Part 2

“Now, God be praised, I die in peace!” and Wolfe expires.

The fiercest of the conflict ever rages round a bit of bunting on the end of a stick. The lilies of France come down; up goes the Union Jack to usher in the birthday of the Greater Britain, and Horace Walpole says, “We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is, for fear of missing one.”

Voltaire gives a fête at Fernay to celebrate the deliverance from fifteen hundred leagues of frozen country; the Pompadour tells her Louis that now he may sleep in peace; and outsiders ask of Pitt that which a celebrated novelist, a century later, asks of his hero--“What will he do with it?” “The more a man is versed in business,” said the experienced Pitt, “the more he finds the hand of Providence everywhere.”

But Providence would need to have broad shoulders if generals, kings and statesmen are to place all their doings there.

* * * * *

By 1837 Canada was no longer a giant in its cradle. Colonial boyhood had arrived; a most obstreperous and well-nigh unmanageable youth, with many of the usual mistakes of alternate harshness and indulgence from the parent. For it was not all wisdom that came from Downing Street, either in despatches or in the gubernatorial flesh. It is easy now to see that much emanating therefrom came from those whose vision was confined to the limits of a small island.

The great lubberly youth was given to measuring himself from time to time; for Canadian epochs are much like the marks made by ambitious children on the door jamb, marks to show increase in height and a nearer approach to the stature of the parent.

Canadians’ privileges, like children’s, existed only during the good pleasure of those who governed them. Some meant well and did foolishly; others were “somewhat whimsical, fond of military pomp, accustomed to address deputations, parliamentary or others, as if they had been so many recruits liable to the quickening influence of the cat-o’-nine-tails.” One peer in the House of Lords, during a debate on the vexed Canadian question, demurred at the members of Colonial Assemblies being treated like froward children, forever tied to the Executive leading-strings. Canada was, in fact, bound to the Mother Country by bonds of red tape and nothing else. “Who made you?” catechized Great Britain. In the words of Mr. Henry Labouchere’s precocious young catechumen: “Let bygones be bygones; I intend to make myself,” replied the colony.

The problem of assimilation created by the influx of all nations, and the fact of two divisions, a conquering and a conquered, with languages, customs and creeds as diverse as the peoples, made up an enigma the solution of which still occupies French and English wits alike.

The English and the French temperaments, each the antipodes of the other, called for mutual patience and forbearance. But historic truth compels many admissions: first, that British rule with British freedom left out made a dark period from the Conquest to the Rebellion; second, that the national, religious and intellectual ideas of the French-Canadians, their whole mental attitude, were dominated by the Quebec Act; and the motto given them by Etienne Parent, “Nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois,” had become a kind of fetich. They looked upon themselves as the agents of their mother country and the Church in the New World; and they argued did they give up these laws, institutions and language, and become Anglicized, their nationality would be forever lost.

The toast among officers en route to the Conquest had been, “British colours on every fort, port and garrison in America.” For many years after the British flag had first waved on the citadel the habitant on the plain lifted his eyes to where he had seen the lilies of France, and with heavy heart said to himself that which has become an historic saying, “Still we shall see the old folks back again”--words as pathetic in their hope as the Highlanders’ despairing “We return no more, no more.”

It is doubtful if at this period the old folks bothered themselves much about their late colony. Like their own proverb, “In love there is always one who kisses and one who holds the cheek,” French Canada was expending a good deal of sentiment upon people who had forgotten that tucked away in a remote corner of the new world was “a relic preserved in ice,” a relic of France before the Revolution, its capital the farthermost point of manner and civilization, a town with an Indian sounding name, which yet bore upon its front the impress of nobility. For Quebec is and should be the central point of interest for all Canadians; the history of the old rock city for many a day was in effect the history of Canada. History speaks from every stone in its ruined walls--walls that have sustained five sieges.

The Revolution did not create the same excited interest in Canada that might have been looked for, yet there were those who “wept bitterly” when they heard of the execution of the King. The patois, ignorance, superstition, devotion of its inhabitants, were identical with a time prior to the Revolution; and with them were the same social ideas and the same piety.

But the power divided in France among king, nobles, and priest, in Canada was confined to priest alone; and when the dream of a republic was dreamt it was the priest and not the British soldier who made the awakening. The British soldier and those who sent him seem to have been not a whit better informed about the colony gained than France was about the colony lost. Some London journalists were not sure whether Canada formed part of the Cape of Good Hope or of the Argentine Republic. For a long time the English Government annually sent a flagpole for the citadel, probably grown in a Canadian forest. Nor did time improve their knowledge, for as late as the Trent affair one statesman in the House of Commons informed his more ignorant brethren that Canada was separated from the United States by the Straits of Panama.

