THE CANADIAN Y*/ NALITY LES J. BINMORE • "■ • 11 ■ ',' « I ■"»V ,' l!7i LONDON: HAMILTON, ADAMS & CO. 32, Paternoster Row CANADA: W. DRYSDALE & CO., Montreal Price Sixpence i\ 1888 '%.. ?5li) / The present Paper is submitted to the public of Great Britain as a short, impartial account of the origin, development, and tendency of the Canadian national feeling. The soundness of the writer's conclusions may be disputed ; but the truth of his state- ments cannot be denied. •• • •', THE CANADIAN NATIONALITY. In the life of the nation as of the individual, there come events which stand thenceforward as boundary points of history, marking the end of a stage of existence and the beginning of a new era. Such a turning-point in the history of Canada was the passage of the Act of Confederation which raised the country to the rank of a nation, and called into existence the Canadian nationality. It is not too much to say that, previous to that event, Canadian patriotism, among the English-speaking people of the provinces at least, was absolutely non-existent. Their interest in the land in which they lived was rather a domestic than a patriotic attachment, the love of each man for his own home, rather than the united devotion of the community to the country of their birth or adoption. The very name of Canadian was confined, by common consent, to the descendants of the original French settlers, between whom and their British com- patriots there stood the triple barrier of difference in race, religion, and language. The English immigrants were in the country but not of it, and remembering, as was quite natural, only the good of the land they had left, they loved England with a fervour which, perhaps, they had never felt at home. The vast treasures of history and art, the high culture, the accumulated wealth, the well-ordered life of a long-settled community, the fair fields of the dear " old country," even the villified English climate, all furnished points of comparison to the disadvantage of Canada. The Union Jack above their heads and the scarlet uniform brightening their streets, gave the outward and visible sign of their part and lot with their brethren at home, and the foreign and domestic policy of the British Government, the course of legislation and the fortunes of the ministry of the day were followed with the same attention, and criticised from the same standpoint, in Montreal and Toronto as in London or Manchester. The Englishman in Canada was, of necess""v. sur- rounded by circumstances and conditions of life differing widely 53441 from those which he had obtained at home, but the idea that these changed or affected his nationality was the last thing he would have imagined. He felt himself not the less, but the more, English for his separation from the land of England, and he transmitted to his children the distinctive marks of his nationality, accentuated and intensified by a certain refinement of the senti- ment. To them, as to him, Canada's dignity and importance rested upon the fact that she is a part of the British Empire, and in them also, the most salient national characteristic was a devotion to the mother-country which has been well described as passionate, and a jealous maintenance of their right and part in her life. Without the voter's power to influence her policy, without the tax-payer's sense of ownership in the state, they yet gloried in the prestige and greatness of England as a personal possession, and claimed an equal share in her history and an equal sonship in her historic soil. Cornish cliff and Sussex down, the lanes of Devonshire and the fields of Kent, were as familiar to them as to their fathers, but transfigured by the en- chantment of distance, and glorified by all the associations of a thousand years of national life. The famous places of English history were at once classic and sacred ground : the latest home in Canada rested its foundations upon the soil of Runnymede and the ashes of Smith field, and the heart of the people turned towards Westminster Abbey as did the hearts of the Crusaders towards the Holy Sepulchre. The loyalty of the Colonies was an ever-present fact, and was proved by more substantial tokens than the quick outburst of applause which always greeted the slightest public reference to the greatness of the Empire or the name of its thrice-beloved Queen. Twenty-five years ago this feeling was universal, to-day, though still widespread and deep-rooted, though still forming the heart- wood of the Canadian nationality, it has been overlaid by the sapwood of a later growth. It goes without saying that a senti- ment so romantic and enthusiastic was unintelligible alike to the official obtuseness of Downing Street and the commercial sharp- ness of Cheapside. To this day the ground of the Canadian attachment to England is almost universally misunderstood in the mother-country, and no Canadian who has crossed the Atlantic can have failed to be half amused, half irritated, at the manner in which his \/ords are interpreted to express a feudal attachment to a superior race acting through the Colonial Office, and personi- fied in the cockney consequence of the average 'Arry. The Manchester school of politicians regarded the Colonies simply as appendages to the kingdom, possessing doubtful commercial value and entailing certain political risk, and again and again they hinted so unmistakably at their willingness to release Canada from her allegiance to the Crown, as to justify the in- dignant protest of the poet-laureate on behalf of " that loyal North." A greater knowledge of the Imperial dignity and a higher sense of Imperial duty now