[home university library f II mil 1 11 ii m II iBiiiiBii Will i III! iiiiiiiiwiBiHW f ill Mdi iiiii — i m niiimiiim iiiiiiwi— fUSaKOUKdH x^wviBriXmwii'uniWwa Class /=/Od2 linnlc ^J^ 6^ present!:d 1!Y HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE No. 34 Editors: HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, LiTT.D., LL.D., F.B.A. Prof, J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. Prof, WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODER:^ KIN^OWLEDGE i6mo cloth, 50 cents net, by mail 56 cents HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY Already Published THE DAWN OF HISTORY . . . By J. L. Myres ROME By W. Warde Fowleb THE PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES By William Barry MEDIEVAL EUROPE By H. W. C. Davis THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . By Hilaire Belloc, THE IRISH NATIONALITY . . By Mrs. J. R. Greem CANADA By A. G. Bradley THE CIVIL WAR By Frederic L. Paxson HISTORY OF OUR TIME (i885- 191 1) ByC. P. GoocH POLAR EXPLORATION (with maps) By W. S. Bruce THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA By Sir H. H. Johnstox THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA By H. A. Giles A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE ByG. H. Perris MODERN GEOGRAPHY By Marion Newbigik Future Issues A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE By Herbert Fisher ANCIENT GREECE By Gilbert Murray THE REFORMATION By Principal Lindsay A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA By Prof. Milyoukov PEOPLES AND PROBLEMS OF INDIA By Sir T. W. Holderness FRANCE OF TO-DAY By Gabriel Monod THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES . By Patrick Geddes ANCIENT EGYPT By F. L. Griffith THE COLONIAL PERIOD ... By Charles M. Andrews FROM JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN By William MacDonald RECONSTRUCTION AND UNION (1865-1912) By Paul L. Ha worth LATIN AMERICA By W. R. Shepherd CANADA BY A. G. BRADLEY AUTHOR OF "THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA*' ** CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY " " THE MAKING OF CANADA," ETC. NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE mm OCT 3 lei* ^ ^_ ^ ^ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGB I Geographical . . . • • 7 II The Conquest of Canada ... 34 III Founding of British Canada by American Loyalists 66 rV Through Revolution to Federation . 97 V Fed:eration 120 VI The French in Canada .... 132 VII The Maritime Provinces . , . 160 VIII The Praieie Provinces and the Rise of the North-West .... 190 IX British Columbia . . . . . 213 X The Dominion of To-day . , . 228 Bibliography . . • • . 251 Index 253 CANADA CHAPTER I GEOGRAPHICAL Geography plays such an influential part in the past story and the present condition of that long string of British North American provinces which, stretching right across North America, now comprise the Dominion of Canada, that some preliminary indication of its character seems indispensable here. The shape of the Dominion is, in short, unique among countries — among those at least which count for much in our modern civilization. It has affected its history in the past so vitally and influences all its political, commercial, and social considerations so strongly to-day, that a general idea of its physical characteristics seems vital to a proper understanding of its past and present conditions. Inhabited Australia is a fringe round or partly round an island Continent, with an uninhabitable heart of drought and heat. 7 8 CANADA Inhabited Canada, on the contrary, is a thin belt across a continent, confronting every- where a northern wilderness where winter cold, not torrid drought, is the enemy. If you regard the mere surface of the map this is not so apparent ; you will see a straight line, with curves only at one or two points, running from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a distance of nearly three thousand miles, signifying the boundary between Canada and the United States. To the northward of this there appears upon the map of British North America an illimitable country fading away into the Arctic regions. But the point lo be noted is that nearly the whole population of present-day Canada clusters along that south- ern boundary line within a belt of country from one to two hundred miles in width. There are sections of this line or base too rugged for serious occupation now or ever, either upon or to the north of it. There are some containing an old and well-established civilization not nearly a hundred miles wide, with no prospect of extending itself north- ward from natural obstacles. Lastly, there are other very considerable sections of this long line that have no limit to their north- ward expansion but a vaguely conjectured one, not yet proven, where a no longer endurable winter or a too short summer will call an absolute halt. Of the seven million GEOGRAPHICAL 9 souls or more now residing in the Dominion, six million and a half are probably living within a hundred and fifty miles of that three thousand mile long boundary line, and this is what makes the Dominion unlike any other country in the world. Over the eastern half, speaking approximately, the spread of popula- tion to the northward of this narrow belt will not be sufficient within measurable time, if ever, to alter seriously the present conditions. For the wilderness is generally rough and sterile, and the climate of necessity increasingly severe. On most of the western half, the first conditions do not exist, and the belt is gradually expanding northward, and will continue to do so till the severity of climate alone makes further advance impossible. Leaving population and its possibilities, however, for the present, and regarding only the physical surface of the Dominion, the reader may