As early as March, Bagot had begun to feel that the views of the Cabinet in Britain were impracticable: and that even the Civil List might not be so easily defended as Stanley imagined. "I know well by what a slender thread the adhesion of the colony will hang whenever we consent to leave the matter entirely in its own hands.... But the present supply is not sufficient for its purposes. We must always be dependent on the Legislature for provision to meet its excess; and I cannot but {139} think that the sooner the Legislature succeeds, if they are to succeed, in carrying the point, the more generous they may possibly be in the use of their victory."[12] Bagot was already defining the policy which was to be peculiarly his own. He had a singularly clear eye for facts, even when they contradicted his preconceived ideas; and, being a man of the world, he saw that compromise with the opposition was as natural in Canada as in Britain. But in answer to his despatches, proposing such a compromise, Stanley, with his dogmatic omniscience, and eloquent certainty, had nothing but regrets to express, and difficulties to suggest. England, he thought, had dealt generously with Canada in the terms of the Act of Union, and sound statesmanship lay in resolute defence of that measure. And, since there always seems to be in such imperialists a sense of political pathos—the lacrymae rerum politicarum—he began to have pessimistic views of the permanence of the connection: "I am very far from underrating the value to Great Britain of her extensive and rapidly improving North American possessions, but I cannot conceal from myself the fact that they are maintained to her at no light cost, and at no {140} trifling risk. To all this she willingly submits, so long as the bonds of union between herself and her colonies are strengthened by mutual harmony, good will, and confidence; and it would be indeed painful to me to contemplate the possibility that embarrassments, arising from uncalled for and unfounded jealousies on the part of Canada, might lead the people of England to entertain a doubt how far the balance of advantages preponderated in favour of the continuance of the present relations."[13] The Civil List raised the fundamental question, but it was a simple issue, and it lay still far in the future. The constitution of the ministry, however, and its relation to the coming parliament, could be neither evaded nor delayed.

Bagot's instructions gave him a certain scope, for he was permitted to avail himself of the advice and services of the ablest men, without reference to the distinction of local party. In making use of this liberty, Bagot had to consider chiefly the need of finding a majority in the Lower House—happily he could postpone their meeting till September. Of the probable tone of that Assembly the estimates varied, but Murdoch, who knew the situation as well as any man, calculated that while {141} the government party would number thirty, the French, with their British Radical friends, would be thirty-six strong, the old Conservatives eight, and some ten or so would "wait on providence or rather on patronage."[14] In Sydenham's last days, the government majority, which he had so subtly, and by means so machiavellian, got together, had vanished. Reformers, not all of them so scrupulous as Baldwin, were ready to ruin a government which kept them from a complete triumph. Sir Allan MacNab with his old die-hards, fulminating against all enemies of the British tradition, was still willing to make an unholy alliance with the French, if only he could checkmate a governor-general who did not seem to appreciate his past services to Britain. And the French themselves, alienated and insulted by Sydenham, sat gloomily alone, restless over the Union, seemingly on the threshold of some fresh racial conflict. Everything was uncertain, save the coming government defeat.[15]

At the very outset, Bagot had this question of French Canada thrust upon him. From the moment of his arrival his council advised the {142} admission of the French Canadians to a share in power. He refused, for Stanley had very carefully instructed him on that subject. The Colonial Secretary had spoken of the wisdom of forgetting old divisions, but he never permitted himself to forget that the French leaders—La Fontaine, Viger, Girouard—had all been, in some fashion or other, involved in the troubles of 1837. He believed that there still existed in Lower Canada a gloomy, rebellious, French Canadian party, which no responsible British statesman could afford to recognize. Sober-minded Canadian statesmen told him that it was useless to attempt to detach from the party individuals—les Vendus their compatriots called them. He answered that he would like to multiply such Vendus; and he hoped for a day when the anglicising of the Lower Province should have been completed. It was his intention to break down all forces tending in the opposite direction. He was conscious of a repulsion, equally strong, in his feelings towards Baldwin, and the Reform party. Whether it came by French racial hate, or Upper Canadian republicanism, which was the name he gave to all views of a reforming colour, the ruin of the Empire would follow hard on concession to agitation. In his heart, he trusted only {143} the old Tories, and not all his disgust at MacNab's interested advances could alter his conviction that one party alone cared for Britain—the former Family Compact men. When he bade Bagot disregard party divisions in his choice of ministers, he was unconsciously limiting Bagot's choice to a very little circle, all of them most unmistakably displeasing to the populace, whose wishes he professed to be willing to consult. He claimed to be a man of principle—mistaking the clearness of doctrinaire ignorance for the certainty of honest knowledge.

Happily the governor-general of Canada was not in this sense a man of principle. He observed, took counsel, and began to shape his own policy. It is not easy to describe that policy in a sentence, or even to make it absolutely clear. He had come out to Canada, forewarned against Baldwin and the school of constitutionalists associated with him; and the warning made him reluctant to consent to their ideas. He had been advised to draw his councillors from all directions, and his naturally moderate spirit approved a policy of judicious selection. But the noteworthy feature in the line of action which he ultimately followed was that he allowed his diplomatic instincts to overbalance the advice imposed on him by the British ministry. {144} In selecting individuals for his councils, he almost unconsciously followed the wishes of Baldwin and his party, until, at the end, he found himself in the hands of resolute advocates of responsible government, and did nothing to withstand their doctrine. But this is to anticipate events, and to simplify what was actually a process involved in some confusion. He filled two vacant places—one with the most brilliant of reforming financiers, Francis Hincks, whose merits he saw at once; the other, after a gentlemanly refusal from Cartwright, with Sherwood, a sound but comparatively moderate Conservative from Upper Canada. In an admirable letter to Stanley at the beginning of the summer, he outlined his policy. Stanley, ever fearful of rash experiments, warned him that a combination of black and white does not necessarily produce grey. To this he answered: "My hope is that, circumstanced as I am, I possibly may be able to do this, that is, to take from all sides the best and fittest men for the public service.... The attempt to produce such a grey, whether it succeed or not, must, I think, after all that has passed, and at this particular crisis in which I find myself here, be the safest line."[16] Stanley, then, limited his {145} choice of men, and in the event of a crisis, was prepared that he should risk a defeat and the violent imposition of an alien ministry, on the chance that such a reverse might provoke a loyalist uprising to defend the British connection. Baldwin dreamed of a consistently Radical cabinet. MacNab, with his eyes shut to the consequences, seems to have considered a leap in the dark—a coalition between his men and the French Canadians. Bagot, as opportunist as the Tories, but opportunist for the sake of peace, and some kind of constitutional progress, laid aside lofty ideals, and said, as his most faithful advisers also said, that the future lay with judicious selection, no party being barred except where their conduct should have made recognition of them impossible to a self-respecting governor.

It is difficult to name all the influences which operated on Bagot's mind. He corresponded largely and usefully with Draper, the soundest of his conservative advisers. His own innate courtesy led him to end the social ostracism of the French, and taught him their good qualities. Being quick-witted and observant, his political instincts began almost unconsciously to force a new programme upon him. Before August, he had conciliated moderate reforming opinion through Hincks; he {146} had proved to the French, by legal appointments, which met with a stiff and forced acquiescence in Stanley, that at least he was not their enemy. He had begun to question the certainty of Stanley's wisdom on the Civil List, and various other subjects. Then, between July 28th and September 26th, the date of two sets of despatches, which, if despatches ever deserve the term, must be called works of genius, he completed his plan, brought it to the test of practice, and challenged the home government to acquiesce, or recall him. With his ministry constituted as it was in July, he had to face the certainty of a vote of no confidence as soon as parliament met. Were he to do nothing, some unholy alliance of groups would defeat the government. In that case, his ministers, pledged as they were to constitutionalism by the resolutions of September, 1841, had warned him beforehand, that they would resign in a body. All hold over the French would be lost, and responsible government, whether he and Stanley willed it or not, would be established in its most obnoxious form. To fill the vacant places, or to reconstruct the ministry, the field of choice was very small, even if men of every connection were included. "Out of the 84 members of the House of {147} Assembly," he told Stanley, "not above 30, as far as I can judge, are at all qualified for office, by the common advantages of intelligence and education, and of these, ten at least are not in a position to accept it."[17] In the case of the French he seemed to have reached an absolute deadlock. He found offers to individual Frenchmen useless, for he did not gain the party, and he ruined the men whom he honoured. The Assembly was to meet on the 8th of September, and as that date drew near, the excitement rose. It was a crisis with many possibilities both for England and for Canada.

