Canada and the Canadian Question

Front matter

CANADA AND THE CANADIAN QUESTION

CANADA

AND

Chapter I: The Subject

CHAPTER I

THE SUBJECT

Whoever wishes to know what Canada is, and to understand the Canadian question, should begin by turning from the political to the natural map. The political map displays a vast and unbroken area of territory, extending from the boundary of the United States up to the North Pole, and equalling or surpassing the United States in magnitude. The physical map displays four separate projections of the cultivable and habitable part of the Continent into arctic waste. The four vary greatly in size, and one of them is very large. They are, beginning from the east, the Maritime Provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island; Old Canada, comprising the present Provinces of Quebec and Ontario; the newly-opened region of the North-West, comprising the Province of Manitoba and the districts of Alberta, Athabasca, Assiniboia, and Saskatchewan; and British Columbia. The habitable and cultivable parts of these blocks of territory are not contiguous, but are divided from each other by great barriers of nature, wide and irreclaimable wildernesses or manifold chains of mountains. The Maritime Provinces are divided from Old Canada by the wilderness of many hundred miles through which the Inter- colonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a passenger or a bale of freight by the way. Old Canada is divided from Manitoba and the North-West by the great freshwater son of Lake Superior, and a wide wilderness on either side of it. Manitoba and the North-West again are divided from British Columbia by a triple range of mountains, the Rockies, the Selkirks, and the Golden or Coast range. Each of the blocks, on the other hand, is closely connected by nature, physically and economically, with that portion of the habitable and cultivable continent to the south of it which it immediately adjoins, and in which are its natural markets—the Maritime Provinces, with Maine and the New England States; Old Canada, with New York and with Pennsylvania, from which she draws her coal; Manitoba and the North-West, with Minnesota and Dakota, which share with her the Great Prairie; British Columbia, with the States of the Union on the Pacific. Between the divisions of the Dominion there is hardly any natural trade, and but little even of forced trade has been called into existence under a stringent system of protection. The Canadian cities are all on or near the southern edge of the Dominion; the natural cities at least, for Ottawa, the political capital, is artificial. The principal ports of the Dominion in winter, and its ports largely throughout the year, are in the United States, trade coming through in bond. Between the two provinces of Old Canada, though there is no physical barrier, there is an ethnological barrier of the strongest kind, one being British, the other thoroughly French, while the antagonism of race is intensified by that of religion. Such is the real Canada. Whether the four blocks of territory constituting the Dominion can for ever be kept by political agencies united among themselves and separate from their Continent, of which geographically, economically, and with the exception of Quebec ethnologically, they are parts, is the Canadian question.

Where the subject is so complex and so disjointed, to devise a satisfactory arrangement is not easy. Writers and readers of the history of the Dominion too well know how wanting it is in unity. For the special purpose of this work, which is neither elaborate description nor detailed history, but the presentation of a case and of a problem, it seemed best first, briefly to delineate the Provinces, which are the factors of the case, then to sketch their political history, leading up to Confederation, then to give an account of the Confederation itself, with its political sequel, up to the present time, and finally to propound the problem. The general reader, if any one answering to that description ever takes up this work, may skip the chapter on the Federal polity, the subject of which to the render specially interested in Colonial institutions will probably seem the most important of all. To impart anything like liveliness to a discussion of the British North America Act one must have the touch of Voltaire.

The writer knows too well that he is on highly controversial ground. All he can say is that the subject is clearly and practically before the public mind; that he has done his best to take his readers to the heart of it by setting the whole case before them; that his opinions have not been hastily formed; that they have not, so far as he is aware, been biassed by personal motives of any kind; and that he does not think that the honour or the true interest of his native country can for a moment be absent from his breast.

