Produced by Al Haines









[Frontispiece: The Fathers of Confederation.  After a painting by
Robert Harris.]





THE FATHERS OF CONFEDERATION

A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion


by

A. H. U. COLQUHOUN





TORONTO

GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY

1916




  _Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
  the Berne Convention_




  TO

  COLONEL GEORGE T. DENISON

  WHOSE LIFE-WORK IS PROOF THAT
  LOYALTY TO THE EMPIRE IS
  FIDELITY TO CANADA




{ix}

CONTENTS

                                                                  Page

    I. THE DAWN OF THE MOVEMENT  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
   II. OBSTACLES TO UNION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
  III. THE EVE OF CONFEDERATION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  21
   IV. THE HOUR AND THE MEN  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  30
    V. THE CHARLOTTETOWN CONFERENCE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  44
   VI. THE QUEBEC CONFERENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  56
  VII. THE RESULTS OF THE CONFERENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  65
 VIII. THE DEBATES OF 1865 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  84
   IX. ROCKS IN THE CHANNEL  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  97
    X. 'THE BATTLE OF UNION' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
   XI. THE FRAMING OF THE BILL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
  XII. THE FIRST DOMINION MINISTRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
 XIII. FROM SEA TO SEA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
  XIV. THE WORK OF THE FATHERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
       BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
       INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193




{xi}

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE FATHERS OF CONFEDERATION . . . . . . . . . . . .    _Frontispiece_
  After the painting by Robert Harris.

WILLIAM SMITH  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   _facing page_ 4
  From a portrait in the Parliament Buildings, Ottawa.

SIR ALEXANDER T. GALT  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      "     "   16
  From a photograph by Topley.

GEORGE BROWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      "     "   32
  From a photograph in the possession of Mrs Freeland
  Barbour, Edinburgh.

SIR GEORGE CARTIER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      "     "   42
  From a painting in the Château de Ramezay.

SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      "     "   80
  From the painting by A. Dickson Patterson.

SIR CHARLES TUPPER, BART.  . . . . . . . . . . . . .      "     "  116
  From a photograph by Elliott and Fry, London.

ALEXANDRE ANTONIN TACHÉ  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      "     "  166
  From a photograph lent by Rev. L. Messier, St Boniface.

AN ELECTION CAMPAIGN--GEORGE BROWN ADDRESSING AN AUDIENCE
  OF FARMERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      "     "  180
  From a colour drawing by C. W. Jefferys.




{1}

CHAPTER I

THE DAWN OF THE MOVEMENT

The sources of the Canadian Dominion must be sought in the period
immediately following the American Revolution.  In 1783 the Treaty of
Paris granted independence to the Thirteen Colonies.  Their vast
territories, rich resources, and hardy population were lost to the
British crown.  From the ruins of the Empire, so it seemed for the
moment, the young Republic rose.  The issue of the struggle gave no
indication that British power in America could ever be revived; and
King George mournfully hoped that posterity would not lay at his door
'the downfall of this once respectable empire.'

But, disastrous as the war had proved, there still remained the
fragments of the once mighty domain.  If the treaty of peace had shorn
the Empire of the Thirteen Colonies and the great region south of the
Lakes, it had left unimpaired the provinces to the east and {2}
north--Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Canada--while still farther north
and west an unexplored continent in itself, stretching to the Pacific
Ocean, was either held in the tight grip of the Hudson's Bay Company or
was shortly to be won by its intrepid rival, the North-West Company of
Montreal.  There were not lacking men of prescience and courage who
looked beyond the misfortunes of the hour, and who saw in the dominions
still vested in the crown an opportunity to repair the shattered empire
and restore it to a modified splendour.  A general union of the
colonies had been mooted before the Revolution.  The idea naturally
cropped up again as a means of consolidating what was left.  Those who
on the king's side had borne a leading part in the conflict took to
heart the lesson it conveyed.  Foremost among these were Lord
Dorchester, whom Canada had long known as Guy Carleton, and William
Smith, the Loyalist refugee from New York, who was appointed chief
justice of Lower Canada.  Each had special claims to be consulted on
the future government of the country.  During the war Dorchester's
military services in preserving Canada from the invaders had been of
supreme value; and his occupation {3} of New York after the peace,
while he guided and protected the Loyalist emigration, had furnished a
signal proof of his vigour and sagacity.  William Smith belonged to a
family of distinction in the old colony of New York.  He possessed
learning and probity.  His devotion to the crown had cost him his
fortune.  It appears that it was with him, rather than with Dorchester,
that the plan originated of uniting the British provinces under a
central government.  The two were close friends and had gone to England
together.  They came out to Quebec in company, the one as
governor-general, the other as chief justice.  The period of confusion,
when constructive measures were on foot, suggested to them the need of
some general authority which would ensure unity of administration.

And so, in October 1789, when Grenville, the secretary of state, sent
to Dorchester the draft of the measure passed in 1791 to divide Quebec
into Upper and Lower Canada, and invited such observations as
'experience and local knowledge may suggest,' Dorchester wrote:


I have to submit to the wisdom of His Majesty's councils, whether it
may not be {4} advisable to establish a general government for His
Majesty's dominions upon this continent, as well as a governor-general,
whereby the united exertions of His Majesty's North American Provinces
may more effectually be directed to the general interest and to the
preservation of the unity of the Empire.  I inclose a copy of a letter
from the Chief Justice, with some additional clauses upon this subject
prepared by him at my request.

[Illustration: William Smith.  From a portrait in the Parliament
Buildings, Ottawa]

The letter referred to made a plea for a comprehensive plan bringing
all the provinces together, rather than a scheme to perpetuate local
divisions.  It reflected the hopes of the Loyalists then and of their
descendants at a later day.  In William Smith's view it was an
imperfect system of government, not the policy of the mother country,
that had brought on the Revolution.  There are few historical documents
relating to Canada which possess as much human interest as the
reminiscent letter of the old chief justice, with its melancholy
recital of former mistakes, its reminder that Britons going beyond the
seas would inevitably carry with them their instinct for liberal
government, and its striking prophecy {5} that 'the new nation' about
to be created would prove a source of strength to Great Britain.  Many
a year was to elapse before the prophecy should come true.  This was
due less to the indifference of statesmen than to the inherent
difficulties of devising a workable plan.  William Smith's idea of
confederation was a central legislative body, in addition to the
provincial legislatures, this legislative body to consist of a council
nominated by the crown and of a general assembly.  The members of the
assembly were to be chosen by the elective branches of the provincial
legislatures.  No law should be effective until it passed in the
assembly 'by such and so many voices as will make it the Act of the
majority of the Provinces.'  The central body must meet at least once
every two years, and could sit for seven years unless sooner dissolved.
There were provisions for maintaining the authority of the crown and
the Imperial parliament over all legislation.  The bill, however, made
no attempt to limit the powers of the local legislatures and to reserve
certain subjects to the general assembly.  It would have brought forth,
as drafted, but a crude instrument of government.  The outline of the
measure revealed the honest {6} enthusiasm of the Loyalists for unity,
but as a constitution for half a continent, remote and unsettled, it
was too slight in texture and would have certainly broken down.
Grenville replied at length to Dorchester's other suggestions, but of
the proposed general parliament he wrote this only: 'The formation of a
general legislative government for all the King's provinces in America
is a point which has been under consideration, but I think it liable to
considerable objection.'

Thus briefly was the first definite proposal set aside.  The idea,
however, had taken root and never ceased to show signs of life.  As
time wore on, the provincial constitutions proved unsatisfactory.  At
each outbreak of political agitation and discontent, in one quarter or
another, some one was sure to come forward with a fresh plea for
intercolonial union.  Nor did the entreaty always emanate from men of
pronounced Loyalist convictions; it sometimes came from root-and-branch
Reformers like Robert Gourlay and William Lyon Mackenzie.

The War of 1812 furnished another startling proof of the isolated and
defenceless position of the provinces.  The relations between Upper
Canada and Lower Canada, never cordial, {7} became worse.  In 1814, at
the close of the war, Chief Justice Sewell of Quebec, in a
correspondence with the Duke of Kent (Queen Victoria's father),
disclosed a plan for a small central parliament of thirty members with
subordinate legislatures.[1]  Sewell was a son-in-law of Chief Justice
Smith and shared his views.  The duke suggested that these legislatures
need be only two in number, because the Canadas should be reunited and
the three Atlantic colonies placed under one government.  No one heeded
the suggestion.  A few years intervened, and an effort was made to
patch up a satisfactory arrangement between Lower Canada and Upper
Canada.  The two provinces quarrelled over the division of the customs
revenue.  When the dispute had reached a critical stage a bill was
introduced in the Imperial parliament to unite them.  This was in 1822.
But the proposal to force two disputing neighbours to dwell together in
the same house as a remedy for disagreements failed to evoke enthusiasm
from either.  The friends of federation then drew together, and Sewell
joined hands with Bishop Strachan {8} and John Beverley Robinson of
Upper Canada in reviving the plea for a wider union and in placing the
arguments in its favour before the Imperial government.  Brenton
Halliburton, judge of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia (afterwards
chief justice), wrote a pamphlet to help on the cause.  The Canada
union bill fell through, the revenue dispute being settled on another
basis, but the discussion of federation proceeded.

To this period belongs the support given to the project by William Lyon
Mackenzie.  Writing in 1824 to Mr Canning, he believed that


a union of all the colonies, with a government suitably poised and
modelled, so as to have under its eye the resources of our whole
territory and having the means in its power to administer impartial
justice in all its bounds, to no one part at the expense of another,
would require few boons from Britain, and would advance her interests
much more in a few years than the bare right of possession of a barren,
uncultivated wilderness of lake and forest, with some three or four
inhabitants to the square mile, can do in centuries.


{9} Here we have the whole picture drawn in a few strokes.  Mackenzie
had vision and brilliancy.  If he had given himself wholly to this
task, posterity would have passed a verdict upon his career different
from that now accepted.  As late as in 1833 he declared: 'I have long
desired to see a conference assembled at Quebec, consisting of
delegates freely elected by the people of the six northern colonies, to
express to England the opinion of the whole body on matters of great
general interest.'  But instead of pursuing this idea he threw himself
into the mad project of armed rebellion, and the fruits of that folly
were unfavourable for a long time to the dreams of federation.  Lord
Durham came.  He found 'the leading minds of the various colonies
strongly and generally inclined to a scheme that would elevate their
countries into something like a national existence.'  Such a scheme, he
rightly argued, would not weaken the connection with the Empire, and
the closing passages of his Report are memorable for the insight and
statesmanship with which the solid advantages of union are discussed.
If Lord Durham erred, it was in advocating the immediate union of the
two Canadas as the first necessary step, and in announcing as one of
his objects {10} the assimilation to the prevailing British type in
Canada of the French-Canadian race, a thing which, as events proved,
was neither possible nor necessary.

Many of the advocates of union, never blessed with much confidence in
their cause, were made timid by this point of Durham's reasoning.  His
arguments, which were intended to urge the advantages of a complete
reform in the system and machinery of government, produced for a time a
contrary effect.  Governments might propose and parliaments might
discuss resolutions of an academic kind, while eloquent men with voice
and pen sought to rouse the imaginations of the people.  But for twenty
years after the union of the Canadas in 1841 federation remained little
more than a noble aspiration.  The statesmen who wielded power looked
over the field and sighed that the time had not yet come.



[1] It has been said that Attorney-General Uniacke of Nova Scotia
submitted, in 1809, a measure for a general union, but of this there
does not appear to be any authentic record.




{11}

CHAPTER II

OBSTACLES TO UNION

The prospect was indeed one to dismay the most ardent patriot.  After
the passage of the Constitutional Act of 1791 the trend of events had
set steadily in the direction of separation.  Nature had placed
physical obstacles in the road to union, and man did his best to render
the task of overcoming them as hopeless as possible.  The land
communication between the Maritime Provinces and Canada, such as it
was, precluded effective intercourse.  In winter there could be no
access by the St Lawrence, so that Canada's winter port was in the
United States.  As late as 1850 it took ten days, often longer, for a
letter to go from Halifax to Toronto.  Previous to 1867 there were but
two telegraph lines connecting Halifax with Canada.  Messages by wire
were a luxury, the rate between Quebec and Toronto being seventy-five
cents for ten words and eight cents for each additional word.  Neither
commerce nor friendship could {12} be much developed by telegraph in
those days, and, as the rates were based on the distance, a telegram
sent from Upper Canada to Nova Scotia was a costly affair.  To reach
the Red River Settlement, the nucleus of Manitoba, the Canadian
travelled through the United States.  With the colonies of Vancouver
Island and British Columbia the East had practically no dealings.  Down
to 1863, as Sir Richard Cartwright once said,[1] there existed for the
average Canadian no North-West.  A great lone land there was, and a few
men in parliament looked forward to its ultimate acquisition, but
popular opinion regarded it vaguely as something dim and distant.  In
course of time railways came, but they were not interprovincial and
they did nothing to bind the East to the West.  The railway service of
early days is not to be confounded with the rapid trains of to-day,
when a traveller leaves Montreal after ten in the morning and finds
himself in Toronto before six o'clock in the afternoon.  Said
Cartwright, in the address already cited:


Even in our own territory, and it was a matter not to be disregarded,
the state {13} of communication was exceedingly slow and imperfect.
Practically the city of Quebec was almost as far from Toronto in those
days, during a great part of the year, as Ottawa is from Vancouver
to-day.  I can remember, myself, on one occasion being on a train which
took four days to make its way from Prescott to Ottawa.


Each province had its own constitution, its tariff, postage laws, and
currency.  It promoted its own interests, regardless of the existence
of its British neighbours.  Differences arose, says one writer, between
their codes of law, their public institutions, and their commercial
regulations.[2]  Provincial misunderstandings, that should have been
avoided, seriously retarded the building of the Inter-colonial Railway.
'The very currencies differ,' said Lord Carnarvon in the House of
Lords.  'In Canada the pound or the dollar are legal tender.  In Nova
Scotia, the Peruvian, Mexican, Columbian dollars are all legal; in New
Brunswick, British and American coins are recognized by law, though I
believe that the shilling is taken at twenty-four cents, which is less
than its value; in Newfoundland, {14} Peruvian, Mexican, Columbian, old
Spanish dollars, are all equally legal; whilst in Prince Edward's
Island the complexity of currencies and of their relative value is even
greater.'  When the Reciprocity Treaty was negotiated at Washington in
1854, Nova Scotia felt, with some reason, that she had not been
adequately consulted in the granting to foreign fishermen of her
inshore fisheries.  In a word, the chief political forces were
centrifugal, not centripetal.  All the jealousy, the factious spirit,
and the prejudice, which petty local sovereignties are bound to
engender, flourished apace; and the general effect was to develop what
European statesmen of a certain period termed Particularism.  The
marvel is not that federation lagged, but that men with vision and
courage, forced to view these depressing conditions at close range,
were able to keep the idea alive.

There was some advance in public opinion between 1850 and 1860, but, on
the whole, adverse influences prevailed and little was achieved.  The
effects of separate political development and of divided interest were
deeply rooted.  Leaders of opinion in the various provinces, and even
men of the same province, refused to join hands for any great national
purpose.  Party conflict absorbed {15} their best energies.  To this
period, however, belongs the spadework which laid the foundations of
the future structure.  The British American League held its various
meetings and adopted its resolutions.  But the League was mainly a
party counterblast to the Annexation Manifesto of 1849 and soon
disappeared.  To this period, too, belong the writings of able
advocates of union like P. S. Hamilton of Halifax and J. C. Taché of
Quebec, whose treatises possess even to-day more than historical value.
Another notable contribution to the subject was the lecture by
Alexander Morris entitled _Nova Britannia_, first delivered at Montreal
in 1858 and afterwards published.  Yet such propaganda aroused no
perceptible enthusiasm.  In Great Britain the whole question of
colonial relations was in process of evolution, while her statesmen
were doubtful, as ours were, of what the ultimate end would be.  That a
full conception of colonial self-government had not yet dawned is shown
by these words, written in 1852 by Earl Grey to Lord John Russell: '_It
is obvious that if the colonies are not to become independent states,
some kind of authority must be exercised by the Government at home._'

This decade, however, witnessed some {16} definite political action.
In 1854 Johnston, the Conservative Opposition leader in the Nova Scotia
legislature, presented a motion in these terms: 'Resolved, That the
union or confederation of the British Provinces on just principles,
while calculated to perpetuate their connection with the parent state,
will promote their advancement, increase their strength and influence,
and elevate their position.'  This resolution, academic in form, but
supported in a well-balanced and powerful speech by the mover, drew
from Joseph Howe, then leader of the government, his preference for
representation in the British House of Commons.  The attitude of Howe,
then and afterwards, should be examined with impartiality, because he
and other British Americans, as well as some English statesmen, were
the victims of the honest doubts which command respect but block the
way to action.  Johnston, as prime minister in 1857, pressed his policy
upon the Imperial government, but met with no response.  When Howe
returned to power, he carried a motion which declared for a conference
to promote either the union of the Maritime Provinces or a general
federation, but expressing no preference for either.  Howe never was
pledged to federation as his fixed {17} policy, as so many persons have
asserted.  He made various declarations which betokened uncertainty.
So little had the efforts put forth down to 1861 impressed the official
mind that Lord Mulgrave, the governor of Nova Scotia, in forwarding
Howe's motion to the Colonial Office, wrote: 'As an abstract question
the union of the North American colonies has long received the support
of many persons of weight and ability, but so far as I am aware, no
political mode of carrying out this union has ever been proposed.'

[Illustration: Sir Alexander T. Galt.  From a photograph by Topley.]

The most encouraging step taken at this time, and the most far-reaching
in its consequences, was the action of Alexander Galt in Canada.  Galt
possessed a strong and independent mind.  The youngest son of John
Galt, the Scottish novelist, he had come across the ocean in the
service of the British American Land Company, and had settled at
Sherbrooke in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada.  Though personally
influential and respected, he wielded no general political authority,
for he lacked the aptitude for compromise demanded in the game of
party.  He was the outspoken champion of Protestant interests in the
Catholic part of Canada, and had boldly declared for the annexation of
Canada to the {18} United States in the agitation of 1849.  His views
on clericalism he never greatly modified, but annexation to the United
States he abandoned, with characteristic candour, for federation.  In
1858 he advocated a federal union of all the provinces in a telling
speech in parliament, which revealed a thorough knowledge of the
material resources of the country, afterwards issued in book form in
his _Canada: 1849 to 1859_.  During the ministerial crisis of August
1858 Sir Edmund Head asked Galt to form a government.  He declined, and
indicated George Cartier as a fit and proper person to do so.  The
former Conservative Cabinet, with some changes, then resumed office,
and Galt himself, exacting a pledge that Confederation should form part
of the government's policy, assumed the portfolio of Finance.  The
pledge was kept in the speech of the governor-general closing the
session, and in October of that year Cartier, with two of his
colleagues, Galt and Ross, visited London to secure approval for a
meeting of provincial delegates on union.  Galt's course had forced the
question out of the sphere of speculation.  A careful student of the
period[3] argues with point {19} that to Galt we owe the introduction
of the policy into practical politics.  In the light of after events
this view cannot be lightly set aside.  But the effort bore no fruit
for the moment.  The colonial secretary, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton,
declined to authorize the conference without first consulting the other
provinces, and the government did not feel itself bound because of this
to resign or consult the constituencies.  In other words, the question
did not involve the fate of the Cabinet.  But Galt had gained a great
advantage.  He had enlisted the support of Cartier, whose influence in
Lower Canada was henceforth exerted with fidelity to win over the
French to a policy which they had long resisted.  The cause attained
additional strength in 1860 by the action of two other statesmen,
George Brown and John A. Macdonald, who between them commanded the
confidence of Upper Canada, the one as Liberal, the other as
Conservative leader.  Brown brought before parliament resolutions
embodying the decisions of the Reform Convention of 1859 in favour of a
federation confined to the Canadas, and Macdonald declared
unequivocally for federative union as a principle, arguing that a
strong central government should be the chief aim.  {20} Brown's
resolutions were rejected, and the movement so auspiciously begun once
more exhibited an ominous tendency to subside.  The varying fortunes
which attended the cause during these years resembled its previous
vicissitudes.  It appeared as if all were for a party and none were for
the state.  If those who witnessed the events of 1860 had been asked
for their opinion, they would probably have declared that the problem
was as far from solution as ever.  Yet they would have been mistaken,
as the near future was to show.  A great war was close at hand, and, as
war so often does, it stimulated movements and policies which otherwise
might have lain dormant.  The situation which arose out of the Civil
War in the United States neither created nor carried Confederation, but
it resulted, through a sense of common danger, in bringing the British
provinces together and in giving full play to all the forces that were
making for their union.



[1] Address to Canadian Club, Ottawa, 1906.

[2] _Union of the Colonies_, by P. S. Hamilton, Halifax, 1864.

[3] See the chapter, 'Parties and Politics, 1840-1867,' by J. L.
Morison, in _Canada and its Provinces_, vol. v.




{21}

CHAPTER III

THE EVE OF CONFEDERATION

A day of loftier ideas and greater issues in all the provinces was
about to dawn.  The ablest politicians had been prone to wrangle like
washerwomen over a tub, colouring the parliamentary debates by personal
rivalry and narrow aims, while measures of first-rate importance went
unheeded.  The change did not occur in the twinkling of an eye, for the
cherished habits of two generations were not to be discarded so
quickly.  Goldwin Smith asserted[1] that, whoever laid claim to the
parentage of Confederation, the real parent was Deadlock.  But this was
the critic, not the historian, who spoke.  The causes lay far deeper
than in the breakdown of party government in Canada.  Events of
profound significance were about to change an atmosphere overladen with
partisanship and to strike the imaginations of men.

{22}

The first factor in the national awakening was the call of the great
western domain.  British Americans began to realize that they were the
heirs of a rich and noble possession.  The idea was not entirely new.
The fur traders had indeed long tried to keep secret the truth as to
the fertility of the plains; but men who had been born or had lived in
the West were now settled in the East.  They had stories to tell, and
their testimony was emphatic.  In 1856 the Imperial authorities had
intimated to Canada that, as the licence of the Hudson's Bay Company to
an exclusive trade in certain regions would expire in 1859, it was
intended to appoint a select committee of the British House of Commons
to investigate the existing situation in those territories and to
report upon their future status; and Canada had sent Chief Justice
Draper to London as her commissioner to watch the proceedings, to give
evidence, and to submit to his government any proposals that might be
made.  Simultaneously a select committee of the Canadian Assembly sat
to hear evidence and to report a basis for legislation.  Canada boldly
claimed that her western boundary was the Pacific ocean, and this
prospect had long encouraged men like George Brown to look {23} forward
to extension westward, and to advocate it, as one solution of Upper
Canada's political grievances.   It was a vision calculated to rouse
the adventurous spirit of the British race in colonizing and in
developing vast and unknown lands.  Another wonderful page was about to
open in the history of British expansion.  And, hand in hand with
romance, went the desire for dominion and commerce.

But if the call of the West drew men partly by its material
attractions, another event, of a wholly different sort, appealed
vividly to their sentiment.  In 1860 the young Prince of Wales visited
the provinces as the representative of his mother, the beloved Queen
Victoria.  His tour resembled a triumphal progress.  It evoked feelings
and revived memories which the young prince himself, pleasing though
his personality was, could not have done.  It was the first clear
revelation of the intensity of that attachment to the traditions and
institutions of the Empire which in our own day has so vitally affected
the relations of the self-governing states to the mother country.  In a
letter from Ottawa[2] to Lord Palmerston, {24} the Duke of Newcastle,
the prince's tutor, wrote:


I never saw in any part of England such extensive or beautiful outward
demonstrations of respect and affection, either to the Queen or to any
private object of local interest, as I have seen in every one of these
colonies, and, what is more important, there have been circumstances
attending all these displays which have marked their sincerity and
proved that neither curiosity nor self-interest were the only or the
ruling influences.


Of all the events, however, that startled the British provinces out of
the self-absorbed contemplation of their own little affairs, the Civil
War in the United States exerted the most immediate influence.  It not
only brought close the menace of a war between Great Britain and the
Republic, with Canada as the battle-ground, but it forced a complete
readjustment of our commercial relations.  Not less important, the
attitude of the Imperial government toward Confederation underwent a
change.  It was D'Arcy McGee who perceived, at the very outset, the
probable {25} bearing of the Civil War upon the future of Canada.  'I
said in the House during the session of 1861,' he subsequently
declared, 'that the first gun fired at Fort Sumter had a message for
us.'  The situation became plainer when the _Trent_ Affair embroiled
Great Britain directly with the North, and the safety of Canada
appeared to be threatened.  While Lincoln was anxiously pondering the
British demand that the Confederate agents, Mason and Slidell, removed
by an American warship from the British steamer the _Trent_, should be
given up, and Lord Lyons was labouring to preserve peace, the fate of
Canada hung in the balance.  The agents were released, but there
followed ten years of unfriendly relations between Great Britain and
the United States.  There were murmurs that when the South was subdued
the trained armies of the North would be turned against the British
provinces.  The termination of the Reciprocity Treaty, which provided
for a large measure of free trade between the two countries, was seen
to be reasonably sure.  The treaty had existed through a period which
favoured a large increase in the exports of the provinces.  The Crimean
War at first and the Civil War later had created an unparalleled demand
for the food products {26} which Canada could supply; and although the
records showed the enhanced trade to be mutually profitable, with a
balance rather in favour of the United States, the anti-British feeling
in the Republic was directed against the treaty.  Thus military defence
and the necessity of finding new markets became two pressing problems
for Canada.