usefully picture it as divided into three grand and distinct sections proceed- ing from east to west. First, comes the region of unbroken primaeval forest, out of which the axe has hacked every acre which is inhabited. This extends from the Atlantic to beyond Lake Superior, the most westerly of the great lakes, or in other words, about half-way across the continent. Upon this eastern half, and in a strip along the bottom of it, about three-quarters of the population of Canada 10 CANADA at present reside, a proportion which will steadily decrease in relation to the whole. Next, moving westward, comes the open prairie country, which rolls away for nearly eight hundred miles to the foot of the stupen- dous barrier of the Rocky Mountains. Lastly is that third section which consists of the great ranges and still mainly mountain- ous stretches down to the Pacific, and may be defined with sufficient accuracy as British Columbia. The greatest in area of these three — the eastern section — is represented by the old provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, little Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Ontario, together with the virtually un- peopled and but partially explored wilds of Labrador and the Hudson's Bay, which, as seats of future population, may be dismissed from the mind. Nearly the whole of this vast surface is undulating or broken, though seldom rising to the height of actual moun- tains. The Laurentian Range in the province of Quebec, however, reaches the altitude of from three to four thousand feet, while the Appalachian Chain that runs up through all the Atlantic provinces of the United States culminates in New Brunswick in heights of rather less distinction. The southern and more accessible portions of these provinces have now this Ions: time been converted into GEOGRAPHICAL 11 flourishing and populous regions. But by far I the greater portion of the surface of the eastern half of the Dominion, some fifteen hundred miles long, is still wild woodland or scrub, which for the most part covers a rugged, rocky surface, threaded by waterways and crowded with lakes. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, particularly the former — being limited in area — have a smaller proportion of wilderness, and this, for geographical reasons, is not a great northern hinterland like the other, but merely the rejected rugged or inferior portions of provinces whose civiliza- tion is scattered around and through them on the desirable lands. Quebec and Ontario, as displayed upon a map painted to indicate physical conditions, would exhibit a vast shaggy wilderness with a narrow fringe of prosperous civilization strung along its southern boundary, save at the eastern and western extremities, which are in the grip — like most of the interior — of a rugged and inhospitable wilderness. The expansion of this narrow belt, which contains all the civilization and nearly all the settled population of Quebec and Ontario, can never be sufficient to alter appreciably this general bird's-eye view of the country sketched on a broad canvas, and avoiding all those reservations which only tend to confusion and do not much matter. The 12 CANADA inducements to extending serious settlement northward in the face of difficulties are conspicuously wanting, above all, in a country whose surplus people can migrate west with such ease and still remain in Canada. Over this immense hinterland from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to beyond the head of Lake Superior, stretching northward to the Hudson's Bay, and north of the Hudson's Bay into space, are sprinkled thousands of clear lakes of every size and innumerable clear rivers and streams running over rocky beds. Every- where is forest or scrub, pine of different varieties preponderating, save where forest fires have left miles of bare charred poles. Where there is sufficient soil the woods are thick ; where the rocks are on the surface, the trees are poor and straggling. Wherever lakes, streams, and woods are in combination there must be beauties. But the monotony over hundreds of miles, added to a certain air of hardness and desolation, makes a type of scenery that cannot be realised by anyone used only to European standards and variety. The wild scenery of Canada is, in detail, very often beautiful. But its qualities are very similar all the way from Nova Scotia to Winn peg, and the great and extraordinary change en to the prairies. It is at its best where the woods frinofincr its countless lakes and waterways are of hardwood, such as GEOGRAPHICAL 13 beech, maple, elm, and the like. The old settled parts of the country are generally- pleasing as rural landscape, but there, again, character tends to uniformity, whether in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Ontario. In French Canada the difference of style of rural architecture and methods of early settlement from those of the English provinces gives some variety, and provides a pleasing contrast. The change on to the prairies is prodigious. You seem to have emerged into another world. Hitherto the forest has been domin- ant. Not the forest of our English associations, where you can stroll easily through bracken and over grassy glades, between graceful, shapely trees, or through easily threaded undergrowth, but woods of dense, tangled growth springing out of the rotting wreckage of fallen trees, or scattered more thinly over the rough surface of barren rocks. The hills and even the mountains, where such they be, are covered to their summits with timber of some kind. You move for ever as if with a hood over your head. The only smooth and open places are the surface of the many lakes and rivers, while through all the summer months mosquitoes and other pestilent insects hold unchecked sway. Even the cleared, civilized, and