As certainly as Stanley, with all the wisdom of Peel's cabinet behind him, was wrong, and fatally so, Bagot's conduct between September 10th and September 14th was precisely right. In a correspondence with Peel, just before the crisis, Stanley sought to get his great leader to take his view. Even Peel's genius proved incompetent to settle a problem of local politics, three thousand miles away from the scene of action. The wisdom of his answer lay, not in its suggestions, which were useless to Bagot, but in its hint "that much must be left to the judgment and discretion of those who have to act at a great distance from the supreme {148} authority."[18] Stanley himself, from first to last, was for allowing Bagot to face defeat, although he always thought it possible that stubborn resistance to what he counted treason would rally a secure majority to Bagot and the Crown. Time and again after assuring Bagot that he and the ministry acquiesced, which, to do them justice, they did like men, he harked back to the idea of allowing events to prove that the government was indeed powerless, before it made a definitive surrender. Long before Parliament met, the situation had been discussed in all its bearings; and the only doubt that remained was concerning which out of three or four foreshadowed catastrophes would end the existence of the government. The ministers themselves had their negative programme ready; for, having consented to the constitutional resolutions of September, 1841, they forewarned Bagot that if they were left in a minority, or in a very small majority, they should feel themselves compelled to resign, and they added that, if Bagot did not accept their recommendation to admit the French Canadians, they would insist upon his accepting their resignation.[19]

{149}

When the Assembly met, events moved very rapidly. On the opening day, Neilson brought forward the exciting question of amnesty; and the air was filled with rumours and schemes, of which the most ominous for government was the project of coalition between Conservatives and French Canadians. The time had come for action—if anything could really be done. To understand the boldness of Bagot's tactics, it must be remembered that they went "in the teeth of an almost universal feeling at home ... certainly in opposition to Lord Durham's recorded sentiments, and as certainly to Lord Sydenham's avowed practice"—to say nothing of Stanley's own wishes. La Fontaine was definitely approached on the tenth, and, seemingly, Bagot was not quite prepared for the greatness of his claims—"four places in the Council, with the admission of Mr. Baldwin into it."[20] But he had no alternative, for on the 12th he received a plain statement from his cabinet that, if he failed, they were not prepared to carry on the government.[21] To his dismay, the surrender, if one may so term it, which he signed next day, was not accepted, since Baldwin could not {150} countenance the pensioning of the ministers, Ogden and Davidson, who had been compulsorily retired, and, although MacNab was at hand with the offer of sixteen Conservative stalwarts, the plan was useless, and, in view of MacNab's general conduct at this time, irritating. When Bagot wrote that night to Stanley it was as a despairing man, for the attack had begun at 3 o'clock, Baldwin leading off with an address, as usual pledging the House to responsible government, and there was every chance that he would defeat the ministry. At this point Bagot took the strange and daring plan of allowing Draper to read his letter to La Fontaine in the House, that the Lower Canadians might "learn how abundantly large an offer their leaders have rejected, and the honest spirit in which that offer was made."[22] His unconventionality won the day, by convincing the House that the governor-general was in earnest. Successive adjournments staved off the debate on the address; and by September 16th, terms had been settled. La Fontaine, Small, Aylwin, Baldwin, and Girouard if he cared to take office, were to enter, Draper, Davidson, Ogden and Sherwood passing out. Unfortunately, since neither Ogden nor Sherwood happened to be {151} present, Bagot had to accept their resignations on his own initiative, and without previous consultation with them. Not even that dexterous correspondent could quite disguise the awkwardness of his position when he wrote to tell both men that they had ceased to be his ministers.[23] So the crisis ended.

The address was carried by fifty-five votes to five, the malcontents being MacNab, foiled once more in his ambitions; Moffat and Cartwright, representing inflexible Toryism; Neilson, whose position as a recognized opponent of the Union tied his hands, and Johnstone, a disappointed place man. Peace ruled in the Assembly, and the battle passed to the province, the newspapers, and most ominous of all for the governor, to the cabinet and public in Britain. A storm of abuse, criticism, and regrets broke over Bagot's devoted head. The opposition press in Canada called him "a radical, a puppet, an old woman, an apostate, a renegade descendant of old Colonel Bagot who fell at Naseby fighting for his King."[24] MacNab, in the House, led a bitterly personal opposition. At least one {152} cabinet meeting in England was called specially to consider the incident, and for some months Stanley tempered assurances that he and the government would support their representative, with caustic expressions of regret. The necessity of the change, he reiterated, had not been fully proven. The French members and Baldwin were doubtful characters. If the worst must be accepted, and a ministry constructed, containing both Baldwin and the French, then Bagot had better obtain from the new cabinet some assurance of "their intention of standing by the provisions of the Act of Union, including the Civil List, and every other debatable question." Then, fearing lest the very citadel of responsibility and control should be surrendered, he set forth his theory of government in an elaborate letter which revealed distinct distrust of his correspondent's power of resistance. "Your position is different from that of the Crown in England. The Crown acts avowedly and exclusively on the advice of its ministers, and has no political opinions of its own. You act in concert with your Executive Council, but the ultimate decision rests with yourself, and you are recognised, not only as having an opinion, but as supreme and irresponsible, except to the Home government, for {153} your acts in your executive capacity. Practically you are (influenced) by the advice you receive, and by motives of prudence, in not running counter to the advice of those who command a majority in the Legislature; but you cannot throw on them the onus of your actions in the same sense that the Crown can in this country."[25]

Yet, so far as Canada was concerned, Bagot had reason to feel satisfied. Threatened with half a dozen hostile combinations, he had forestalled them all, and found the Assembly filled with friends, not enemies. He had approached a sullen French nation—and thereafter the French party formed as solid an accession to Canadian political stability as they had once been dangerous to Imperial peace; and their union with the moderate reformers in government, while it gave them all they asked, enabled the governor to exercise a natural restraint on them, should they again be tempted to nationalist excesses. He had not explicitly surrendered to any sweeping doctrine of responsible government. There was peace at last. The Assembly which passed over thirty acts, reaffirmed the rights of the royal prerogative, and {154} was dismissed in the most amiable temper with itself, and the governor-general.

One may discern, however, a curious contradiction between the superficial consequences of the crisis, as described by Bagot, and the fundamental changes the beginnings of which he was able to trace in the months which followed. On the face of it, Bagot's policy of frank expediency had saved Stanley and his party from a crushing defeat and a humiliating surrender to extreme views. So far, he had assisted the cause of conservatism. But the disaster and the humiliation would have come, not from the grant of responsible government, but from the misuse of it to which a victory, won against a more resolute governor, might have tempted Baldwin and La Fontaine, and from the false position in which the imperial government would have stood, towards the men who had challenged imperial authority and won. It is interesting to follow the process by which Bagot came to see all that lay in his action. Yielding to Canadian autonomy, he went on to new surrenders. He had already warned Stanley that the agitation over the Civil List would certainly reawaken; to the end he seems to have been considering the advisability of a complete surrender {155} on that point. When he wrote communicating to the minister the Assembly's acknowledgment of the royal prerogative, in recognizing the right of the Crown to name the capital, he pointed out that, prerogative or no prerogative, the possessor of the purse had the final voice. He rebuked his new minister, Baldwin, for tacking on question-begging constitutional phrases to a legal opinion, but he told Stanley, quite frankly, that, "whether the doctrine of responsible government is openly acknowledged, or is only tacitly acquiesced in, virtually it exists."[26] During the remainder of his tenure of office, partly because of his own ill-health, but partly also, I think, from conviction, he gave his ministers the most perfect freedom of action. And, although he did not gain the point, he was willing to make sweeping concessions in answer to the call for an amnesty for the rebels of 1837. He recognized the force of trusting, in a self-governing community, even those who had once striven against the British rule with arms—the final proof in any man that he has come to understand the secrets, at once of Empire, and of constitutional government.

There is little more to tell of Bagot's rule, for {156} the last months of his life were spent in a struggle to overcome extreme bodily sickness in the interest of public duty; and Stanley himself, in the name of the Cabinet, expressed his admiration for the gallantry of his stand.

To the end, he held himself justified in his political actions, and if there were moments when he questioned whether Stanley would see things in a reasonable light, he possessed the perfect confidence of his Canadian ministers, who did not neglect his injunction to them to defend his memory.[27]

Nevertheless the irritation of the Colonial Secretary was neither unnatural nor unjustifiable. He confidently expected that separation from England would be the immediate consequence of a surrender to the reform party in Canada; and he believed that Bagot had made that surrender. In the latter opinion he was correct. There are times when the party of reaction sees more clearly than their opponents the scope and consequences of innovation, however blind they may be to the developments which by their parallel advance check the obvious dangers; and Sir Charles Metcalfe, whom Stanley sent to Canada to stay the flowing tide, has furnished the most accurate negative criticism of {157} the Bagot incident: "The result of the struggle naturally increased the conviction that Responsible Government was effectually established, new Councillors were forced on the governor-general.... The Council was no longer selected by the governor. It was thrust on him by the Assembly of the people. Some of the new members of the Council had entered it with extreme notions of the supremacy of the Council over the governor; and the illness of Sir Charles Bagot, after this change, threw the current business of administration almost entirely into their hands, which tended much to confirm these notions."[28] It fell to the lot of this critic to attempt to correct Bagot's mistakes.