From the Imperial authorities there came now at last distinct
encouragement.  Hitherto they had hung back.  The era of economic dogma
in regard to free trade, to some minds more authoritative than Holy
Writ, was at its height.  Even Cobden was censured because, in the
French treaty of 1861, he had departed from the free trade theory.  The
doctrine of _laissez-faire_, carried to extremes, meant that the
colonies should be allowed to cut adrift.  But the practical English
mind saw the sense and statesmanship of a British American union, and
the tone of the colonial secretary changed.  In July 1862 the Duke of
Newcastle, who then held that office and who did not share the
indifference of so many of his predecessors[3] to the colonial
connection, wrote sympathetically to Lord Mulgrave, the governor of
Nova Scotia:

{27}

If a union, either partial or complete, should hereafter be proposed
with the concurrence of all the Provinces to be united, I am sure that
the matter would be weighed in this country both by the public, by
Parliament, and by Her Majesty's Government, with no other feeling than
an anxiety to discern and promote any course which might be the most
conducive to the prosperity, the strength and the harmony of all the
British communities in North America.


Nova Scotia, always to the front on the question, had declared for
either a general union or a union of the Maritime Provinces, and this
had drawn the dispatch of the Duke of Newcastle.  A copy of this
dispatch was sent to Lord Monck, the governor-general of Canada, for
his information and guidance, so that the attitude of the Imperial
authorities was generally known.  It remained for the various
provincial Cabinets to confer and to arrange a course of action.  The
omens pointed to union in the near future.  But, as it happened, a new
Canadian ministry, that of Sandfield Macdonald, had shortly before
assumed office, and its members were in no wise pledged to the {28}
union project.  In fact, as was proved later, several of them, notably
the prime minister himself, with Dorion, Holton, and Huntington,
regarded federation with suspicion and were its consistent opponents
until the final accomplishment.

The negotiations for the joint construction of an intercolonial railway
had been proceeding for some time.  These the ministry continued, but
without enthusiasm.  The building of this line had been ardently
promoted for years.  It was the necessary link to bind the provinces
together.  To secure Imperial financial aid in one form or another
delegates had more than once gone to London.  The Duke of Newcastle had
announced in April 1862 that the nature and extent of the guarantee
which Her Majesty's government would recommend to parliament depended
upon the arrangements which the provinces themselves had to propose.[4]
There was a conference in Quebec.  From Nova Scotia came Howe and
Annand, who two years later fought Confederation; from New Brunswick
came Tilley and Peter Mitchell, who carried the cause to victory in
their province.  Delegates from the Quebec meeting {29} went to London,
but the railway plan broke down, and the failure was due to Canada.
The episode left a bad impression in the minds of the maritime
statesmen, and during the whole of 1863 it seemed as if union were
indefinitely postponed.  Yet this was the very eve of Confederation,
and forces already in motion made it inevitable.



[1] _Canada and the Canadian Question_, by Goldwin Smith, p. 143.

[2] _Life of Henry Pelham, fifth Duke of Newcastle_, by John Martineau,
p. 292.

[3] Between 1852 and 1870 there were thirteen colonial secretaries.

[4] Dispatch of the colonial secretary to the lieutenant-governor of
New Brunswick.




{30}

CHAPTER IV

THE HOUR AND THE MEN

The acceptance of federation in the province of Canada came about with
dramatic simplicity.  Political deadlock was the occasion, rather than
the cause, of this acceptance.  Racial and religious differences had
bred strife and disunion, but no principle of any substance divided the
parties.  The absence of large issues had encouraged a senseless
rivalry between individuals.  Surveying the scene not long after,
Goldwin Smith, fresh from English conditions, cynically quoted the
proverb: 'the smaller the pit, the fiercer the rats.'  The upper and
lower branches of parliament were elective, and in both bodies the
ablest men in the country held seats.  In those days commerce,
manufacturing, or banking did not, as they do now, withhold men of
marked talent from public affairs.  But personal antipathies, magnified
into feuds, embittered the relations of men who naturally held many
views in {31} common, and distracted the politics of a province which
needed nothing so much as peace and unity of action.

The central figures in this storm of controversy were George Brown and
John A. Macdonald, easily the first personages in their respective
parties.  The two were antipathetic.  Their dispositions were as wide
asunder as the poles.  Brown was serious, bold, and masterful.
Macdonald concealed unrivalled powers in statecraft and in the
leadership of men behind a droll humour and convivial habits.  From the
first they had been political antagonists.  But the differences were
more than political.  Neither liked nor trusted the other.  Brown bore
a grudge for past attacks reflecting upon his integrity, while
Macdonald, despite his experience in the warfare of party, must often
have winced at the epithets of the _Globe_, Brown's newspaper.  During
ten years they were not on speaking terms.  But when they joined to
effect a great object, dear to both, a truce was declared.  'We acted
together,' wrote Macdonald long after of Brown, 'dined in public places
together, played euchre in crossing the Atlantic and went into society
in England together.  And yet on the day after he resigned we resumed
our old positions {32} and ceased to speak.'[1]  To imagine that of all
men those two should combine to carry federation seemed the wildest and
most improbable dream.  Yet that is what actually happened.

[Illustration: George Brown.  From a photograph in the possession of
Mrs Freeland Barbour, Edinburgh.]

In June 1864, during the session of parliament in Quebec, government by
party collapsed.  In the previous three years there had been two
general elections, and four Cabinets had gone to pieces.  And while the
politicians wrangled, the popular mind, swayed by influences stronger
than party interest, convinced itself that the remedy lay in the
federal system.  Brown felt that Upper Canada looked to him for relief;
and as early as in 1862 he had conveyed private intimation to his
Conservative opponents that if they would ensure Upper Canada's just
preponderance in parliamentary representation, which at that date the
Liberal ministry of Sandfield Macdonald refused to do, they would
receive his countenance and approval.  In 1864 he moved for a select
committee of nineteen members to consider the prospects of federal
union.  It sat with closed doors.  A few hours before the defeat of the
Taché-Macdonald ministry in {33} June, he, the chairman of the
committee, reported to the House that


a strong feeling was found to exist among the members of the committee
in favour of changes in the direction of a federative system, applied
either to Canada alone, or to the whole British North American
provinces, and such progress has been made as to warrant the committee
in recommending that the subject be referred to a committee at the next
session of Parliament.


Three years later, on the first Dominion Day, the _Globe_,[2] in
discussing this committee and its work, declared that 'a very free
interchange of opinion took place.  In the course of the discussions it
appeared probable that a union of parties might be effected for the
purpose of grappling with the constitutional difficulties.'  Macdonald
voted against the committee's report.  Brown was thoroughly in earnest,
and the desperate nature of the political situation gave him an
opportunity to prove his sincerity and his unselfishness.

{34}

On the evening of Tuesday, June 14, 1864, immediately after the defeat
of the ministry on an unimportant question, Brown spoke to two
Conservative members and promised to co-operate with any government
that would settle the constitutional difficulty.  These members,
Alexander Morris and John Henry Pope, were on friendly terms with him
and became serviceable intermediaries.  They were asked to communicate
this promise to Macdonald and to Galt.  The next day saw the
reconciliation of the two leaders who had been estranged for ten years.
They met 'standing in the centre of the Assembly Room' (the formal
memorandum is meticulously exact in these and other particulars), that
is, neither member crossing to that side of the House led by the other.
Macdonald spoke first, mentioning the overtures made and asking if
Brown had any 'objection' to meet Galt and himself.  Brown replied,
'Certainly not.'  Morris arranged an interview, and the following day
Macdonald and Galt called upon Brown at the St Louis Hotel, Quebec.
Negotiations, ending in the famous coalition, began.

The memorandum read to the House related in detail every step taken to
bring about the coalition, from the opening conversation {35} which
Brown had with Morris and Pope.  It was proper that a full explanation
should be given to the public of a political event so extraordinary and
so unexpected.  But the narrative of minute particulars indicates the
complete lack of confidence existing between the parties to the
agreement.  The relationships of social life rest upon the belief that
there is a code of honour, affecting words and actions, which is
binding upon gentlemen.  The memorandum appeared to assume that in
political life these considerations did not exist, and that unless the
whole of the proceedings were set forth in chronological order, and
with amplitude of detail, some of the group would seek to repudiate the
explanation on one point or another, while the general public would
disbelieve them all.  To such a pass had the extremes of partyism
brought the leading men in parliament.  If, however, the memorandum is
a very human document, it is also historically most interesting and
important.  The leaders began by solemnly assuring each other that
nothing but 'the extreme urgency of the present crisis' could justify
their meeting together for common political action.  The idea that the
paramount interests of the nation, threatened by possible invasion and
by {36} commercial disturbance, would be ground for such a junction of
forces does not seem to have suggested itself.  After the preliminary
skirmishing upon matters of party concern the negotiators at last
settled down to business.


Mr Brown asked what the Government proposed as a remedy for the
injustice complained of by Upper Canada, and as a settlement of the
sectional trouble.  Mr Macdonald and Mr Galt replied that their remedy
was a Federal Union of all the British North American Provinces; local
matters being committed to local bodies, and matters common to all to a
General Legislature.[3]

Mr Brown rejoined that this would not be acceptable to the people of
Upper Canada as a remedy for existing evils.  That he believed that
federation of all the provinces ought to come, and would come about ere
long, but it had not yet been thoroughly considered by the people; and
even were this otherwise, there were {37} so many parties to be
consulted that its adoption was uncertain and remote.

Mr Brown was then asked what his remedy was, when he stated that the
measure acceptable to Upper Canada would be Parliamentary Reform, based
on population, without regard to a separating line between Upper and
Lower Canada.  To this both Mr Macdonald and Mr Galt stated that it was
impossible for them to accede, or for any Government to carry such a
measure, and that, unless a basis could be found on the federation
principle suggested by the report of Mr Brown's committee, it did not
appear to them likely that anything could be settled.


At this stage, then, Brown thought federation should be limited to
Canada, believing the larger scheme uncertain and remote, while the
others preferred a federal union for all the provinces.  At a later
meeting Cartier joined the gathering and a confidential statement was
drawn up (the disinclination to take one another's word being still a
lively sentiment), so that Brown could consult his friends.  The
ministerial promise in its final terms was as follows:


{38}

The Government are prepared to pledge themselves to bring in a measure
next session for the purpose of removing existing difficulties by
introducing the federal principle into Canada, coupled with such
provisions as will permit the Maritime Provinces and the North-West
Territory to be incorporated into the same system of government.  And
the Government will seek, by sending representatives to the Lower
Provinces and to England, to secure the assent of those interests which
are beyond the control of our own legislation to such a measure as may
enable all British North America to be united under a General
Legislature based upon the federal principle.


This basis gave satisfaction all round, and the proceedings relapsed
into the purely political diplomacy which forms the least pleasant
phase of what was otherwise a highly patriotic episode, creditable in
its results to all concerned.  Brown fought hard for a representation
of four Liberals in the Cabinet, preferring to remain out of it
himself, and, when his inclusion was deemed indispensable, offering to
join as a minister without portfolio or salary.  {39} Finally Macdonald
promised to confer with him upon the personnel of the Conservative
element in the Cabinet, so that the incoming Liberals would meet
colleagues with whom harmonious relations should be ensured.  The fates
ordained that, since Brown had been the first to propose the sacrifice
of party to country, the arrangement arrived at was the least
advantageous to his interests.  He had the satisfaction of feeling that
the Upper Canada Liberals in the House supported his action, but those
from Lower Canada, both English and French, were entirely
unsympathetic.  The Lower Canada section of the ministry accordingly
remained wholly Conservative.

It does not require much depth of political experience to realize the
embarrassment of Brown's position.  The terms were not easy for him.
In a ministry of twelve members he and two colleagues would be the only
Liberals.  The leadership of Upper Canada, and in fact the real
premiership, because Taché was frail and past his prime, would rest
with Macdonald.  The presidency of the Executive Council, which was
offered him, unless joined to the office of prime minister, was of no
real importance.  Some party friends throughout the country {40} would
misunderstand, and more would scoff.  He had parted company with his
loyal personal friends Dorion and Holton.  If, as Disraeli said,
England does not love coalitions, neither does Canada.  For the time
being, and, as events proved, for a considerable time, the Liberal
party would be divided and helpless, because the pledge of Brown
pledged also the fighting strength of the party.  Although the union
issue dwarfed all others, questions would arise, awkward questions like
that of patronage, old questions with a new face, on which there had
been vehement differences.  For two of his new colleagues, Macdonald
and Galt, Brown entertained feelings far from cordial.  Cautious
advisers like Alexander Mackenzie and Oliver Mowat counselled against a
coalition, suggesting that the party should support the government, but
should not take a share in it.  All this had to be weighed and a
decision reached quickly.  But Brown had put his hand to the plough and
would not turn back.  With the dash and determination that
distinguished him, he accepted the proposal, became president of the
Executive Council, with Sir Etienne Taché as prime minister, and
selected William McDougall and Oliver Mowat as his Liberal colleagues.
Amazement and {41} consternation ran like wildfire throughout Upper
Canada when the news arrived from Quebec that Brown and Macdonald were
members of the same government.  At the outset Brown had feared that
'the public mind would be shocked,' and he was not wrong.  But the
sober second thought of the country in both parties applauded the act,
and the desire for union found free vent.  Posterity has endorsed the
course taken by Brown and justly honours his memory for having, at the
critical hour and on terms that would have made the ordinary politician
quail, rendered Confederation possible.  There is evidence that the
Conservative members of the coalition played the game fairly and
redeemed their promise to put union in the forefront of their policy.
On this issue complete concord reigned in the Cabinet.  The natural
divergences of opinion on minor points in the scheme were arranged
without internal discord.  This was fortunate, because grave obstacles
were soon to be encountered.

If George Brown of Upper Canada was the hero of the hour, George
Cartier of Lower Canada played a rôle equally courageous and
honourable.  The hostile forces to be encountered by the
French-Canadian leader were {42} formidable.  Able men of his own race,
like Dorion, Letellier, and Fournier, prepared to fight tooth and nail.
The Rouges, as the Liberals there were termed, opposed him to a man.
The idea of British American union had in the past been almost
invariably put forward as a means of destroying the influence of the
French.  Influential representatives, too, of the English minority in
Lower Canada, like Dunkin, Holton, and Huntington, opposed it.  Joly de
Lotbinière, the French Protestant, warned the Catholics and the French
that federation would endanger their rights.  The Rouge resistance was
not a passive parliamentary resistance only, because, later on, the
earnest protests of the dissentients were carried to the foot of the
throne.  But all these influences the intrepid Cartier faced
undismayed; and Brown, in announcing his intention to enter the
coalition, paid a warm tribute to Cartier for his frank and manly
attitude.  This was the burial of another hatchet, and the amusing
incident related by Cartwright illustrates how it was received.

[Illustration:  Sir George Cartier.  From a painting in the Château de
Ramezay.]

In that memorable afternoon when Mr Brown, not without emotion, made
his {43} statement to a hushed and expectant House, and declared that
he was about to ally himself with Sir George Cartier and his friends,
for the purpose of carrying out Confederation, I saw an excitable,
elderly little French member rush across the floor, climb up on Mr
Brown, who, as you remember, was of a stature approaching the gigantic,
fling his arms about his neck, and hang several seconds there
suspended, to the visible consternation of Mr Brown and to the infinite
joy of all beholders, pit, box, and gallery included.


At last statesmanship had taken the place of party bickering, and, as
James Ferrier of Montreal, a member of the Legislative Council,
remarked in the debates of 1865, the legislators 'all thought, in fact,
that a political millennium had arrived.'



[1] _Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald_, by Sir Joseph Pope, vol. i, p. 265.

[2] This portion of the lengthy survey of the new Dominion in the
_Globe_ of July 1, 1867, is said to have been written by George Brown
himself.

[3] Sir Joseph Pope states that in the printed copy of this memorandum
which Sir John Macdonald preserved there appears, immediately following
the word 'Legislature' at the end of this paragraph, in the handwriting
of Mr Brown, these words: 'Constituted on the well-understood
principles of federal gov.'




{44}

CHAPTER V

THE CHARLOTTETOWN CONFERENCE

Not an instant too soon had unity come in Canada.  The coalition
ministry, having adjourned parliament, found itself faced with a
situation in the Maritime Provinces which called for speedy action.

Nova Scotia, the ancient province by the sea, discouraged by the
vacillation of Canada in relation to federation and the construction of
the Intercolonial Railway, was bent upon joining forces with New
Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.  The proposal was in the nature of
a reunion, for, when constitutional government had been first set up in
Nova Scotia in 1758, the British possessions along the Atlantic coast,
save Newfoundland, were all governed as one province from Halifax.  But
the policy in early days of splitting up the colonies into smaller
areas, for convenience of administration, was here faithfully carried
out.  In 1770 a separate government was conferred {45} upon Prince
Edward Island.  In 1784 New Brunswick was formed.  In the same year the
island of Cape Breton was given a governor and council of its own.
Cape Breton was reunited to the parent colony of Nova Scotia in 1820,
but three separate provinces remained, each developing apart from the
others, thus complicating and making more difficult the whole problem
of union when men with foresight and boldness essayed to solve it.
Nova Scotia had kept alive the tradition of leadership.  The province
which has supplied three prime ministers to the Canadian Dominion never
lacked statesmen with the imagination to perceive the advantages which
would flow from the consolidation of British power in America.

In 1864, a few weeks before George Brown in the Canadian House had
moved for his select committee on federal union, Dr Charles Tupper
proposed, in the legislature of Nova Scotia, a legislative union of the
Maritime Provinces.  The seal of Imperial authority had been set upon
this movement by the dispatch, already quoted, from the Duke of
Newcastle to Lord Mulgrave in 1862.

A word concerning the services of Charles Tupper to the cause of union
will be in order here.  None of the Fathers of Confederation {46}
fought a more strenuous battle.  None faced political obstacles of so
overwhelming a character.  None evinced a more unselfish patriotism.
The overturn of Tilley in New Brunswick, of which we shall hear
presently, was a misfortune quickly repaired.  The junction of Brown,
Cartier, and Macdonald in Canada ensured for them comparatively plain
sailing.  But the Nova Scotian leader was pitted against a redoubtable
foe in Joseph Howe; for five years he faced an angry and rebellious
province; he gallantly gave up his place in the first Dominion ministry
in order that another might have it; and at every turn he displayed
those qualities of pluck, endurance, and dexterity which compel
admiration.  The Tuppers were of Puritan stock.[1]  The future prime
minister, a practising physician, had scored his first political
victory at the age of thirty-four by defeating Howe in Cumberland
county.  Throughout his long and notable career, a superabundance of
energy, and a characteristic which may be defined in a favourable sense
as audacity, never failed him.

{47}

When the motion was presented to appoint delegates to a conference at
Charlottetown, to consider a legislative union for the three maritime
provinces, the skies were serene.  The idea met with a general, if
rather languid, approval.  There was not even a flavour of partisanship
about the proceedings, and the delegates were impartially selected from
both sides.  The great Howe regarded the project with a benignant eye.
At this time he was the Imperial fishery commissioner, and it was his
duty to inspect the deep-sea fishing grounds each summer in a vessel of
the Imperial Navy.  He was invited to go to Charlottetown as a
delegate, and declined in the following terms:


I am sorry for many reasons to be compelled to decline participation in
the conference at Charlottetown.  The season is so far advanced that I
find my summer's work would be so seriously deranged by the visit to
Prince Edward Island that, without permission from the Foreign Office,
I would scarcely be justified in consulting my own feelings at the
expense of the public service.  I shall be home in October, and will be
very happy to co-operate in {48} carrying out any measure upon which
the conference shall agree.


A more striking evidence of his mood at this juncture is afforded by a
speech which he delivered at Halifax in August, when a party of
visitors from Canada were being entertained at dinner.


I am not one of those who thank God that I am a Nova Scotian merely,
for I am a Canadian as well.  I have never thought I was a Nova
Scotian, but I have looked across the broad continent as the great
territory which the Almighty has given us for an inheritance, and
studied the mode by which it could be consolidated, the mode by which
it could be united, the mode by which it could be made strong and
vigorous while the old flag still floats over the soil.[2]


In the time close at hand Howe was to find these words quoted against
him.  Meanwhile they were a sure warrant for peace and harmony.

In addressing the Assembly Tupper stated that his visit to Canada
during the previous {49} year had convinced him that for some time the
larger union was impracticable.  He had found in Upper Canada a
disinclination to unite with the Maritime Provinces because, from their
identity of interest and geographical position, they would strengthen
Lower Canada.  Lower Canada was equally averse from union through fear
that it would increase the English influence in a common legislature.
Tupper favoured the larger scheme, and looked forward to its future
realization, which would be helped, not hindered, by the union of the
Maritime Provinces as a first step.  Other speakers openly declared for
a general union, and consented to the Charlottetown gathering as a
convenient preliminary.  The resolution passed without a division; and,
though the members expressed a variety of opinion on details, there was
no hint of a coming storm.

The conference opened at Charlottetown on September 1, the following
delegates being present: from Nova Scotia, Charles Tupper, William A.
Henry, Robert B. Dickey, Jonathan McCully, Adams G. Archibald; from New
Brunswick, S. L. Tilley, John M. Johnston, John Hamilton Gray, Edward
B. Chandler, W. H. Steeves; from Prince Edward Island, J. H. Gray,
Edward Palmer, W. H. Pope, {50} George Coles, A. A. Macdonald.
Newfoundland, having no part in the movement, sent no representatives.
Meanwhile Lord Monck, at the request of his ministers, had communicated
with the lieutenant-governors asking that a delegation of the Canadian
Cabinet might attend the meeting and lay their own plans before it.
This was readily accorded.  The visitors from Canada arrived from
Quebec by steamer.  They were George Brown, John A. Macdonald,
Alexander T. Galt, George E. Cartier, Hector L. Langevin, William
McDougall, D'Arcy McGee, and Alexander Campbell.  No official report of
the proceedings ever appeared.  It is improbable that any exists, but
we know from many subsequent references nearly everything of importance
that took place.  On the arrival of the Canadians they were invited to
address the convention at once.  The delegates from the Maritime
Provinces took the ground that their own plan might, if adopted, be a
bar to the larger proposal, and accordingly suggested that the visitors
should be heard first.  The Canadians, however, saw no reason to fear
the smaller union.  They believed that Confederation would gain if the
three provinces by the sea could be treated as a single unit.  {51}
But, being requested to state their case, they naturally had no
hesitation in doing so.  During the previous two months the members of
the coalition must have applied themselves diligently to all the chief
points in the project.  It may be supposed that Galt, Brown, and
Macdonald made a strong impression at Charlottetown.  They spoke
respectively on the finance, the general parliament, and the
constitutional structure of the proposed federation.  These subjects
contained the germs of nearly all the difficulties.  When the delegates
reassembled a month later at Quebec, it is clear, from the allusions
made in the scanty reports that have come down to us, that the leading
phases of the question had already been frankly debated.

Having heard the proposals of Canada, the delegates of the Maritime
Provinces met separately to debate the question that had brought them
together.  Obstacles at once arose.  Only Nova Scotia was found to be
in favour of the smaller union.  New Brunswick was doubtful, and Prince
Edward Island positively refused to give up her own legislature and
executive.  The federation project involved no such sacrifice; and, as
Aaron's rod swallowed up all the others, the dazzling prospects held
out by Canada eclipsed the other proposal, since they {52} provided a
strong central government without destroying the identity of the
component parts.  The conference decided to adjourn to Halifax, where,
at the public dinner given to the visitors, Macdonald made the formal
announcement that the delegates were unanimous in thinking that a
federal union could be effected.  The members, however, kept the
secrets of the convention with some skill.  The speeches at Halifax,
and later on at St John, whither the party repaired, abounded in
glowing passages descriptive of future expansion, but were sparing of
intimate detail.  A passage in Brown's speech at Halifax created
favourable comment on both sides of the ocean.


In these colonies as heretofore governed [he said] we have enjoyed
great advantages under the protecting shield of the mother country.  We
have had no army or navy to sustain, no foreign diplomacy to
sustain,--our whole resources have gone to our internal
improvement,--and notwithstanding our occasional strifes with the
Colonial Office, we have enjoyed a degree of self-government and
generous consideration such as no colonies in ancient or modern history
ever enjoyed at the hands of a {53} parent state.  Is it any wonder
that thoughtful men should hesitate to countenance a step that might
change the happy and advantageous relations we have occupied towards
the mother country?  I am persuaded there never was a moment in the
history of these colonies when the hearts of our people were so firmly
attached to the parent state by the ties of gratitude and affection as
at this moment, and for one I hesitate not to say that did this
movement for colonial union endanger the connection that has so long
and so happily existed, it would have my firm opposition.