Chapter II: The French Province

CHAPTER II

THE FRENCH PROVINCE

The eldest first. Canada proper was a French colony. To the habitans, as the Quebec peasantry are called, it is a French colony still; for they know no Canadians but those of their own race. French enterprise it was that first looked down from the high-pooped barque, in which, without chart or quadrant, it had braved the wide and wild Atlantic, upon the St. Lawrence, then running between forests full of bears, moose, and beavers, and roamed by a few human wolves in the shape of Red Indians. The true Canada is the river explored by Jacques Cartier, with its shores, its affluents, and the country of which it is the outlet. A royal river it is, bearing on its broad breast of waters Atlantic steamers a thousand miles from its mouth, and running between high banks, while its rival, the Mississippi, spreads over vast flats of mud; its weak point being that the frost of Canadian winter binds it half the year in chains which invention has been tasked in vain to loose. Quebec and Montreal are the only historic cities of the Dominion, and Quebec alone retains its historic aspect. Even in Quebec there are in the way of buildings but scanty remnants of the Bourbon days. But the citadel, the prize of battle between the races, the key and throne of empire, stills crowns the rock which stands a majestic warder at the portal of the Upper St. Lawrence; and the city with its narrow, steep, and crooked streets, crouching close under its guardian fortress, recalls an age of military force and fear in contrast to the cities of the New World, with their broad and straight streets spreading out freely in the security of industrial peace.

Quebec is a surviving offset of the France of the Bourbons, cut off by conquest from the mother country and her revolutions. Its character has been perpetuated by isolation like the form of an antediluvian animal preserved in Siberian ice. Just now the ice is in appearance freezing harder than ever, though there are ominous crackings and rumblings which to the listening car seem to portend dissolution, and do certainly portend critical change. The Bourbon monarchy is gone, and very faintly is its image replaced in the heart of the French Canadian by that of the alien monarchy of Great Britain. The aristocracy is gone, since the seigniories instituted by Louis XIV—poor counterparts of Old World seigniories even while they existed—have been bought up and abolished, though a slight influence is retained by a few old families. The power of the notary rests on a foundation of adamant which no conquest or revolution can overthrow. But it and all other powers, political or social, are small compared with that of the priest. Quebec is a theory. While Rome has been losing her hold on Old France and on all the European nations, she has retained, nay tightened, it here. The people are the sheep of the priest. He is their political as well as their spiritual chief and nominates the politician, who serves the interest of the Church at Quebec or at Ottawa. The faith of the peasantry is medieval. It is in Quebec alone on the Western Continent that miracles are still performed. The shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré is thronged with pilgrims and thickly hung with votive offerings, though her cures are confined to ailments of a certain class, chiefly nervous, and she has not restored a limb or healed anybody of cancer. A bishop writing to the people of his diocese about his visit to Rome assumes that they receive as undoubted truth the legend of the three fountains marking the three boundings of St Paul's head after it had been cut off, and that of St. Zeno and his 10,203 companions in martyrdom. Not only have the clergy been the spiritual guides and masters of the French Canadian, they have been the preservers and champions of his nationality, and they have thus combined the influence of the tribune with that of the priest.

The habitant is a French peasant of the Bourbon day. The "Angelus" would be his picture, only that in the "Angelus" the devotion of the man seems less thorough than that of the woman, whereas the habitant and his wife are alike devout. He is simple, ignorant, submissive, credulous, unprogressive, but kindly, courteous, and probably, as his wants are few, not unhappy. If, in short, there is an Arcadia anywhere, in his village most likely it is to be found. He tills in the most primitive manner his paternal lot, reduced by subdivision, executed lengthways, to a riband-like strip, with, if possible, a water-front; the river having been the only highway of an unprosperous colony when the lots were first laid out. His food is home-raised, and includes a good deal of peasoup, which affords jokes to the mockers. His raiment is homespun, and beneath his roof the hum of the spinning wheel is still heard. His wife is the robust and active partner of his toil. Their cabin, though very humble, is clean. Such decorations as it has are religious. The Church services are to the pair the poetry and pageantry of life. If either reads anything it is the prayer-book. There are, however, Chansons Populaires, though probably more read by the cultivated than by the people, and there is a folk-lore brought apparently from Old France, perhaps from the France before Christianity. The domestic affections among the habitans are strong; that grand source of happiness at least is theirs; and two or more branches of the same family are found living in harmony under the same roof The habitant is not cultivated or aspiring, but his life is above that of the troglodyte of La Terre.