[1] Stanley to Bagot, 8 October, 1841.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Bagot Correspondence: Stanley to Bagot, 17 May, 1842. The term Bagot Correspondence is used to denote the letters to and from Bagot, other than despatches, in the possession of the Canadian Archives.

[4] Stanley to Bagot, 8 October, 1841.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Bagot Correspondence: Murdoch to Bagot, 18 October, 1842.

[7] Bagot to Stanley, 26 September, 1842.

[8] Bagot Correspondence: Harrison to Bagot, 11 July, 1842

[9] Bagot Correspondence: W. H. Draper to Bagot, 18 May, and 16 July, 1842.

[10] Bagot Correspondence: Murdoch to Bagot, 3 September, 1842.

[11] Goulburn to Stanley, 16 September, 1842.

[12] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 26 March, 1842.

[13] Stanley to Bagot, 27 May, 1842.

[14] Bagot Correspondence: Stanley to Bagot, describing an interview with Murdoch, 1 September, 1842.

[15] See Bagot's admirable analysis of French conditions in his public and confidential despatches, 26 September, 1842.

[16] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 12 June, 1842.

[17] Bagot to Stanley: 26 September, 1842—confidential.

[18] Peel to Stanley, 28 August, 1842.

[19] Bagot to Stanley, 26 September, 1842—confidential.

[20] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 July, 1842.

[21] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 13 September, 1842.

[22] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 13 September, 1842.

[23] Bagot Correspondence: letters to Sherwood 16 September, and to Ogden 19 September. Dismissal is far too blunt a term in which to describe the transaction.

[24] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 October, 1842.

[25] Bagot Correspondence: Stanley to Bagot, 3 November and 3 December, 1842.

[26] Bagot Correspondence: Bagot to Stanley, 28 October, 1842.

[27] Hincks, Reminiscences of his Public Life, p. 89.

[28] Kaye, Papers and Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe, p. 416.



{158}

CHAPTER V.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD METCALFE.

A surrender of the official Imperial position so unexpected and so contrary to the intentions of the Colonial Office, as that which Bagot had made, provoked a natural reaction. Bagot's successor was one of those men of principle who are continually revealing the flaws and limitations implicit in their principles by earnest over-insistence on them. It is unfortunate that Sir Charles Metcalfe should appear in Canadian history as the man whose errors almost precipitated another rebellion, for among his predecessors and successors few have equalled him, none has outstripped him, in public virtue or experience. He had earned, throughout thirty-seven years in India, a reputation for efficiency in every kind of administrative work. As a lad of little more than twenty he had negotiated with Ranjit Singh the treaty which, for a generation, kept Sikhs and British at peace. In the {159} residency at Hyderabad he had fought, in the face of the governor-general's displeasure, a hard but ultimately successful battle for incorrupt administration. After Bentinck had resigned, Metcalfe had been appointed acting governor-general, and he might have risen even higher, had not the courageous act, by which he freed the press in India from its earlier disabilities, set the East India Company authorities against him. He was something more than what Macaulay called him—"the ablest civil servant I ever knew in India"; his faculty for recommending himself to Anglo-Indian society on its lighter side, and the princely generosity which bound his friends to him by a curious union of reverence and affection, combined with his genius for administration to make him an unusual and outstanding figure in that generation of the company officials in India. Led by the sense of duty which ever dominated him, he had passed from retirement in England to reconcile the warring elements in Jamaica to each other; and his success there had been as great as in India. In English politics, in which he had naturally played little part, he identified himself with the more liberal wing of the Whigs, although his long absence from the centre of affairs, and the inclination natural to {160} an administrator, to think of liberalism rather as a thing of deeds and acts than of opinion, gave whatever radicalism he may have professed a bureaucratic character. He described himself not inaptly to a friend thus: "A man who is for the abolition of the corn laws, Vote by Ballot, Extension of the Suffrage, Amelioration of the Poor-laws for the benefit of the poor, equal rights to all sects of Christians in matters of religion, and equal rights to all men in civil matters...; and (who) at the same time, is totally disqualified to be a demagogue—shrinks like a sensitive plant from public meetings; and cannot bear to be drawn from close retirement, except by what comes in the shape of real or fancied duty to his country."[1] Outside of the greater figures of the time, he was one of the first citizens of the Empire, and Bagot, as he thought of possible successors, only dismissed the suggestion of Metcalfe's appointment because it seemed too good news to be true. Nevertheless Sir Charles Metcalfe had one great initial disadvantage for work in Canada. Distinguished as were his virtues, a very little discernment in the home government might have discovered the obstacles which must meet an absolutely efficient, {161} liberal administrator in a country where democracy, the only possible principle of government for Canada, was still in its crude and repulsive stage. The delimitation of the frontier between Imperial control and Canadian self-government required a subtler and more flexible mind than Metcalfe's, and a longer practice than his in the ways of popular assemblies. Between March, 1843, when he assumed office, and the end of 1845, when he returned to die in England, Metcalfe's entire energy was spent in grappling with the problem of holding the balance level between local autonomy and British supremacy. His real contribution to the question was, in a sense, the confusion and failure with which his career ended; for his serious practical logic reduced to an absurdity, as nothing else could have done, the position stated so firmly by Russell in 1839.

Sir Charles Metcalfe came to Canada at a moment when responsible government in its most extended interpretation seemed to have triumphed. In Upper and Lower Canada the reforming party had accepted Bagot's action as the concession of their principle, and the two chief ministers, Baldwin and La Fontaine, were men resolute to endure no diminution of their share of responsibility. Bagot's {162} illness had given additional strength to their authority, and Gibbon Wakefield, who was then a member of Assembly, believed that Baldwin had already taken too great a share of responsibility to be willing to occupy a secondary place under an energetic governor.[2] Indeed an unwillingness to allow the governor-general his former unlimited initiative becomes henceforth a mark of the leaders of the Reformers, and La Fontaine, who had resented Sydenham's activity as much as his anti-nationalist policy, protested against the suggestion that Charles Buller should be sent to Canada, because he "apprehended that Buller would be disposed to take an active part himself in our politics."[3] There seemed to be no obstacle in the way of a complete victory for reforming principles. The French remained as solidly as ever a unit, and under La Fontaine they were certain to continue to place their solidarity at the disposal of the Upper Canada reformers. The latter, ultras and moderates alike, were too adequately represented, in all their shades and aspects, in the cabinet, to be willing to shake its power; and {163} the sympathetic co-operation between Irishmen in Canada, and those who at that time in Ireland were beginning another great democratic agitation, made the stream of Hibernian immigration a means of reinforcing the Canadian progressives. One of the best evidences of the growth of Reform was the persistent agitation of the Civil List question. Following up their action under Bagot, the reformers demanded the concession of a completer control than they seemed then to possess over their own finances, and a more economical administration of them. The inspector-general, in a report characterized by all his admirable clearness, stated the issue thus: "It is impossible for any government to support a Civil List to which objections are raised, and with justice, by the people at large; first, on the ground that its establishment was a violation of their constitutional rights; second, that the services provided for are more than ought to be placed on the permanent Civil List; third, on the ground that the salaries provided are higher than the province can afford to pay with a due regard to the public interests, and more especially to the maintenance of the public credit."[4]

{164}

Metcalfe, then, found in Canada a ministry not far from being unanimous, supported by a union of French and British reformers; and he ought to have realized how deeply the extended view of self-government had affected the minds of all, so that only by a serious struggle could Sydenham's position of 1839 be recovered. But Metcalfe was an Anglo-Indian, trained in the school of politics most directly opposed to the democratic ways of North America. He was entirely new to Canadian conditions; and one may watch him studying them conscientiously, but making just those mistakes, which a clever examination candidate would perpetrate, were he to be asked of a sudden to turn his studies to practical account. The very robustness of his sense of duty led him naturally to the two most contentious questions in the field—those which concerned the responsibility of the colonial executive government, and the place of party in dictating to the governor-general his policy and the use to be made of his patronage.