These and other utterances, equally forceful and appealing directly to
the pride and ambition of the country, were not without effect in
moulding public opinion.  The tour was a campaign of education.  By
avoiding the constitutional issues the delegates gave little
information which could afford carping critics an opportunity to assail
the movement prematurely.  It is true, some sarcastic comments were
made upon the manner in which the Canadians had walked into the
convention and taken possession.  At the Halifax dinner the governor of
Nova Scotia, Sir Richard Graves {54} Macdonnell, dropped an ironical
remark on the 'disinterested' course of Canada, which plainly betrayed
his own attitude.  But the gathering was, in the main, highly
successful and augured well for the movement.

The Charlottetown Conference was therefore an essential part of the
proceedings which culminated at Quebec.  The ground had been broken.
The leaders in the various provinces had formed ties of intimacy and
friendship and favourably impressed each other.  At this time were laid
the foundations of the alliance between Macdonald and Tilley, the
Liberal leader in New Brunswick, which made it possible to construct
the first federal ministry on a non-party basis and which enlisted in
the national service a devoted and trustworthy public man.  Tilley's
career had few blemishes from its beginning to its end.  He was a
direct descendant of John Tilley, one of the English emigrants to
Massachusetts in the _Mayflower_, and a great-grandson of Samuel
Tilley, one of the Loyalists who removed to New Brunswick after the War
of Independence.  He had been drawn into politics against his wishes by
the esteem and confidence of his fellow-citizens.  A nominating
convention at which he was not present had selected him for {55} the
legislature, and his first election had taken place during his absence
from the country.  Yet he had risen to be prime minister of his
province; and his was the guiding hand which brought New Brunswick into
the union.  His defeat at first and the speedy reversal of the verdict
against Confederation form one of the most diverting episodes in the
history of the movement.

The ominous feature of the Charlottetown Conference was the absence of
Joseph Howe, the most popular leader in Nova Scotia.  This was one of
the accidents which so often disturb the calculations of statesmen.
When the delegates resumed their labours at Quebec he was in
Newfoundland, and he returned home to find that a plan had been agreed
upon without his aid.  From him, as well as from the governors of Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick, the cause of federation was to receive its
next serious check.



[1] See _Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada_, p. 2.  The original
Tupper in America came out from England in 1635.  Sir Charles Tupper's
great-grandfather migrated from Connecticut to Nova Scotia in 1763.

[2] _The Speeches and Public Letters of Joseph Howe_, edited by J. A.
Chisholm, vol. ii, p. 433.  Halifax, 1909.




{56}

CHAPTER VI

THE QUEBEC CONFERENCE

The Quebec Conference began its sessions on the 10th of October 1864.
It was now the task of the delegates to challenge and overcome the
separatist tendencies that had dominated British America since the
dismemberment of the Empire eighty years before.  They were to prove
that a new nationality could be created, which should retain intact the
connection with the mother country.  For an event of such historic
importance no better setting could have been chosen than the Ancient
Capital, with its striking situation and its hallowed memories of
bygone days.  The delegates were practical and experienced men of
affairs, but they lacked neither poetic and imaginative sense nor
knowledge of the past; and it may well be that their labours were
inspired and their deliberations influenced by the historic
associations of the place.

The gathering was remarkable for the varied {57} talents and forceful
character of its principal members.  And here it may be noted that the
constitution was not chiefly the product of legal minds.  Brown,
Tilley, Galt, Tupper, and others who shared largely in the work of
construction were not lawyers.  The conference represented fairly the
different interests and occupations of a young country.  It is to be
recorded, too, that the conclusions reached were criticized as the
product of men in a hurry.  Edward Goff Penny, editor of the Montreal
_Herald_, a keen critic, and afterwards a senator, complained that the
actual working period of the conference was limited to fourteen days.
Joseph Howe poured scorn upon Ottawa as the capital, stating that he
preferred London, the seat of empire, where there were preserved 'the
archives of a nationality not created in a fortnight.'  Still more
vigorous were the protests against the secrecy of the discussions.  A
number of distinguished journalists, including several English
correspondents who had come across the ocean to write about the Civil
War, were in Quebec, and they were disposed to find fault with the
precautions taken to guard against publicity.  The following memorial
was presented to the delegates:


{58}

The undersigned, representatives of English and Canadian newspapers,
find that it would be impossible for them satisfactorily to discharge
their duties if an injunction of secrecy be imposed on the conference
and stringently carried into effect.  They, therefore, beg leave to
suggest whether, while the remarks of individual members of your body
are kept secret, the propositions made and the treatment they meet
with, might not advantageously be made public, and whether such a
course would not best accord with the real interests committed to the
conference.  Such a kind of compromise between absolute secrecy and
unlimited publicity is usually, we believe, observed in cases where an
European congress holds the peace of the world and the fate of nations
in its hands.  And we have thought that the British American Conference
might perhaps consider the precedent not inapplicable to the present
case.  Such a course would have the further advantage of preventing
ill-founded and mischievous rumours regarding the proceedings from
obtaining currency.[1]


{59} This ingenious appeal was signed by S. Phillips Day, of the London
_Morning Herald_, by Charles Lindsey of the Toronto _Leader_, and by
Brown Chamberlain of the Montreal _Gazette_.  Among the other writers
of distinction in attendance were George Augustus Sala of the London
_Daily Telegraph_, Charles Mackay of _The Times_, Livesy of _Punch_,
and George Brega of the New York _Herald_.  But the conference stood
firm, and the impatient correspondents were denied even the mournful
satisfaction of brief daily protocols.  They were forced to be content
with overhearing the burst of cheering from the delegates when
Macdonald's motion proposing federation was unanimously adopted.  The
reasons for maintaining strict secrecy were thus stated by John
Hamilton Gray,[2] a delegate from New Brunswick, who afterwards became
the historian of the Confederation movement:


After much consideration it was determined, as in Prince Edward Island,
that the convention should hold its {60} deliberations with closed
doors.  In addition to the reasons which had governed the convention at
Charlottetown, it was further urged, that the views of individual
members, after a first expression, might be changed by the discussion
of new points, differing essentially from the ordinary current of
subjects that came under their consideration in the more limited range
of the Provincial Legislatures; and it was held that no man ought to be
prejudiced, or be liable to the charge in public that he had on some
other occasion advocated this or that doctrine, or this or that
principle, inconsistent with the one that might then be deemed best, in
view of the future union to be adopted....  Liberals and Conservatives
had there met to determine what was best for the future guidance of
half a continent, not to fight old party battles, or stand by old party
cries, and candour was sought for more than mere personal triumph.  The
conclusion arrived at, it is thought, was judicious.  It ensured the
utmost freedom of debate; the more so, inasmuch as the result would be
in no way binding upon those whose interests were to be affected until
and unless adopted after the {61} greatest publicity and the fullest
public discussions.


That the conference decided wisely admits of no doubt.  The provincial
secretaries of the several provinces were appointed joint secretaries,
and Hewitt Bernard, chief clerk of the department of the
attorney-general for Upper Canada, was named executive secretary.  In
his longhand notes, found among the papers of Sir John Macdonald, and
made public thirty years later by Sir Joseph Pope, we have the only
official record of the resolutions and debates of the conference.
Posterity has reason to be grateful for even this limited revelation of
the proceedings from day to day.  It enables us to form an idea of the
difficulties overcome and of the currents of opinion which combined to
give the measure its final shape.  No student of Canadian
constitutional history will leave unread a single note thus fortunately
preserved.  The various draft motions, we are told by Sir Joseph Pope,
are nearly all in the handwriting of those who moved them, and it was
evidently the intention to prepare a complete record.  The conference
was, however, much hurried at the close.  When it began, Sir Etienne
Taché, prime minister of Canada, was {62} unanimously elected
chairman.[3]  Each province was given one vote, except that Canada, as
consisting of two divisions, was allowed two votes.  After the vote on
any motion was put, the delegates of a province might retire for
consultation among themselves.  The conference sat as if in committee
of the whole, so as to permit of free discussion and suggestion.  The
resolutions, having been passed in committee of the whole, were to be
reconsidered and carried as if parliament were sitting with the speaker
in the chair.

The first motion, which was offered by Macdonald and seconded by
Tilley, read: _That the {63} best interests and present and future
prosperity of British North America will be promoted by a federal union
under the crown of Great Britain, provided such union can be effected
on principles just to the several provinces_.  This motion, general in
its terms, asserted the principle which the conference had met to
decide.  It passed unanimously amid much enthusiasm.  To support it,
one may think, involved no serious responsibility, since any province
could at a later stage raise objections to any methods proposed in
carrying out the principle.  But to secure the hearty and unanimous
acceptance of a federal union, as the basis on which the provinces were
ready to coalesce, was really to submit the whole issue to the crucial
test.  {64} Macdonald's motion reflects, in its careful and
comprehensive phrasing, the skill in parliamentary tactics of which he
had, during many years, displayed so complete a mastery.  To commit the
conference at the outset to endorsement of the general principle was to
render subsequent objection on some detail, however important,
extremely difficult for earnest and broad-minded patriots.  The two
small provinces might withdraw from the scheme, as they subsequently
did, but the larger provinces, led by men of the calibre of Tupper and
Tilley, would feel that any subsequent obstacle must be of gigantic
proportions if it could not be overcome by statesmanship.  After
cheerfully taking this momentous step, which irresistibly drove them on
to the next, the conference proceeded to discuss Brown's motion
proposing the form the federation was to assume.  There was to be a
general government dealing with matters common to all, and in each
province a local government having control of local matters.  The
second motion was likewise unanimously concurred in.  Having, as it
were, planted two feet firmly on the ground, the conference was now in
a good position to stand firmly against divergences of view, provincial
rivalries, and extreme demands.



[1] Pope's _Confederation Documents_.

[2] There were two delegates named John Hamilton Gray, one whose views
are quoted here, the other the prime minister of Prince Edward Island.
Only one volume of Gray's work on Confederation ever appeared, the
second volume, it is said, being unfinished when the author died in
British Columbia.

[3] A list of the delegates, who are now styled the Fathers of
Confederation, follows:

_From Canada, twelve delegates_--SIR ETIENNE P. TACHÉ, receiver-general
and minister of Militia; JOHN A. MACDONALD, attorney-general for Upper
Canada; GEORGE E. CARTIER, attorney-general for Lower Canada; GEORGE
BROWN, president of the Executive Council; OLIVER MOWAT,
postmaster-general; ALEXANDER T. GALT, minister of Finance; WILLIAM
McDOUGALL, provincial secretary; T. D'ARCY McGEE, minister of
Agriculture; ALEXANDER CAMPBELL, commissioner of Crown Lands; J. C.
CHAPAIS, commissioner of Public Works; HECTOR L. LANGEVIN,
solicitor-general for Lower Canada; JAMES COCKBURN, solicitor-general
for Upper Canada.

_From Nova Scotia, five delegates_--CHARLES TUPPER, provincial
secretary; WILLIAM A. HENRY, attorney-general; R. B. DICKEY, member of
the Legislative Council; JONATHAN McCULLY, member of the Legislative
Council; ADAMS G. ARCHIBALD, member of the Legislative Assembly.

_From New Brunswick, seven delegates_--SAMUEL LEONARD TILLEY,
provincial secretary; WILLIAM H. STEEVES, minister without portfolio;
J. M. JOHNSTON, attorney-general; PETER MITCHELL, minister without
portfolio; E. B. CHANDLER, member of the Legislative Council; JOHN
HAMILTON GRAY, member of the Legislative Assembly; CHARLES FISHER,
member of the Legislative Assembly.

_From Prince Edward Island, seven delegates_--COLONEL JOHN HAMILTON
GRAY, president of the Council; EDWARD PALMER, attorney-general;
WILLIAM H. POPE, colonial secretary; A. A. MACDONALD, member of the
Legislative Council; GEORGE COLES, member of the Legislative Assembly;
T. HEATH HAVILAND, member of the Legislative Assembly; EDWARD WHELAN,
member of the Legislative Assembly.

_From Newfoundland, two delegates_--F. B. T. CARTER, speaker of the
Legislative Assembly; AMBROSE SHEA.




{65}

CHAPTER VII

THE RESULTS OF THE CONFERENCE

The constitution which the founders of the Dominion devised was the
first of its kind on a great scale within the Empire.  No English
precedents therefore existed.  Yet their chief aim was to preserve the
connection with Great Britain, and to perpetuate in North America the
institutions and principles which the mother of parliaments, during her
splendid history, had bequeathed to the world.  The Fathers could look
to Switzerland, to New Zealand, to the American Republic, and to those
experiments and proposals in ancient or modern times which seemed to
present features to imitate or examples to avoid.[1]  But they were
guided, perforce, by the special conditions with which they had to
deal.  If they had been free to make a perfect contribution to the
science of government, the constitution might have been {66} different.
It is, of course, true of all existing federations that they were
determined largely by the relations and circumstances of the combining
states.  This is illustrated by comparing the Canadian constitution
with those of the two most notable unions which followed.  Unlike
Canada, Australia preferred to leave the residue of powers to the
individual states, while South Africa adopted a legislative instead of
a federal union.  For Canada, a legislative union was impracticable.
This was due partly to the racial solidarity of the French, but even
more largely to the fully developed individualism of each province.  It
is to the glory of the Fathers of Confederation that the constitution,
mainly constructed by themselves as the product of their own experience
and reflection, has lasted without substantial change for nearly half a
century.  They were forced to deal with conditions which they had not
created, yet could not ignore--conditions which had long perplexed both
Imperial and colonial statesmen, and had rendered government
ineffective if not impossible.  They found the remedy; and the result
is seen in the powerful and thriving nationality which their labours
evolved.

To set up a strong central government was {67} the desire of many of
the delegates.  Macdonald, as has been recorded already, had contended
for this in 1861.  He argued to the same effect at the conference.  The
Civil War in the United States, just concluded, had revealed in
startling fashion the dangers arising from an exaggerated state
sovereignty.  'We must,' he said, 'reverse this process by
strengthening the general government and conferring on the provincial
bodies only such powers as may be required for local purposes.'  When
Chandler of New Brunswick perceived with acuteness that in effect this
would mean legislative union, Macdonald, as we gather from the
fragmentary notes of his speech, made an impassioned appeal for a
carefully defined central authority.


I think [he declared] the whole affair would fail and the system be a
failure if we adopted Mr Chandler's views.  We should concentrate the
power in the federal government and not adopt the decentralization of
the United States.  Mr Chandler would give sovereign power to the local
legislatures, just where the United States failed.  Canada would be
infinitely stronger as she is than under such a system {68} as proposed
by Mr Chandler.  It is said that the tariff is one of the causes of
difficulty in the United States.  So it would be with us.  Looking at
the agricultural interests of Upper Canada, manufacturing of Lower
Canada, and maritime interests of the lower provinces, in respect to a
tariff, a federal government would be a mediator.  No general feeling
of patriotism exists in the United States.  In occasions of difficulty
each man sticks to his individual state.  Mr Stephens, the present
vice-president [of the Confederacy], was a strong union man, yet, when
the time came, he went with his state.  Similarly we should stick to
our province and not be British Americans.  It would be introducing a
source of radical weakness.  It would ruin us in the eyes of the
civilized world.  All writers point out the errors of the United
States.  All the feelings prognosticated by Tocqueville are shown to be
fulfilled.


These and other arguments prevailed.  Several of the most influential
delegates were in theory in favour of legislative union, and these were
anxious to create, as the best alternative, a general parliament
wielding {69} paramount authority.  This object was attained by means
of three important clauses in the new constitution: one enumerating the
powers of the federal and provincial bodies respectively and assigning
the undefined residue to the federal parliament; another conferring
upon the federal ministry the right to dismiss for cause the
lieutenant-governors; and another declaring that any provincial law
might, within one year, be disallowed by the central body.  Instead of
a loosely knit federation, therefore, which might have fallen to pieces
at the first serious strain, it was resolved to bring the central
legislature into close contact at many points with the individual
citizen, and thus raise the new state to the dignity of a nation.

How the designs of the Fathers have been modified by the course of
events is well known.  The federal power has been restrained from undue
encroachment on provincial rights by the decisions, on various issues,
of the highest court, the judicial committee of the Imperial Privy
Council.  The power to dismiss lieutenant-governors was found to be
fraught with danger and has been rarely exercised.  The dismissal of
Letellier, a strong Liberal, from the lieutenant-governorship of Quebec
by the {70} Conservative ministry at Ottawa in 1879, gave rise to some
uneasiness and criticism.  The reason assigned was that his 'usefulness
was gone,' since both houses of parliament had passed resolutions
calling for his removal.  He was accused of partisanship towards his
ministers.  The federal prime minister, Sir John Macdonald, assented
reluctantly, it is said, to the dismissal.  But some of the facts are
still obscure.  The status of the office and the causes that would
warrant removal were thus given by Macdonald at Quebec, according to
the imperfect report which has come down to us:


The office must necessarily be during pleasure.  The person may break
down, misbehave, etc....  The lieutenant-governor will be a very high
officer.  He should be independent of the federal government, except as
to removal for cause, and it is necessary that he should not be
removable by any new political party.  It would destroy his
independence.  He should only be removable upon an address from the
legislature.


The power of disallowance, the third expedient for curbing the
provinces, was exercised with {71} some freedom down to 1888.  In that
year a Quebec measure, the Jesuits' Estates Act, with a highly
controversial preamble calculated to provoke a war of creeds, was not
disallowed, although protests were carried past parliament to the
governor-general personally.  The incident directed attention to the
previous practice at Ottawa under both parties and a new era of
non-intervention was inaugurated.  Disallowance is now rare, except
where Imperial interests are affected, and never occurs on the ground
of the policy or impolicy of the measure.  The provinces, as a matter
of practice, are free within their limits to legislate as they please.
But the Dominion as a self-governing state has long passed the stage
where the clashing of provincial and federal jurisdictions could shake
the constitution.

When the conference, however, considered provincial powers it went to
the root of a federal system.  The maritime delegates as a whole
displayed magnanimity and statesmanship.  Brown, as the champion of
Upper Canada, was concerned to see that the interests of his own
province were amply secured.  He held radical views.  When he spoke,
the calm surface of the conference, where a moderate and essentially
conservative {72} constitutionalism sat entrenched, may have been
ruffled.  The following is from the summary which has been preserved of
one of his speeches:[2]


As to local governments, we desire in Upper Canada that they should not
be expensive, and should not take up political matters.  We ought not
to have two electoral bodies.  Only one body, members to be elected
once in every three years.  Should have whole legislative
power--subject to lieutenant-governor.  I would have
lieutenant-governors appointed by general government.  It would thus
bring these bodies into harmony with the general government.  In Upper
Canada executive officers would be attorney-general, treasurer,
secretary, commissioner of crown lands and commissioner of public
works.  These would form the council of the lieutenant-governor.  I
would give lieutenant-governors veto without advice, but under certain
vote he should be obliged to assent.  During recess lieutenant-governor
could have power to suspend executive officers.  They might be elected
for three years or {73} otherwise.  You might safely allow county
councils to appoint other officers than those they do now.  One
legislative chamber for three years, no power of dissolution, elected
on one day in each third year.  Departmental officers to be elected
during pleasure or for three years.  To be allowed to speak but not to
vote.


A more suggestive extract than this cannot be found in the discussion.
From the astonished Cartier the ejaculation came, 'I entirely differ
with Mr Brown.  It introduces in our local bodies republican
institutions.'  From the brevity of the report we cannot gather the
whole of Brown's meaning.  Apparently his aim was a strictly
businesslike administration of provincial affairs, under complete
popular control, but with the executive functions as far removed from
party domination as erring human nature would permit.  There may be
seen here points of resemblance to an American state constitution, but
Brown was no more a republican than was Napoleon.  He was, like
Macdonald, an Imperialist who favoured the widest national expansion
for Canada.  The idea of a republic, either in the abstract or the
concrete, had no friends in the {74} conference.  Galt believed
independence the proper aim for a young state, but we find him stating
later: 'We were and are willing to spend our last men and our last
shilling for our mother country.'[3]  Many years after Confederation
Sir Oliver Mowat declared independence the remote goal to keep in view.
These opinions were plainly speculative.  Neither statesman took any
step towards carrying them out, but benevolently left them as a legacy,
unencumbered by conditions, to a distant posterity.

At the conference Mowat was active to strengthen the central authority,
as also was Brown.  But there was general agreement, despite Brown's
plea for a change, that the local governments should take the form
preferred by themselves and that ministerial responsibility on the
British model should prevail throughout.  Upon the question of
assigning the same subjects, such as agriculture, to both federal and
provincial legislatures, Mowat said:


The items of agriculture and immigration should be vested in both
federal and local governments.  Danger often arises where there is
exclusive jurisdiction and not so {75} often in cases of concurrent
jurisdiction.  In municipal matters the county and township council
often have concurrent jurisdiction.


In the famous contests for provincial rights which he was afterwards to
wage before the courts, and always successfully, Mowat was not
necessarily forgetful that he himself moved for the power of
disallowance over provincial laws to be given to the federal authority.
With the caution and clearness of mind that governed his political
course, he naturally made sure of his ground before fighting, and could
thus safely break a lance with the federal government.  The provincial
constitutions were, therefore, left to be determined by the provinces
themselves, and this freedom to modify them continues, 'except as
regards the office of lieutenant-governor.'  No province has yet
proposed any constitutional change which could be regarded as an
infringement of the inviolacy of that office, and no circumstances have
arisen to throw light upon the kind of measure which would be so
regarded.[4]

One more point, touching upon provincial autonomy, deserves to be
noticed.  In the {76} resolutions of the conference, as well as in the
British North America Act, the laws passed by the local legislatures
are reviewable for one year by the _governor-general_, not by the
_governor-general in council_.  The colonial secretary drew attention
in 1876 to this distinction in the expressions used, and suggested that
it was intended to place the responsibility of deciding the validity of
provincial laws upon the governor-general personally.  The able and
convincing memoranda in reply were composed by Edward Blake, the
Canadian minister of Justice.  He contended that under the letter and
spirit of the constitution ministers must be responsible for the
governor's action.  His view prevailed, and thus within ten years after
Confederation the principle that the crown's representative must act
only through his advisers on all Canadian matters was maintained.
There was nothing in the available records in 1876 to explain why the
term 'governor-general' instead of 'governor-general in council' was
employed.[5]  It is, {77} however, an unassailable principle that the
control of the crown over the Canadian provinces can be exercised only
through the federal authorities.

When the conference had accepted the outline of the federal and
provincial constitutions the danger points might reasonably have been
considered past.  But there remained to be discussed the representation
in the federal parliament and the financial terms.  These were the
rocks on which the ship nearly split.  Representation by population in
the proposed House of Commons had been agreed upon at Charlottetown;
but when the Prince Edward Island delegates saw that, with sixty-five
members for Lower Canada as a fixed number, the proportion assigned to
the Island would be five members only, they objected.  They were
dismayed by the prospect, and when the financial proposals also proved
unsatisfactory, their discontent foreshadowed the ultimate withdrawal
of the province from the scheme.  The other provinces accepted without
demur the basis of representation in the new House of Commons.

The composition of the Senate, however, brought on a crisis.  'We were
very near broken up,' wrote Brown in a private letter on {78} October
17, 'on the question of the distribution of members in the upper
chamber of the federal legislature, but fortunately we have this
morning got the matter amicably compromised, after a loss of three days
in discussing it.'  The difficulty seems to have been to select the
members of the first Senate with due regard to party complexion, so as
not to operate in Upper Canada, as Brown felt, unfairly against the
Liberals.  Finally, an agreement was arranged on the basis that the
senators should be drawn from both parties; and this was ultimately
carried out.

A far more important point, whether the second chamber should be
nominated or elected, caused less debate.  Macdonald opened the
discussion with his usual diplomacy:


With respect to the mode of appointments to the Upper House, some of us
are in favour of the elective principle.  More are in favour of
appointment by the crown.  I will keep my own mind open on that point
as if it were a new question to me altogether.  At present I am in
favour of appointment by the crown.  While I do not admit that the
elective principle has been a failure in Canada, I think we had {79}
better return to the original principle, and in the words of Governor
Simcoe endeavour to make ours 'an image and transcript of the British
constitution.'


Differing on other issues, Brown and Macdonald were at one on this.
They were opposed to a second set of general elections, partly because
it would draw too heavily on the organizations and funds of the
parties.  As an instance of the stability of Brown's views, it should
be remembered that he never, at any period, approved of an elective
second chamber.  The other Liberal ministers from Upper Canada, Mowat
and McDougall, stood by the elective system, but the conference voted
it down.  The Quebec correspondence of the _Globe_ at this time throws
some light on the reasons for the decision: 'Judging from the tone of
conversation few delegates are in favour of election.  The expense of
contesting a division is enormous and yearly increases.  The
consequence is there is great difficulty in getting fit candidates, and
the tendency is to seek corrupt aid from the administration of the day.
There is also fear of a collision between two houses equally
representing the people.  It is less important to us than to the {80}
French.  Why should we not then let Lower Canada, which desires to
place a barrier against aggression by the west, decide the question and
make her defensive powers as strong as she likes?  It would be no great
stretch of liberality on our part to accord it to her.'  During the
debates on Confederation in the Canadian Assembly, in the following
year, Macdonald derided the notion that a government would ever
'overrule the independent opinion of the Upper House by filling it with
a number of its partisans and political supporters.'  This, however, is
precisely what has taken place.  The Senate is one of the few
unsatisfactory creations of the Fathers of Confederation.[6]

[Illustration: Sir John A. Macdonald.  From the painting by A. Dickson
Patterson.]