Close observers think that they can still trace the race characters of the two districts of Old France from which the French Canadians came, and distinguish the Breton Celt from the more solid and shrewder Norman; but the general characteristics prevail. It is denied that the language is a patois, such as a Parisian could not understand, though there are in it old Breton and Norman words and phrases. English words and phrases have also intruded, but these French patriotism is now trying to weed out.

The French Canadians breed apace. To them, as to the Irish, the Church preaches early marriage and speedy re-marriage in the interest of morality, and to multiply the number of the faithful, perhaps also with an eye to fees. From a return just laid before the Quebec Legislature it appears that for the grant of a hundred acres of land bestowed as a reward upon families boasting twelve or more children, there are 1009 claimants. One family numbers twenty-three; a family of twenty-six has been known. There is no saying what bound there would be to the extension of the French if they did not prefer pills made of paper with a likeness of the Virgin to vaccination as a preventive of smallpox. As it is, they are overflowing in multitudes into New England, and threaten, in conjunction with the Irish, who are also settling there in great numbers, to supplant the Puritan in his old abode. They are also displacing the English in Eastern Ontario, and making the politicians of the province feel their power. The digestive forces of Canada have been too weak to assimilate the French element even politically as those of the great mass of American Englishry have assimilated, sufficiently at least for the purposes of political union, the French population of Louisiana. Instead of being assimilated, the French Canadians assimilate, and Scotch regiments disbanded among them have become French in language, in religion, and in everything but name and face. The factories of New England welcome the French not only on account of the cheapness of their labour, but because they are tractable, amenable to factory discipline, and not addicted to industrial war.

Farming is not the only pursuit of the French Canadians in their own country. With it they combine one of a more stirring kind. They furnish a large proportion of the lumbermen. The forest wealth of Canada is immense, though it is now, unfortunately, being fast reduced not only by the axe, but by forest fires, which the carelessness of trappers or tramps kindles, and which are terrible in their destructive range, while governments, their thoughts engrossed by the party conflict, have left the forests to take care of themselves. For lumbering winter, when the snow makes slides, is the season, so that the French peasant may combine it with the cultivation of his little farm. Picturesque writers dwell with rapture on the romance of life in the lumber shanty, the forest ringing with the axe, the glories of the winter landscape by sunlight and by moonlight, the healthiness of the work, the vigour and skill which it calls forth, and the joviality of the gangs, touching with poetry even "the huge pan of fat pork fried and floating in gravy." In the dangerous work of guiding the logs down the stream, above all, great nerve as well as agility is displayed. The lumber shanty is also a school of temperance, for in it no liquor is allowed. Nor does religion fail to say her mass there, or to unpack her bale of ecclesiastical wares.

The land east of Quebec city is poor; even with the help of the lumber trade subsistence is rapidly outrun by population, and if there were not this ready outflow into the adjoining states of the American Union, Quebec would be a second Ireland, and an analogy would be presented which might be useful in teaching Irish reformers to deal with the fundamental problem of congestion rather than try to feed a heedless and thriftless people with statutory parliaments. But the priest looks on emigration with an evil eye; it takes away his flock, and those who return, as not a few do when they have earned some money in the New England factory, are apt to bring back with them the mental habits of a free commonwealth. Schemes of "repatriation" have been formed, but of course in vain, and desperate attempts are being made to turn the current of emigration northwards to Lake St. John. Shipment to the French settlement in Manitoba is another device of the same policy; but the star of French colonisation in Manitoba is waning low. This is one quarter from which danger threatens the Church's "ancient and solitary reign." Another is the railway, which, by bringing the peasant and his wife within the attraction of the city with its luxuries and vanities, corrupts the rural simplicity and contentment approved with good reason by the Church. Hence fulminations of clerical wrath against social corruption which would prove the Church's system a failure if they were taken literally and without allowance for the fervour of the pulpit.