prevail in England, but mean- time this policy of the cold shoulder has had the desired efifect of turning the direction of Canadian national growth away from England. Those Canadians, indeed, who were older than con- federated Canada, who felt themselves Englishmen above all things, bitterly resented this policy as a denial of their rights. They held their birthright, with all that it included, as the gift of God and not of the British Government, and refused to recognize the right of any Parliament to deprive them of their nationality. But the rising generation of Canada, conscious that between themselves and their fellow-subjects in England there existed certain dissimilarities following upon differences of climate, social conditions and habits of life, conscious that the very fact of their residence in a different part of the Empire produced differences in interests, commercial and political, and constantly reminded by the British Government and the British Press that these differences were regarded as more than provincial, naturally gave Canada that pre-eminent place which their elder brethren had been accustomed to consider as belonging to the mother-country and the British Empire at large. The authority of the British Government over the people of Canada has been so diminished as not consciously to touch the people at all, and the sole distinctive and visible signs of Imperial co-citizenship are the lingering traits of mind and body which mark a common origin, an occasional instance of that attachment to the soil of England which was once the universal rule, and a widespread and enthusiastic loyalty to the person of the sove- reign. The boyhood of the Canadian people, with its dreams, its hero-worship, and its acceptance of a dependent relationship, is a thing of the past ; and the nation has reached its majority and is conscious of its individual life and separate interests. Not that it has yet formulated its plans and fixed the lines of its future, the clear purpose and decisive action of ripe manhood as yet are not, and the aim of the Canadian nationality can only be expressed in a vague resolve that somehow it will be something. What that something will be, or how it will be attained, the future alone can determine ; this only seems certain, that the dream of a great northern empire can never be realized, and that Canada will never stand among the nations as a separate independent power. The element of cohesion, the very soul of a nationality, is conspicuously wanting, and the Act of Confederation which united the provinces has utterly failed to unify the people. The Canadian national feeling whose growth I have attempted to trace is confined to one division only of the population, and even there it is neither wholly Canadian nor distinctly national. The elder generation is still rather British than Canadian, and the younger is still very young. The differences between them are rather negative than positive, a less passionate attachment to the mother-country, a less vehement antipathy to the United States. And in sharp contrast to both, there exists in Canada a nationality which bears all the distinctive marks of national difference, difference in race, religion, language and purpose, attached to the Dominion but not assimilating with it, clinging to its separate existence, and maintaining its separate place with greater and greater tenacity, and cherishing the firm resolve to build up on the banks of the St. Lawrence a new power which shall not be Pan-Canadian. The French-Canadian people, after more than a century of English rule, are still almost as untouched by British influence as on the day when the British flag was first hoisted over the Citadel of Quebec, and the utter failure of the Anglo- Saxon race in Canada to absorb the foreign element is rendered more striking by contrast with the widely different results obtained by the same race in the United States. The act of capitulation which transferred the possession of Canada from France to Great Britain, guaranteed a continuance of the French regime. The language and laws of France, the French seigniorial system of land tenure, the position of the Church of Rome as the state church, with rights of tax and tithe, were all recognized as the fundamental conditions of life in the new possession, r.nd the changes which have since been made have, so far, served only to increase the difference between the descendants of the French settlers and the English immigrants. The result of Confederation, by giving to each province a necessarily larger measure of local independence, has been rather to strengthen than to weaken the barriers between them; and, in the case of the Province of Quebec, it has put into the hands of the French- Canadian majority a con- trolling power over the English-speaking minority, which the 1 latter sharply resent as something closely approaching foreign rule. The complete estrangement between the two peoples can be fully appreciated only by one living on the battle-ground of the races, where it is strikingly shown by the adoption of a policy of mutual exclusiveness and isolation. Political and com- mercial intercourse of course exists within certain limits, but social life is sharply bounded by the national lines, and the rare occasions upon which the two peoples meet and mingle without some compelling cause are felt thereby to assume an international character. Peace is preserved only by recognizing the impossi- bility of unity, and by the establishment of a system of separate institutions, which begins at the door of the public school and does not end at the gate of the cemetery. The