His study of Sydenham's despatches revealed to him the contradiction between that statesman's resolute proclamation of Russell's doctrine, and the course of practical surrender which his actions seemed to have followed in 1841. "In adopting {165} the very form and practice of the Home Government, by which the principal ministers of the Crown form a Cabinet, acknowledged by the nation as the executive administration, and themselves acknowledging responsibility to Parliament, he rendered it inevitable that the council here should obtain and ascribe to themselves, in at least some degree, the character of a cabinet of ministers."[5] In a later despatch, Metcalfe attempted to demonstrate the inapplicability of such a form of government to a colony: "a system of government which, however suitable it may be in an independent state, or in a country where it is qualified by the presence of a Sovereign and a powerful aristocracy, and by many circumstances in correspondence with which it has grown up and been gradually formed, does not appear to be well adapted for a colony, or for a country in which those qualifying circumstances do not exist, and in which there has not been that gradual progress, which tends to smooth away the difficulties, otherwise sure to follow the confounding of the legislative and executive powers, and the inconsistency of the practice with the theory of the Constitution."[6]

{166}

To his mind, what Durham had advocated was infinitely sounder—"that all officers of the government except the governor and his secretary should be responsible to the united Legislature; and that the governor should carry on his government by heads of departments, in whom the United Legislature repose confidence.... The general responsibility of heads of departments, acting under the orders of the Governor, each distinctly in his own department, might exist without the destruction of the former authority of her Majesty's Government."[7] So set was he in his opposition to cabinet government on British lines in Canada, that he prophesied separation as the obvious consequence of concession. It was natural that one so distrustful of cabinet machinery in a colony should altogether fail to see the place of party. It must always be remembered that party, in Canada, had few of those sanctions of manners, tradition, and national service, which had given Burke his soundest arguments, when he wrote the apologetic of the eighteenth century Whigs. Personal and sometimes corrupt interests, petty ideas, ignoble quarrels, a flavour of pretentiousness which came from the misapplication of British terms, and a {167} lack of political good-manners—in such guise did party present itself to the British politician on his arrival in British North America. Metcalfe, from his previous experience, had come to identify party divisions with factiousness, a political evil which the efficient governor must seek to extirpate. His triumph in Jamaica had secured the death of party through the benevolent despotism of the governor, and there can be no doubt that he hoped in Canada to perform a precisely similar task. "The course which I intend to pursue with regard to all parties," he wrote to Stanley in April, 1843, "is to treat all alike, and to make no distinctions, as far as depends on my personal conduct." But since parties did exist, and were unlikely to cease to exist, the governor-general's distaste for party in theory merely forced him to become in practice the unconscious leader of the Canadian conservatives, who, under men like MacNab and the leaders of the Orange Lodges, differed only from other parties in the loudness of their loyalist professions, and the paucity of their supporters among the people. Metcalfe complained that at times the whole colony must be regarded as a party opposed to her Majesty's Government.[8] He might have {168} seen that what he deplored proceeded naturally from the identification of himself with the smallest and least representative group of party politicians in the colony.

The radical opposition between the governor and the coalition which his executive council represented led naturally to the crisis of November 26th, 1843. For months the feeling of mutual alienation had been growing. On several occasions, more notably in the appointment to the speakership of the legislative council, and in one to a vacant clerkship of the peace, the governor's use of patronage had caused offence to his ministers; and, towards the end of November, the entire Cabinet, with the exception of Daly, whose nickname "the perpetual secretary" betokened that he was either above party feeling or beneath it, handed in their resignations. The motives of their action became, as will be shown, the subject of violent controversy; but the statement of Sir Charles Metcalfe seems in itself the fairest and most probable account of what took place. "On Friday, Mr. La Fontaine and Mr. Baldwin came to the Government House, and after some irrelevant matters of business, and preliminary remarks as to the course of their proceedings, demanded of {169} the Governor-general that he should agree to make no appointment, and no offer of an appointment, without previously taking the advice of the Council; that the lists of candidates should in every instance be laid before the Council; that they should recommend any others at discretion; and that the Governor-general in deciding, after taking their advice, shall not make any appointment prejudicial to their influence."[9]

At a slightly later date the ministers attributed their resignation to a serious difference between themselves and the governor-general on the theory of responsible government. To that statement Metcalfe took serious exception, but he admitted that "in the course of the conversations which both on Friday and Saturday followed the explicit demand made by the Council regarding the patronage of the Crown, that demand being based on the construction put by some of the gentlemen on the meaning of responsible government, different opinions were elicited on the abstract theory of that still undefined question as applicable to a colony."[10] There can be no doubt that the casus belli was an absolute assertion of the right of the council to control patronage, but it is, at the same time, {170} perfectly clear that in the opinion of the ministers the disposal of patronage formed part of the system of responsible government, and that they were quite explicit to Metcalfe in their statements on that point. The incident, striking enough in itself, gave occasion for an extraordinary outburst of pamphleteering; and the reckless or incompetent statements of men on either side make it necessary to dispel one or two illusions created by the partizan excitement of the time. On the side of the council, Hincks, the inspector-general, then and afterwards contended that the incident was only an occasion and a pretext; that Stanley had sent Metcalfe out to wreck the system of responsible government, so far conceded by Sydenham and Bagot; and that the episode of 1843 was part of a deeper plot to check the growth of Canadian freedom.[11] Apart from the absurdities contained in Hincks' statement of the case, the only answer which need be made to the charge is that, if Stanley could have descended to such ignoble plotting, Metcalfe was the last man in the world to act as his dishonoured instrument. On the other side, Gibbon Wakefield believed that {171} the council chose the occasion to escape from a defeat otherwise inevitable, in the hope that a renewed agitation for responsible government might reinstate them in public favour. As Metcalfe gave the suggestion some authority by accepting it provisionally in a despatch,[12] the details of Wakefield's charge may be given. The ministry, he held, had been steadily weakening. Two bills, advocated by them, had been abandoned owing to the opposition of their followers. The French solidarity had begun to break up, and La Fontaine had found in Viger a rival in the affections of his adherents. The ministers, intoxicated by the possession of a little brief authority, had offended the sense of the House by their arrogance; and the debates concerning the change of the seat of government from Kingston to Montreal had been a cause of stumbling to many. With their authority weakened in the House, doubtful in the country, and more than doubtful with the governor-general, the resignation of the ministers, in Wakefield's view of the case, "upon a ground which was sure to obtain for them much popular sympathy, was about the most politic of their ministerial acts."[13]

{172}

But the ministry possessed and continued to possess a great parliamentary majority; and a dissolution could not in any way have improved their position. Besides this, the alienation of the councillors from the governor-general had developed far more deeply than was generally supposed; indeed it is difficult to see how common action between the opposing interests could have continued with any real benefit to the public. On May 23rd, that is six months before the resignation, Captain Higginson, the Governor's civil secretary, had an interview with La Fontaine, to ascertain his views on the appointment of a provincial aide-de-camp, and on general topics. The accuracy of Higginson's precis of the conversation was challenged by La Fontaine, but its terms seem moderate and probable, and do not misrepresent the actual position of the Executive Council in 1843—a determined opposition to the governor-general's attempt to destroy government by party: "Mr. La Fontaine said, 'Your attempts to carry on the government on principles of conciliation must fail. Responsible government has been conceded, and when we lose our majority we are prepared to retire; to strengthen us we must have the entire confidence of the Governor-general exhibited most {173} unequivocally—and also his patronage—to be bestowed exclusively on our political adherents. We feel that His Excellency has kept aloof from us. The opposition pronounce that his sentiments are with them. There must be some acts of his, some public declaration in favour of responsible government, and of confidence in the Cabinet, to convince them of their error. This has been studiously avoided.'"[14] The truth is that the ministry felt the want of confidence, which, on the governor's own confession, existed in his mind towards them. Believing, too, as all of them did more or less, in party, they must already have learned the views of Metcalfe on that subject, and they suspected him of taking counsel with the conservatives, whom Metcalfe declared to be the only true friends to Britain in Canada. Matters of patronage Metcalfe had determined, as far as possible, to free from party dictation; and so he and his ministers naturally fell out on the most obvious issue which their mutual differences could have raised. There was nothing disingenuous in the popular party claiming that the patronage question stood in this case for the broader issue. Indeed Metcalfe's own statement that "he objected to the {174} exclusive distribution of patronage with party views and maintained the principle that office ought, in every instance, to be given to the man best qualified to render efficient service to the State" was actually a challenge to the predominance of the party-cabinet system, which no constitutionalist could have allowed to pass in silence. Egerton Ryerson, to whom in this instance the maxim about the cobbler sticking to his last is applicable, erected a ridiculous defence for Metcalfe, holding that "according to British practice, the councillors ought to have resigned on what Metcalfe had done, and not on what he would not promise to do. If the Crown intended to do just as they desired the governor-general to do, still the promise ought not to be given, nor ought it to have been asked. The moment a man promises to do a thing he ceases to be as free as he was before he made the promise."[15] The actual struggle lay between two schools directly opposed in their interpretation of responsible government; and since Sir Charles Metcalfe definitely and avowedly set himself against cabinet government, the party system, and the place of party in allocating patronage, the ministers were not free to allow him to {175} appoint men at his own discretion. For the sake of a theory of government for which many of them had already sacrificed much, they were bound to defend what their opponents called the discreditable cause of party patronage.