The question of the financial terms was surrounded with difficulties.
The Maritime Provinces, unlike Upper Canada, were without the municipal
organization which provides for local needs by direct taxation.  With
them {81} the provincial government was a nursing mother and paid for
everything.  Out of the general revenue came the money for bridges,
roads, schools, wharves, piers, and other improvements, in addition to
the cost of maintaining the fiscal, postal, and other charges of the
province.  The revenue was raised by customs duties, sales of crown
lands, royalties, or export duties.  The devotion to indirect taxation,
which is not absent from provinces with municipal bodies, was to them
an all-absorbing passion.  The Canadian delegates were unsympathetic.
John Hamilton Gray describes the scene:


Agreement seemed hopeless, and on or about the tenth morning, after the
convention met, the conviction was general that it must break up
without coming to any conclusion.  The terms of mutual concession and
demand had been drawn to their extremest tension and silence was all
around.  At last a proposition was made that the convention should
adjourn for the day, and that in the meantime the finance ministers of
the several provinces should meet, discuss the matter amongst
themselves, and see if they could not agree upon something.[7]


{82} On this committee were Brown and Galt acting for Canada, while the
others were Tupper, Tilley, Archibald, Pope, and Shea.  The scheme set
forth in the resolutions was the result.  It need not be detailed, but
the sixty-fourth resolution, on which was centred the keenest
criticism, reads as follows:


In consideration of the transfer to the general parliament of the
powers of taxation, an annual grant in aid of each province shall be
made, equal to 80 cents per head of the population as established by
the census of 1861, the population of Newfoundland being estimated at
130,000.  Such aid shall be in full settlement of all future demands
upon the general government for local purposes and shall be paid
half-yearly in advance to each province.


The system of provincial subsidies has often been denounced.  The
delegates may have thought that they had shut the door to further
claims, but the finality of the arrangement was soon tested, and in
1869 Nova Scotia received better terms.  There were increases in the
subsidies to the provinces on several subsequent occasions, and no one
believes the end has yet been reached.  The growing needs of the {83}
provinces and the general aversion from direct taxation furnish strong
temptations to make demands upon the federal treasury.

The conference, after adopting the seventy-two resolutions embodying
the basis of the union, agreed that the several governments should
submit them to the respective legislatures at the ensuing session.
They were to be carried _en bloc_, lest any change should entail a
fresh conference.  The delegates made a tour of Canada, visiting
Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, where receptions and congratulations
awaited them.  Their work had been done quickly.  It had now to run the
gauntlet of parliamentary discussion.



[1] D'Arcy McGee published a treatise in 1865 entitled _Notes on
Federal Government Past and Present_, presenting a useful summary of
the various constitutions.

[2] The quotations in this chapter are taken from Pope's _Confederation
Documents_.

[3] At Cornwall, March 2, 1866.

[4] It is worth noting that almost any change of importance would
affect the office of the lieutenant-governor and thus challenge federal
interference.

[5] We know now from Sir Joseph Pope's _Confederation Documents_ (p.
140) that it was proposed in the first draft of the union bill to have
interpretation clauses, and one of these declared that where the
governor-general was required to do any act it was to be assumed that
he performed it by the advice and consent of his executive council.

[6] In the copy of the Confederation debates possessed by the writer
there appears on the margin of the page, in William McDougall's
handwriting and initialled by himself, these words: 'In the Quebec
Conference I moved and Mr Mowat seconded a motion for the elective
principle.  About one-third of the delegates voted for the proposition,
Brown arguing and voting against it.  At this date (1887) under Sir
John's policy and action the Senate contains only 14 Liberals; all his
appointments being made from his own party.'

[7] Gray's _Confederation_, p. 62.




{84}

CHAPTER VIII

THE DEBATES OF 1865

In the province of Canada no time was lost in placing the new
constitution before parliament.  A dilatory course would have been
unwise.  The omens were favourable.  Such opposition as had developed
was confined to Lower Canada.  The Houses met in January 1865, and the
governor-general used this language in his opening speech:


With the public men of British North America it now rests to decide
whether the vast tract of country which they inhabit shall be
consolidated into a State, combining within its area all the elements
of national greatness, providing for the security of its component
parts and contributing to the strength and stability of the Empire; or
whether the several Provinces of which it is constituted shall remain
in their present fragmentary and isolated condition, comparatively
powerless for mutual {85} aid, and incapable of undertaking their
proper share of Imperial responsibility.


The procedure adopted was the moving in each House of an address to the
Queen praying that a measure might be submitted to the Imperial
parliament based upon the Quebec resolutions.  The debate began in the
Legislative Council on the 3rd of February and in the Assembly three
days later.  The debate in the popular branch lasted until the 13th of
March; in the smaller chamber it was concluded by the 23rd of February.

These debates, subsequently published in a volume of 1032 pages, are a
mirror which reflects for us the political life of the time and the
events of the issue under discussion.  They set forth the hopes and
intentions of the Fathers with reference to their own work; and if
later developments have presented some surprises, some situations which
they did not foresee, as was indeed inevitable, their prescience is
nowhere shown to have been seriously at fault.  Some of the speeches
are commonplace; a few are wearisome; but many of them are examples of
parliamentary eloquence at its best, and the general level is high.

The profound sincerity of the leaders of the {86} coalition, whether in
or out of office, is not to be questioned.  The supporters of the union
bore down all opposition.  Macdonald's wonderful tact, Brown's
passionate earnestness, and Galt's mastery of the financial problem,
were never displayed to better advantage; while the redoubtable Cartier
marshalled his French compatriots before their timidity had a chance to
assert itself.  Particularly interesting is the attitude which Brown
assumed towards the French.  He had been identified with a vicious
crusade against their race and creed.  Its cruel intolerance cannot be
justified, and every admirer of Brown deplores it.  He met them now
with a frank friendliness which evoked at once the magnanimity and
readiness to forgive that has always marked this people and is one of
their most engaging qualities.  Said Brown:


The scene presented by this chamber at this moment, I venture to
affirm, has few parallels in history.  One hundred years have passed
away since these provinces became by conquest part of the British
Empire.  I speak in no boastful spirit.  I desire not for a moment to
excite a painful thought.  What was then the fortune of {87} war of the
brave French nation might have been ours on that well-fought field.  I
recall those olden times merely to mark the fact that here sit to-day
the descendants of the victors and the vanquished in the fight of 1759,
with all the differences of language, religion, civil law and social
habit nearly as distinctly marked as they were a century ago.  Here we
sit to-day seeking amicably to find a remedy for constitutional evils
and injustice complained of.  By the vanquished?  No, sir, but
complained of by the conquerors! [French-Canadian cheers.]

Here sit the representatives of the British population claiming
justice--only justice; and here sit the representatives of the French
population, discussing in the French tongue whether we shall have it.
One hundred years have passed away since the conquest of Quebec, but
here sit the children of the victor and the vanquished, all avowing
hearty attachment to the British Crown, all earnestly deliberating how
we shall best extend the blessings of British institutions, how a great
people may be established on this continent in close and hearty
connection with Great Britain.


{88}

In thus proclaiming the aim and intent of the advocates of
Confederation in respect to the Imperial link, Brown expressed the
views of all.  It was not a cheap appeal for applause, because the
question could not be avoided.  It came up at every turn.  What was the
purpose, the critics of the measure asked, of this new constitution?
Did it portend separation?  Would it not inevitably lead to
independence?  and if not, why was the term 'a new nationality' so
freely used?  In the opening speech of the debate Macdonald met the
issue squarely with the statesmanlike gravity that befitted the
occasion:


No one can look into futurity and say what will be the destiny of this
country.  Changes come over peoples and nations in the course of ages.
But so far as we can legislate, we provide that for all time to come
the sovereign of Great Britain shall be the sovereign of British North
America.


And he went on to predict that the measure would not tend towards
independence, but that the country, as it grew in wealth and
population, would grow also in attachment to the crown and seek to
preserve it.  This prophecy, as we know, has proved true.

{89}

The fear of annexation to the United States figured likewise in the
debate, but the condition of the Republic, so recently in the throes of
civil war, was not such as to give rise to serious apprehension on that
score.  The national sentiment, however, which would naturally arise
when the new state was constituted, was a proper subject for
consideration, since it might easily result in a complete, if peaceful,
revolution.

There were other uncertain factors in the situation which gave the
opponents of Confederation an opportunity for destructive criticism.
The measure was subjected to the closest scrutiny by critics who were
well qualified to rouse any hostile feeling in the country if such
existed.  Weighty attacks came from dissentient Liberals like Dorion,
Holton, and Sandfield Macdonald.  A formidable opponent, too, was
Christopher Dunkin, an independent Conservative, inspired, it may be
supposed, by the distrust of constitutional change entertained by his
immediate fellow-countrymen, the English minority in Lower Canada.

Brown bore the brunt of the attack from erstwhile allies and faced it
in this fashion:


No constitution ever framed was without defect; no act of human wisdom
was ever {90} free from imperfection....  To assert then that our
scheme is without fault, would be folly.  It was necessarily the work
of concession; not one of the thirty-three framers but had on some
points to yield his opinions; and, for myself, I freely admit that I
struggled earnestly, for days together, to have portions of the scheme
amended.


This was reasonable ground to take and drew some of the sting from the
criticism.

But all the criticism was not futile.  Some of the defects pointed out
bore fruit in the years that followed.  As already stated, the
financial terms were far from final, and a demand for larger subsidies
had soon to be met.  Friction between the federal and provincial powers
arose in due course, but not precisely for the reasons given.  The
administration of the national business has cost more than was
expected, and has not been free, to employ the ugly words used in these
debates, from jobbery and corruption.  The cost of a progressive
railway policy has proved infinitely greater than the highest estimates
put forth by the Fathers.  The duty of forming a ministry so as to give
adequate representation {91} to all the provinces has been quite as
difficult as Dunkin said it would be.  To parcel out the ministerial
offices on this basis is one of the unwritten conventions of the
constitution, and has taxed the resources of successive prime ministers
to the utmost.  With all his skill, as we shall see later, Sir John
Macdonald nearly gave up in despair his first attempt to form a
ministry after Confederation.  Yet it must be said, surveying the whole
field, that the critics of the resolutions failed to make out a case.

Both in the Legislative Council and in the Assembly the resolution for
a nominated second chamber caused much debate.  But the elective
principle was not defended with marked enthusiasm.  By the Act of 1840
which united the Canadas the Council had been a nominated body solely.
Its members received no indemnity; and, as some of them were averse
from the political strife which raged with special fury until 1850, a
quorum could not always be obtained.  Sir Etienne Taché drew an
affecting picture of the speaker frequently taking the chair at the
appointed time, waiting in stiff and solemn silence for one hour by the
clock, and at last retiring discomfited, since members enough did not
appear to form a {92} quorum.  To remedy the situation the Imperial
parliament had passed an Act providing for the election of a portion of
the members.  Fresh difficulties had then arisen.  The electoral
divisions had been largely formed by grouping portions of counties
together; the candidates had found that physical endurance and a long
purse were as needful to gain a seat in the Council as a patriotic
interest in public affairs; and it had become difficult to secure
candidates.  This unsatisfactory experience of an elective upper
chamber made it comparatively easy to carry the resolution providing
for a nominated Senate in the new constitution.

The agreement that the resolutions must be accepted or rejected as a
whole led Dorion to complain that the power of parliament to amend
legislation was curtailed.  What value had the debate, if the
resolutions were in the nature of a treaty and could not be moulded to
suit the wishes of the people's representatives?  The grievance was not
so substantial as it appeared.  The Imperial parliament, which was
finally to pass the measure, could be prompted later on to make any
alterations strongly desired by Canadian public opinion.

Why were not the terms of Confederation {93} submitted to the Canadian
people for ratification?  The most strenuous fight was made in
parliament on this point, and in after years, too, constitutional
writers, gifted with the wisdom which comes after the event, have
declared the omission a serious error.  Goldwin Smith observed that
Canadians might conceivably in the future discard their institutions as
lacking popular sanction when they were adopted, seeing that in reality
they were imposed on the country by a group of politicians and a
distant parliament.  In dealing with such objections the reasons given
at the time must be considered.  The question was discussed at the
Quebec Conference, doubtless informally.[1]  The constitutional right
of the legislatures to deal with the matter was unquestioned by the
Canadian members.  Shortly after the conference adjourned, Galt in a
speech at Sherbrooke[2] declared that, if during the discussion of the
scheme in parliament any serious doubt arose respecting the public
feeling on the subject, the people would be called upon to decide for
themselves.  The {94} _Globe_, which voiced the opinion of Brown, said:


If on the assembling of Parliament the majority in that body in favour
of Confederation shall be found so large as to make it manifest that
any reference to the country would simply be a matter of form,
Ministers will not, we take it, feel warranted in putting the country
to great trouble and expense for the sake of that unessential formality.


When challenged in parliament the government gave its reasons.  The
question of Confederation had, in one form or another, been before the
country for years.  During 1864 there had been elections in eleven
ridings for the Assembly and in fourteen for the Legislative Council.
The area of country embraced by these contests included forty counties.
Of the candidates in these elections but four opposed federation and
only two of them were elected.  Brown stated impetuously that not five
members of parliament in Upper Canada dare go before the people against
the scheme.  No petitions against it were presented, and its opponents
had not ventured to hold meetings, knowing that an enormous majority of
the {95} people favoured it.  This evidence, in Upper Canada, was
accepted as conclusive.  In Lower Canada appearances were not quite so
convincing.  The ministry representing that section was not a
coalition, and the Liberal leaders, both French and English, organized
an agitation.  But afterwards, in the campaign of 1867, Cartier swept
all before him.  It was also argued that parliament was fresh from the
people as recently as 1864, and that though the mandate to legislate
was not specific, it was sufficient.  The method of ascertaining the
popular verdict by means of a referendum was proposed, but rejected as
unknown to the constitution and at variance with British practice.

Parliament finally adopted the resolutions by a vote of ninety-one to
thirty-three in the Assembly and of forty-five to fifteen in the
Legislative Council.  Hillyard Cameron, politically a lineal descendant
of the old Family Compact, supported by Matthew Crooks Cameron, a
Conservative of the highest integrity and afterwards chief justice,
then moved for a reference to the people by a dissolution of
parliament.  But after an animated debate the motion was defeated, and
no further efforts in this direction were attempted.  That an eagerness
to invoke the judgment of democracy {96} was not seen at its best, when
displayed by two Tories of the old school, may justify the belief that
parliamentary tactics, rather than the pressure of public opinion,
inspired the move.

Fortune had smiled upon the statesmen of the Canadian coalition.  In a
few months they had accomplished wonders.  They had secured the aid of
the Maritime Provinces in drafting a scheme of union.  They had made
tours in the east and the west to prepare public opinion for the great
stroke of state.  They and their co-delegates had formulated and
adopted the Quebec resolutions, on which a chorus of congratulation had
drowned, for the time, the voices of warning and expostulation.  And,
finally, the ministers had met parliament and had secured the adoption
of their scheme by overwhelming majorities.

But all was not so fair in the provinces by the sea.  Before the
Canadian legislature prorogued, the Tilley government had been hurled
from power in New Brunswick, Joseph Howe was heading a formidable
agitation in Nova Scotia, and in the other two provinces the cause was
lost.  It seemed as if a storm had burst that would overwhelm the union
and that the hands of the clock would be put back.



[1] See the remark of McCully of Nova Scotia that the delegates should
take the matter into their own hands and not wait to educate the people
up to it--Pope's _Confederation Documents_, p. 60.

[2] November 23, 1864.




{97}

CHAPTER IX

ROCKS IN THE CHANNEL

In the month of March 1865, as the Canadian debates drew to a close,
ominous reports began to arrive from all the Maritime Provinces.  An
election campaign of unusual bitterness was going on in New Brunswick.
The term of the legislature would expire in the following June; and the
Tilley government had decided to dissolve and present the Quebec
resolutions to a newly elected legislature, a blunder in tactics due,
it may be, to over-confidence.  The secrecy which had shrouded the
proceedings of the delegates at first was turned to account by their
opponents, who set in motion a campaign of mendacity and
misrepresentation.  The actual terms became known too late to
counteract this hostile agitation, which had been systematically
carried on throughout the province.  The bogey employed to stampede the
electors was direct taxation.  The farmers were told that every cow or
horse they {98} possessed, even the chickens in the farmyard, would be
taxed for the benefit of Canada.  Worse than all, it was contended, the
bargain struck at the honour of the province, because, as the subsidy
was on the basis of paying to the provinces annually eighty cents per
head of population, the people were really being sold by the government
like sheep for this paltry price.  The trusted Tilley, easily first in
popular affection by reason of his probity and devotion to public duty,
was discredited.  His opponent in the city of St John, A. R. Wetmore,
illustrated the dire effects of Confederation in an imaginary dialogue,
between himself and his young son, after this fashion: 'Father, what
country do we live in?'--and, of course, the reply came promptly--'My
dear son, you have no country, for Mr Tilley has sold us all to the
Canadians for eighty cents a head.'  Time and full discussion would
have dissipated the forces of the anti-confederates.  But
constituencies worked upon by specious appeals to prejudice are
notoriously hard to woo during an election struggle.  There existed
also honest doubts in many minds regarding federation.  Enough men of
character and influence in both parties joined to form a strong
opposition, while one of Tilley's {99} colleagues in the ministry,
George Hathaway, went over to the enemy at a critical hour.  The
agitation swept the province.  It was not firmly rooted in the
convictions of the people, but it sufficed to overwhelm the government.
All the Cabinet ministers, including Tilley, were beaten.  And so it
happened that, when the Canadian ministers were in the full tide of
parliamentary success at home, the startling news arrived that New
Brunswick had rejected federation, and that in a House of forty-one
members only six supporters of the scheme had been returned from the
polls.

Equally alarming was the prospect in Nova Scotia.  On arriving home
from Quebec, Dr Tupper and his fellow-delegates found a situation which
required careful handling.  'When the delegates returned to the
Province,' says a pamphlet of the time, 'they did not meet with a very
flattering reception.  They had no ovation; and no illuminations,
bonfires, and other demonstrations of felicitous welcome hailed their
return.  They were not escorted to their homes with torches and
banners, and through triumphal arches; no cannon thundered forth a
noisy welcome.  They were received in solemn, sullen and ominous
silence.  {100} No happy smiles greeted them; but they entered the
Province as into the house of mourning.'[1]  And in Nova Scotia the
hostility was not, as in New Brunswick, merely a passing wave of
surprise and discontent.  It lasted for years.  Nor was it, as many
think, the sole creation of the ambitious Joseph Howe.  It doubtless
owed much to his power as a leader of men and his influence over the
masses of the Nova Scotians.  But there is testimony that this proud
and spirited people, with traditions which their origin and history
fully warranted them in cherishing, regarded with aversion the prospect
of a constitutional revolution, especially one which menaced their
political identity.  Robert Haliburton has related the results of his
observations before the issue had been fairly disclosed and before Howe
had emerged from seclusion to take a hand in the game.


In September and October, 1864, when our delegates were at Quebec, and
therefore before there could be any objections raised to the details of
the scheme, or to the mode of its adoption, I travelled through six
{101} counties, embracing the whole of Cape Breton and two counties in
Nova Scotia, and took some trouble to ascertain the state of public
opinion as to what was taking place, and was greatly surprised at
finding that every one I met, without a solitary exception, from the
highest to the lowest, was alarmed at the idea of a union with Canada,
and that the combination of political leaders, so far from recommending
the scheme, filled their partisans with as much dismay as if the powers
of light and darkness were plotting against the public safety.  It was
evident that unless the greatest tact were exercised, a storm of
ignorant prejudice and alarm would be aroused, that would sweep the
friends of union out of power, if not out of public life.  The profound
secrecy preserved by the delegates as to the scheme, until an
accomplice turned Queen's evidence, added fuel to the flame, and
convinced the most sceptical that there was a second Gunpowder Plot in
existence, which was destined to annihilate our local legislature and
our provincial rights.[2]


{102}

This was the situation which confronted Howe when he returned in the
autumn from his tour as fishery commissioner.  He had written from
Newfoundland, on hearing of the conference at Charlottetown: 'I have
read the proceedings of the delegates and I am glad to be out of the
mess.'  At first he listened in silence to the Halifax discussions on
both sides of the question.  These were non-partisan, since Archibald
and McCully, the Liberal leaders, were as much concerned in the result
as the Conservative ministers.  Howe finally broke silence with the
first of his articles in the Halifax _Chronicle_ on 'The Botheration
Scheme.'  This gave the signal for an agitation which finally bore Nova
Scotia to the verge of rebellion.  Howe's course has been censured as
the greatest blot upon an otherwise brilliant career.  In justice to
his memory the whole situation should be examined.  He did not start
the agitation.  Many able and patriotic Nova Scotians urged him on.
Favourable to union as an abstract theory he had been: to Confederation
as a policy he had never distinctly pledged himself.  The idea that the
Quebec terms were sacrosanct, and that hostility to them involved
disloyalty to the Empire, must be put aside.  It is neither {103}
necessary nor fair to assume that Howe's conduct was wholly inspired by
the spleen and jealousy commonly ascribed to him; for, with many
others, he honestly held the view that the interests of his native
province were about to be sacrificed in a bad bargain.  Nevertheless,
his was a grave political error--an error for which he paid
bitterly--which in the end cost him popularity, private friendship, and
political reputation.  But the noble courage and patience with which he
sought to repair it should redeem his fame.[3]

It was no secret that the governor of Nova Scotia, Sir Richard Graves
Macdonnell, was opposed to Confederation.  The veiled hostility of his
speech in Halifax has already been noted; and he followed it with
another at Montreal, after the conference, which revealed a captious
mind on the subject.  Arthur Hamilton Gordon (afterwards Lord
Stanmore), the lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, also hampered the
movement; although the Imperial instructions, even at this early stage
of the proceedings, pointed to an opposite {104} course.  In the
gossipy diary of Miss Frances Monck, a member of Lord Monck's household
at Quebec in 1864, appears this item: 'Sir R. M. is so against this
confederation scheme because he would be turned away.  He said to John
A.: You shall not make a mayor of _me_, I can tell you! meaning a
deputy governor of a province.'  Macdonnell was transferred to
Hong-Kong; and Gordon, after a visit to England, experienced a change
of heart.  But the mischief done was incalculable.

In view of the disturbed state of public opinion in Nova Scotia the
Tupper government resolved to play a waiting game.  When the
legislature met in February 1865, the federation issue came before it
merely as an open question.  The defeat of Tilley in New Brunswick
followed soon after, and the occasion was seen to be inopportune for a
vote upon union.  But, as some action had to be taken, a motion was
adopted affirming the previous attitude of the legislature respecting a
maritime union.  There was a long debate; Tupper expounded and defended
the Quebec resolutions; but no one seemed disposed to come to close
quarters with the question.  Tupper's policy was to mark time.

Prince Edward Island made another {105} contribution to the chapter of
misfortune by definitely rejecting the proposed union.  The Legislative
Council unanimously passed a resolution against it, and in the Assembly
the adverse vote was twenty-three against five.  It was declared that
the scheme 'would prove politically, commercially and financially
disastrous'; and an address to the Queen prayed that no Imperial action
should be taken to unite the Island to Canada or any other province.

Newfoundland, likewise, turned a deaf ear to the proposals.  The
commercial interests of that colony assumed the critical attitude of
the same element in Nova Scotia, and objected to the higher customs
duties which a uniform tariff for the federated provinces would
probably entail.  It was resolved to take no action until after a
general election; and the representations made to the legislature by
Governor Musgrave produced no effect.  Although the governor was
sanguine, it required no great power of observation to perceive that
the ancient colony would not accept federation.

The Canadian government took prompt measures.  On the arrival of the
bad news from New Brunswick it was decided to hurry the debates to a
close, prorogue parliament, and send a committee of the Cabinet to
England {106} to confer with the Imperial authorities on federation,
defence, reciprocity, and the acquisition of the North-West
Territories.  This programme was adhered to.  The four ministers who
left for England in April were Macdonald, Brown, Galt, and Cartier.
The mission, among other results pertinent to the cause of union,
secured assurances from the home authorities that every legitimate
means for obtaining the early assent of the Maritime Provinces would be
adopted.[4]  But the calamities of 1865 were not over.  The prime
minister, Sir Etienne Taché, died; and Brown refused to serve under
either Macdonald or Cartier.  He took the ground that the coalition of
parties had been held together by a chief (Taché) who had ceased to be
actuated by strong party feelings or personal ambitions and in whom all
sections reposed confidence.  Standing alone, this reasoning is sound
in practical politics.  Behind it, of course, was the unwillingness of
Brown to accept the leadership of his great rival.  Macdonald then
proposed Sir Narcisse Belleau, one of their colleagues, as leader of
the government.  Brown assented; and the coalition was {107}
reconstituted on the former basis, but not with the old cordiality.
The rift within the lute steadily widened, and before the year closed
Brown resigned from the ministry.  His difference with his colleagues
arose, he stated, from their willingness to renew reciprocal trade
relations with the United States by concurrent legislation instead of,
as heretofore, by a definite treaty.  Although his two Liberal
associates remained in the ministry, and the vacancy was given to
another Liberal, Fergusson Blair, the recrudescence of partisan
friction occasioned by the episode was not a good omen.  Brown,
however, promised continued support of the federation policy until the
new constitution should come into effect--a promise which he fulfilled
as far as party exigencies permitted.  But the outlook was gloomy.
There were rocks ahead which might easily wreck the ship.  Who could
read the future so surely as to know what would happen?