dual life of the peoples of old Canada moves onward like the waters of their two great rivers, meeting but not mingling, flowing indeed, in the same channel, but each maintaining its own place, and making the line of contact the limit of intercourse. The evils which follow may easily be imagined. The principle of separation can- not be universally applied, and in municipal and provincial affairs the violently opposing ideas and interests of French and English are constantly brought into violent collision. Notre langue, notre religion, nos lois, avant tout soyons. " Canadiens, soyons unis," are the continually recurring rallying words of the French-Canadian people, and anything which appears to dispute the maintenance or extension of their peculiar institutions, or to contest the supreme will of the united race is attacked with the most intense energy. Their defence of the leader of the North-West rebellion brought out in a significant manner the fact of the solidity of the nationality. An apostate from their church, the inciter of that unspeakable horror, an Indian war, a self-made alien from the country of his birth, and, therefore, with only a foreigner's interest in its affairs, a mercenary traitor to his misguided followers, for the second time a rebel, not against any unfriendly provincial authority, but against the Federal Government of the Dominion, his was a case where apparently there was neither reason for race difference nor room for its display. Yet, in the eyes of the French-Canadians, his half-share of French-Canadian blood covered all his offences and absolved him from all his sins, and no sooner was he brought to trial than the entire nation rose as one man in his defence. With true Gallic inconsistency and with the most strenuous energy, they maintained that he was both a lunatic and 8 a patriot, totally irresponsible for his acts and entirely justified in their performance, and the tempest of fury which followed his execution shook the incoherent Confederation to its foundations and startled men into a recollection of the fate foretold of a house divided against itself. The presence of an alien element in the population offers nearly as difficult a problem in Canada as it does in the United Kingdom, and the growth and extension of the French-Canadian power, in the Province of Quebec especially, are viewed by the English-speaking residents with mingled feel- ings of perplexity and alarm. The Act of Confederation, as I have already stated, gave a large measure of independence to the Provincial authorities, and the French-Canadians within their own province now possess all the power which a democratic form of government places in the hands of a large majority. How firm and close a front that majority offers for all purposes of offence and defence, every British-Canadian knows, and the continuance and extension of their power are guaranteed by the increasing preponderance which is given by their increasing numbers. A lower standard of comfort and an enormously high birth-rate gave them a decisive advantage in the struggle which ends in the survival of the cheapest, and from every part of the Province, not already distinctly French, there comes the complaint that the French are driving the English from the country. And with increasing power there comes the increasing determination to bend the conditions of civil life to the level of French-Canadian ideas, and to fix the limits of religious toleration within the lines laid down by the Church of Rome. And the French-Canadian national feeling runs the more deep and strong for its being confined in the narrowest of channels. Upon all Imperial affairs, at home or abroad, the French-Canadians look with the eyes of Gallio. The army of England may be a hollow sham and her navy a broken reed, the Russians may be thundering at the gates of India, and the Irish triumphant on College Green, but the French-Canadians, supremely indifferent to the tie of Imperial co-citizenship, strive only to make their province more completely their own and to maintain a controlling power in the councils of the Dominion. There, indeed, the French-Canadian ascendency meets, for the first time, a substantial check for the people of the great English- speaking Province of Ontario ; the backbone of the whole Dominion are nothing if not anti-French. The dislike and suspicion with which the French-Canadians regard their English compatriots are heartily returned by the people of Ontario, with the galling addition of a loudly-expressed contempt. The resistance offered by the English of Quebec to the exten- sion of French-Canadian influence in municipal and provincial affairs is often justifiable, and the consequent attitude of custo- mary opposition is at least intelligible ; but the people of Ontario, without this excuse, assume a position of lofty disdain, and unhesitatingly attribute to the difference of nationality the higher prosperity which they owe chiefly to the superiority of their soil and climate, and to their greater command of external capital and labour. And it is a significant fact, as throwing some light upon the future, that, in stepping away from French Canada, Ontario has also stepped nearer to the United States. The relations between Canada and the Great Republic have con- stantly exercised a determining influence upon the growth and direction of the Canadian nationality; but before Confederation that influence served to repel rather than to attract, and the same feeling which made Canada intensely English made her also intensely un-American. The depth and extent of the rancorous hostility cherished by the United States