The line of action which the members of council followed had already been sketched out by Robert Baldwin in his encounter with Sydenham. In the debate of June 18th, 1841, Baldwin had admitted that should the representative of the Crown be unwilling to accept the advice offered to him by his council, it would be impossible by any direct means to force that advice upon him. But he also held that this did not relieve the members of council for a moment from the fulfilment of an imperative duty. "If their advice," he said, "were accepted—well and good. If not, their course would be to tender their resignations."[16]

This indeed was battle a outrance between two conflicting theories of government. Russell, Sydenham, and Metcalfe, had refused to admit self-government beyond a certain limit, and Metcalfe, in accepting the situation created by the resignation of his ministers, was battling very directly for his view. On the other side, Baldwin and the {176} colonial politicians had claimed autonomy as far as it might be granted within the empire. By resigning their offices, they called on their opponents to make the alternative system work. For two years Metcalfe occupied himself with the task they set him.

It is not necessary to enter into all the details of those years. The relevant facts group themselves round three centres of interest—the painful efforts put forth by Metcalfe to build up a new council, the general election through which he sought to find a party for his ministers, and the attitude of the colony towards the new ministers, and of both toward the representative of the Crown on the eve of his departure for England in 1845.

The struggle to reconstruct the ministry was peculiarly distressing, and ended in a very qualified success. Daly, Metcalfe's one remaining councillor, carried no weight in the country. Baldwin and his group could not be approached; and Harrison, the most moderate of the reformers, had previously resigned over the question of the removal of the seat of government from Kingston. In Lower Canada, Metcalfe found himself almost as much the object of French hatred as Sydenham had been, and it was with great difficulty that he {177} secured Viger to represent the French Canadians in his council—at the expense of Viger's influence among his compatriots.[17] By the end of 1843, Metcalfe had secured the services of three men, "Viger representing the French party, and Mr. Daly and Mr. Draper representing in some degree as to each both the British and moderate Reform parties."[18] Officious supporters, of whom Egerton Ryerson was chief, did their best to introduce to the governor competent outsiders, and Draper used his reputation for moderation in the effort to secure suitable candidates. Even after the election of 1844 was over, Draper, and Caron, the Speaker in the Upper House, actually attempted an intrigue with La Fontaine; and although the episode brought little credit to any of the parties concerned, La Fontaine at least recognized how much was involved in acceptance or rejection of the proposals of government—when he said: "If under the system of accepting office at any price, there are persons, who, for a personal and momentary advantage, do not fear to break the only bond which constitutes our strength, union among ourselves, I do not wish to be, and I never will be, of the {178} number."[19] Eventually a patchwork ministry was constructed, but its pitiable weakness proved how difficult it was to create a council, except along orthodox British party lines. It was a reductio ad absurdum of the eclectic principle of cabinet building.

The reconstruction of the council involved a dissolution of Parliament. The late councillors had a steady and decisive majority in the existing Assembly; and the governor-general found it necessary to face the risk of an appeal to the country. The fate of Lower Canada he could imagine beforehand; nothing but accident could prevent the return of an overwhelming majority against his men. Even among the western British settlers an unprejudiced observer reported early in 1844 that more than nine-tenths of the western voters were supporters of the late Executive Council.[20] Montreal, which, thanks to Sydenham's manoeuvres, counted among the British seats, returned an opponent of the new Ministers at a bye-election in April, 1844, although the {179} government party explained away the defeat by stories of Irish violence. But Metcalfe's extraordinary persistence, and his belief that the battle was really one for the continuance of the British connection, gave him and his supporters renewed vigour, and, even to-day, the election of November, 1844, is remembered as one of the fiercest in the history of the colony. Politics in Canada still recognized force as one of the natural, if not quite legitimate, elements in the situation, and it was eminently characteristic of local conditions that, early in his term of office, Metcalfe should have reported that meetings had been held near Kingston at which large numbers of persons attended armed with bludgeons, and, in some cases, with firearms.[21] Montreal, with all its possibilities of conflict, and with its reputation for disorder to maintain, led the-way in election riots. In April, 1844, according to the loyalists, the reformers had won through the use of Irish labourers brought in from the Lachine canal. However that may be, the military had been called in, and at least one death had resulted from the confused rioting of the day.[22] In November, the loyalists in their turn organized {180} a counter demonstration, and the success of the loyal party was not altogether disconnected with physical force.[23] From the west came similar stories of violence and trickery. In the West Riding of Halton, the Tories were said to have delayed voting, which seemed to be setting against them, by various stratagems, including the swearing in of old grey-headed men as of 21 years of age, and among the accusations made by the defeated candidate was one that certain deputy returning officers had allowed seven women to vote for the sitting member.[24] On the whole the election went in favour of the governor-general, although Metcalfe took too favourable a view of the situation when he reported the avowed supporters of government as 46, as against 28 avowed adversaries. At best his majority could not rise above six. Yet even so, the decision of the country still seems astonishing. There was the unflinching Tory element at the centre; and the British members from Lower Canada. Ryerson had used his great influence among the Methodists, and, since the cry was one of loyalty to the Crown, many waverers {181} may have voted on patriotic grounds for the government candidates. Metcalfe's reputation, too, counted for him, for he had already become known as more than generous, and one of his successors estimated that he spent L6,000 a year in excess of his official income. "It must be admitted," he himself wrote to Stanley, "that this majority has been elected by the loyalty of the majority of the people of Upper Canada, and of those of the Eastern townships in Lower Canada."[25]

The government, and presumably also the governor-general, were accused of having secured their victory by doubtful tactics, and Elgin reported in 1847 that his Assembly, which was that of the 1844 election, had had much discredit thrown on it on the ground that the late governor-general had interfered unduly in the elections.[26] Neither side had been perfectly scrupulous in its methods of warfare, and it is not necessary to blame Metcalfe for the misguided zeal and cunning of his Ministers and his country supporters. Be that as it may, the governor-general had won a hard-fought victory—Pyrrhic as it proved.

Throughout this political warfare, Metcalfe had {182} been sustained by the strong support of the home government. The cabinet announced itself ready to give him every possible support in maintaining the authority of the Queen, and of her representative, against unreasonable and exorbitant pretensions.[27] In the debate on the troubles, which Roebuck introduced on May 30th, 1844, all the leading men on either side, Stanley, Peel, Russell, and Buller, warmly supported the governor, Russell and Buller being as strong in their reprobation of the demands of the council as Stanley himself.[28] And the chorus of approval culminated in the letters from Peel and Stanley, which announced the conferring of a peerage on Metcalfe "as a public mark of her Majesty's cordial approbation of the judgment, ability, and fidelity, with which he had discharged the important trust confided to him by her Majesty."[29] In a sense the honours and praise were not altogether out of place. Metcalfe had been sent out to conduct the administration of Canada on what we now regard as an impossible system; and unlike his immediate predecessors he had conceded not one point to the other side. In spite of all that his enemies could say, his {183} personal honour and dignity remained untarnished. The nicknames and cruel taunts flung at him, in the earlier months, apparently by his own ministers, recoil now on their heads, as the petty insults of unmannerly politicians; indeed, the accusations which they made of simplicity and honesty, simply reinforce the impression of quixotic high-mindedness, which was not the least noble feature in Metcalfe's character. His generosity had been unaffected by his difficulties; and there are few finer things in the history of British administration than the sense of duty exhibited throughout 1845 by Lord Metcalfe, when, dying of cancer in the cheek, almost blind, and altogether unable to write his despatches, he still clung to his post "to secure the preservation of this colony and the supremacy of the mother country." It is easy to separate the man from the official, and to praise the former as one of the noblest of early Victorian administrators.