populous areas show at once that they have been cut in no very remote times out of the all-pervading primaeval forest — 14 CANADA heavy and thick in this case, for the land was fertile in varying degree, and it was an arduous task. In the farming countries, whether of Nova Scotia or Ontario, pleasant and home- like though they now look, the mark of a once forest country is all over them. The woods that have been left on practically every farm for utility purposes are obviously patches of the original clothing of the land, though often tamed by thinning into more gracious-looking groves. The close fencing, for farms and consequently fields are everywhere small, is mainly of timber rails. In many places the stumps of the forest trees may even yet be seen, while along the fringes of the old settled countries the process of hacking farms out of the forest — though no longer of the profitable significance it had before the West was opened — still proceeds sufficiently to provide an illustration, with its stump- strewn clearings, of how Eastern Canada was made. There are no open commons of heather or grass, or wide fenceless tracts, as there are in little England, and most other old countries. The whole inhabited rural country of every province of Eastern Canada consists either of forest or of railed- in fields under cultivation. It will give the reader a good idea of this situation when it is remarked that for the manoeuvring of cavalry, even on a small scale, there is not GEOGRAPHICAL 15 a single natural arena between the prairies and the Atlantic. Winnipeg stands virtually at the gate of the prairie country, the central one of those three grand divisions which Nature has fixed on the Dominion. The fifteen hundred miles of forest wilderness (to use approximate figures) 'press so near to the prairie capital and the Red River, that the brief interval of compromise need not trouble us on so large a canvas. To the bred-and-born Canadian of the old provinces, this stepping out on to the prairies is literally like entering a new world. Much more so, indeed, than to th^ Briton from home, who is accustomed in our southern downs and northern moorlands to open sweeps for so far, at any rate, as the eye can travel, which is all that really matters. To the European the prairies do not impart an utterly new, and not always a pleasant, sensation, as they do in the case of the Eastern Canadian, who has lived always in an arti- ficially created landscape, woods and timber fences all about him and the boundless forest always within conscious reach upon one flank, and wide, open seas either of fresh or salt water upon the other. This prairie country, generally known as the " North- West, " is neither for the most part flat, nor yet is it devoid of woodland. It is not often the monotonous billiard table of the old-time 16 CANADA tall story, over which you could run a straight furrow with a plough from Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains, nor yet the treeless waste that it is often supposed to be. There are stretches of flat country, to be sure but a great part of the prairie is undulating and often hilly, like the down land of Wiltshire and Hampshire. This prairie division of Canada includes the original province of Manitoba, founded forty years ago, and the newer provinces of Sas- katchewan and Alberta, the last being nearest to the Rocky Mountains. Though compari- sons between old and new countries are generally not happy ones, the rolling prairie, with its short, natural grass, interspersed with large breadths of wheat and oats, or brown fallows and clumps of trees, is really not at all unlike the do^vn countries of England. There are low ranges of hills, too, here and there, sometimes smooth like downs, but often lightly covered with wood, though the trees are generally of a different kind from those in the forest country. Indeed, almost everything here is the very reverse of the eastern country. The woodland is in mere patches, and of small stature, upon an otherwise open landscape, or it grips the sides and summits of low hills as already mentioned, and nearly always grows thick along the water-courses. Here too, practically the whole country is of a smooth GEOGRAPHICAL 17 surface without rocks or stones. The streams and rivers are fairly numerous, but they have cut deep hollows through the down-like prairie country, and slide smoothly along with muddy current between soft, woody banks. There are plenty of lakes, and some very large ones, but small meres and pools in the hollows of the prairie are a characteristic feature of much of the country. Some regions are flatter, others hillier ; in some there is more, in others less wood. But this type of country and similarity of landscape stretches for seven to eight hundred miles till the huge barrier of the Rockies looms in sight, and a continuous chain of rugged and jagged peaks rears up against the horizon. Towns and villages are strung at intervals along the railroads, and homesteads are now scattered over most of the country at the rate of about two or three to the square mile, whereas in Eastern Canada, the farms being smaller, there would be roughly about five to the mile. Not only east and west, but from south (the American border line) to north, so far as we need take it here into account, this type of country extends, with no great variations, and its farms always pushing on to the still unpeopled territories. The enclosures here are larger than in Eastern Canada, and are of wire fencing, which scarcely detracts at all from the wide-open look of the landscape. 