against England have never yet been either fully understood or half reciprocated by the mother-country, and the efforts of the British people to bridge the gap made by the Declaration of Independence have usually had the effect of making it wider. The truth is, that the root of bitterness is rather of a social than of a political nature ; the Americans, rightly or wrongly, believe to this day that the British nation, being eminently aristocratic in its temperament, looks down upon a people who have made vulgarity a national characteristic. A sense of national self-respect would have enabled the Americans to surmount this prejudice, supposing it to exist, but unfortunately the distinction between self-respect and self-esteem seems to be imperfectly appreciated by the citizens of the Great Republic, and in a hundred heedless ways the British nation has shaken the card-palace of American dignity. The very existence of Canada as a British possession is regarded resentfully by the disciples of President Monroe, and the American idea of the Canadian position is summed up in the gracious dictum, " It's a one-horse country -'nyhow, and we can take it any day we've a mind to." The Gregorian resemblance between the Anglican and the angelic natures has never been more than skin-deep, and the effect of the American idea, expressed in every attitude of their 10 Government, and uttered in every word of their Press, was to rouse in every Canadian breast a feeling of resentment, of re- sistance, of bitter hate. The American hatred of England, in the existence of which England refused to believe, was visited upon Canada in constant scoff and sneer, in flagrant misrepre- sentation of the facts of history, in every form of petty malignity, and in the direct encouragement of the enemies of the Empire, which finally culminated in the Fenian invasions of Canadian soil. And side by side with the exhibition of their enmity there came the still more insulting offer of their friendship in the form of the proposal, urged again and again upon the Canadian people, to forswear their allegiance to their Queen and country, and place their territory under the American flag. How unanimously this offer has been rejected may be judged from the fact that, so far as I know, no journal in Canada has ever dared to advocate annexation, and the proposal that the Canadians should forsake their flag has been as abhorrent to them as a suggestion that they should abandon their religion. To many of them, indeed, their nationality is a part of their religion ; for whatever may be the faults and shortcomings of the National Church of England, this fact stands eternally to her credit, that she unites in one house- hold of faith the sons of England at home and abroad, and welds into one all-conquering passion the love of God, of home, and of country. Yet however unfriendly the international relations may have been or may still be, the result has proved the truth of Solo- mon's proverb, " Better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off." The fact of their proximity, the absence of any natural boundary line between the two countries, their possession with ourselves of a common descent, a common language and a common literature, the preponderance given by their outnumbering us twelve to one, and, above all, the close, intimate ties of trade founded upon a natural and geographical basis, these give the United States an influence upon the grow- ing Canadian nationality which it is impossible to ignore. The direction of the growth of a free community is determined by social laws to which, in the end, existing political conditions must yield ; and other things being equal, the tie of trade is closer than that of blood, and the neighbour that is near is better, because a more frequent and natural customer than the brother that is far off. The dependence of Canada upon her trade with her southern, indeed her only neighbour, is a fact li which a glnnce at the returns of the Custom House will establish beyond question ; and as an instance of what might be expected if the natural laws of trade were unhampered by artificial restrictions, it may be stated that during the first year of comparative free trade under the Reciprocity Treaty, the value of the exports of Canada to the United States rose five- fold. Twice in the history of Canada an attempt has been made to provide a substitute for the American market from which Canada has been partly shut out by a high protective tariff. It was one of the objects of Confederation to promote inter-provincial trade by the union of the provinces and the abolition of customs duties between them. Only a slight mea- sure of success has followed the attempt, because Canada has only that diversity of production which arises from difference of soil and situation, not that which arises from variety of climate, and the natural lines of trade run north and south rather than east and west. A second attempt was made in 1879 by the adoption of the so-called National Policy of Protection, under which it was hoped that Canada would become a manu- facturing country, and thus be enabled to offer that variety of occupation without which she could neither expect to attract British immigration nor to retain the Canadian-born population. Previous to that time the occupations of the people had been almost exclusively either agricultural or commercial, and the natural increase of capital had flowed in far too great a degree into the latter channel. The profits of agriculture, in the older provinces at least, have never been such as to attract urban capital, and it has rarely happened that all