But even before Lord Metcalfe's departure at the end of 1845, the inadequacy of his system stood revealed. He had indeed a majority in the Assembly, but a small and doubtful majority; and since its members had been elected rather to support Metcalfe than to co-operate with his ill-assorted {184} ministry, difficulties very soon revealed themselves. There were causes of dissension, chief among them the University question in Upper Canada, which threatened to wreck the government party. But the most ominous sign of coming defeat was the incompatibility of temper which rapidly developed between loyal ministers and loyal Assembly. "It is remarkable," Metcalfe wrote in May, 1845, "that none of the Executive Council, although all are estimable and respectable, exercise any great influence over the party which supports the government. Mr. Draper is universally admitted to be the most talented man in either House of the Legislature, and his presence in the Legislative Assembly was deemed to be so essential, that he resigned his seat in the Upper House, sacrificing his own opinions in order that he might take the lead in the Assembly; nevertheless he is not popular with the party that supports the government, nor with any other, and I do not know that, strictly speaking, he can be said to have a single follower. The same may be remarked of every other member of the Executive Council; and although I have much reason to be satisfied with them, and have no expectation of finding others who would serve her Majesty better, still I do not {185} perceive that any of them individually have brought much support to the government."[30]

That is the confession of a man who has attempted the impossible, and who is being forced reluctantly to witness his own defeat. The ministry which he had created lacked the authority which can come only from the best political talent of a people acting in sympathy with the opinions of that people. He had, with great difficulty, found a House of Assembly willing by a narrow majority to support him, but personal support is not in itself a political programme, and the fallacy of his calculations appeared when work in detail had to be accomplished. He had reprobated party, and he found in a party—narrower in practice even than that which he had displaced—the only possible foundation for his authority. He had come to Canada to complete the reconciliation of opposing races within the colony, and, when he left, the French seemed once more about to retreat into their old position of invincible hostility to all things British. The governor-generalship of Lord Metcalfe is almost the clearest illustration in the nineteenth century of the weakness of the doctrinaire in practical politics. Unfortunately, the {186} doctrine which Metcalfe had strenuously enforced was backed by the highest of imperial authorities, and sanctioned by monarchy itself. In less than ten years after the Rebellion, the renovated theory of colonial autonomy had produced a new dilemma. It remained with Metcalfe's successor to decide whether Britain preferred a second rebellion and probable separation to a radical change of system.



[1] Kaye, Life of Lord Metcalfe, revised edition, ii. p. 313.

[2] A View of Sir Charles Metcalfe's Government of Canada, by a member of the Provincial Parliament, p. 29.

[3] Baldwin Correspondence: La Fontaine to Baldwin, 26 July, 1845.

[4] Parliamentary Paper concerning the Canadian Civil List (1 April, 1844), p. 5.

[5] Metcalfe to Stanley, 5 August, 1843.

[6] Metcalfe to Stanley, 13 May, 1845.

[7] Metcalfe to Stanley, 6 August, 1843.

[8] Metcalfe to Stanley, 13 May, 1845.

[9] Kaye, Life of Lord Metcalfe, ii. pp. 367-8.

[10] Ibid. ii. p. 369.

[11] See Hincks, Lecture on the Political History of Canada; and Dent, The Last Forty Years. The latter work was written under the influence of Sir Francis Hincks, whose comments on it are contained in the inter-leaved copy in the possession of the Canadian archives.

[12] Metcalfe to Stanley, 26 December, 1843.

[13] A Letter on the Ministerial Crisis, by the old Montreal Correspondent of the Colonial Gazette, Kingston, 1843.

[14] Quoted from Ryerson, Story of my Life, pp. 332-3.

[15] Ryerson, op. cit. p. 323.

[16] See above, p. 116.

[17] Viger was defeated in the election of 1844.

[18] Kaye, Papers and Correspondence of Lord Melcalfe, p. 426.

[19] See, for the whole intrigue, Correspondence between the Hon. W. H. Draper and the Hon. B. E. Garon; and, between the Honbles. L. H. La Fontaine and A. N. Morin, Montreal, 1840.

[20] The Rev. John Ryerson to Egerton Ryerson, February, 1844, in The Story of my Life.

[21] Metcalfe to Stanley, 23 December, 1843.

[22] Montreal Gazette, 23 April, 1844.

[23] Montreal Daily Witness, 7 March, 1896, containing reminiscences by Dr. William Kingsford.

[24] Young, Early History of Galt and Dumfries, p. 193.

[25] Metcalfe to Stanley, 23 November, 1844.

[26] Elgin-Grey Correspondence: Elgin to Grey, 9 December, 1847.

[27] Stanley to Metcalfe, 18 May, 1844.

[28] Hansard, 30 May, 1844.

[29] Kaye, Life of Lord Metcalfe, ii. pp. 405-9.

[30] Metcalfe to Stanley, 13 May, 1845.



{187}

CHAPTER VI.

THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL: LORD ELGIN.

The year which intervened between Metcalfe's departure and the arrival of Lord Elgin at the beginning of 1847, may be disregarded in this inquiry. Earl Cathcart, who held office in the interval, was chosen because relations with the United States at that time were serious enough to make it desirable to combine the civil and the military headship in Canada in one person. In domestic politics the governor-general was a negligible quantity, as his successor confessed: "Lord Cathcart, not very unreasonably perhaps, has allowed everything that required thought to lie over for me."[1]

But the arrival of Elgin changed the whole aspect of affairs, and introduced the most {188} important modification that was made in Canadian government between 1791 and the year of Confederation. Since 1839, governors-general who took their instructions from Britain, and who seldom allowed the Canadian point of view to have more than an indirect influence on their administration, had introduced the most unhappy complications into politics. Both they and the home government were now reduced to the gloomiest speculations concerning the permanence of the British connection. In place of the academic or official view of colonial dependence which had hitherto dominated Canadian administration, Elgin came to substitute a policy which frankly accepted the Canadian position, and which as frankly trusted to a loyalty dependent for none of its sanctions upon external coercion or encouragement. With 1846, Great Britain entered on an era of which the predominating principle was laissez faire, and within twelve months of the concession of that principle in commerce, Elgin applied it with even more astonishing results in the region of colonial Parliamentary institutions.

The Canadian episode in Elgin's career furnishes the most perfect and permanently useful service rendered by him to the Empire. Although he {189} gathered laurels in China and India, and earned a notable place among diplomatists, nothing that he did is so representative of the whole man, so valuable, and so completely rounded and finished, as the seven years of his work in Canada. Elsewhere he accomplished tasks, which others had done, or might have done as well. But in the history of the self-governing dominions of Britain, his name is almost the first of those who assisted in creating an Empire, the secret of whose strength was to be local autonomy.

He belonged to the most distinguished group of nineteenth century politicians, for with Gladstone, Canning, Dalhousie, Herbert, and others, he served his apprenticeship under Sir Robert Peel. All of that younger generation reflected the sobriety, the love of hard fact, the sound but progressive conservatism, and the high administrative faculty of their great master. It was an epoch when changes were inevitable; but the soundest minds tended, in spite of a powerful party tradition, to view the work in front of them in a non-partizan spirit. Gladstone himself, for long, seemed fated to repeat the party-breaking record of Peel; and three great proconsuls of the group, Dalhousie, Canning, and Elgin, found in imperial administration a more {190} congenial task than Westminster could offer them. Elgin occupies a mediate position between the administrative careers of Dalhousie and Canning, and the parliamentary and constitutional labours of Gladstone. He was that strange being, a constitutionalist proconsul; and his chief work in administration lay in so altering the relation of his office to Canadian popular government, as to take from the governor-generalship much of its initiative, and to make a great surrender to popular opinion. Between his arrival in Montreal at the end of January, 1847, and the writing of his last official despatch on December 18th, 1854, he had established on sure foundations the system of democratic government in Canada.

Never was man better fitted for his work. He came, a Scotsman, to a colony one-third Scottish, and the name of Bruce was itself soporific to the opposition of a perfervid section of the reformers. His wife was the daughter of Lord Durham, whom Canadians regarded as the beginner of a new age of Canadian constitutionalism. He had been appointed by a Whig Government, and Earl Grey, the new Colonial Secretary, was already learned in liberal theory, both in politics and economics, and understood that Britons, abroad as at home, {191} must have liberty to misgovern themselves. Elgin's personal qualities were precisely those best fitted to control a self-governing community. Not only was he saved from extreme views by his caution and sense of humour, but he had, to an extraordinary degree, the power of seeing both sides, and more especially the other side, of any question. In Canada too, as later in China and India, he exhibited qualities of humanity which some might term quixotic;[2] and, as will be illustrated very fully below, his gifts of tact and bonhomie made him a singularly persuasive force in international affairs, and secured for Britain at least one clear diplomatic victory over America.