[1] _Confederation Examined in the Light of Reason and Common Sense_,
by Martin I. Wilkins.

[2] _Intercolonial Trade our only Safeguard against Disunion_, by R. G.
Haliburton.  Ottawa, 1868.

[3] Howe's biographers have dealt with this episode in his life in a
vein of intelligent generosity.  See _Joseph Howe_ by Mr Justice
Longley in the 'Makers of Canada' series and _The Tribune of Nova
Scotia_, by Prof. W. L. Grant, in the present Series.

[4] Report of the Canadian ministers to Lord Monck, July 13, 1865.




{108}

CHAPTER X

'THE BATTLE OF UNION'

At the dawn of 1866 the desperate plight of the cause of union called
for skilful generalship in four different arenas of political action.
In any one of them a false move would have been fatal to success; and
there was always the danger that, on so extended a front, the advocates
of union might be fighting at cross purposes and so inflicting injury
on each other instead of upon the enemy.  It was necessary that the
Imperial influence should be exerted as far as the issues at stake
warranted its employment.  Canada, the object of suspicion, must march
warily to avoid rousing the hostile elements elsewhere.  The unionists
of New Brunswick should be given time to recover their position, while
those of Nova Scotia should stand ready for instant co-operation.

The judicious but firm attitude of the Imperial authorities was a
material factor in the {109} situation.  From 1862 onwards there was no
mistaking the policy of Downing Street, as expressed by the Duke of
Newcastle in that year to the governor of Nova Scotia.  Colonial
secretaries came and went and the complexion of British ministries
changed, but the principle of union stood approved.  Any proposals,
however, must emanate from the colonies themselves; and, when an
agreement in whole or in part should be reached, the proper procedure
was indicated.  'The most satisfactory mode,' said the dispatch of
1862, 'of testing the opinion of the people of British North America
would probably be by means of resolution or address proposed in
legislatures of each province by its own government.'  This course all
the governments had kept in mind, with the additional safeguard that
the ministers of the day had associated with themselves the leaders of
the parliamentary oppositions.  Nothing could have savoured less of
partisanship than the Quebec Conference; and Mr Cardwell, the colonial
secretary, had acknowledged the resolutions of that body in handsome
terms.

The home authorities faced the difficulties with a statesmanlike front.
They had no disposition to dictate, but, once assured that a {110}
substantial majority in each consenting province supported the scheme,
it was their duty to speak plainly, no matter how vehemently a section
of opinion in England or in the provinces protested.  They held the
opinion, that since the provinces desired to remain within the Empire,
they must combine.  All the grounds for this belief could not be
publicly stated.  It was one of those exceptional occasions when
Downing Street, by reason of its superior insight into foreign affairs
and by full comprehension of the danger then threatening, knew better
than the man on the spot.  The colonial opposition might be sincere and
patriotic, but it was wrong.  Heed could not be paid to the agitations
in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick because they were founded upon narrow
conceptions of statesmanship and erroneous information.

Another difficulty with which British governments, whether Liberal or
Tory, had to contend was the separatist doctrine known as that of the
Manchester School.  When George Brown visited England in 1864 he was
startled into communicating with John A. Macdonald in these terms:


I am much concerned to observe--and I {111} write it to you as a thing
that must seriously be considered by all men taking a lead hereafter in
Canadian public matters--that there is a manifest desire in almost
every quarter that, ere long, the British American colonies should
shift for themselves, and in some quarters evident regret that we did
not declare at once for independence.  I am very sorry to observe this;
but it arises, I hope, from the fear of invasion of Canada by the
United States, and will soon pass away with the cause that excites it.


The feeling did pass away in time.  The responsible statesmen of that
period were forced to go steadily forward and ignore it, just as they
refused to be dominated by appeals from colonial reactionaries who
abhorred change and who honestly believed that in so doing they
exhibited the best form of attachment to the Empire.

Why Mr Arthur Gordon, the lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, was at
first opposed to Confederation, when his ministers were in favour of
it, is not quite clear.[1] {112} However this may be, his punishment
was not long in coming; and, if he escaped from the storm without loss
of honour, he certainly suffered in dignity and comfort.  The new
ministry which took office in New Brunswick was formed by A. J. Smith,
who afterwards as Sir Albert Smith had a useful career in the Dominion
parliament.  His colleagues had taken a prominent part in the agitation
against Confederation, but it appears that they had no very settled
convictions on this question, and that they differed on many others.
At any rate, dissension soon broke out among them.  The colonial
secretary pressed upon the province the desirability of the union in
terms described as 'earnest and friendly suggestions,' and which left
no doubt as to the wishes of the home government.  'You will express,'
said the colonial secretary to the lieutenant-governor, 'the strong and
deliberate opinion of Her Majesty's Government that it is an object
much to be desired that all the British North American colonies should
agree to unite in one government.'  In stating {113} the reasons for
this opinion the dispatch continued:


Looking to the determination which this country has ever exhibited to
regard the defence of the colonies as a matter of Imperial concern, the
colonies must recognize a right, and even acknowledge an obligation,
incumbent on the home government to urge with earnestness and just
authority the measures which they consider to be most expedient on the
part of the colonies with a view to their own defence.


The New Brunswick frontier, as well as Canada, was disturbed by the
threatened Fenian invasion, so that the question of defence was
apposite and of vital importance.

Presently a change of sentiment began to show itself in the province,
and the shaky Cabinet began to totter from resignations and
disagreements.  By-elections followed and supporters of federation were
returned.  The legislature met early in March.  In the
lieutenant-governor's speech from the throne, a reference to the
colonial secretary's dispatch implied that Gordon had changed his views
and was now favourable to union.  He {114} afterwards explained that
the first minister and several of his colleagues had privately
intimated to him their concurrence, but felt unable at the time to
explain their altered attitude to the legislature.  The next step
involved proceedings still more unusual, if not actually
unconstitutional: the address of the Legislative Council in reply to
the speech from the throne contained a vigorous endorsement of union;
and the lieutenant-governor accepted it, without consulting his
advisers, and in language which left them no recourse but to resign.  A
new ministry was formed on the 18th of April, and the House was
dissolved.  The ensuing elections resulted in a complete victory for
federation.  On the 21st of June the legislature met, fresh from the
people, and adopted, by a vote of thirty to eight, a resolution
appointing delegates to arrange with the Imperial authorities a scheme
of union that would secure 'the just rights and interests of New
Brunswick.'  The battle was won.

Meanwhile, like the mariner who keeps a vigilant eye upon the weather,
the Tupper government in Nova Scotia observed the proceedings in New
Brunswick with a view to action at the proper moment.  The agitation
throughout the province had not affected the {115} position of parties
in the legislature which met in February.  The government continued to
treat federation as a non-contentious subject.  No reference to it was
made in the governor's speech, and the legislature occupied itself with
other business.  The agitation in the country, with Howe leading it,
and William Annand, member for East Halifax and editor of the
_Chronicle_, as his chief associate, went on.  Then the débâcle of the
anti-confederate party in New Brunswick began to attract attention and
give rise to speculations on what would be the action of the Tupper
government.  This was soon to be disclosed.  In April, a few days
before the fall of the Smith ministry in New Brunswick, William Miller,
member for Richmond, made a speech in the House which was destined to
produce a momentous effect.  His proposal was to appoint delegates to
frame a scheme in consultation with the Imperial authorities, and thus
ignore the Quebec resolutions.  To these resolutions Miller had been
strongly opposed.  He had borne a leading part with Howe and Annand in
the agitation, although he was always favourable to union in the
abstract and careful on all occasions to say so.  Now, however, his
speech provided a means of enabling Nova Scotia to enter the {116}
union with the consent of the legislature, and Tupper was quick to
seize the opportunity by putting it in the form of a motion before the
House.  An extremely bitter debate followed; vigorous epithets were
exchanged with much freedom, and Tupper's condemnation of Joseph Howe
omitted nothing essential to the record.  But at length, at midnight of
the 10th of April, the legislature, by a vote of thirty-one to
nineteen, adopted the motion which cleared the way for bringing Nova
Scotia into the Dominion.

Miller's late allies never forgave his action on this occasion.  He was
accused of having been bribed to desert them.  When he was appointed to
the Senate in 1867 the charge was repeated, and many years afterwards
was revived in an offensive form.  Finally, Miller entered suit for
libel against the Halifax _Chronicle_, and in the witness-box Sir
Charles Tupper bore testimony to the propriety of Miller's conduct in
1866.  Notwithstanding the hostility between Howe and Tupper, they
afterwards resumed friendly relations and sat comfortably together in
the Dominion Cabinet.  In politics hard words can be soon forgotten.
The doughty Tupper had won his province for the union and could afford
to forget.

[Illustration: Sir Charles Tupper, Bart.  From a photograph by Elliott
and Fry, London.]

{117}

The tactics pursued in Canada during these exciting months in the
Maritime Provinces were those defined by a great historian, in dealing
with a different convulsion, as 'masterly inactivity.'  In that
memorable speech of years afterwards when Macdonald, about to be
overwhelmed by the Pacific Railway charges, appealed to his countrymen
in words that came straight from the heart, he declared: 'I have fought
the battle of union.'  The events of 1866 are the key to this
utterance.  Parliament was not summoned until June; and meanwhile
ministers said nothing.  That this line of policy was deliberate, is
set forth in a private letter from Macdonald to Tilley:


Had we met early in the year and before your elections, the greatest
embarrassment and your probable defeat at the polls would have ensued.
We should have been pressed by the Opposition to declare whether we
adhered to the Quebec resolutions or not.  Had we answered in the
affirmative, you would have been defeated, as you were never in a
position to go to the polls on those resolutions.  Had we replied in
the negative, and stated that it was an {118} open question and that
the resolutions were liable to alteration, Lower Canada would have
arisen as one man, and good-bye to federation.


Thus was the situation saved; and, although the delegates from the
Maritime Provinces were obliged to wait in London for some months for
their Canadian colleagues, owing to the Fenian invasion of Canada and
to a change of ministry in England, the body of delegates assembled in
December at the Westminster Palace Hotel, in London, and sat down to
frame the details of the bill for the union of British North America.



[1] Gordon's dispatches to the colonial secretary indicate that from
the first he distrusted the Quebec scheme and that the overthrow of his
ministers owing to it occasioned him no great grief.  James Hannay, the
historian, attributes his conduct to chagrin at the pushing aside of
maritime union, as he had hoped to be the first governor of the smaller
union.




{119}

CHAPTER XI

THE FRAMING OF THE BILL

When the British American delegates met in London to frame the bill
they found themselves in an atmosphere tending to chill their
enthusiasm.  Lord Palmerston had died the year before, and with him had
disappeared an adventurous foreign policy and the militant view of
empire.  The strictly utilitarian school of thought was dominant.
Canada was unpleasantly associated in the minds of British statesmen
with the hostile attitude of the United States which seemed to threaten
a most unwelcome war.  John Bright approved of ceding Canada to the
Republic as the price of peace.  Gladstone also wrote to Goldwin Smith
suggesting this course.  The delegates were confronted by the same
ideas which had distressed George Brown two years earlier.  The
colonies were not to be forcibly cast off, but even in official circles
the opinion prevailed that ultimate separation was the inevitable end.
The reply {120} of Sir Edward Thornton, the British minister at
Washington, to a proposal that Canada should be ceded to the United
States was merely that Great Britain could not thus dispose of a colony
'against the wishes of the inhabitants.'  These lukewarm views made no
appeal to the delegates and the young communities they represented.  It
was their aim to propound a method of continuing the connection.
Theirs was not the vision of a military sway intended to overawe other
nations and to revive in the modern world the empires of history.  To
them Imperialism meant to extend and preserve the principles of
justice, liberty, and peace, which they believed were inherent in
British institutions and more nearly attainable under monarchical than
under republican forms.

Minds influential in the Colonial Office and elsewhere saw in this only
a flamboyant patriotism.  The Duke of Newcastle, when colonial
secretary, had not shared the desire for separation, and he found it
hard to believe that any one charged with colonial administration
wished it.  He had written to Palmerston in 1861:


You speak of some supposed theoretical gentlemen in the colonial office
who wish {121} to get rid of all colonies as soon as possible.  I can
only say that if there are such they have never ventured to open their
opinion to me.  If they did so on grounds of peaceful separation, I
should differ from them so long as colonies can be retained by bonds of
mutual sympathy and mutual obligation; but I would meet their views
with indignation if they could suggest disruption by the act of any
other, and that a hostile, Power.


The duke was not intimate with his official subordinates, or he would
have known that Palmerston's description exactly fitted the permanent
under-secretary at the Colonial Office.  Sir Frederic Rogers (who later
became Lord Blachford) filled that post from 1860 to 1871.  He was
therefore in office during the Confederation period.  He left on record
his ideas of the future of the Empire:


I had always believed--and the belief has so confirmed and consolidated
itself that I can hardly realize the possibility of any one seriously
thinking the contrary--that the destiny of our colonies is
independence; and that in this view, the function of the Colonial
Office is to secure that {122} our connexion, while it lasts, shall be
as profitable to both parties, and our separation, when it comes, as
amicable as possible.  This opinion is founded first on the general
principle that a spirited nation (and a colony becomes a nation) will
not submit to be governed in its internal affairs by a distant
government, and that nations geographically remote have no such common
interests as will bind them permanently together in foreign policy with
all its details and mutations.


In other words, Sir Frederic was a painstaking honourable official
without a shred of imagination.  He typifies the sort of influence
which the delegates had to encounter.

The conference consisted of sixteen members, six from Canada and ten
from the Maritime Provinces.  The Canadians were Macdonald, Cartier,
Galt, McDougall, Howland, and Langevin.  From Nova Scotia came Tupper,
Henry, Ritchie, McCully, and Archibald; while New Brunswick was
represented by Tilley, Johnston, Mitchell, Fisher, and Wilmot.  They
selected John A. Macdonald as chairman.  The resignation of Brown had
left Macdonald the leader of the movement, and the nominal {123}
Canadian prime minister, Sir Narcisse Belleau, was not even a delegate.
The impression Macdonald made in London is thus recorded by Sir
Frederic Rogers in language which gives us an insight into the working
of the conference:


They held many meetings, at which I was always present.  Lord Carnarvon
[the colonial secretary] was in the chair, and I was rather
disappointed in his power of presidency.  Macdonald was the ruling
genius and spokesman, and I was very greatly struck by his power of
management and adroitness.  The French delegates were keenly on the
watch for anything which weakened their securities; on the contrary,
the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick delegates were very jealous of
concessions to the _arriérée_ province; while one main stipulation in
favour of the French was open to constitutional objections on the part
of the Home Government.  Macdonald had to argue the question with the
Home Government on a point on which the slightest divergence from the
narrow line already agreed upon in Canada was watched for--here by the
French and {124} there by the English--as eager dogs watch a rat hole;
a snap on one side might have provoked a snap on the other and put an
end to the concord.  He stated and argued the case with cool ready
fluency, while at the same time you saw that every word was measured,
and that while he was making for a point ahead, he was never for a
moment unconscious of any of the rocks among which he had to steer.


The preliminaries had all been settled before the meetings with the
colonial secretary.  The gathering was smaller in numbers than the
Quebec Conference, and the experience of two years had not been lost.
We hear no more of deadlocks or of the danger of breaking up.  There
was frank discussion on any point that required reconsideration, but
the delegates decided to adhere to the Quebec resolutions as far as
possible.  For the Liberal ministers from Upper Canada, Howland and
McDougall, this was the safest course to pursue, because they knew that
George Brown had put his hand and seal upon the basis adopted at Quebec
and would bitterly resent any substantial departure from it.  This was
also the view of the representatives of Lower Canada.  The {125}
maritime delegates wanted better financial terms if such could be
secured, but beyond this were content with the accepted outline of the
constitution.

The delegates were careful to make plain their belief that the union
was to cement and not to weaken the Imperial tie.  At Quebec they had
agreed upon a motion in these terms:


That in framing a constitution for the general government, the
conference, with a view to the perpetuation of our connection with the
Mother Country and to the promotion of the best interests of the people
of these provinces, desire to follow the model of the British
constitution, so far as our circumstances will permit.


The saving clause at the close was a frank admission that a federal
system could not be an exact copy of the British model with its one
sovereign parliament charged with the whole power of the nation.  But
the delegates were determined to express the idea in some form; and
this led to the words in the preamble of the British North America Act
declaring 'a constitution similar in principle to that of the United
Kingdom.'  To this writers {126} of note have objected.  Professor
Dicey has complained of the 'official mendacity' involved in the
statement.  'If preambles were intended to express the truth,' he said,
'for the word _Kingdom _ought to have been substituted _States_, since
it is clear that the constitution of the Dominion is modelled on that
of the United States.'  It is, however, equally clear what the framers
of the Act intended to convey.  If they offended against the precise
canons of constitutional theory, they effected a political object of
greater consequence.  The Canadian constitution, in their opinion, was
British in principle for at least three reasons: because it provided
for responsible government in both the general and local legislatures;
because, unlike the system in the United States, the executive and
legislative functions were not divorced; and because this enabled
Canada to incorporate the traditions and conventions of the British
constitution which bring the executive immediately under control of the
popular wish as expressed through parliament.  Furthermore, the
principle of defining the jurisdictions of the provinces, while the
residue of power was left to the federal parliament, marked another
wide distinction between Canada and the Republic.  A {127} federation
it had to be, but a federation designed in the narrowest sense.  In
theory Canada is a dependent and subordinate country, since its
constitution was conferred by an Act of the Imperial parliament, but in
practice it is a self-governing state in the fullest degree.  This
anomaly, so fortunate in its results, is no greater than the
maintenance in theory of royal prerogatives which are never exercised.

It was intended that the name of the new state should be left to the
selection of the Queen, and this was provided for in the first draft of
the bill.  But the proposal was soon dropped.  It revived the memory of
the regrettable incident of 1858 when the Queen had, by request,
selected Ottawa as the Canadian capital and her decision had been
condemned by a vote of the legislature.  The press had discussed a
suitable name long before the London delegates assembled.  Some
favoured New Britain, while others preferred Laurentia or Britannia.
If the maritime union had been effected, the name of that division
would probably have been Acadia, and this name was suggested for the
larger union.  Other ideas were merely fantastic, such as Cabotia,
Columbia, Canadia, and Ursalia.  The decision that Canada should give
up its name {128} to the new Confederation and that Upper and Lower
Canada should find new names for themselves was undoubtedly a happy
conclusion to the discussion.  It was desired to call the Confederation
the Kingdom of Canada, and thus fix the monarchical basis of the
constitution.  The French were especially attached to this idea.  The
word Kingdom appeared in an early draft of the bill as it came from the
conference.  But it was vetoed by the foreign secretary, Lord
Stanley,[1] who thought that the republican sensibilities of the United
States would be wounded.  This preposterous notion serves to indicate
the inability of the controlling minds of the period to grasp the true
nature of the change.  Finally, the word 'Dominion' was decided upon.
Why a term was selected which is so difficult to render in the French
language (_La Puissance_ is the translation employed) is not easy of
comprehension.  There is a story, probably invented, that when
'Dominion' was under consideration, a member of the conference, well
versed in the Scriptures, found a verse which, as a piece of
descriptive prophecy, at once clinched the matter: 'And his dominion
shall be from {129} sea even to sea, and from the river even to the
ends of the earth.'[2]

The knotty question of the second chamber, supposed to have been solved
at Quebec, came up again.  The notes of the discussion[3] are as
interesting as the surviving notes of the Quebec Conference.  Some of
the difficulties since experienced were foreseen.  But no one appears
to have realized that the Senate would become the citadel of a defeated
party, until sufficient vacancies by death should occur to transform it
into the obedient instrument of the government of the day.  No one
foresaw, in truth, that the Senate would consider measures chiefly on
party grounds, and would fail to demonstrate the usefulness of a second
chamber by industry and capacity in revising hasty legislation.  The
delegates actually believed that equality of representation between the
three divisions, Upper Canada, Lower Canada, and the Maritime
Provinces, would make the Senate a bulwark of protection to individual
provinces.  In this character it has never shone.[4]  Its chief value
has been as {130} a reservoir of party patronage.  The opinions of
several of the delegates are prophetical:


HENRY (Nova Scotia)--I oppose the limitation of number.  We want a
complete work.  Do you wish to stereotype an upper branch irresponsible
both to the crown and the people?  A third body interposed
unaccountable to the other two.  The crown unable to add to their
number.  The people unable to remove them.  Suppose a general election
results in the election of a large majority in the Lower House
favourable to a measure, but the legislative council prevents it from
becoming law.  The crown should possess some power of enlargement.

FISHER (New Brunswick)--The prerogative of the crown has been only
occasionally used and always for good.  This new fangled thing now
introduced, seventy-two oligarchs, will introduce trouble.  I advocate
the principle of the power of the crown to appoint additional members
in case of emergency.

HOWLAND (Upper Canada)--My remedy would be to limit the period of
service and vest the appointment in the local legislatures.  Now, it is
an anomaly.  It won't work and cannot be continued.  You cannot give
the crown an unlimited power to appoint.


One result of the views exchanged is found in the twenty-sixth section
of the Act.  This gives the sovereign, acting of course on the advice
of his ministers and at the request of the Canadian government, the
right to add {131} three or six members to the Senate, selected equally
from the three divisions mentioned above.  These additional members are
not to be a permanent increase of the Senate, because vacancies
occurring thereafter are not to be filled until the normal number is
restored.  Once only has it been sought to invoke the power of this
section.  In 1873, when the first Liberal ministry after Confederation
was formed, the prime minister, Alexander Mackenzie, finding himself
faced by a hostile majority in the Senate, asked the Queen to add six
members to the Senate 'in the public interests.'  The request was
refused.  The colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, held that the power
was intended solely to bring the two Houses into accord when an actual
collision of opinion took place of so serious and permanent a kind that
the government could not be carried on without the intervention of the
sovereign as prescribed in this section.  The Conservative majority in
the Senate highly approved of this decision, and expressed its
appreciation in a series of resolutions which are a fine display of
unconscious humour.

Not the least important of the changes in the scheme adopted at London
was that relating to the educational privileges of {132} minorities.
This is embodied in the famous ninety-third section of the Act, and
originated in a desire to protect the Protestant minority in Lower
Canada.  Its champion was Galt.  An understanding existed that the
Canadian parliament would enact the necessary guarantees before Canada
entered the union.  But the proposal, when brought before the House in
1866, was so expressed as to apply to the schools of both the
Protestant minority in Lower Canada and the Catholic minority in Upper
Canada.  This led to disturbing debates and was withdrawn.  No
substitute being offered, Galt, deeming himself pledged to his
co-religionists, at once resigned his place in the Cabinet and stated
his reasons temperately in parliament.  Although no longer a minister,
he was selected as one of the London delegates, partly because of the
prominent part taken by him in the cause of Confederation and partly in
order that the anxieties of the Lower Canada minority might be allayed.
Galt's conduct throughout was entirely worthy of him.  That he was an
enlightened man the memoranda of the London proceedings prove, for
there is a provision in his handwriting showing his desire to extend to
all minorities the protection he claimed for the Lower {133} Canada
Protestants.  The clause drawn by him differs in its phraseology from
the wording in the Act and is as follows:


And in any province where a system of separation or dissentient schools
by law obtains, or where the local legislature may adopt a system of
separate or dissentient schools, an appeal shall lie to the governor in
council of the general government from the acts and decisions of the
local authorities which may affect the rights or privileges of the
Protestant or Catholic minority in the matter of education.  And the
general parliament shall have power in the last resort to legislate on
the subject.[5]


The bill passed through parliament without encountering any serious
opposition.  Lord Carnarvon's introductory speech in the House of Lords
was an adequate, although not an eloquent, presentation of the subject.
His closing words were impressive:


We are laying the foundation of a great State--perhaps one which at a
future day {134} may even overshadow this country.  But, come what may,
we shall rejoice that we have shown neither indifference to their
wishes nor jealousy of their aspirations, but that we honestly and
sincerely, to the utmost of our power and knowledge, fostered their
growth, recognizing in it the conditions of our own greatness.  We are
in this measure setting the crown to the free institutions which more
than a quarter of a century ago we gave them, and therein we remove, as
I firmly believe, all possibilities of future jealousy or
misunderstanding.


No grave objections were raised in either the Lords or the Commons.  In
fact, the criticisms were of a mild character.  No division was taken
at any stage.  In the House of Commons, Mr Adderley, the
under-secretary for the Colonies, who was in charge of the measure,
found a cordial supporter, instead of a critic, in Mr Cardwell, the
former colonial secretary, so that the bill was carried through with
ease and celerity.  John Bright's speech reflected the anti-Imperial
spirit of the time.  'I want the population of these provinces,' he
said, 'to do that which they believe to be the {135} best for their own
interests--remain with this country if they like, in the most friendly
manner, or become independent states if they like.  It they should
prefer to unite themselves with the United States, I should not
complain even of that.'

