississippi and followed it to its outlet. On into the farther west they pushed. They reached the prairies, they saw the Rocky Mountains.

The French are a virile race. No other breed, except perhaps the Jew, cHngs to its own ideals and mode of life with such unconquerable tenacity. To the French, pride in the civilization of France and love for the land of France are mastering passions. In Europe through long ages they had fought the English and in America they had no other thought than to fight them until one should master the other. The English were of like mind. Hardly had they found themselves in Virginia when they learned tb^tthe French, long known to be on the Saint Lawrence, had actually dared in 1605 to found farther south a strugghng colony, Port Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, where now stands the httle town of Annapolis, in Nova , Scotia. Such audacity was too much, and in 1613, though France and England were not openly at war, an expedition from Virginia destroyed this budding settlement. The Saint Lawrence was not to be secure for the French. In 1629 the Enghsh appeared at Quebec and captured this infant capital of New France. For a century and a half the struggle of one power to drive out the other hardly ceased. The English fitted out expedition after expedition against Quebec, and at Quebec Frontenac, the governor, planned serious efforts to root out the English from both the banks of the Hudson and from New England and to make Louis XIV master of New York and Boston. Of living peacefully side by side as good neighbors neither nation had any serious thought. One race, one language, one flag must be supreme everywhere in North America. On this both sides were determined. War followed war. Peace was only a truce. And at last, in 1760, the British triumphed. To them France sw' rendered Canada and abandoned her long struggle for empire in America.

Thus it was that the British acquired all of America north of the Gulf of Mexic;^ which at that time was known to the world. Three types of possession had come together under one sovereignty. In the far north was the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company. It had acquired a generous inheritance, for King Charles II, by what right we shall not too curiously question, had given it all the lands bordering on the waters flowing into Hudson Bay, which meant the whole vast prairie land of the present Canadian West stretching away almost illimitably to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. That was an empire in itself; yet was it httle accounted of in the day of final conquest. Britain had always claimed it, and since 1713 France had yielded the claim. Next to this were the former possessions of the French, that vast New France in which the Bishop of Quebec had at one time been spiritual lord both at