Following on a succession of short-lived and troubled governorships, under which, while the principle of government had remained constant, nothing else had done so, Elgin had practically to begin Durham's work afresh, and build without much regard for the foundations laid since 1841. The alternatives before him were a grant of really responsible government, or a rebellion, with annexation to the United States as its probable end. The {192} new Governor saw very clearly the dangers of his predecessor's policy. "The distinction," he wrote at a later date, "between Lord Metcalfe's policy and mine is twofold. In the first place he profoundly distrusted the whole Liberal party in the province—that great party which, excepting at extraordinary conjunctures, has always carried with it the mass of the constituencies. He believed its designs to be revolutionary, just as the Tory party in England believed those of the Whigs and Reformers to be in 1832. And, secondly, he imagined that when circumstances forced the party upon him, he could check these revolutionary tendencies by manifesting his distrust of them, more especially in the matter of the distribution of patronage, thereby relieving them in a great measure from that responsibility, which is in all free countries the most effectual security against the abuse of power, and tempting them to endeavour to combine the role of popular tribunes with the prestige of ministers of the crown."[3]

The danger of a crisis was the greater because, as has been shown, Metcalfe's anti-democratic policy had been more than the expression of a personal {193} mood. It was the policy of the British government. After Metcalfe's departure, and Stanley's resignation of the Colonial office, Gladstone, then for a few months Colonial Secretary, assured Cathcart that "the favour of his Sovereign and the acknowledgment of his country, have marked (Metcalfe's) administration as one which, under the peculiar circumstances of the task he had to perform, may justly be regarded as a model for his successors."[4] In truth, the British Colonial office was not only wrong in its working theory, but ignorant of the boiling tumult of Canadian opinion in those days; ignorant of the steadily increasing vehemence of the demand for true home rule, and of the possibility that French nationalism, Irish nationalism, and American aggression, might unite in a great upheaval, and the political tragedy find its consummation in another Declaration of Independence.

But Elgin was allowed little leisure for general reflections; the concrete details of the actual situation absorbed all his energies. Since Metcalfe's resignation, matters had not improved. There was still an uncertain majority in the House of Assembly, although, in the eyes of probably a {194} majority of voters, the disorders of the late election had discredited the whole Assembly. But the ministry had gone on from weakness to further weakness. Draper, who did his best to preserve the political decencies, had been forced to ask Cathcart to assist him in removing certain of his colleagues. Viger had been a complete failure as President of the Council, and performed none of the duties of his department except that of signing his name to reports prepared by others. Daly was of little use to him; and, as for the solicitor-general for Upper Canada, Sherwood, "his repeated absence on important divisions, his lukewarm support, and occasional (almost) opposition, his habit of speaking of the Members of your Excellency's Government and of the policy pursued by them, his more than suspected intrigues to effect the removal of some members of the council, have altogether destroyed all confidence in him."[5] Draper himself had seemingly grown tired of the dust and heat of the struggle, and, soon after Elgin's assumption of authority, resigned his premiership for a legal position as honourable and more peaceful.

{195}

Elgin, then, found a distracted ministry, a doubtful Assembly, and an irritated country. His ministers he thought lacking in pluck, and far too willing to appeal to selfish and sordid motives in possible supporters.[6] He was irritated by what seemed to him the petty and inconsistent divisions of Canadian party life: "In a community like this, where there is little, if anything, of public principle to divide men, political parties will shape themselves under the influence of circumstances, and of a great variety of affections and antipathies, national, sectarian, and personal.... It is not even pretended that the divisions of party represent corresponding divisions of sentiment on questions which occupy the public mind, such as voluntaryism, Free Trade, etc., etc. Responsible Government is the one subject on which this coincidence is alleged to exist."[7] The French problem he found peculiarly difficult. Metcalfe's policy had had results disconcerting to the British authorities. Banishing, as he thought, sectarianism or racial views, he had yet practically shut out French statesmen from office so successfully, that, when Elgin, acting through Colonel Tache, {196} attempted to approach them, he found in none of them any disposition to enter into alliance with the existing ministry.[8] Elgin, who was willing enough to give fair play to every political section, could not but see the obvious fault of French Canadian nationalism. "They seem incapable of comprehending that the principles of constitutional government must be applied against them, as well as for them," he wrote to Grey. "Whenever there appears to be a chance of things taking this turn they revive the ancient cry of nationality, and insist on their right to have a share in the administration, not because the party with which they have chosen to connect themselves is in the ascendant, but because they represent a people of distinct origin."[9] Most serious of all, because it hampered his initiative, he found every party except that in office suspicious of the governor's authority, and newspapers like Hincks' Pilot grumbling over Imperial interference.

One sweeping remedy, he had, within a few months of his arrival, laid aside as impossible. Lord John Russell and Grey had discussed with {197} him the possibility of raising Canadian politics out of their pettiness by a federal union of all the British North American colonies. But as early as May 1847, Elgin had come to doubt whether the free and independent legislatures of the colonies would be willing to delegate any of their authority to please a British ministry.[10] It was necessary then to fall back on the unromantic alternative of modifying the constitution of the ministry; and here French solidarity had made his task difficult. Yet the amazing thing in Elgin was the speed, the ease, and the accuracy, with which he saw what none of his predecessors had seen—the need to concede, and the harmlessness of conceding, responsible government in Baldwin's sense of the term. Within two months of his accession to power, he declared, "I am determined to do nothing which will put it out of my power to act with the opposite party, if it is forced upon me by the representatives of the people."[11] Two months later, sick of the struggles by which his ministers were trying to gain here and there some trivial vote to keep them in office, he recurred to the same idea as not merely harmless but sound. That ministers {198} and opposition should occasionally change places struck him not merely as constitutional, but as the most conservative convention in the constitution; and in answer to the older school to whom a change of ministers at the dictation of a majority in the Assembly meant the degradation of the governor-generalship, he hoped "to establish a moral influence in the province, which will go far to compensate for the loss of power consequent on the surrender of patronage to an executive responsible to the local parliament."[12]

To give his ministers a last fair chance of holding on to office, he dissolved parliament at the end of 1847, recognizing that, in the event of a victory, their credit would be immensely increased. The struggle of December 1847, to January 1848, was decisive. While the French constituencies maintained their former position, even in Upper Canada the discredited ministry found few supporters. The only element in the situation which disturbed Elgin was the news that Papineau, the arch-rebel of 1837, had come back to public life with a flourish of agitating declarations; and that the French people had not condemned with sufficient decisiveness his seditious utterances. Yet he need have {199} had no qualms. La Revue Canadienne in reviewing the situation certainly refused to condemn Papineau's extravagances, but its conclusion took the ground from under the agitator's feet, for it declared that "cette moderation de nos chefs politiques a puissamment contribue a placer notre parti dans la position avantageuse qu'il occupe maintenant."[13] Now Papineau was incapable of political moderation.

The fate of the ministry was quickly settled. Their candidate for the speakership of the Lower House was defeated by 54 votes to 19; a vote of no confidence was carried by 54 to 20; on March 23rd parliament was prorogued and a new administration, the first truly popular ministry in the history of Canada, accepted office, and the country, satisfied at last, was promised "various measures for developing the resources of the province, and promoting the social well-being of its inhabitants."[14]

The change was the more decisive because it was made with the approval of the Whig government in England. "I can have no doubt," Grey wrote to Elgin on February 22nd, "that you must accept {200} such a council as the newly elected parliament will support, and that however unwise as relates to the real interests of Canada their measures may be, they must be acquiesced in, until it shall pretty clearly appear that public opinion will support a resistance to them. There is no middle course between this line of policy, and that which involves in the last resort an appeal to parliament to overrule the wishes of the Canadians, and this I agree with Gladstone and Stanley in thinking impracticable."[15] The only precaution he bade Elgin take was to register his dissent carefully in cases of disagreement. Having conceded the essential, it mattered little that Grey could not quite rid himself of doubts as to the consequences of his previous daring. The concession had come most opportunely, for Elgin, who feared greatly the disturbing influences of European revolutionism, Irish discontent, and American democracy in its cruder forms, believed that, had the change not taken place, "we should by this hour (November 30th, 1848) either have been ignominiously expelled from Canada, or our relations with the United States would have been in a most precarious condition."

{201}

It is not necessary to follow Elgin through all the details of more than seven busy years. It will suffice to watch him at work on the three great allied problems which combined to form the constitutional question in Canada; the character of the government to be conceded to, and worked along with, the colonists; the recognition to be given to French nationalist feeling; and the nature of the connection between Britain and Canada which would exist after concessions had been made on these points. The significance of his policy is the greater, because the example of Canada was certain, mutatis mutandis, to be followed by the other greater colonies. Elgin's solution of the question of responsible government was so natural and easy that the reader of his despatches forgets how completely his task had baffled all his predecessors, and that several generations of colonial secretaries had refused to admit what in his hands seemed a self-evident truth. At the outset Elgin's own mind had not been free from serious doubt. He had come to Canada with a traditional suspicion of the French Canadians and the progressives of Upper Canada; yet within a year, since the country so willed it, he had accepted a cabinet, composed entirely of these two sections. On his {202} way to the formation of that cabinet he not only brushed aside old suspicions, but he refused to surrender to the seductions of the eclectic principle, which allowed his predecessors to evade the force of popular opinion by selecting representatives of all shades of that opinion. He saw the danger of allowing responsible government to remain a party cry, and he removed "that most delicate and debatable subject" from party politics by conceding the whole position. The defects of the Canadian party system never found a severer critic than Elgin, but he saw that by party Canada would be ruled, and he could not, as Metcalfe had done, deceive himself into thinking he had abolished it by governing in accordance with the least popular party in the state. With the candour and the discriminating judgment which so distinguished all his doings in Canada, he admitted that, notwithstanding the high ground Lord Metcalfe had taken against party patronage, the ministers favoured by that governor-general had "used patronage for party purposes with quite as little scruple as his first council."[16]

Since the first general election had proved beyond a doubt that Canadians desired a {203} progressive ministry, he made the change with perfect success, and remained a consistent guide and friend to his new ministers.