While the people are poor the Church is, for such a country, immensely rich. Not Versailles or the Pyramids bespoke the power of the king more clearly than the great Church and the monastery rising above the cabins bespeak the power of the priest. Exactly how great the wealth of the Church in Quebec is cannot be told; no politician dares to move for a return. A hundred millions of dollars (£20,000,000 stg.) would probably be a low estimate of her realised property, while her income is reckoned at ten millions. Bishop Laval acquired from the Government the seigniories of the Petit Nation, the Island of Jesus, and Beaupré, the last of which, beginning a few miles below Quebec, runs along the St. Lawrence for sixteen leagues, with a depth of six leagues measured from the river. Favours have more recently been obtained from obsequious governments, while all legal facilities are given by legislatures not less obsequious. The Church has, by law transmitted from the Bourbon days and recognised at the Conquest, the right of taking from all members of her own communion tithe (though the amount of the impost has been reduced to a twenty-sixth) and money for building and repairing churches. Masses for souls are everywhere a source of revenue to her. She is always investing with profit. Besetting the people from the cradle to the grave with her friars and her nuns, she daily gathers in money, of which none ever leaves her coffers, even for taxes, since she asserts her sacred immunity from taxation. Lotteries, in spite of their affinity to gambling, are sanctioned to add to the holy fund. To add to the holy fund priests do not disdain to peddle ecclesiastical amulets and trinkets. Nor does Ste. Anne de Beaupré perform her cures for nothing. Meantime the mayor of St. Jean Baptiste, a village annexed to Montreal, states that of the seventy-five hundred people of that village, six thousand are too poor to protect themselves against smallpox, and the city must come to their assistance, while Le Canadien of Quebec calls upon the governments of the Dominion and the Province to provide work for the people of the counties below Quebec whose crops are a failure, warning them that unless the Matane Railway be pushed on to give the people bread there will be an exodus which will be ruinous to the Dominion. The treasury of the Province is empty, and her financiers are fain to levy political tribute on the Confederation or to raid by taxation of financial companies on the strongbox of the commercial Protestants at Montreal. The Reformation was perhaps to a greater extent than is commonly supposed a movement of economical self-preservation on the part of communities whose land and wealth were being absorbed by the Church.

The champions of the Church say that for all that she takes she gives full value in the shape of morality and charity. Her charity, if it means the control of charitable institutions, is not unconnected with her finance. It is probably on financial grounds, in part, that she is at this moment struggling to keep the lunatic asylums in her hands. But she has made the people in her way moral, as well as in her way religious. Her rule is almost Genevan in its austerity; balls and low dresses are denounced as well as Opera Bouffe. The relations of the sexes are watched with a jealous eye. Probably the most favourable specimen of the Roman Catholic system anywhere to be found is in Quebec, where, be it remembered, the Church has been under British rule, linked to a British province, tempered in her action by British influences, and stimulated by Protestant emulation. Nevertheless, looking to the condition of the people on the one hand, and the vast array of churches, convents, and rectories on the other, we are reminded of Edmond About's saying about the peasantry of the Romagna, who were backward and unprosperous though they had fourteen thousand monks preaching to them the gospel of labour.

What the mind of the Church is respecting popular education we know from the history of countries such as Southern Italy, Spain, the Roman Catholic provinces of Austria, and the Spanish colonies in South America, where she has had it all her own way. The Jesuit boasts of his services to education in Canada and elsewhere: he has no doubt cultivated the art to great perfection after his kind; but the objects of his attention as an educator have been youths destined for the priesthood, or sons of the rich and powerful whom it was his aim to draw into his net, and to whom he imparts a set of showy and superficial accomplishments serving mainly to allay the thirst for truth. In Quebec the Church has it not all her own way. She is exposed to the rivalry and criticism of a body of Protestants on the spot, and of a still larger body in the Dominion. She has therefore taken up popular education, but she has taken it up without zeal and given it an ecclesiastical turn. The days may have gone by when by a Statute of the Province of Quebec school trustees were authorised by law to sign with a mark; but illiteracy still prevails. The mayor of a town cannot always write. Mr. Arthur Buies, a French Canadian journalist of eminence, cites a witness who, having held a high official position, and lived in a rural district for fifty years, deposes that among the men between twenty and forty not one in twenty can read, and not one in fifty can write; that they will tell you that they have been at school but have forgotten all they learned; and that what the "all" was you will be able to guess when you know that the teachers were mostly young girls taken from the convents with a salary of from 200 to 400 francs a year, and chosen because their priests were unable to pay the convent tuition fees. This account seems to be borne out by the inquiries of the Massachusetts School Inspector among the French Canadian immigrants in Massachusetts, though these are likely to be not among the least active-minded or intelligent of the community from which they come. In fact education for the masses is probably little more than preparation for the first communion. The series of school books in use in the Province is highly ecclesiastical and very poor.