The strenuous protests made by Joseph Howe and the Nova Scotian
opponents of Confederation were not unnoticed.  It was claimed by one
or two speakers that the electors of that province should be allowed to
pronounce upon the measure, but this evoked no support, and the wishes
of all the provinces were considered to have been sufficiently
consulted.  The argument for further delay failed to enlist any active
sympathy; and the wish of the delegates that no material alteration be
made in the bill, as it was a compromise based upon a carefully
arranged agreement, was respected.  The constitution was thus the
creation of the colonial statesmen themselves, and not of the Imperial
government or parliament.

That so important a step in the colonial policy of the Empire should
have been received at London in a passive and indifferent spirit has
often been the subject of complaint.  When the Australian Commonwealth
came into existence, the event was marked by more {136} ceremony and
signalized by greater impressiveness.  But another phase of the
question should be kept in mind.  The British North America Act
contained the promise of the vast Dominion which exists to-day, but not
the reality.  The measure dealt with the union of the four provinces
only.  The Confederation, as we have it, was still incomplete.  When
the royal proclamation was issued on the 10th of May bringing the new
Dominion into being on July 1, 1867, much remained to be done.  The
constitution must be put to the test of practical experience; and the
task of extending the Dominion across the continent must be undertaken.
Upon the first government of Canada, in truth, would rest a duty as
arduous as ever fell to the lot of statesmen.  They had in their hands
a half-finished structure, and might, conceivably, fail in completing
it.



[1] He became Lord Derby in 1869 and bore this title in 1889 when Sir
John Macdonald related the incident.

[2] Zechariah ix 10.

[3] Sir Joseph Pope's _Confederation Documents_.

[4] The recent increase in the number of western senators modifies this
feature.

[5] _Confederation Documents_, p. 112.  Mr Justice Day of Montreal, an
English Protestant enjoying the confidence of the French, is believed
to have had a hand in framing the Galt policy on this subject.




{137}

CHAPTER XII

THE FIRST DOMINION MINISTRY

Before the delegates left London the governor-general privately invited
John A. Macdonald to form the first ministry of the Dominion.  A month
later the same offer was made more formally in writing:


I entrust this duty to you as the individual selected for their
chairman and spokesman by the unanimous vote of the delegates when they
were in England, and I adopt this test for my guidance in consequence
of the impossibility, under the circumstances, of ascertaining, in the
ordinary constitutional manner, who possesses the confidence of a
Parliament which does not yet exist.  In authorizing you to undertake
the duty of forming an administration for the Dominion of Canada, I
desire to express my strong opinion that, in future, it shall be
distinctly understood that the position of first minister shall be
{138} held by _one_ person, who shall be responsible to the
Governor-General for the appointment of the other ministers, and that
the system of dual first ministers, which has hitherto prevailed, shall
be put an end to.[1]


The selection of Macdonald was inevitable.  When George Brown by his
action in 1864 made Confederation possible and entered a Cabinet where
his great rival was the commanding influence, he must have foreseen
that, in the event of the cause succeeding, his own chances of
inaugurating the new state as its chief figure were not good.  And by
leaving the coalition abruptly before union was accomplished he had put
himself entirely out of the running.  In a group of able men which
included several potential prime ministers Macdonald had advanced to
the first place by reason of gifts precisely suited to the demands of
the hour.  Lord Monck's choice was therefore justified.  Nor was the
resolve to abolish the awkward and indefensible system of a dual
premiership less open to question.  It may have given pain to Cartier,
but it was a wise and necessary decision.

{139}

Lord Monck, however, does not rank high in the list of talented men who
have filled the office of governor-general.  The post had gone
a-begging when he accepted it in 1861.  It had been offered to and
refused by Lord Wodehouse, a former viceroy of Ireland; Lord Harris,
once governor of Madras and a contemporary of Elgin; Lord Eversley, who
had been speaker of the House of Commons; and the Duke of Buckingham.
Lord Monck had scarcely arrived in Canada when the _Trent_ Affair
occurred.  Later on the St Albans Raid intensified the bitter feelings
between Great Britain and the United States.  On both occasions he
performed his duties as an Imperial officer judiciously and well.  But
his relations with Canadian affairs were not so happy.  He became
dissatisfied with the political conditions as he found them; and his
petulance over the slow progress of Confederation led him to threaten
resignation.  He contrived, moreover, to incur much personal
unpopularity, which found vent, during the first session of the
Dominion parliament, in a measure to reduce the salary of the
governor-general from £10,000 to $32,000.  That this unparalleled
action was, in part, directed at Lord Monck is shown in the
determination {140} to put the reduction in force at once.  The home
authorities, however, disallowed the bill.  In his speech in the House
of Lords on the British North America Act, Monck failed to rise to the
occasion, owing to a sympathy with the views of the Manchester School.
To remain long enough in Canada to preside over the new Dominion had
been his own wish.  But it does not appear that he utilized his
opportunities to marked advantage.

A unique political situation confronted Macdonald.  It was natural to
suppose that, as the federation leaders belonged to both parties, the
first Cabinet should be composed of representative men of both.  This
was the line Macdonald proposed to take.  By this policy a strong
national party, with larger aims, would arise, and the old prejudices
and issues would be swept away.  This statesmanlike conception involved
certain embarrassments, because the number of ambitious men looking for
Cabinet appointments would be increased and the expectations of
faithful Conservative supporters must suffer disappointment.  These
problems, however, were not new to Macdonald.  He had faced similar
dangers before, and his skill in handling them was equal to his
experience.

{141}

Meanwhile, Brown set himself to prevent a plan which would detach a
section of the Liberals from their former associates and permanently
range them under a Conservative leader.  He cannot be blamed for this.
Confederation being now a fact, he considered himself under no
obligation to continue an alliance proposed for a special object.
Although Macdonald might be able to enlist the support of some maritime
Liberals, Brown strove to reunite his party in Ontario and present a
solid phalanx to the enemy.

A Liberal convention met in Toronto on the 27th and 28th of June 1867.
There was a good attendance, and impassioned appeals were made to men
of the party throughout the province to join in opposing any ministry
which Macdonald might form.  It was generally understood that the three
Liberal ministers--Howland, McDougall, and Blair--were to continue in
the government, which would be renewed as a coalition with a certain
degree of Liberal support in the House.  To strict party men this was
obnoxious.  George Brown denounced any further coalition of parties:


If, sir, there is any large number of men in this assembly who will
record their votes {142} this night in favour of the degradation of the
public men of that party [the Liberals] by joining a coalition, I
neither want to be a leader nor a humble member of that party.
[Cheers.]  If that is the reward you intend to give us all for our
services, I scorn connection with you.  [Immense cheering.]  Go into
the same government with Mr John A. Macdonald!  [Cries of never!
never!]  Sir, I understood what degradation it was to be compelled to
adopt that step by the necessities of the case, by the feeling that the
interests of my country were at stake, which alone induced me ever to
put my foot into that government; and glad was I when I got out of it.
None ever went into a government with such sore hearts as did two out
of the three who entered it on behalf of the Reform party--I cannot
speak for the third.  It was the happiest day of my life when I got out
of the concern.  [Cheers.]


These were warm words, designed to rally a divided party.  In due time
the tireless energy of the speaker and his friends reawakened the
fighting strength of their followers.  For the moment, however, a
considerable number of {143} Liberals were disposed to give the new
conditions a trial.  Howland and McDougall were invited to address the
convention, and they put their case in temperate and dignified
language.  Howland pointed out that in the new ministry there would be
several Liberals from the lower provinces, and these men had requested
their Ontario friends not to leave them.  McDougall's address was
especially apt and convincing:


We think that the work of coalition is not done, but only begun.  We
think that British Columbia should be brought into the confederacy,
that the great north-western territory should be brought in, that
Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland should be brought in.  I say that
the negotiations of the terms upon which these provinces are to be
brought in are important, and that it is as necessary that the
government in power should not be obliged to fight from day to day for
its political existence, as when Confederation was carried up to the
point we have now reached....  I think the coalition ought not to cease
until the work begun under Mr Brown's auspices is ended.


{144}

It was evident from these remarks that the arguments--what his critics
called the blandishments--of Macdonald had prevailed.


The first Cabinet, which was announced on July 1, began on a non-party
basis.  This commended it to moderate men generally.  But the task of
getting it together had been herculean.  To secure a ministry
representative of all parts of the country seemed a reasonable policy
at the beginning.  With time this has grown into an unwritten
convention of the constitution which cannot be ignored.  In 1867 the
Cabinet representation had to be determined by geography, race, creed,
and party.  None but an old parliamentary hand could have made the
attempt successfully.  Ontario claimed and was assigned five ministers,
Quebec four, and the Maritime Provinces four.  So much for geography.
Then came race and creed.  It was found necessary to give the Irish
Catholics and the English minority in Quebec each a minister.  The
French demanded and were granted three ministers.  Finally, the fusion
of parties imposed another difficulty upon the cabinet-maker.  He could
not find room for all the really deserving.  There were thirteen
ministers--too many, {145} thought Brown and the _Globe_--and of these
six were Liberal and six Conservative, while Kenny of Nova Scotia had
once been a Liberal but had lately acted with the Tupper party.  The
surprises were the absence of the names of McGee and Tupper from the
list.  To have selected McGee as the Irish Catholic minister meant five
representatives for Quebec, and Ontario would not consent.  This
threatened a deadlock, and Macdonald was about to advise the
governor-general to send for George Brown, when McGee and Tupper, with
a disinterested generosity rare in politics, waived their claims, and
Edward Kenny became the Irish representative and second minister from
Nova Scotia.  The first administration was thus constituted:


  JOHN A. MACDONALD, Prime Minister and Minister of Justice.
  GEORGE E. CARTIER, Minister of Militia and Defence.
  S. LEONARD TILLEY, Minister of Customs.
  ALEXANDER T. GALT, Minister of Finance.
  WILLIAM McDOUGALL, Minister of Public Works.
  WILLIAM P. HOWLAND, Minister of Inland Revenue.
  ADAMS G. ARCHIBALD, Secretary of State for the Provinces.
  A. J. FERGUSSON BLAIR, President of the Privy Council.

{146}

  PETER MITCHELL, Minister of Marine and Fisheries.
  ALEXANDER CAMPBELL, Postmaster-General.
  JEAN C. CHAPAIS, Minister of Agriculture.
  HECTOR L. LANGEVIN, Secretary of State of Canada.
  EDWARD KENNY, Receiver-General.


The two men who had stepped aside in order that a ministry might be
formed under Macdonald were actuated partly by personal regard for
their leader.  It was not a small sacrifice.  Macdonald wrote to McGee:


The difficulties of adjusting the representation in the Cabinet from
the several provinces were great and embarrassing.  Your disinterested
and patriotic conduct--and I speak of Tupper as well as yourself--had
certainly the effect of removing those difficulties.  Still, I think
you should have first consulted me.  However, the thing is done and
can't be undone for the present; but I am very sure that at a very
early day your valuable services will be sought for by the government.


McGee was to have retired from political life and to have received the
appointment of commissioner of patents at $3200 a year, a sinecure
which would have enabled him to pursue his literary work.  His
assassination in the {147} early morning of April 7, 1868, on returning
to his lodging after a late session of the House, is one of the most
tragic episodes in the annals of Canada.

The ministers having been sworn of the Privy Council, Lord Monck
announced that Her Majesty had been pleased to confer upon the new
prime minister the rank of Knight Commander of the Bath, and upon
Cartier, Galt, Tilley, Tupper, Howland, and McDougall the companionship
of the same order.  No previous intimation had been given to any of
them.  Cartier and Galt, deeming the recognition of their services
inadequate, declined to receive it.  This incident is only worthy of
mention because it tended to disturb the personal relations of men who
should have acted in complete harmony at a time of national importance.
No Imperial honours had been conferred in Canada since 1860, and it was
unfortunate that the advice tendered the crown on this historic
occasion should have been open to criticism and have engendered ill
feeling.  Cartier thought that his race had been affronted in his
person, and his reasons for protest were political.  He told his
colleagues: 'Personally I care nothing for honours, but as a
representative of one of the {148} two great provinces in Confederation
I have a position to maintain, and I shall not accept the honour.  I
regret that such an action is necessary, because it may be construed as
an insult to Her Majesty.  I feel aggrieved that I should not have been
notified in advance, so that I should not now have to refuse, but I
shall write to Her Majesty myself explaining the reasons for my
refusing the honour.'[2]  The error was soon rectified and Cartier was
made a baronet.  A number of persons, including Charles Tupper and
Edward Watkin, a member of the Imperial parliament, interested
themselves in the matter, pointing out to the London authorities the
unwisdom of bestowing titles without due regard to the Imperial
services of the recipients.  The reputations of Galt and Cartier as
serious statesmen were not enhanced.  Explain it as we may, there is a
flavour of absurdity about their proceedings.  Galt was offered a
knighthood in 1869, and would not accept until the Imperial government
had been made aware of his views upon the ultimate destiny of Canada.
In a letter to the governor-general he thus placed himself on record:


{149}

I regard the confederation of the British North American Provinces as a
measure which must ultimately lead to their separation from Great
Britain.  The present connection is undoubtedly an embarrassment to
Great Britain in her relations to the United States and a source of
uneasiness to the Dominion, owing to the insecurity which is felt to
exist from the possibility of a rupture between the two nations.  It
cannot be the policy of England, and is certainly not the desire of the
people here, to become annexed to the United States; but I believe the
best, and indeed the only way to prevent this, is to teach the Canadian
people to look forward to an independent existence as a nation in the
future as desirable and possible.  Unless such a spirit be cultivated,
the idea will become engrained in the public mind, that failing the
connection with Great Britain annexation must ensue.


Galt went on to state that he hoped separation would be postponed as
long as possible.  The reply of the secretary of state, Lord Granville,
was private, but it appears to have been in effect a declaration that
Galt could hold {150} any views he pleased about the future of the
Empire.  He accepted the K.C.M.G. and worthily wore it to the end of an
honourable and public-spirited career.  Thus was vindicated the freedom
of speech which is the birthright of every British subject.  But Galt,
in exercising it, showed lack of stability and a tendency to take an
erratic course, which crippled his influence in the young state he had
done so much to found.

It was an enormous burden of duty which now fell upon the executive.
The whole machinery of state required recasting.  The uncertainties of
a situation wherein party bonds sat lightly and diversities of opinion
lingered, taxed all the resources of the leader of the government.
Although different views are held as to the particular stage in his
long career in which the remarkable qualities of Sir John Macdonald
displayed themselves most conspicuously, the first five years of the
union may well be regarded by future historians as the period when his
patience, tenacity, and adroitness were especially in evidence.

The provincial governments had to be constituted; and in Ontario
Macdonald scored again by persuading Sandfield Macdonald to form a
coalition ministry in which party lines {151} were effaced and the
policy of coalition was defended by an erstwhile Liberal leader.
Sandfield Macdonald was a man of talent and integrity.  His attitude of
mind was rather that of an oppositionist, upon whom the functions of
independent critic sat more easily than the compromises and discipline
entailed by party leadership.  He bore restraint with impatience, and
if his affiliations had always been with the Liberals, it was not
because his sympathies were radical and progressive.[3]  In the Liberal
caucus of 1864 he had moved the resolution requesting George Brown to
enter the coalition government, without recognizing, apparently, that
he thereby incurred an obligation himself to support federation.  Both
in the Ontario legislature, where he was loth to follow any course but
his own, and in the Dominion parliament, where he ostentatiously {152}
sat on an Opposition bench, he presented a shining example of that type
of mind which lacks the capacity for unity and co-operation with
others.  He illustrated, too, one of the difficult features of
Macdonald's problem--the absence of unity among the public men of the
time--a condition which complicated, if it did not retard, the
formation of a homogeneous national sentiment.[4]

The general elections were impending, and everything turned upon the
verdict of the country.  The first elections for the House of Commons
took place during the months of August and September, the practice of
holding elections all on one day having not yet come into vogue.  The
three provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick sustained the
government by large majorities.  But in Nova Scotia the agitation
against the union swept the province.  Tupper was the only Conservative
elected.  His victory was the more notable in that he defeated William
Annand, the chief lieutenant of Howe and afterwards the leader of the
repeal movement.  Adams Archibald, the secretary of state, was {153}
defeated in Colchester by A. W. McLelan, and Henry, another member of
the Quebec Conference, was rejected in Antigonish.  In Ontario there
were losses.  George Brown was defeated in South Ontario by a few
votes, and did not again sit in parliament until he was appointed to
the Senate in 1874.  In the early years of the Dominion a member might
sit both in the House of Commons and in the legislature of his
province.  So it was that at this election Edward Blake was returned
from South Bruce to the Ontario legislature and from West Durham to the
House of Commons.  Other members who occupied seats in both bodies were
Sandfield Macdonald, John Carling, Alexander Mackenzie, and E. B. Wood.
Cartier's success in Quebec left his opponents only fifteen seats out
of sixty-five.  The stars in their courses fought for the government;
and had it not been for Nova Scotia, where the victorious and hostile
forces were pledged to repeal, the consolidation of the Dominion could
have gone forward without hindrance.

To deal with 'that pestilent fellow Howe,' to use Macdonald's phrase,
was a first charge upon the energies of the government.  The history of
the repeal movement in Nova Scotia, {154} with all its incidents and
sidelights, has yet to be written.  It was but one of the
disintegrating forces which Macdonald found so hard to cope with, that
in a moment of discouragement he seriously thought of withdrawing from
the government and letting others carry it on.  A large portion of the
year 1868 was occupied with the effort to reconcile the Nova Scotians.
Instead of abating, the anti-confederate feeling in that province grew
more bitter.  A delegation headed by Howe and Annand went to England to
demand repeal from the Imperial authorities.  To counteract this move
the Dominion government sent Charles Tupper to present the other side
of the case.  None of the passages in his political life reflect more
credit upon him than his diplomacy upon this occasion.  He had already
declined, as we have seen, a seat in the Cabinet.  Later, he had
further strengthened his reputation by refusing the lucrative office of
chairman of the commission to build the Intercolonial Railway.  This
fresh display of independence enabled him to meet the repeal delegates
on ground as patriotic as their own, for it had shown that in this
crisis they were not the only Nova Scotians who wanted nothing for
themselves.

{155}

Tupper's first step on reaching London was to call on Howe.  'I said to
him,' writes Tupper, 'I will not insult you by suggesting that you
should fail to undertake the mission that brought you here.  When you
find out, however, that the Government and the Imperial Parliament are
overwhelmingly against you, it is important for you to consider the
next step.'[5]  This was to put the finger upon the weakest spot in
Howe's armour.  After his mission had failed and the Imperial
authorities had refused to allow the union to be broken up, as they
most assuredly would, what could Howe and his friends do next?  A
revolution was unthinkable.  A province 'on strike' would have no
adequate means of raising a revenue, and a government lacking the power
of taxation soon ceases to exist.  The extremists talked Annexation;
but in this they counted without Howe and the loyal province of Nova
Scotia.  The movement, noisy and formidable as it appeared, was
foredoomed to failure.  All this Tupper put to Joseph Howe; and when
Tupper proposed that Howe should enter the Dominion Cabinet, not as his
docile follower but as his leader, it {156} can readily be believed
that he was 'completely staggered.'

True to Tupper's forecast, and due in part, at least, to his powerful
advocacy of the cause of union, the home government stood firm against
the cry from Nova Scotia.  The delegates and their opponents returned
home.  Then the rapid development of events compelled Howe to face the
issue: when legal and constitutional methods were exhausted without
avail, what then?  The crisis came.  Howe was obliged to break with his
associates, some of whom were preaching sedition, and to take a stand
more in accordance with his real convictions and his Imperial
sentiments.  Early in August 1868 Sir John Macdonald went to Halifax
and met the leading malcontents.  'They have got the idea into their
heads,' wrote Howe in a private letter, 'that you are a sort of wizard
that, having beguiled Brown, McDougall, Tupper, etc., to destruction,
is about to do the same kind of office to me.'  Howe was not beguiled,
but a master of tactics showed him the means by which Nova Scotia could
be kept in the union; the way was paved for a final settlement; and a
few months later Howe joined the Dominion government.

Long after Joseph Howe had passed to his {157} rest, echoes of the
repeal agitation were heard in Nova Scotia; and it was frequently
asserted that the question of union should have been submitted to a
vote of the people.  Such a course, owing to the circumstances already
narrated, was impracticable and would have been fatal to Confederation.
But the pacification of the province was a great feat of statesmanship;
for to maintain the young Dominion intact was essential to its further
extension.



[1] _Memoirs_, vol. i, p. 319.

[2] _Sir George Etienne Cartier, Bart; His Life and Times_, by John
Boyd.  Toronto, 1914.

[3] Sir James Whitney, prime minister of Ontario from 1903 to 1914, who
was a young student in Sandfield Macdonald's law office in Cornwall and
shared his political confidence, assured the present writer that
Ontario's first prime minister was not a Liberal in the real sense, his
instincts and point of view being essentially Conservative.  After
Robert Baldwin's retirement Sandfield Macdonald's natural course would
have been an alliance with the progressive Conservatives under John A.
Macdonald, but his antipathy to acknowledging any leader kept him
aloof.  His laconic telegram in reply to John A. Macdonald's offer of
cabinet office is characteristic: 'No go!'

[4] A conspicuous case in point is the entire want of sympathy between
Brown and Galt, men of similar type, whose opinions on several
questions coincided.

[5] _Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada_, by the Rt. Hon. Sir
Charles Tupper, Bart.




{158}

CHAPTER XIII

FROM SEA TO SEA

The extension of the Dominion to the Pacific ocean had been discussed
at the Quebec Conference.  Some of the maritime delegates, however,
thought they had no authority to discuss the acquisition of territory
beyond the boundaries of the provinces; and George Brown, one of the
strongest advocates of western extension, conceded that the inclusion
of British Columbia and Vancouver Island in the scheme of union was
'rather an extreme proposition.'  But the Canadian leaders never lost
sight of the intervening regions of Rupert's Land and the North-West
Territory.  They foresaw the danger of the rich prairie lands falling
under foreign control, and entertained no doubts as to the necessity of
terminating in favour of Canada the hold of the Hudson's Bay Company
over these regions.

In 1857 the select committee of the Imperial House of Commons,
mentioned in a preceding {159} chapter, had believed it 'essential to
meet the just and reasonable wishes of Canada to be enabled to annex to
her territory such portion of the land in her neighbourhood as may be
available to her for the purposes of settlement.'  The districts on the
Red River and on the Saskatchewan were considered as likely to be
desired; and, as a condition of occupation, Canada should open up and
maintain communication and provide for local administration.  The
committee thought that if Canada were unwilling to take over the Red
River country at an early date some temporary means of government might
be devised.  Nothing, however, had come of the suggestion.  Had it been
carried out, and a crown colony created, comprising the territory which
is now the province of Manitoba, the Dominion would have been saved a
disagreeable and humiliating episode, as well as political
complications which shook the young state to its foundations.  This was
the trouble known to history as the Red River Rebellion.  As an armed
insurrection it was only a flash in the pan.  But it awoke passions in
Ontario and Quebec, and revived all those dissensions, racial and
religious, which the union had lulled into a semblance of harmony.

{160}

One of the first steps taken by parliament in the autumn of 1867 was
the adoption of an address to the Queen, moved by William McDougall,
asking that Rupert's Land and the North-West Territory be united with
Canada.  Two members of the government, Cartier and McDougall, went to
England to negotiate for the extinction of the rights of the Hudson's
Bay Company.  After months of delay, caused partly by the serious
illness of McDougall, it was agreed that the company should receive
£300,000, one-twentieth of the lands lying within the Fertile Belt, and
45,000 acres adjacent to its trading-posts.  The Canadian parliament
formally accepted the bargain, and the deed of surrender provided that
the change of rule should come into force on December 1, 1869.

It was no mean ambition of William McDougall to be the first Canadian
administrator of this vast region with its illimitable prospects; a man
of talent, experience, and breadth of view, such as McDougall was,
might reasonably hope there to carve out a great career for himself and
do the state some service.  He was appointed on September 26, 1869,
lieutenant-governor of the 'North-West Territory'--an indefinite term
meant {161} apparently to cover the whole western country--and left at
once for his post.  He appears to have been quite in the dark
concerning the perilous nature of the mission.  At any rate, he could
not foresee that, far from bringing him distinction, the task would
shortly end, as Sir John Macdonald described it, in an inglorious
fiasco.

At this time, it should be remembered, the actual conditions in the
West were but vaguely known in Canada.  Efforts towards communication
and exploration, it is true, had begun as early as 1857, when Simon
Dawson made surveys for a road from Fort William and Professor Henry
Youle Hind undertook his famous journey to the plains for scientific
and general observation.  A number of adventurous Canadians had gone
out to settle on the plains.  There was a newspaper at Fort Garry--the
_Nor'Wester_--the pioneer newspaper of the country--which had been
started by Mr William Buckingham and a colleague in 1859.  But even in
official circles the community to which Governor McDougall went to
introduce authority was very imperfectly understood.

