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Ebook has 624 lines and 114902 words, and 13 pages

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BANEFUL DOMINATION 13

MORE BANEFUL DOMINATION 44

THE CANADAS AT WESTMINSTER 63

A CALL TO UMBRELLAS 91

LE GRAND BRULE 132

GALLOWS HILL 161

AUTOCRATS ALL 202

HURON'S AGE HEROIC 272

DEBORAHS OF '37 308

HUMOURS OF '37.

Baneful Domination.

The mills of the gods in their slow grind have reversed the conditions of the contestants; the Norman conquest of England becomes a British conquest of New France. The descendants of the twenty thousand barbarians who landed at Hastings have but come to claim their own.

Life is "moving music." The third movement in this historic sonata comes back to the original subject, even if the return to the tonic opens in a minor mode.

"Gentlemen, I commend to your keeping the honour of France," says the dying Montcalm.

"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 f?te 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.

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 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.

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.

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:

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 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.

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."

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.

Lord Gosford had found his task more difficult than he expected. His predecessor, Sir James Kempt, had done his best and failed, through no fault of his own but because there was a determination in the majority of his subjects not to be satisfied. Lord Gosford tried the effect of a proclamation as an antidote for revolutions. But the habitants tore it to shreds, crying, "A bas le proclamation! Vive Papineau, vive la libert?, point de despotisme," and made their enthusiasm sacred by holding their meetings at parish church doors. Papineau was omnipotent; one would imagine ubiquitous, for he seems everywhere. He made the tour of the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, while his supporters, Girouard and Lafontaine, took the southern, making the excited people still more discontented. In after years, as a refugee in Paris, Papineau disclaimed any practical treason at this time: "None of us had prepared, desired, or foreseen armed resistance." Yet the pikes were further sharpened, and the firelocks looked to; and at St. Thomas alone sixty men on horseback, carrying flags and maple boughs, preceded him, and following him were several pieces of artillery and the remainder of the two thousand people who formed his procession. Bishop Lartigue, a relative of Papineau, warned his people to beware of revolt, declaring himself impelled by no external influence, only actuated by motives of conscience. Addressing one hundred and forty priests, he used unmistakable terms as to how they were to resist rebellion in the people; no Roman Catholic was permitted to transgress the laws of the land, nor to set himself up against lawful authority. He even speaks of "the Government under which we have the happiness to live," while his relative was contending that the yoke on the necks of the Canadians was made in a fashion then obsolete--the Stuart pattern. But he spoke too late; his people were beyond his control, and they in turn condemned clerical interference in politics, and the cur? in charge at the combustible Two Mountains had his barns burned in answer to his exhortation. On the first Monday of every month these sons of Liberty, organized by Storrow Brown, met--"Son projet r?uissoit ? merveille, chaque jours le corps augmentoit en nombre et d?j? de pareilles soci?t?s se formaient dans la campagne."

But even such evidences of ignorance as did arrive by despatches and otherwise did not warrant, in the minds of many Liberals, the overthrow of a monarchy. They made allowance for good disposition in the abstract, and spoke of "want of knowledge and characteristic apathy." The influence of these men cannot now be overestimated. They were then looked upon with suspicion by either side, for they recognized that gigantic obstacles and class exclusions were to be met; a recognition which lessened the credit of their heartfelt "Je suis loyal." On the other hand, a good many French Canadians were made to join the rebel side by intimidation.

If the assurance of "Je suis loyal" did not come quickly enough some inoffensive Frenchman would find himself popped into the guardhouse, and the results of jealousy and over-zeal have left us many absurd stories. A county M.P., at the Ch?teau one sultry evening, seeing the rest all busy at ice-cream, asked for some. The Canadian Solon took a huge spoonful, his first taste of such a delicacy. With a feeling of rage at what he thought an insult, or at least neglect, he cried out what is translated into, "You abominable rascal, had this been for an Englishman you would have taken the chill off."

Although Murray said the ignorance of the French-Canadian and his devotion to his priest ran together, and that the veneration was in proportion to the ignorance, he has to say also that, with the exception of nineteen Protestant families and a few half-pay officers, most of the British population were traders, followers of the army, men of mean education. All had their fortunes to make: "I fear few are solicitous about the means when the end can be obtained.... The most immoral collection of men I ever knew, of course little calculated to make the new subjects enamoured with our laws, religion and customs, and far less adapted to enforce these laws which are to govern."

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