The school history is a characteristic work. It scarcely mentions British Canada, treats the British as alien intruders, exults in French victories over them, imputes to them insidious designs of crushing French nationality, and glorifies the priesthood for having preserved it from their attacks. Lord Durham, the author of the hated union with British Canada, is accused of having scattered money broadcast for that object, and Sir John Colborne is charged with ravaging the country at the head of seven or eight thousand men when the rebellion was over and order had been restored. The Conquest, the pupil is taught to believe, was followed by eighty years of persecution, of religious intolerance, and of despotism, during which England was following, with regard to Canada, the sinister policy which she had pursued with regard to Ireland. This is a primer sanctioned by the Council of Public Instruction in a province styled British. There is at present no ill-feeling among the French Canadians against Great Britain. British rule has been too mild to provoke hatred. British Royalty when it visits Quebec is perfectly well received. But Great Britain is a foreign country to the French Canadian.

There is in Quebec a circle of French literary men con- taining some names of eminence; but it is hardly more connected with the Church and her people than was the literary circle of the eighteenth century with the Church and her people in France. It draws its intellectual aliment from Paris, where some of its members are well known, and M. Frechette, the poet of French Canada, has won a crown. Probably it is itself better known at Paris than in Quebec.

In this Paradise of Faith there is a serpent called the Parti Rouge, though it is not Dynamitard or Atheist, but merely Liberal, or at most free-thinking, and opposed to clerical domination. It had at Montreal a literary society called the Institut Canadien. This society, for taking heterodox literature, was excommunicated as a body by the Church. Guibord, one of its members, died under the ban, and the Church refused to let him be buried in the Catholic cemetery where he had owned a lot. The Provincial courts upheld the sentence of the Church. But the Privy Council on appeal, after debating the question, as Carlyle says, with the iron gravity of Roman augurs, decided that men must, according to the Canon Law, be excommunicated individually, not in the lump; consequently that Guibord had not lost his right to burial in the cemetery. The Church showed fight, the militia were under orders, a huge block of granite was prepared to protect the grave from desecration, a collision seemed to be impending, when the Bishop of Montreal cut the knot by proclaiming that in whatever spot the excommunicate might be laid that spot would thereby be cut off from the rest of the ground and deconsecrated; so that in the rest of the ground the faithful might sleep. uncontaminated and in peace.