The Red River Settlement in 1869 contained about twelve thousand
inhabitants.  The English-speaking portion of the population {162}
consisted of heterogeneous groups without unity among them for any
public purpose.  Some were descendants or survivors of Lord Selkirk's
settlers who had come out half a century before; others were servants
of the Hudson's Bay Company, both retired and active; a third group
were the Canadians; while a fourth was made up of a small though noisy
body of Americans.  Outnumbering the English, and united under leaders
of their own race, the French and French half-breeds dwelt chiefly on
the east bank of the Red River, south of Fort Garry.  These
half-breeds, or Métis, were a hardy race, who subsisted by hunting
rather than by farming, and who were trained to the use of arms.  They
regarded with suspicion the threatened introduction of new political
institutions, and were quite content under the paternal sway of the
Hudson's Bay Company and under the leadership of their spiritual
advisers, Bishop Taché and the priests of the Métis parishes.

The Canadian population numbered about three hundred, with perhaps a
hundred adults, and they, conscious that they represented the coming
régime, were not disposed to conciliate either the company or the
native settlers.  It was mooted among the half-breeds that they {163}
were to be swamped by the incoming Canadians, and much resentment was
aroused among them against the assumption of authority by the Dominion
government.  To make matters worse, a Canadian surveying party, led by
Colonel J. Stoughton Dennis, had begun in the summer of 1869 to make
surveys in the Province.  This created alarm among the half-breed
settlers, whose titles did not rest in any secure legal authority, and
who were fearful that they were about to lose their possessions.  Thus
it came about that they resolved upon making a determined attempt to
resist the transfer of the country to Canada.

Underrating the difficulty and impatient of delay, McDougall took the
unwise step of issuing a proclamation, from his temporary headquarters
at Pembina, assuming control of the territory and calling upon the
inhabitants to recognize his authority.  He supposed, of course, that
the transfer would be made, according to agreement, on December 1, and
did not know that the Canadian government had declined to accept it or
pay over the purchase-money until assured that peace and good order
prevailed.  The advices from Ottawa to McDougall were delayed, and he
felt himself {164} obliged to act without definite knowledge of the
position of affairs.

After months of agitation the Métis under Louis Riel took command of
the situation, armed their fighting men, seized Fort Garry, put a
number of prominent white residents under arrest, and formed a
provisional government.  They sent word to the new governor not to
enter the country; and when he advanced, with his official party, a
short distance over the frontier, he was forcibly compelled by the
insurgents to retreat into the United States.  The rebels at Fort Garry
became extremely menacing.  Louis Riel, the central figure in this
drama, was a young French half-breed, vain, ambitious, with some
ability and the qualities of a demagogue.  He had received his
education in Lower Canada, and was on intimate terms with the French
priests of the settlement.  His conduct fifteen years later, when he
returned to head another Métis rebellion farther west and paid the
penalty on the scaffold, indicates that once embarked on a dangerous
course he would be restrained by no one.  That he was half, or wholly,
insane on either occasion is not credible.

Efforts were now made to negotiate with {165} the rebels and quiet the
disturbance.  Delegates went to the West from Canada consisting of
Grand Vicar Thibault, Colonel de Salaberry, and Donald A. Smith
(afterwards Lord Strathcona).  There were exciting scenes; but the
negotiations bore no immediate fruit.  It was the depth of winter.  The
delegates had not come to threaten because they had no force to employ.
The rebels had the game in their own hands.  Bishop Taché, who was
unhappily absent in Rome, was summoned home to arrange a peace on terms
which might have left Riel and his associates some of the high stakes
for which they were playing, had they not spoiled their own chances by
a cruel, vindictive murder.

After the departure of the Canadian delegates and the announcement of
Bishop Taché's return, Riel felt his power ebbing away.  His
provisional government became a thing of shreds and patches, in spite
of its large assumptions and its temporary control during the winter
when the country was inaccessible.  Among the imprisoned whites was
Thomas Scott, a young man from Ontario who had been employed in
surveying work and who was prominent in resistance to the usurpers.
Riel is credited with a threat to shed some {166} blood to prove the
reality of his power and to quell opposition.  He rearrested a number
of whites who had been released under promise of safety.  One of them
was Scott, charged with insubordination and breaking his parole.  He
was brought before a revolutionary tribunal resembling a court-martial,
and was sentenced to be shot.  Even if Riel's lawless tribunal had
possessed judicial authority, Scott's conduct in no respect justified a
death sentence.  He had not been under arms when captured, and he was
given no fair opportunity of defending himself.  Efforts were made to
save him, but Riel refused to show mercy.  On March 4, a few days
before Bishop Taché arrived at the settlement, Scott was shot by six
men, several of them intoxicated, one refusing to prime his rifle, and
one discharging a pistol at the victim as he lay moaning on the ground.

[Illustration: Alexandre Antonin Taché.  From a photograph lent by Rev.
L. Messier, St. Boniface.]

When the news of this barbarous murder reached the East, a political
crisis was imminent.  Scott was an Orangeman; and Catholic priests, it
was said, had been closely identified with the rising.  This was enough
to start an agitation and to give it the character of a race and creed
struggle.  There existed also a suspicion that a miniature Quebec was
to {167} be set up on the Red River, thus creating a sort of buffer
French state between Ontario and the plains.  Another cause of
discontent was the belief that the government proposed to connive at
the assassination of Scott and to allow his murderers to escape
punishment.  McDougall returned home, mortified by his want of success,
and soon resigned his position.  He blamed the government for what had
occurred, and associated himself with the agitation in Ontario.  The
organization known as the Canada First party took a hand in the fray.
It was composed of a few patriotic and able young men, including W. A.
Foster, a Toronto barrister; Charles Mair, the well-known poet; John
Schultz, who many years later, as Sir John Schultz, became governor of
Manitoba, and who with Mair had been imprisoned by Riel and threatened
with death; and Colonel George T. Denison, whose distinguished career
as the promoter of Imperial unity has since made him famous in Canada
and far beyond it.

The circumstances of the time, the distrust between the races and the
vacillation of a sorely pressed government, combined to make an awkward
situation.  The evidence does not show that the Ontario agitators let
slip any {168} of their opportunities.  The government was compelled to
send under Colonel Wolseley an expeditionary force of Imperial troops
and Canadian volunteers to nip in the bud the supposed attempt to
establish French ascendancy on the Red River.  This expedition was
completely successful without the firing of a shot.  Riel, at the sight
of the troops, fled to the United States, and the British flag was
raised over Fort Garry.  So, in 1870, Manitoba entered the Dominion as
a new province, and the adjacent territories were organized under a
lieutenant-governor and council directly under federal jurisdiction.
Out of them, thirty-five years later, came the provinces of Alberta and
Saskatchewan.

But the fruits of the rebellion were evident for years.  One result was
the defeat in Ontario of Sandfield Macdonald's ministry in 1871.  'I
find the country in a sound state,' wrote Sir John Macdonald during the
general elections of 1872, 'the only rock ahead being that infernal
Scott murder case, about which the Orangemen have quite lost their
heads.'[1]

When order was restored the clever miscreant Riel returned to the
settlement.  By raising a force to aid in quelling a threatened Fenian
{169} invasion, he gulled Bishop Taché and the new governor, Adams G.
Archibald, and had himself elected to the Dominion parliament.  But
Riel's crimes were too recent and too gross to be overlooked.  His
effrontery in taking the oath as a member was followed by his expulsion
from the House; and once more he fled the country, only to reappear in
the rôle of a rebel on the Saskatchewan in 1884, and, in the following
year, to expiate his crimes on the scaffold.


Having carried the Dominion to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, the
next step for the government was the acquisition of British Columbia.
After the Oregon Treaty of 1846 the British possessions on the Pacific
coast lay in three divisions, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and
the Stikeen Territory, all in the domains of the Hudson's Bay Company.
In 1863, after the inrush of gold-seekers, the two latter had been
united under one government and granted a Legislative Council, partly
elective.  Vancouver Island already had a legislature with two
chambers, one elective.  In 1865 Amor DeCosmos, one of the members of
the Assembly for Victoria, began the union movement by proposing that
Vancouver Island should be joined to British Columbia.  There {170} was
friction between the two colonies, largely on commercial grounds.  A
tariff enacted by the colony on the mainland proved injurious to the
island merchants who flourished under a free port.  So in 1866 the
Imperial parliament passed an Act uniting the two colonies.  Despite
the isolation of the Pacific coast settlements from the British
colonies across the continent on the Atlantic, the Confederation
movement had not passed unnoticed in the Far West; and in March 1867
the Legislative Council of British Columbia adopted a resolution
requesting Governor Seymour to take measures to secure the admission of
British Columbia into the Dominion 'on fair and equitable terms.'  In
transmitting the resolution to the home authorities the governor
candidly pointed out the difficulties.  He was not strongly in favour
of the policy.  The country east of the Rocky Mountains, it should be
kept in mind, was still in the hands of the Hudson's Bay Company.  An
alien population from the United States was increasing in number.
Enormous obstacles stood in the way of communication eastward.  'The
resolution,' wrote Seymour, 'was the expression of a despondent
community longing for change.'  However, a public meeting in Victoria
held on January {171} 29, 1868, urgently recommended union.  A memorial
to the Canadian government declared that the people generally were
enthusiastic for the change.  The leading newspapers endorsed it.  The
popularly elected councils of Victoria and New Westminster were of the
same mind.  Opposed to this body of opinion were the official class and
a small party who desired annexation to the United States.  The terms
demanded were the assumption by Canada of a debt of about $1,500,000, a
fixed annual subsidy, a wagon-road between Lake Superior and the head
of navigation on the Fraser within two years, local representative
institutions, and representation in the Canadian parliament.

The legislature, despite the alluring prospect set forth in an address
to the Queen moved by DeCosmos, cautiously adopted an amendment
declaring that, while it adhered to its previous action in endorsing
the principle of union 'to accomplish the consolidation of British
interests and institutions in North America,' it lacked the knowledge
necessary to define advantageous terms of union.  A convention of
delegates met at Yale to express dissatisfaction with local conditions
in British Columbia and to frame the terms on which {172} union would
be desirable.  The Legislative Council, still unconvinced, again
declared for delay; but a dispatch from Lord Granville in August 1869,
addressed to the new governor, Anthony Musgrave, who, on the
recommendation of Sir John Macdonald, had succeeded Seymour,
emphatically endorsed Confederation, leaving open only the question of
the terms.  The Confederation debate took place in the Legislative
Council in 1870.  In concluding his speech in favour of the policy,
Joseph Trutch, one of the three delegates who afterwards went to Canada
to perfect the bargain, said:


I advocate Confederation because it will secure the continuance of this
colony under the British flag and strengthen British interests on this
continent, and because it will benefit this community--by lessening
taxation and giving increased revenue for local expenditure; by
advancing the political status of the colony; by securing the practical
aid of the Dominion Government...; and by affording, through a railway,
the only means of acquiring a permanent population which must come from
the east of the Rocky Mountains.


{173} The arrangement made by Canada was a generous one.  It included a
promise to begin within two years and to complete within ten a railway
to the Pacific, thus connecting British Columbia with the eastern
provinces.  The terms were ratified by the people of British Columbia
in the general election of 1870, and the union went into force on July
20, 1871.  The Dominion now stretched from sea to sea.

Prince Edward Island had fought stoutly in resistance to the union.
For six years it remained aloof.  The fears of a small community, proud
of its local rights and conscious that its place in a federal system
could never be a commanding one, are not to be despised.  At first
federation had found eloquent advocates.  There could not be, it was
pointed out, any career for men of distinction in a small sea-girt
province cut off completely from the life and interests of the larger
area.  But these arguments failed, as also did proposals of a more
substantial kind.  Nova Scotia and New Brunswick desired greatly to
augment the maritime importance and influence in the Dominion by the
inclusion of the little island province.  During the summer of 1866,
while the delegates from the two maritime provinces {174} were waiting
in London for the arrival of their Canadian colleagues, they made an
offer to James C. Pope, prime minister of the Island, who happened to
be in London, that the sum of $800,000 should be allowed the Island, in
order to extinguish the rights of the absentee land-owners, an incubus
that had long caused discontent.  The Canadian delegates, at first
reluctant, were brought to agree to this proposal.  But it was
declined, and the same fate overtook better financial terms which
Tilley offered in 1869.  The Island went its way, but soon found that
the capital necessary for internal development was hard to secure and
harder still to repay if once obtained.  A railway debt was incurred,
and financial difficulties arose.

This situation came to the knowledge of Sir John Rose, the first
finance minister of Canada, who had gone to reside in London as a
partner in the great banking house of Morton, Rose and Co.  There is a
touch of romance both in the career of Rose and in the fact that it was
through his agency that the little province entered the federation.
Rose was a Scottish lad who had come to Canada to make his fortune.
When a practising barrister in Montreal he had lost his silk gown as
Queen's Counsel {175} for signing the Annexation Manifesto in 1849.
His abilities were of the first order, but his tastes inclined to law
rather than to politics.  The Dominion was in its infancy when his
talents for finance attracted attention abroad and secured him the
handsome offer which drew him away from Canada and led to his
remarkable success in the money centre of the world.  But he never lost
interest in the Dominion.  He maintained a close and intimate
correspondence with Sir John Macdonald, and, learning of Prince Edward
Island's difficulties, communicated with the Canadian prime minister.
Thus was the way opened for negotiations.  Finally a basis of union was
arranged by which the Dominion assumed the provincial burden and made
the Island railway part of the state system of railways.  Prince Edward
Island joined the union on July 1, 1873, and has contributed its full
quota of brain and energy to the upbuilding of Canada.


Newfoundland definitely rejected union in the general election of 1869,
and only once since has it shown an inclination to join the Dominion.
During the financial crisis of 1893 delegates from Newfoundland visited
Ottawa and sought to reach a satisfactory {176} arrangement.  But the
opportunity was allowed to pass, and the ancient colony has ever since
turned a deaf ear to all suggestions of federation.  But it is still
the hope of many that the 'Oldest Colony' will one day acknowledge the
hegemony of Canada.



[1] _Memoirs_, vol. ii, p. 150.




{177}

CHAPTER XIV

THE WORK OF THE FATHERS

The lapse of fifty years should make it possible for us to value the
work of the Fathers with due regard for historical truth.  Time has
thrown into bold relief the essential greatness of their undertaking
and has softened the asperities of criticism which seem inseparable
from all political movements.  A struggle for national unity brings out
the stronger qualities of man's nature, but is not a magic remedy for
rivalries between the leading minds in the state.  On the contrary, it
accentuates for the time being the differences of temperament and the
clash of individual opinions which accompany a notable effort in
nation-making.  But distance from the scene and from the men furnishes
a truer perspective.  The Fathers were not exempt from the defects that
mark any group of statesmen who take part in a political upheaval; who
uproot existing conditions and disturb settled interests; and who bid,
each {178} after his own fashion, for popular support and approval.
The chief leaders in the federation movement survived to comparatively
recent years.  The last of them, Sir Charles Tupper, died in the autumn
of 1915.  All were closely associated with party politics.  There yet
live many who walked and talked with them, who rejoiced with them in
victory and condoled with them in defeat.  It were vain to hope that
the voice of faction has been silenced and that the labours of the
Fathers can be viewed in the serene atmosphere which strips the mind of
prejudice and passion.  And yet the attempt should be made, because the
founders of Canada are entitled to share the fame of those who made the
nineteenth century remarkable for the unification of states and the
expansion of popular government.

During Sir John Macdonald's lifetime his admirers called him the Father
of Confederation.  In length and prestige of official service and in
talent for leadership he had no equals.  His was the guiding hand after
the union.  The first constructive measures that cemented the Dominion
are identified with his régime.  When he died in the twenty-fourth year
of Confederation he had been prime minister for nearly nineteen years.
To his contemporaries {179} he towered above others.  Time established
his reputation and authority.  The personal attachment of his followers
was like to nothing we have seen since, because to their natural pride
in his political triumphs was added a passionate devotion to the man
himself.  His opponents have cheerfully borne tribute to the
fascination he exercised over young and old.  Holton's delightfully
ambiguous remark, on the occasion of Macdonald's marvellous restoration
to office in 1878, is historic: 'Well!  John A. beats the devil.'  Sir
Oliver Mowat said, 'He was a genial man, a pleasant companion, full of
humour and wit.'  Even his satirical foe, Sir Richard Cartwright,
recognized in him an unusual personality impressing all who came in
contact with it.  'He had an immense acquaintance,' wrote Cartwright,
'with men of all sorts and conditions from one end of Canada to the
other.'

As long as he lived, therefore, an impartial estimate of Macdonald's
share in effecting Confederation could not be expected.  After his
death the glamour of his name prevented a critical survey of his
achievements.  Even yet it is too soon to render a final verdict.  He
took control of the situation at an early stage, because to frame a new
constitution was a task {180} after his own heart.  He managed the
Quebec Conference with the arts which none of the other members
possessed in equal degree.  As political complications arose his
remarkable astuteness soon overcame them; and he emerged from the
negotiations the most conspicuous figure in a distinguished group.  It
is inevitable that genius for command should overshadow the merits of
others.  True in every line of endeavour, this is especially so in
politics.  With his great gifts, Macdonald preserved his ascendancy in
the young nation and was the chief architect of its fortunes for many
years.

[Illustration: An election campaign--George Brown addressing an
audience of farmers.  From a colour drawing by C. W. Jefferys]

To assert, however, that one person was the author of Confederation, in
the sense that the others played subordinate parts and were mere
satellites revolving round the sun, is to mistake the nature and
history of the movement.  It was a long battle against adverse
influences.  If left unchallenged, they forbade the idea of a Dominion
stretching from sea to sea.  It was not Macdonald who forced the issue
to the front, who bore down stubborn opposition, and who rallied to its
support the elements indispensable to success.  Into the common fund
contributions were made from many sources.  At least eight of the
Fathers of Confederation {181} must be placed in the first rank of
those to whom Canada owes undying gratitude.  The names of Brown,
Cartier, Galt, Macdonald, Tupper, Tilley, McGee, and McDougall stand
pre-eminent.  All these performed services, each according to his
opportunities, which history will not ignore.

The foremost champion of union at the critical moment was George Brown.
But for him, it is easy to believe, Confederation might have been
delayed for a generation or never have come at all.  His enthusiasm
inspired the willing and carried the doubting.  In the somewhat rare
combination of courage, force, and breadth of view no one excelled him.
As a political tactician he was not so successful, and to this defect
may be traced the entanglements in which he was prone to land both
himself and his party.  His resignation from the coalition in 1865 was
a mistake.  It could not be explained.  In leaving the ship before it
reached the haven of safety he laid himself open to charges of spleen
and instability.  Impulsive he was, but not unstable, and his jealousy
was not greater than other men's.  He was always embarrassed by the
fact that the criticisms of his newspaper the _Globe_, in the exercise
of its undoubted rights as an organ {182} of public opinion, were laid
at his door.  He found, as other editors have found, that the
compromises of political life and the freedom of the press are natural
enemies.  In his patriotic sacrifice in behalf of Confederation lies
his best claim to the respect and affection of his countrymen.

The quality most commonly ascribed to Cartier is courage; and rightly
so.  But equally important were his freedom from religious bigotry and
his devotion to the interests of his own people.  He guarded at every
step the place of his race in the constitution of the Dominion; and if
we are to believe the story that he fought stoutly in London for strict
adherence to every concession agreed upon at Quebec, his insight into
the future proved equal to his courage.  The French were rooted in the
belief that union meant for them a diminished power.  There were
grounds for the apprehension.  To Cartier was due the subordination of
prejudice to the common good.  He was great enough to see that if Lower
Canada was to become the guardian of its special interests and
privileges, Upper Canada must be given a similar security; and this
threw him into the closest alliance with Brown.  This principle, as
embodied in the {183} constitution, is the real basis of Confederation,
which cannot be seriously menaced as long as neither of the central
provinces interferes with the other.  Cartier exemplified in his own
person the truth that the French are a tolerant and kindly community,
and that pride of race, displayed within its own proper bounds, makes
for the strength and not the weakness of the Dominion.  Unhappily, his
health declined, and he did not live to lead his race in the
development of that larger patriotism of which, with good reason, he
believed them to be capable.  But his example survives, and its
influence will be felt in the generations to come.

What share Galt had in affecting Cartier's course is not fully known,
but the two men between them dominated Lower Canada, and their
_rapprochement_ was more than a match for the nullifying efforts of
Dorion and Holton.  Galt's best work was also done before the
consummation of the union.  After 1867 he practically retired from the
activities of politics, owing more to a distaste for the yoke of party
than to any loss of interest in the welfare of Canada.  He had an ample
mind, and in his speeches and writings there is a valuable legacy of
suggestion.

{184}

Thomas D'Arcy McGee was the orator of the movement.  While other
politicians hung back, he proclaimed the advantages of union in season
and out with the zeal of the crusader.  His speeches, delivered in the
principal cities of all the provinces, did much to rouse patriotic
fervour.

To Tupper and to Tilley, as this narrative has sought to show, we owe
the adherence of the Maritime Provinces.  The present Dominion would
have been impossible but for their labours and sacrifice.  A federated
state without an Atlantic seaboard would have resulted in a different
destiny for Canada.  Each of these statesmen withstood the temptation
to bend before the storm of local prejudice.  By yielding to the
passion of the hour each would have been a hero in his own province and
have enjoyed a long term of office.  If evidence were needed that
Confederation inspired its authors to nobler aims than party victories,
the course taken by these leaders furnishes conclusive proof.

William McDougall's part in the movement has suffered eclipse owing to
his political mishaps.  No one brought more brilliant qualities to bear
upon the work than he.  On the platform and in parliament he had, as a
{185} speaker, no superior.  In his newspaper, the _North American_, he
had espoused a federal union as the first article of his political
creed; and when Brown purchased the paper, McDougall, as the chief
writer for the _Globe_, strengthened Brown's hands and became his
natural ally in the coalition.  They quarrelled openly when McDougall
elected to cast in his lot with Macdonald in the first Dominion
ministry.  The Red River episode ruptured his relations with Macdonald,
who never again sought his support.  Avoided by both leaders and never
tolerant of party discipline, McDougall sought to fill the rôle of
independent critic and thus earned for himself, unfairly, the sobriquet
'Wandering Willie.'  But the Dominion owed much to his constructive
talent.  There is evidence that his influence was potent in the
constitutional conferences, and that during his term as minister he had
a strong hand in shaping public policy.

Oliver Mowat left politics for the judicial bench immediately after the
Quebec Conference.  He has related that, as the delegates sat round the
table, Macdonald, on being notified of the vacancy in the
vice-chancellorship of Upper Canada, silently passed him a note in
appreciative terms offering him the place.  {186} For seven years he
remained on the bench.  But he returned in 1872 to active political
life, and his services to the nation as prime minister of Ontario
display his balanced judgment and clearness of intellect.

Some Canadian statesmen who were invaluable to the new nationality
suffer in being judged too exclusively from a party standpoint.  Canada
was fortunate in drawing from the ranks of both Conservatives and
Liberals many men capable of developing the Dominion and adapting an
untried constitution to unforeseen conditions.  None had quite the same
opportunities as Sir John Macdonald, who not only helped to frame the
union but administered its policy for a lengthy period.  Alexander
Mackenzie gave the country an example of rectitude in public life and
of devotion to duty which is of supreme value to all who recognize that
free government may be undermined and finally destroyed by selfishness
and corruption.  Edward Blake, with his lofty conceptions of national
ambition and his profound insight into the working of the constitution,
also exerted a beneficial effect on the evolution of the state.  He,
like Sir John Thompson, was a native of the country.  In temperament,
in breadth of mind, and in contempt for petty {187} and sordid aims,
Blake and Thompson had much in common.  They, and others who are too
near our own day for final judgment, fully grasped the work of the
Fathers and helped to give Canada its honourable status in the British
Empire and its distinctive place as a self-governing community.


A retrospective glance reveals the extent to which the Fathers attained
their principal objects.  A threefold purpose inspired them.  Their
first duty was to evolve a workable plan of government.  In this they
succeeded, as fifty years of experience shows.  The constitution, after
having stood the usual tests and strain, is firmly rooted in national
approval; and this result has been reached by healthy normal processes,
not by exaggerated claims or a spurious enthusiasm.  The constitution
has always been on trial, so to speak, because Canadians are prone to
be critical of their institutions.  But at every acute crisis popular
discontent has been due to maladministration and not to defects of
organization.  The structure itself stands a monument to those who
erected it.

In the second and most trying of their tasks, the unification of the
provinces, the Fathers {188} were also triumphant.  From the beginning
the country was well stocked with pessimists and Job's comforters.
They derived inspiration during many years from the brilliant writings
of Goldwin Smith.  But in the end even the doubters had to succumb to
the stern logic of the facts.  Under any federation, growth in unity is
bound to be slow.  The relations of the provinces to the federal power
must be worked out and their relations to each other must be adjusted.
Time alone could solve such a problem.  Until the system took definite
shape national sentiment was feeble.  But a modified and well-poised
federation, with its strong central government and its carefully
guarded provincial rights, at last won the day.  Years of doubt and
trial there were, but in due course the Nova Scotian came to regard
himself as a Canadian and the British Columbian ceased to feel that a
man from the East was a foreigner.  The provinces have steadily
developed a community of interest.  They meet cordially in periodical
conferences to discuss the rights and claims possessed in common, and
if serious, even menacing, questions are not dealt with as they should
be, the failure will be traced to faulty statesmanship and not to lack
of unity.