the sons of a farmer have had either the means or the wish to follow their father's occupation. The consequence was a rapid increase in the number of traders, the very class which, as non-producers, it is a sin against political economy to encourage, and, as a natural result of ignorant competition and of the extreme subdivision of an inelastic volume of business, a widespread and chronic bank- ruptcy ensued. The evil was aggravated and extended by the operation of an insolvent law ingeniously so misconstructed as to secure the survival of the unfittest, and the trade period which ended in the spring of 1879 was perhaps the most disastrous which has ever been known in Canada. The times were rife for the introduction of the fiscal innova- tion which the Conservatives offered the country under the alluring title of the National Policy. The popular dissatisfaction 13 would have welcomed any change which promised commercial improvement, and the growing Canadian feeling was flattered by the cry of " Canada First," and by the hope held out that Canada would become a great manufacturing country, able to offer work and wages to men of every occupation, rounding the national industrial life into something like completeness, and rising to a higher and more independent place among the nations than she could occupy simply as a minister to their industries and a furnisher of the raw produce of the field, the forest and the mine. The control of the home market, at least, could be secured by the imposition of a high customs tariff, under the protection of which considerable manufacturing industries were established or extended, with the half hope that in time an export trade in manufactured goods might follow. Few schemes have ever com- pletely answered the expectations of their promoters, and the National Policy is not an exception to the rule. The limit of the Canadian demand even for staple manufactured goods, was soon reached, and it was found much easier to invest capital in a special industry than to obtain a dividend from the investment. The chief difficulty arose from the keen competition between rival manufacturing companies for a limited domestic trade, which had the effect of reducing, or even annihilating, all chance of profit, and of forcing the companies into highly unpopular combinations for mutual protection. One permanent result, however, has been to encourage the investment of so much capital as to produce a powerful manufacturing interest, which must be reckoned as a factor in any movement towards new politico-commercial relations. That the present position of Canada is transitory only, and that a turning-point in her history will soon be reached, few, I think, will deny. The natural law of national growth is drawing her daily farther from England towards a separate, independent life, and the natural law of gravitation is drawing her nearer to union with the United States. Without the overshadowing influence of the Great Republic, the parting of the attenuated tie which binds Canada to the mother- country might be indefinitely deferred, and Canada might almost insensibly grow into an independent nation, to be instantly rent asunder by a civil war between the two races, but the pressure of that dominant power upon the whole long line of her southern frontier renders the question of Canadian independence only that of a possible temporary name. The temper displayed by the American people during the early part of the present fishery ^3 dispute, their refusal to discuss the Canadian view of the case, or the treaty agreement upon which the action of the Canadian Government was based, the hot haste with which the sweeping Retaliation Bill was thrust through Congress, these leave no room for doubt as to what the action of the American Govern- ment would have been had not the rights of the Dominion been supported by the strength of the Empire. Occupying a territory which nearly conforms to the mathematical definition of a line, length without breadth, and outnumbered by the Americans in the ratio of twelve to one, no armed resistance could be offered by the Canadians to any American demand, and few men who have been born into the British birthright would willingly surrender a nationality derived from the grace of God and main- tained by the might of the Empire for one held by the temporary toleration of the United States. Whatever may have been the intended issue of the British North America Act, the phenomenal progress made by the Americans since the close of their civil war, combined with their unconcealed ambition to make their country co-extensive with the continent, has rendered the independence of Canada a prac- tical impossibility. The other alternative, annexation to the United States, is still so repugnant to the Canadian ind, that the term '* annexationist " is universally regarded as one of damning reproach. The word " annexation " has not been happily chosen to express the idea of the transformation of the provinces of Canada into states of the American Union. It sug- gests the idea, not of an equal alliance with states' rights of local self-government, but of a forcible subjugation, of the subjection of the weaker to the will of the stronger party, against which the British nature rises in resistance ; and it is a curious fact, as indi- cating, inter alia, the value of names, that while the suggestion of annexation is indignantly repelled, the self-same idea is now receiving a favourable hearing and a strong support throughout Canada under the plausible title of *' commercial union." The importance of the American trade has been already mentioned, and since