The acts of Regicide France inspired horror in Canada, yet were not without their fruits. Despite his title of the “Corsican ogre” and their horror of revolution, the submission of all Europe to Napoleon did not make the French of Canadian birth more submissive. Nor did the nation of shop-keepers, whom he despised and who were to cut his ambition and send him to his island prison, become more plausible, courteous or conciliatory, through their sense of victory. Many a thing, had the positions been reversed, which would have been passed unnoticed by a phlegmatic Briton, was to the Gallican a national insult.

And LeMoine, that past grand master of the Franco-Anglo-Canadian complexion, says all too truthfully that conciliation was not a vice-regal virtue; and one of the singers of the day, a Briton of the Britons, confirms the opinion:

“So triumph to the Tories and woe to the Whigs, And to all other foes of the nation; Let us be through thick and thin caring nothing for the prigs Who prate about conciliation.”

But, under its fossil simplicity, Quebec, the “relic preserved in ice,” untrue to its formation, burned with a fearsome heat and glow in the years ’37-’38, and those prior to them. The thoughtless words of such birds of passage as commandants and governors were not calculated to put out the fire. The very origin of the name Jean Baptiste, applied generically, arose from a Jean Baptiste answering to every second name or so of a roll called in 1812, when he turned out in force to defend the British flag. Getting tired of the monotony of them, said the officer in his cheerful English way: “D---- them, they are all Jean Baptistes.” And so the name stuck. General Murray, outraged at any gold and scarlet apart from his own soldiers, lost all patience at the sight of French officers in the streets of Quebec. “One cannot tell the conquering from the conquered when one sees these ---- Frenchmen walking about with their uniforms and their swords.”[1]

But the French-Canadians did not struggle against individuals except as they represented a system considered vicious. With the British Constitution Jean Baptiste was a veritable Oliver Twist. He was not satisfied with the morsels doled out, but ever asked for more.

True, there were many--at any rate, some--of the higher class French whose horizon was not bounded by petty feelings regarding race and religion. These men accepted British rule as one of the fortunes of war and enjoyed its benefits. An old seigneur, when dying, counselled his grandson, “Serve your English sovereign with as much zeal and devotion and loyalty as I have served the French monarch, and receive my last blessing.” And that king in whose reign insurrection was on the eve of breaking--irreverently called “Hooked-Nose Old Glorious Billy”--strangely enough had great sympathy with French-Canadian feeling, a sympathy which did much to hearten the minority who counselled abiding by the fortunes of war. But “Old Glorious” was also called the “People’s Friend,” and the Quebecers had lively and pleasant memories of him.

In the nine years preceding the fateful one of ’37 there had been eight colonial ministers, the policy of each differing from that of his predecessor, and all of them with at best but an elementary knowledge of colonial affairs and the complexities arising from dual language, despite the object-lesson daily under their eyes in the Channel Islands. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Each Colonial Secretary had that little, and it proved the proverbial pistol which no one knew was loaded. By them Canadians were spoken of as “aliens to our nation and constitution,” and it was not thought possible that Lower Canada, any more than Hindostan or the Cape, could ever become other than foreign. It was popular and fashionable in some quarters to underrate the historic recollections which were bound up in religion and language; and as for Canadian independence, that was an orchid not yet in vogue. By 1837 he who sat in state in the Château St. Louis (says LeMoine) in the name of majesty had very decided views on that subject. H. M. William IV.’s Attorney-General, Charles Ogden, by virtue of his office “the King’s own Devil,” who was an uncompromising foe to all evil-doers, held it to mean a hempen collar.

The question of British or French rule grew steadily for a half century, until Melbourne’s cabinet and Sir John Colborne made effort to settle it in one way and forever. “Les sacres Anglais” was, in consequence, the name applied to the followers of the latter; and as to the former, probably the illiterate habitant, who could not read the papers but who had an instinct wherewith to reach conclusions, had his own patois rendering of an English colonial’s opinion that the politicians comprising the cabinet might “talk summat less and do summat more.” All classes, indeed, of all sections, were not backward in giving opinion as to the quality of ministerial despatches; for a titled lady, writing from a far-off land where she did much work for the Home Government, dipped her pen in good strong ink and wrote, “My Lord, if your diplomatic despatches are as obscure as the one which lies before me, it is no wonder that England should cease to have that proud preponderance in her foreign relations which she once could boast of.”

A humorous naturalist had said that the three blessings conferred upon England by the Hanoverian succession were the suppression of popery, the national debt, and the importation of the brown or Hanoverian rat.