{189}

To preserve the Imperial tie was the third and greatest object of the
Fathers.  They realized that many dangers threatened it--some tangible
and visible, others hidden and beyond the ken of man.  It may not be
denied that the barque of the new nationality was launched into an
unknown sea.  The course might conceivably lead straight to complete
independence, and honest minds, like Galt's, were held in thrall by
this view.  Could monarchy in any shape be re-vitalized on the
continent where the Great Republic sat entrenched?  What sinister ideas
would not the word Imperialism convey to the practical men of the
western world?  These fears the Fathers met with resolute faith and the
seeing eye.  They believed that inherent in the beneficent rule of
Queen Victoria there was a constitutional sovereignty which would
appeal irresistibly to a young democracy; that unwavering fidelity to
the crown could be reconciled with the fullest extension of
self-government; and that the British Empire when organized on this
basis would hold its daughter states beyond the seas with bonds that
would not break.

And so it has proved.  Of all the achievements of the Fathers this is
the most splendid {190} and enduring.  The Empire came to mean, not the
survival of antiquated ideas, but the blessings of a well-ordered
civilization.  And when in 1914 the Great War shook the world,
Canadians, having found that the sway of Britain brought them peace,
honour, and contentment, were proud to die for the Empire.  To debate
the future of Canada was long the staple subject for abstract
discussion, but the march of events has carried us past the stage of
idle imaginings.  A knowledge of the laws by which Divine Providence
controls the destinies of nations has thus far eluded the subtlest
intellect, and it may be impossible for any man, however gifted, to
foresee what fate may one day overtake the British Empire.  But its
traditions of freedom and toleration, its ideals of pure government and
respect for law, can be handed on unimpaired through the ages.  The
opportunity to maintain and perpetuate these traditions and ideals is
the priceless inheritance which Canada has received from the Fathers of
Confederation.




{191}

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The printed material relative to Confederation is voluminous.  The
earliest proposals are to be found in the _Constitutional Documents_ by
Shortt and Doughty.  The parliamentary debates of the four provinces
from 1864 to 1867 record the progress of the movement which culminated
in the British North America Act.  For the intimate history of the
coalition ministry and the conferences in Quebec and in London the two
works by Sir Joseph Pope, _Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald_ and
_Confederation Documents_, are mines of indispensable information.  The
files of the Toronto _Globe_ and the Halifax _Chronicle_ are valuable,
while the pamphlets, especially those relating to the events in Quebec
and Nova Scotia, are essential.  Gray's _Confederation_ confirms other
material, but is not in itself of paramount importance.  Mr Chisholm's
_Speeches and Public Letters of Joseph Howe_ and Dr Saunders's _Three
Premiers of Nova Scotia_ must be consulted.  Mr John Boyd's _Sir George
Etienne Cartier: His Life and Times_ exhibits full knowledge and is
free from bias.  See also the _Life and Speeches of {192} George
Brown_, by Alexander Mackenzie, which contains some valuable material.
For a clear and impartial biography of Brown, see _George Brown_, by
John Lewis.  For the period after the union, consult Pope's _Memoirs of
Sir John Macdonald_ and Sir John Willison's _Sir Wilfrid Laurier and
the Liberal Party_.  _The Life and Times of Sir Leonard Tilley_ by
James Hannay and Sir Charles Tupper's _Recollections_ throw light on
the question in the Maritime Provinces.  The official dispatches
between the colonial secretary and the governors of the provinces laid
before the Imperial parliament are collected in one volume.   Mr
William Houston's _Constitutional Documents_ contains useful notes.

See also _Canada and its Provinces_, vols. v, vi, xiii, xix, xxi; and,
in the present Series, _The Day of Sir John Macdonald_, _The Day of Sir
Wilfrid Laurier_, and _The Railway Builders_.




{193}

INDEX

Adderley, Mr, 134.

Alberta, in the Dominion, 159, 168.

American Civil War, the, and Confederation, 20, 24-5, 67.

American Revolution, 1; cause of, 4.

Annand, William, his opposition to Confederation, 28, 115, 152, 154.

Annexation Manifesto of 1849, the, 15, 18.

Archibald, Adams G., a father of Confederation, 49, 62 n., 82, 102,
122, 145, 152-3; lieutenant-governor of Manitoba, 169.

Australia, her form of government, 66.


Belleau, Sir Narcisse, prime minister of Canada, 106, 123.

Bernard, Hewitt, secretary of the Quebec Conference, 61.

Blair, A. J. Fergusson, 107, 141, 145.

Blake, Edward, 76, 153, 186-187.

Bright, John, his anti-Imperial views, 119, 134-5.

British American League, the, 15.

British Columbia, 169-70; joins the Dominion, 170-3.

British North America Act, the, 76, 124-36.  See Confederation.

Brown, George, advocates a federation confined to the Canadas, 19, 20;
and extension westward, 22-3, 158; his relations with Macdonald, 31-2,
106, 138, 142; his committee on federal union, 32-3; expresses his
readiness to co-operate with the Conservatives in promoting the federal
system, 32-3, 143; his conference with Macdonald and Galt, 34-8; joins
Macdonald in a coalition government, 38-43, 138, 151; an amusing
incident in the House, 42-3; at the Charlottetown Conference, 50-1; his
speech emphasizing the happy relations of Canada with Britain, 52-3; at
the Quebec Conference, 57, 62 n., 64, 71-3, 74, 77-8, 79, 80 and note,
82, 158; his speech upholding the Imperial link, 86-7, 88; admits
imperfection in the Confederation constitution scheme, 89-90, 94;
resigns from the coalition, 106-7; and the Manchester School, 106,
110-11, his influence in the London Conference, 124; after
Confederation denounces any further coalition of parties, 141-2, 144-5,
185; a member of the Senate, 153; an estimate of his work, 181-2; his
personality, 31-2, 43, 73, 86, 152 n., 181-2.

Buckingham, William, 161.


Cameron, Hillyard, 95.

Cameron, M. C., 95.

Campbell, Alexander, a father of Confederation, 50-1, 62 n., 146.

Canada, in the early nineteenth century, 11-14; the call of the West,
22-3; the visit of the Prince of Wales (Edward VII), 23-4; her
relations with United States, 25-6, 107; the intercolonial railway
negotiations, 28-9.  See Dominion, Parliament.

Canada First party, the, 167.

Canada Union Bill of 1822, the, 8.

Cape Breton Island, 45.

Cardwell, Mr, colonial secretary, 109, 134; his dispatch urging
federation, 112-13.

Carleton, Sir Guy, 2.  See Dorchester.

Carling, John, 153.

Carnarvon, Lord, on Canadian currency, 13-14; and Confederation, 123,
133-4.

Carter, F. B., a father of Confederation, 63 n.

Cartier, George E., his work on behalf of Confederation 18, 19, 37,
41-3, 50-1, 62 n., 73, 86, 95, 122, 145, 153, 160; Brown's tribute to,
42-3; accepts a baronetcy, 147-8; an estimate of his work, 182-3.

Cartwright, Sir Richard, on land communication in the early nineteenth
century, 12-13; an amusing incident in the House, 42-3; on Sir John
Macdonald, 179.

Chandler, E. B., a father of Confederation, 49, 63 n., 67.

Chapais, Jean C., a father of Confederation, 62 n., 146.

Charlottetown Conference, the, 47-55, 77.  See Confederation.

Cobden, William, 26.

Cockburn, James, a father of Confederation, 62 n.

Coles, George H., a father of Confederation, 50, 63 n.

Confederation, when first mooted, 2; William Smith's plan, 3-6;
Sewell's plan, 7; W. L. Mackenzie's belief in, 8-9; Lord Durham's plan,
9-10; Constitutional Act of 1791, 10-11; a period of Particularism,
11-15; 21, 30-1; makes headway in Nova Scotia, 16-17, 26-7, 44-5;
becomes a question of practical politics, 17-20; events which hastened,
20-5; political deadlock, 30-2; coalition government formed to promote,
34-41; some opposition and objection to, 42-3, 49, 84, 89-90, 135; the
CHARLOTTETOWN CONFERENCE, 47-55, 77.  THE QUEBEC CONFERENCE:
constituted, 56-7, 61-2; held with closed doors, 58-61; the Fathers of
Confederation, 62 n.-63 n.; federal union, 62-64; provincial
legislatures with a strong central government, 64, 66-9; federal
powers, 69-71; provincial powers, 71-77; the governor-general's powers,
76-7; the House of Commons, 77; the Senate, 77-80, 91-2, 129-31; the
financial terms, 80-3, 90; the Quebec resolutions adopted in Canada,
84-96; opposition in Maritime Provinces, 97-105; finally accepted in
New Brunswick, 112-14, and in Nova Scotia, 114-16.  THE FRAMING OF THE
BILL: the lukewarm reception of the delegates in London, 118-22, 124,
135-6, 173-4; the desire to cement the Imperial tie by framing a
constitution similar in principle to that of Britain, 125-7; naming of
the Dominion, 127; the Senate, 129-131; the educational privileges of
minorities, 131-2; the passage of the British North America Act, 133-5;
some criticism, 90-1, 92-5; a priceless inheritance, 187-90.  THE
DOMINION: Nova Scotia reconciled, 152-7; the prairie provinces, 158-9,
168; British Columbia, 158, 169-73; Prince Edward Island, 173-6.  See
Dominion, Fathers, Parliament.

Constitutional Act of 1791, the, 3, 11.


Dawson, Simon, 161.

Day, Mr Justice, 133 n.

DeCosmos, Amor, advocates union, 169, 171.

Denison, Colonel G. T., vii, 167.

Dennis, Colonel J.  S., 163.  Dicey, Professor, his view of the
Canadian constitution, 126.

Dickey, R. B., a father of Confederation, 49, 62 n.

Dominion of Canada, the, source and extent of, 1-2; her constitution
compared, 65-6, 125-7; her government representative of all parts of
the country, 144; the naming of, 127-9; the forming of the first
ministry, 137-8, 144-6; the first general elections, 152-153; the
Hudson's Bay Company, 158-60; the Red River Rebellion, 159, 161-8; her
Imperialism, 190.  See Canada, Confederation, Parliament.

Dorchester, Lord, and Confederation, 2-4.

Dorion, A. A., his opposition to Confederation, 28, 40, 42, 89, 92, 183.

Draper, Chief Justice, 22.

Dunkin, Christopher, his opposition to Confederation, 42, 89, 91.

Durham, Lord, his scheme of union, 9-10.


Edward VII, his visit to Canada, 23-4.


Fathers of Confederation, the, 62 n.-63 n.; the leaders honoured,
147-50; an estimate of their work, 177-90.  See Confederation.

Fenian invasion, the, and Confederation, 113, 118.

Ferrier, James, 43.

Fisher, Charles, a father of Confederation, 63 n., 122, 130

Foster, W.  A., 167.

Fournier, Telesphore, 42.


Galt, A. T., forces Confederation out of the sphere of speculation,
17-19, 34-8, 40, 50-1, 57, 62 n., 80, 86, 93, 106, 122, 132-3, 145,
181; his views on the ultimate destiny of Canada, 74, 148-9; desires to
extend educational privileges to all minorities, 132-3; K.C.M.G.,
147-50; his personality, 17-18, 132, 152 n., 183.

George III, and the American Revolution, 1.

Gladstone, W. E., favours cession of Canada to United States, 119.

Gordon, A. H., lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, 55, 103, 104,
111-12, 113-14.

Gourlay, Robert, and Confederation, 6.

Gray, J. H. (P.E.I.), a father of Confederation, 49, 63 n.

Gray, J. H. (N.B.), a father of Confederation, 49, 59-61, 63 n., 81.

Great Britain: the Union Bill of 1822, 7; her colonial policy in 1852,
15; the Hudson's Bay Company, 22, 158-9; the 'Trent' Affair, 25; her
interest in Confederation, 26-27, 108-13, 170; opinions in regarding
the ultimate destiny of Canada, 110-11, 119-122; her consideration for
United States, 119, 128.

Granville, Lord, colonial secretary, 149, 172.

Grenville,  Lord, and Dorchester's proposal, 3, 6.

Grey, Earl, governor-general, 15.


Haliburton, Robert, on opinion in Nova Scotia regarding Confederation,
100-1.

Halifax, the Canadian delegates entertained at, 48, 52-4.

Halliburton, Brenton, 8.

Hamilton, P. S., 15.

Hathaway, George, 99.

Haviland, T. Heath, a father of Confederation, 63 n.

Head, Sir Edmund, governor of Canada, 18.

Henry, William A., a father of Confederation, 49, 62 n., 122, 130, 153.

Hind, Prof. Henry Youle, 161.

Holton, Luther H., opposes Confederation, 28, 40, 42, 89, 183; on Sir
John Macdonald, 179.

House of Commons, the basis of representation in, 77.  See Parliament.

Howe, Joseph, 28-9; his opposition to Confederation, 16-17, 46, 55, 57,
100, 102-3, 115-116, 135; favours maritime union, 47-8; his speech
upholding federation, 48; 'that pestilent fellow,' 153; goes to England
to demand repeal, 154, 156; his meeting with Tupper, 155-6; enters the
Dominion Cabinet, 156.

Howland, William P., and Confederation, 122, 130, 141, 143, 145; C.B.;
147.

Hudsons Bay Company, the, 2, 22; and the Dominion, 158-60.

Huntington, L. S., opposes Confederation, 28, 42.


Intercolonial Railway, the, 13, 28-9.


Jesuits' Estates Act, the, 71.

Johnston, J. W., and Confederation, 16.

Johnston, John M., a father of Confederation, 49, 63 n., 122.


Kenny, Edward, his inclusion in the first Dominion Cabinet, 145, 146.

Kent, Duke of, and Confederation, 7.

Kimberley, Lord, his views on the power to add to the Senate, 131.


Langevin, Hector L., a father of Confederation, 50-1, 62 n., 122, 146.

Letellier, Lieutenant-Governor, 42; the case of his dismissal, 69-70.

Liberals, and Confederation, 39, 40, 42, 141-4.

Lincoln, Abraham, and the 'Trent' Affair, 25.

Lotbinière, Joly de, 42.

Lower Canada, 3; its relations with Upper Canada, 6-8; and
Confederation, 84, 95.

Lyons, Lord, and the 'Trent' Affair, 25.

Lytton, Sir E. B., and Confederation, 19.


McCully, Jonathan, a father of Confederation, 49, 62 n., 93 n., 102,
122.

Macdonald, A. A., a father of Confederation, 50, 63 n.

Macdonald, John A., the Father of Confederation, 19, 33, 54, 106,
178-81; his relations with Brown, 31-2, 106, 142; the reconciliation
and conference with Brown, 34-8, 39; the Charlottetown Conference,
50-1, 52; the Quebec Conference, 59, 61, 62 and note, 64, 180, 185; his
appeal for a strong central authority, 67-8; on the office of
lieutenant-governor, 70; on the mode of appointment to the Senate,
78-9, 80 and note; his prophetic utterance, 88; his policy of 'masterly
inactivity,' 117; chairman at the London Conference, 122; a tribute to,
123-4; forms the first Dominion Cabinet on a non-party basis, 137-8,
140, 142, 144-6, 150; K.C.B., 147; his troubles with Howe and Nova
Scotia, 153-6; the Red River Rebellion, 161; the Scott murder case,
168; and Sir John Rose, 175; his personality, 31, 86, 117, 150, 178-180.

Macdonald, John Sandfield, 151-2; opposed to Confederation, 27-8, 32,
89; prime minister of Ontario, 150-1, 153, 168.

Macdonnell, Sir R. G., governor of Nova Scotia, 53-4, 55, 103, 104.

McDougall, William, 160, 184-185; a father of Confederation, 40, 50-1,
62 n., 79, 80 n., 122, 181, 184-5; joins the Dominion Cabinet, 141,
143-4, 145, 160; C.B., 147; lieutenant-governor of the West Territory,
160-1, 163-164, 167.

McGee, Thomas D'Arcy, the orator of the Confederation movement, 24-5,
50-1, 62 n., 65 n., 181, 184; his patriotic conduct, 145, 146;
assassinated, 146-7.

Mackenzie, Alexander, 40, 153; and a hostile Senate, 131; his
integrity, 186.

Mackenzie, W. L., 6; his plan of Confederation, 8-9.

McLelan, A. W., 153.

Mair, Charles, 167.

Manitoba, in the Dominion, 159-68.

Maritime Provinces, the, and communication with Canada, 11-12; object
to direct taxation, 80-1, 97.  See various provinces.

Miller, William, his troubles in Nova Scotia, 115-16.

Mitchell, Peter, 28; a father of Confederation, 63 n., 122, 146.

Monck, Lord, first governor-general of the Dominion, 27, 50, 84-5,
137-8, 147; his personality and record, 139-40.

Morris, Alexander, 15; and the meeting between Macdonald and Brown, 34,
35.

Mowat, Oliver, a father of Confederation, 40, 62 n., 74-5, 79, 80 n.;
and Macdonald, 179, 185; his career, 185-6.

Mulgrave, Lord, governor of Nova Scotia, 17, 26-7.

Musgrave, Anthony, governor of Newfoundland, 105; and of British
Columbia, 172.


New Brunswick, 13, 44-5, 49, 51; the agitation against Confederation,
97-9; a change of front, 112-14, 173-4.

Newcastle, Duke of, on Canadian loyalty, 24; and Confederation, 26-7,
28, 109, 120-121.

Newfoundland, 13-14, 44, 50; rejects Confederation, 105, 175-6.

North-West Company, the, 2.

Nova Scotia, 13, 14; favours maritime union, 27, 45, 47, 49, 51; the
opposition to Confederation, 99-104, 114-116; the agitation for repeal,
152-7; reconciled, 82, 156, 173-4.


Ontario.  See Upper Canada.


Palmer, Edward, a father of Confederation, 49, 63 n.

Palmerston, Lord, 23; his adventurous foreign policy, 119, 120.

Parliament: Confederation a question of practical politics, 18-19;
political deadlock, 30-32; Brown's committee on federal union, 32-3;
the public reconciliation of Brown and Macdonald, 34; a coalition
formed to forward Confederation, 38-41, 44, 144; an amusing incident,
42-3; the debate on the Quebec resolutions, 84-96; the mission to
England and the resignation of Brown, 105-7; a period of 'masterly
inactivity,' 117; the educational privileges of minorities, 132-3; dual
premiership abolished, 137-9; the Hudson's Bay Company, 160.  See
Dominion.

Penny, Edward Goff, 57.

Pope, James C., 174.

Pope, John Henry, and Brown, 34, 35.

Pope, Sir Joseph, quoted, 32, 36, 61, 72 n., 76 n., 80, 93 n., 129, 138
n.

Pope, W. H., a father of Confederation, 49, 63 n., 82.

Prince Edward Island, 14, 44-45, 49, 51; and Confederation, 77, 104-5,
173-6.


Quebec.  See Lower Canada.

Quebec Conference, the, 56-83.  See under Confederation.


Reciprocity Treaty, the, 14, 25-26, 107.

Red River Rebellion, the, 159, 161-8.

Riel, Louis, leader in the Red River Rebellion, 164-6, 167, 168; his
later career, 168-9.

Robinson, John Beverley, 8.

Rogers, Sir Frederic, his colonial views, 121-2; his tribute to
Macdonald, 123-4.

Rose, Sir John, 174-5.

Ross, John, 18.

Rouges, the, and Confederation, 42.  See Liberals.

Russell, Lord John, 15.


Saskatchewan, in the Dominion, 159, 168.

Schultz, Sir John, 167.

Scott, Thomas, his murder, 165-6.

Senate, the, composition of, 77-78, 129-31; mode of appointment to,
78-80, 91-2.  See Parliament.

Sewell, Chief Justice, his plan of Confederation, 7-8.

Seymour, Frederick, governor of British Columbia, 170, 172.

Shea, Ambrose, a father of Confederation, 63 n., 82.

Smith, Sir Albert, prime minister of New Brunswick, 112, 114.

Smith, Goldwin, quoted, 21, 30, 93, 188.

Smith, William, his plan of Confederation, 2, 3, 4-6.

South Africa, her form of government, 66.

Stanley, Lord, and the naming of Canada, 128.

Steeves, W. H., a father of Confederation, 49, 63 n.

Strachan, Bishop, 7-8.

Strathcona, Lord, and the Red River Rebellion, 165.


Taché, Sir Etienne, prime minister of Canada, 39, 40, 61, 62 n., 91-2;
death of, 106.

Taché, Bishop, and the Red River Rebellion, 162, 165, 169.

Taché, J. C., 15.

Thibault, Grand Vicar, 165.

Thirteen Colonies, granted independence, 1.  See United States.

Thompson, Sir John, 186-7.

Tilley, S. L., 28, 54-5; a father of Confederation, 49, 57, 62 and
note, 82, 122, 145, 181, 184; his defeat in New Brunswick, 97-9, 184;
C.B., 147.

'Trent' Affair, the, 25.

Trutch, Joseph, advocates joining the Dominion, 172.

Tupper, Charles, 46, 154; proposes a maritime union, 45, 48-9; his
services to the cause of Confederation, 45-6, 57, 62 n., 64, 82, 122,
154-6, 181, 184; plays a waiting game in Nova Scotia, 99, 104, 115-116;
waives his claim to a place in the first Dominion Cabinet, 145, 146,
152; C.B., 147, 148; his meeting with Howe in London, 154-6, 116; his
death, 178.


United States, and the 'Trent' Affair, 25; the weakness of her
constitution, 67-8, 126.

Upper Canada, 3; its relations with Lower Canada, 6-8; and
Confederation, 94-5.


Vancouver Island, 169-70.


War of 1812, a proof of the necessity for Confederation, 6-7.

Watkin, Edward, 148.

Wetmore, A. R., defeats Tilley on Confederation, 98-9.

Whelan, Edward, a father of Confederation, 63 n.

Whitney, Sir James, 151 n.

Wolseley, Colonel, quells the Red River Rebellion, 168.

Wood, E. B., 153.




  Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
  at the Edinburgh University Press




THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA

THIRTY-TWO VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED

Edited by GEORGE M. WRONG and H. H. LANGTON



THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA

PART I

THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS

1.  THE DAWN OF CANADIAN HISTORY
    By Stephen Leacock.

2.  THE MARINER OF ST MALO
    By Stephen Leacock.


PART II

THE RISE OF NEW FRANCE

3.  THE FOUNDER OF NEW FRANCE
    By Charles W. Colby.

4.  THE JESUIT MISSIONS
    By Thomas Guthrie Marquis.

5.  THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
    By William Bennett Munro.

6.  THE GREAT INTENDANT
    By Thomas Chapais.

7.  THE FIGHTING GOVERNOR
    By Charles W. Colby.


PART III

THE ENGLISH INVASION

8.  THE GREAT FORTRESS
    By William Wood.

9.  THE ACADIAN EXILES
    By Arthur G. Doughty.

10.  THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE
     By William Wood.

11.  THE WINNING OF CANADA
     By William Wood.


PART IV

THE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA

12.  THE FATHER OF BRITISH CANADA
     By William Wood.

13.  THE UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS
     By W. Stewart Wallace.

14.  THE WAR WITH THE UNITED STATES
     By William Wood.


PART V

THE RED MAN IN CANADA

15.  THE WAR CHIEF OF THE OTTAWAS
     By Thomas Guthrie Marquis.

16.  THE WAR CHIEF OF THE SIX NATIONS
     By Louis Aubrey Wood.

17.  TECUMSEH: THE LAST GREAT LEADER OF HIS PEOPLE
     By Ethel T. Raymond.


PART VI

PIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST

18.  THE 'ADVENTURERS OF ENGLAND' ON HUDSON BAY
     By Agnes C. Laut.

19.  PATHFINDERS OF THE GREAT PLAINS
     By Lawrence J. Burpee.

20.  ADVENTURERS OF THE FAR NORTH
     By Stephen Leacock.

21.  THE RED RIVER COLONY
     By Louis Aubrey Wood.

22.  PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC COAST
     By Agnes C. Laut.

23.  THE CARIBOO TRAIL
     By Agnes C. Laut.


PART VII

THE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM

24.  THE FAMILY COMPACT
     By W. Stewart Wallace.

25.  THE 'PATRIOTES' OF '37
     By Alfred D. DeCelles.

26.  THE TRIBUNE OF NOVA SCOTIA
     By William Lawson Grant.

27.  THE WINNING OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT
     By Archibald MacMechan.


PART VIII

THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY

28.  THE FATHERS OF CONFEDERATION
     By A. H. U. Colquhoun.

29.  THE DAY OF SIR JOHN MACDONALD
     By Sir Joseph Pope.

30.  THE DAY OF SIR WILFRID LAURIER
     By Oscar D. Skelton.


PART IX

NATIONAL HIGHWAYS

31.  ALL AFLOAT
     By William Wood.

32.  THE RAILWAY BUILDERS
     By Oscar D. Skelton.



TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY









End of Project Gutenberg's The Fathers of Confederation, by A. H. U. Colquhoun