the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty repeated, but uniformly unsuccessful, attempts have been made by the Govern- ment of Canada to secure some form of reciprocal free trade with the United States. The chief advantages of such an arrangement would naturally fall to the weaker party ; for, with the partial exception of lumber, all the exports of Canada to the United States are simply those products which are furnished also 14 by the Northern States of the Union, and the quantity supplied by five millions of producers to sixty millions of consumers would not materially affect the price at the point of consumption, and the saving effected by the abolition of the ^ustoms duties between the two peoples would consequently go into the pocket of the Canadian exporter. But hitherto, such proposals have not in- cluded the concession of any trade privilege to the United States which would not be granted equally to other foreign countries, and to the United Kingdom ; and the fact that the scheme of commercial union does discriminate in favour of the United States fgainst all the rest of the world, is significant of the changed feelings witl: which England is now regarded by a part, at least, of the Canadian people. The plan of commercial union has hardly yet taken shape, but in outline it provides for the abolition of all customs duties between Canada and the United States, the assimilation of the customs tariffs of the two countries, upon imports from other parts of the world, and the establishment of some form of zoU- verein for the distribution of the money so raised. It is admitted that the new tariff would be much nearer to thp.t of the United States than to that of Canada, and the effect would be to make Canada discriminate doubly against England, by increasing the duties on imports from the United Kingdom, and at the same time totally abolishing them on imports from the United States. Fifteen years ago, such a plan would not have been seriously discussed for a moment, and its proposal at this time shows how completely Canada has outgrown her present relation to the mother-country. The sentiment of Canadian attachment to England is still sufficiently strong to exact from the advocates of commercial union the tribute of hypocrisy for the statement made by them that the adoption of their plan would not destroy British connection, can only be regarded as at once a sop to Canadian sensibilities and a slur upon Canadian intelligence. The maxim " Trade follows the flag " may with equal truth be read " The flag follows trade," and it can hardly be supposed either that England would continue to grant her protection to a country which should thus discriminate against her interests, or that commercial alliance would not soon be followed by political union. Indeed the position of Canada, with so large a part of her domestic policy determined for her by a foreign country, would •certainly become so intolerably dependent, as to produce the de- sire for annexation as the least disgraceful form of submission. 15 The question of commercial union has not yet been either opposed or approved by the Dominion Government, although there is some probability of its being made a part of the Liberal programme at the next general election, in opposition to the Con- servative National Policy, but the movement has the strength of a natural force which may be diverted, but which cannot long be withstood. The childhood and the apprenticeship of Canada are over and <^one, and like a youth who has attained his majority, and is conscious of his individual manhood, the nation is im- pelled by the law of growth, either to leave the parental house- hold or to seek an administrative share in the parental affairs. The departure of Canada from under the British flag would be an event of the most far-reaching significance. It would form a precedent which the other self-governing colonies could not fail to follow, and would mark the beginning of the end of the colonial empire. Whatever may be the value of the colonies in pounds and pence, few Englishmen, I think, would contemplate with indiffer- ence the loss of Greater Britain, or would welcome the day which should end the rule of "the English beyond the sea." And the danger is neither imaginary nor remote. History is made quickly in this age of rapid thought and action, and the Empire which was won by strong arms cannot be held with folded hands. The establishment of a closer mutual relation- ship, the granting to the colonies of a voice in the Imperial Government, the nationalizing, in the widest sense of the word, of the army and navy, the discrimination in favour of inter-Imperial as against foreign trade, the emphatic assertion in every possible way of the supreme fact of Imperial co-citizenship, are absolutely necessary if the integrity of the Empire is to be maintained. The task is difficult ; in the case of Canada especially, it involves the overruling of the facts of geography ; but the spirit which has conquered and created may well be able to consolidate, and the Power which rules India, and holds in check the Russian march* to the Mediterranean, does not now for the first time stand face to face with an apparent geographical impossibility. What might be the power of the unified Empire, and what the glory of that " latter house," can only faintly be foreseen. The root of Eng- land's greatness is not in her material possessions of land and sea, not in the long muster-roll of the nations who close around her flag, not in her flof^ir. and r.rmies^j her' cities, her .trade, or her wealth, but in the f;>.iih tp. ^a|;^ pn ^ WOP*? * t i