Strange to say, one of the complexities of the Canadian situation was the position taken by that very popery which in England was still looked upon with distrust and suspicion. In 1794, not a decade’s remove from when the streets of London ran alike with rum and Catholic blood, through Protestant intolerance and the efforts of a mad nobleman, Bishop Plessis had thanked God in his Canadian Catholic Cathedral that the colony was English and free from the horrors enacted in the French colonies of the day. “Thank your stars,” cried another from the pulpit, “that you live here under the British flag.”

“The Revolution, so deplorable in itself,” wrote Bishop Hubert of Quebec, “ensures at this moment three great advantages to Canada: that of sheltering illustrious exiles; that of procuring for it new colonists; and that of an increase of its orthodox clergy.” “The French emigrants have experienced most consolingly the nature of British generosity. Those of them who shall come to Canada are not likely to expect that great pecuniary aid will be extended; but the two provinces offer them resources on all sides.”

Many of the French officers whom the fear of the guillotine sent over in numbers to England found their way to that country which the Catholic Canadian priesthood so appreciated. Uncleared land and these fragments of French noblesse came together in this unforeseen way. But there was another view of their position when Burke referred to them as having “taken refuge in the frozen regions and under the despotism of Britain.” Truly has Britain shouldered many sins, made while you wait in the factory of rhetoric; nor is it less true that glorious sunny Canada has suffered equally unjustly as a lesser Siberia from a long line of writers, beginning with Voltaire, ending--let us hope--with Kipling.

The French Revolution over, and a mimic one threatening in the colony, the clergy did not hesitate to remind one another of the fate of their orders in France, to congratulate themselves they were under a different régime, nor fail to remember that the War Fund to sustain British action against the Republicans of France in 1799 had been subscribed to heavily by many of their brethren and themselves. _Le Seminaire_ stands in that list, in the midst of many historic names, against the sum of fifty pounds “per annum during the war.” One point of great difference between new and old was that the habitants, who were more enlightened and more religious than their brother peasants left behind in France, had, with the noblesse, a common calamity in any prospect which threatened subjugation. The variance ’twixt priest and people could only end in one way where the people were devout; and the Lower Canadian has ever been devout and true to Mother Church. But the “patriot,” who was more apt in diatribe against Tories than in prayers, spared not the priests in their historical leanings. “Who was the first Tory?” cries a patriot from his palpitating pages. “The first Tory was Cain, and the last will be the State-paid priest.”

But if the British Government had in some things acted so kindly and justly to those of French extraction as to merit such words, in other matters there had been much of harshness increased by ignorance and indifference, and the time had come when all had to suffer for such inconsistencies, and, unfortunately, those most severely who already were the victims of them.

“C’est la force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans le monde.” Said one of their own writers, “la force en attendant le droit.” In both Canadas “la force” was local supremacy. The painful development as to when it should be superseded proved “le droit” and British supremacy identical.

It was a political struggle prolonged beyond endurance, more than a real wish to shake free from Britain; a political struggle, where the combatants were often greedy and abusive partisans who appealed to the vilest passions of the populace and who were unscrupulous in choosing their instruments of attack. Capital was made out of sentiment most likely to appeal to the suffering:

“Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow ----”

and Papineau, by speech, manifesto and admission, looked toward the seat of vice-royalty and made plain the homely sentiment, “Ote toi de là que moi je m’y mette.” He did not agree with the humble habitant saying, “C’est le bon Dieu qui nous envoya ça, il faut l’endurer.” His opinion leaned more to that of O’Connell, who said the French were the only rightful inhabitants of the country. How much baneful domination had it taken to so change the Papineau of 1820, when on the occasion of the death of George III. he says, “... a great national calamity--the decease of that beloved sovereign who had reigned over the inhabitants of this country since the day they became British subjects; it is impossible not to express the feeling of gratitude for the many benefits received from him, and those of sorrow for his loss so deeply felt in _this_, as in every other portion of his extensive dominions. And how could it be otherwise, when each year of his long reign has been marked by new favours bestowed upon the country?... Suffice it then at a glance to compare our present happy situation with that of our fathers on the eve of the day when George III. became their legitimate monarch ... from that day the reign of the law succeeded to that of violence.... All these advantages have become our birthright, and shall, I hope, be the lasting inheritance of our posterity. To secure them let us only act as British subjects and freemen.”