There was something dramatic in the contrast between the possibilities of trouble in the year when the concession was made, and the peace which actually ensued. It was the year of revolution, and the men whom he called to his assistance were "persons denounced very lately by the Secretary of State to the Governor-General as impracticable and disloyal";[17] but before the year was out he was able to boast that when so many thrones were tottering and the allegiance of so many people was waxing faint, there is less political disaffection in Canada than there ever had been before. From 1848 until the year of his recall, he remained in complete accord with his liberal administration, and never was constitutional monarch more intimately and usefully connected with his ministers than was Elgin, first with Baldwin and La Fontaine, and then with Hincks and Morin.

Elgin gave a rarer example of what fidelity to colonial constitutionalism meant. In these years of liberal success, "Old Toryism" faced a new strain, and faced it badly. The party had {204} supported the empire, when that empire meant their supremacy. They had befriended the representative of the Crown, when they had all the places and profits. When the British connection took a liberal colour, when the governor-general acted constitutionally towards the undoubtedly progressive tone of popular opinion, some of the tories became annexationists. Many of them, as will be shown later, encouraged a dastardly assault on the person of their official head; and all of them, supported by gentlemen of Her Majesty's army, treated the representative of the Crown with the most obvious discourtesy.[18] Nevertheless, when opinion changed, and when a coalition attacked and unseated the Progressive ministry of 1848-1854, Elgin, without a moment's hesitation, turned to the men who had insulted him. "To the great astonishment of the public, as well as to his own," wrote Laurence Oliphant, who was then on Elgin's staff, "Sir Allan MacNab, who had been one of his bitterest opponents ever since the Montreal events, was sent for to form a ministry—Lord Elgin by this act satisfactorily disproving the charges of {205} having either personal or political partialities in the selection of his ministers."[19]

But the first great constitutional governor-general of Canada had to interpret constitutionalism as something more than mere obedience to public dictation with regard to his councillors. He had to educate these councillors, and the public, into the niceties of British constitutional manners; and he had to create a new vocation for the governor-general, and to exchange dictation for rational influence. He had to teach his ministers moderation in their measures, and, indirectly, to show the opposition how to avoid crude and extreme methods in their fight for office. When his high political courage, in consenting to a bill very obnoxious to the opposition, forced them into violence, he kept his temper and his head, and the opposition leaders learned, not from punishment, but from quiet contempt, to express dissent in modes other than those of arson and sticks and stones. For seven years, by methods so restrained as to be hardly perceptible even in his private letters to Grey, he guided the first experimental cabinets into smooth water, and when he resigned, he left behind him politicians {206} trained by his efforts to govern Canada according to British usage.

At the same time his influence on the British Cabinet was as quiet and certain. He was still responsible to the British Crown and Cabinet, and a weaker man would have forgotten the problems which the new Canadian constitutionalism was bound to create at the centre of authority. Two instances will illustrate the point, and Elgin's clear perception of his duty. They are both taken from the episode of the Rebellion Losses Bill, and the Montreal riots of 1849. The Bill which caused the trouble had been introduced to complete a scheme of compensation for all those who had suffered loss in the late Rebellion, whether French or English, and had been passed by majorities in both houses; but while there seemed no valid reason for disallowing it, Elgin suspected trouble—indeed, at first, he viewed the measure with personal disapproval.[20] He might have refused permission to bring in the bill; but the practical consequences of such a refusal were too serious to {207} be accepted. "Only imagine," he wrote, "how difficult it would have been to discover a justification for my conduct, if at a moment when America was boiling over with bandits and desperadoes, and when the leaders of every faction in the Union, with the view of securing the Irish vote for the presidential election, were vying with each other in abuse of England, and subscribing funds for the Irish Republican Union, I had brought on such a crisis in Canada by refusing to allow my administration to bring in a bill to carry out the recommendation of Lord Metcalfe's commissioners."[21] He might have dissolved Parliament, but, as he rightly pointed out, "it would be rather a strong measure to have recourse to dissolution because a Parliament, elected one year ago under the auspices of the present opposition, passed by a majority of more than two to one a measure introduced by the Government." There remained only the possibility of reserving the bill for approval or rejection at home. A weaker man would have taken this easy and fatal way of evading responsibility; but Elgin rose to the height of his vocation, when he explained his reason for acting on his own {208} initiative. "I should only throw upon her Majesty's Government, or (as it would appear to the popular eye here) on Her Majesty herself, a responsibility which rests, and ought I think to rest, on my own shoulders."[22] He gave his assent to the bill, suffered personal violence at the hands of the Montreal crowd and the opposition, but, since he stood firm, he triumphed, and saved both the dignity of the Crown and the friendship of the French for his government.

The other instance of his skill in combining Canadian autonomy with British supremacy is less important, but, in a way, more extraordinary in its subtlety. As a servant of the Crown, he had to furnish despatches, which were liable to be published as parliamentary papers, and so to be perused by Canadian politicians. Elgin had therefore to reckon with two publics—the British Parliament, which desired information, and the Canadian Parliament, which desired to maintain its dignity and freedom. Before the Montreal outrage, and when it was extremely desirable to leave matters as vague as possible, Elgin simply refrained from giving details to the Colonial Office. "I could not have made my official communication to {209} you in reference to this Bill, which you could have laid before Parliament, without stating or implying an irrevocable decision on this point. To this circumstance you must ascribe the fact that you have not heard from me officially."[23] With even greater shrewdness, at a later date, he made Grey expunge, in his book on Colonial Policy, details of the outrage which followed the passing of the Act; for, said he, "I am strongly of opinion that nothing but evil can result from the publication, at this period, of a detailed and circumstantial statement of the disgraceful proceedings which took place after the Bill passed.... The surest way to arrest a process of conversion is to dwell on the errors of the past, and to place in a broad light the contrast between present sentiments and those of an earlier date."[24] In constitutional affairs manners make, not merely the statesman, but the possibility of government; and Elgin's highest quality as a constitutionalist was, not so much his understanding of the machinery of government, as his knowledge of the constitutional temper, and the need within it of humanity and common-sense.

{210}

Great as was Elgin's achievement in rectifying Canadian constitutional practice, his solution of the nationalist difficulty in Lower Canada was possibly a greater triumph of statesmanship; for the present modus vivendi, which still shows no signs of breaking down, dates from the years of Elgin's governorship. The decade which included his rule in Canada was pre-eminently the epoch of nationalism. Italy, Germany, and Hungary, with Mazzini as their prophet, were all struggling for the acknowledgment of their national claims, and within the British Islands themselves, the Irish nationalists furnished, in Davis and the writers to The Nation, disciples and apostles of the new gospel. It is always dangerous to trace European influences across the Atlantic; but there is little doubt that as the French rebellion of 1837 owed something to Europe, so the arch-rebel Papineau's paper, L'Avenir, echoed in an empty blustering fashion, the cries of the nationalist revolution of 1848.[25]

Elgin found on his arrival that British administration had thrown every element in French-Canadian politics into headlong opposition to itself. How dangerous the situation was, one may infer from {211} the disquieting rumours of the ambitions of the American Union, and from the passions and memories of injustice which floods of unkempt and wretched Irish immigrants were bringing with them to their new homes in America. In Elgin's second year of office, 1848, he had to face the possibility of a rising under the old leaders of 1837. His solution of the difficulty proceeded pari passu with his constitutional work. In the latter he had seen that he must remove the disquieting subject of "responsible government" from the party programme of the progressives, and the politic surrender of 1847 had gained his end. Towards French nationalism he acted in the same spirit. As has already been seen, he was conscious of the political shortcomings of the French. Yet there was nothing penal in his attitude towards them, and he saw, with a clearness to which Durham never attained, how idle all talk of anglicizing French Canada must be. "I for one," he said, "am deeply convinced of the impolicy of all such attempts to denationalize the French. Generally speaking, they produce the opposite effect from that intended, causing the flame of national prejudice and animosity to burn more fiercely."[26]