Till lately, however, the Church of Quebec remained a true daughter of the Church of monarchical France, and kept her Gallican tradition, giving Cæsar his due, and living at peace with the civil power. But at length the same change has passed over her which has passed over the Roman Catholic Churches of Europe, since, having lost the allegiance of the national governments, they have been compelled to throw themselves for support on their spiritual centre, and to exalt without limit the authority of the Pope. Ultramontanism has come, and in its van the Jesuit bearing with him the Encyclical and Syllabus, his own work. Having, besides his surpassing skill in intrigue, the ecclesiastical influences of the time in his favour, he captures the Episcopate, fills the Church with his spirit, extends his empire on all sides. The Sulpician order, Gallican in sentiment, whose great seminary rises over Montreal, after a bitter struggle goes down before him, and resigns to him in part the cure of the wealthy city. Against the University, the last fortress of Gallicanism or Liberal Catholicism, his batteries have opened. From his own pulpit, or through the lips of bishops who speak as he prompts, he denounces Gallicanism as a pestilent error, brands Liberal Catholicism, the Catholicism of Montalembert and Lacordaire, as insidious poison, reasserts in the language of the Encyclical the medieval claims of the Papacy to domination over conscience and over the civil power, scornfully repels the idea that the priest is to confine himself to the sacristy, claims for him the right of interference in elections, the censorship of literature and of the public press. Against Protestantism and its pretended rights he proclaims open war; it has no rights, he says; it is merely a triumphant imposture; no religion has any right, or ought to be treated by the State as having any, but that of Rome. Rome is the rightful sovereign of all consciences; and will again, when she can, assert her authority by the same means as before. War is declared against religious liberty, progress, and the organic principles of modern civilisation. On such a course the ship of the French Church of Quebec is now steering, with the Jesuit at the helm. If she holds on, a collision can hardly fail to ensue. It has been said very truly that the Jesuit always fails. This world would be strangely ordered if he did not. His wisdom has never been equal to his craft. When by craft he had got James II into his hands, he, by want of wisdom, hurried the king along the road to ruin. He may do the same with the Nationalist party and politicians of Quebec. In the history of the Order, as often as the marve-lous labours of the sons of Loyola in majorem Dei gloriam seemed on the point of being crowned with success there has come an afflavit Deus et dissipati sunt. But though the Jesuit has always failed, his failures have been tremendously costly to humanity.

The ascendency of Ultramontanism has been aided by the change which has taken place in the position of the clergy. They used to hold their cures, under an ordinance of Louis XIV, by a fixed tenure, like the freehold of an English rector. But they have now been put generally on the footing of missionaries, removable at the pleasure of the bishop, The old-fashioned cur, a man something like the English rector of the old school, quiet and sociable, is passing away, and his place is being taken by a personage of a more stirring spirit, and better suited to be the minister of Ultramontane ambition.

With this advance of ecclesiastical pretensions comes a sympathetic growth of nationalist aspiration. The dream of a French nation on this continent has long been hovering before the minds of French Canadians, though it is hard to say how far the idea has ever assumed a distinct shape or formed a definite motive of action. The Abbé Gingras in a pamphlet some years ago, after glorifying the Dark Ages, justifying the Inquisition, and reviving the claims of Innocent III, set forth what he deemed the necessary policy of French Canadian statesmen towards the Dominion, describing it as one of conciliation, more or less elastic, with the creation of a papal and French nationality always in view as its covert aim. But now the twin movement has taken a more pronounced form. M. Honoré Mercier has risen to lead Ultramontanism and Nationalism at once, and has been raised by their joint forces to the Premiership of the Province, while the old Conservative or Bleu party, which corresponded to the Gallican party in the Church, has suffered a complete overthrow. M. Mercier proclaims himself the devout liegeman of the Pope wears a papal decoration on his breast, seeks the papal blessing before going into an election contest, champions all ecclesiastical claims, restores to the Jesuits their estates, and boasts to a great Roman Catholic assemblage at Baltimore that he has thereby redressed the wrong done by George III. At the same time he avows his Nationalism in language that makes British cars tingle. At the unveiling of a joint memorial to Brebœuf, the Jesuit martyr, and Jacques Cartier, the French discoverer, he bids the Red and Blue party of Quebec blend their ensigns in the Tricolor. He celebrates his political victory in a hall profusely decorated with French flags, while only one Dominion flag is to be seen. "Gentlemen," he says, pointing to the Tricolor, "this flag you know; it is the national flag. The government which you have you know; it is the national government. The party which I have before me I know. This flag, this government, and this party are to-night honoured by the National Club. It is a national triumph which we celebrate to-night, and not national merely in name but national in tendencies, aspirations, and sentiments." The French Canadian nation telegraphs its salutations to the Pope, and the Pope telegraphs back his benediction to the French Canadian nation. On a day in September 1887 the French flag was hoisted above the British flag on the Parliament House of Quebec in honour of the French frigate La Minerve. This was afterwards said to have been an accident. It was an accident full of omen.