About ’31 the Lower Canadian Assembly received a lot of new blood; and very hot, adventurous and zealous blood it was. Young men like Bleury, Lafontaine, and their confreres, were not backward in naming what they considered their rights; and they had somewhat unlimited ideas. The most ardent of the group centred round Papineau and excited him still further. They scouted Lord Goderich (Robinson) and his concessions so long as his countrymen formed a majority in their government. This was a “demarcation insultante” between victor and vanquished. Lord Dalhousie, “glowing with scarlet and gold,” and followed by a numerous staff, had brought a session to a close in a peremptory manner, with words which might have furnished a cue to himself and others. “Many years of continued discussion ... have proved unavailing to clear up and set at rest a dispute which moderation and reason might have speedily terminated.”

To the Loyalist Papineau was the root of all evil. A French loyal ditty attributed every calamity of the era to him, cholera morbus, earthquakes and potato-rot included, each stanza finishing with the refrain, “C’est la faute de Papineau.” “It is certain,” said the latter, “that before long the whole of America will be republicanized.... In the days of the Stuarts those who maintained that the monarchic principle was paramount in Britain lost their heads on the scaffold.” This, surely, was the proverbial word to the wise.

Naturally, such sentiments made him receive cool treatment in Downing Street, even when his Ninety-Two Resolutions embodied much truth and called for affirmative answers. Nothing but the most absolute democratic rule would satisfy the irreconcilables. Their act in the House had led to Lord Aylmer being forced to advance the supplies from the Military Chest, and to embody his disapproval in a resolution of censure. They in turn voted his censures should be expunged from the journals of the House. Then Papineau, from the Speaker’s chair, inveighed against the Mother Country. After the presentation of the Resolutions, Lord Aylmer, alluding to them, imprudently said that dissatisfaction was mostly confined to within the walls of the Assembly rooms, that outside of them the country was at peace and contented. The men who framed them lost no time in giving him a practical denial. Resolutions from many parishes approved of the acts of the Assembly, and the newspaper columns teemed with accounts of popular demonstrations. Lord Aylmer, however, supposed himself within his rights. After his recall, at his interview with the King, and supported by Palmerston and Minto on either side, the monarch declared he entirely approved of Aylmer’s official conduct, that he had acted like a true and loyal subject towards a set of traitors and conspirators, and as became a British officer under the circumstances.

Lord Glenelg sent to the rescue that commission of enquiry, the prelude to the later Durham one, whereof Lord Gosford was chief. This nobleman, who became governor of the province, was Irish, and a Protestant, an opponent of Orangeism, a man of liberal opinions and decisive in speech and action. He tried every means to make friends in the French quarter; visited schools and colleges, enchanted all by his charming politeness of manner, gave a grand ball on the festival day of a favourite saint, and by his marked attentions at it to Madame Bedard showed at once his taste and his ability to play a part. He made a long address to the Chambers, breathing naught but patriotism and justice; so some still had hope. “To the Canadians, both of French and British origin, I would say, consider the blessings you might enjoy but for your dissensions. Offsprings as you are of the two foremost nations of the earth, you hold a vast and beautiful country, having a fertile soil with a healthful climate, whilst the noblest river in the world makes sea-ports of your most remote towns.” He replied to the Assembly first in French, then in English. There is a possibility of doing too much, and the _Montreal Gazette_ censured this little bit of courteous precedence so far as to deny the right of a governor to speak publicly in any language but his own, and construed this innovation by the amiable Earl into one that would lead to the Mother-Country’s degradation. Then what of the Channel Islands, where loyalty was and is above suspicion; where the Legislature declared that members had not the right to use English in debate, and “that only in the event of Jersey having to choose between giving up the French language, or the protection of England, would they consent to accept the first alternative.”

Matters progressed till rulers were burned in effigy, and bands of armed men, prowling about the most disaffected parts, confirmed M. Lafontaine’s saying, “Every one in the colony is malcontent.” “We have demanded reforms,” said he, “and not obtained them. It is time to be up and doing.” “We are despised!” cried M. Morin, “oppression is in store for us, and even annihilation.... But this state of things need endure no longer than while we are unable to redress it.”

“It is a second conquest that is wanted in that colony,” said Mr. Willmot in the House of Commons, when he heard the Canadian news _via_ the _Montreal Gazette_.

So Lord Gosford asked for his recall, got it, stepped into a canoe after a progress through streets lined with guards of honour composed of regular and irregular troops, amid “some perfunctory cheering,” and was paddled to his ship, the band of the 66th playing “Rule Britannia.” She might rule the waves, but many of those who listened were more than ever determined that she should not rule Canadians.

The Gosford report was vehemently protested against by Lord Brougham and Mr. Roebuck, who did not mince matters, but predicted the rebellion and outlined a probable war with the neighbouring republic.

But Lord John Russell, like Sir Francis Bond Head, did not anticipate a rebellion.