18 CANADA Districts vary much in fertility, but good or reasonably good land greatly preponderates There are, however, some large expanses of barren lands. The rainfall, it is needless to say, in a country so world-famous for its grain, is sufficient, but this, too, is more certain in some parts than in others. Speaking generally it decreases as you approach the Rockies, making grain farming more precarious, while the southern portion of Alberta is so dry that irrigation is practised on a large scale. The atmosphere is so clear that these moun- tains come into view when about a hundred miles distant. At eighty miles they seem to be climbing high up into the sky. The country now becomes more broken and hilly, and the streams running out of it are no longer muddy and sluggish, but have the transparency of mountain waters and run fast over stony bottoms. This is known as the foot-hill country, and is more suited to stock than to tillage. But as we are not for the moment concerned with such details, it is enough that here ends the great prairie country of Canada, the middle section, to put it concisely, of the Dominion. From it you pass into the tremendous gloom and solitude of rugged and sterile Alps from eight to ten thousand feet high, to emerge in due course into another country which faces GEOGRAPHICAL 19 and drains into the Pacific. This is British Columbia. If the Eastern Canadian, after travelling through seven hundred miles of the rugged wilderness which divides his own home country from it, steps out on to the prairie as on to a new world, he experiences another shock on the railroad as it crawls at a slow pace for a day or night through Alpine gorges to emerge on to the Pacific slope, with its sights, growths, scents, and general atmos- phere quite different again from anything experienced either in Eastern Candida or on the Prairie. When Columbus was asked to describe the newly discovered island of Jamaica, he briefly indicated its mountainous and diversified surface by crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it on the table. This rough method of illustration would apply still more to British Columbia. It is a land of great mountain ranges running north and south, parallel to the sea coast, of which the Rockies and the Selkirks, virtually the same, are the dominant system, while westward from these, lower ranges, in more irregular courses, may be said to descend in steps to the Pacific coast. Having thus briefly indicated the character of the three grand divisions of Canada, what few further words can be said in a single chapter about the physical conditions of each and the Dominion as a whole may be 20 CANADA commenced at the point we have reached, and continued in a rapid backward journey to the Atlantic. British Columbia is about eight hundred miles in length from north to south, and about half that in width ; a sea of moun- tains and hills all clad with forest, mainly of the pine family, save where the peaks of the Rockies soar in naked rock above the timber line, in some cases capped with perpetual snow and flanked with glaciers. Far the greater proportion of the province is as yet uninhabited and practically uninhabitable, except for such purposes as lumbering and mining. Just here British territory does not extend to " the North Pole," the detached American territory of Alaska, purchased from Russia, intervening just where the cold northern wilds of British Columbia terminate in the celebrated mining district of the Yukon, divided between Canada and the United States. The province, only forty years old in any serious sense, as regards present and future habitation is a mass of intricate labyrinths in the shape of narrow valleys or wider rolling plateaus between the ranges. The Canadian Pacific railroad has now, this long time, climbed the Rockies, forced its way through them and descended through the broken but far less difficult country to the Pacific, while another line to the northward is in the making. The first named road has its port at Vancouver, GEOGRAPHICAL 21 now a large city quite close to the American border. Local communication, so far as it has yet gone for fruit growers, farmers, miners and lumbermen, depends on branch railroads, or considerable lakes, of which last there are quite a number in the valleys. The scenery of the Rockies and Selkirk ranges is mag- nificent, and on the scale of the Swiss Alps, the highest peak reaching eleven thousand feet. That of the lower mountain and hill country is often very beautiful, particularly in the wide valleys and rolling plateaus, often known as " the park country," from the fact of its being prairie diversified with woods, gracefully grouped, as in an English park. This country lies between the Rockies and the sea coast strip, and enjoys a very fine climate — cold in winter, but less so than that of the prairies, and so dry in summer in many parts as to require irrigation for successful horticulture or farming. The coast strip is hilly and broken right down to the Pacific, and entirely covered with timber very largely consisting of huge cedars, pines and hemlocks of a size unknown in Eastern Canada. This gives the hills and mountains a rather mono- tonous aspect, while the density and gloom of the forest itself is prodigious. The climate on and near the sea coast is utterly different from that of any other part of the Dominion, being akin to Devonshire ; brighter and drier 22 CANADA than this last summer, but even wetter and but little colder in winter. The Fraser, rising in the Rockies, is the chief river of the province. It flows into the sea at New Westminster, the old capital and seat of the fishing industry, and within a few miles of Vancouver, the present commercial and shipping capital, which is seated on its own deeply embayed riverless harbour. The rivers of South-Eastern British Columbia drain into the Columbia river, and find their way to the sea through the neighbouring American State of Washington. Population is thickest on the south-western seaboard corner, repre- sented mainly by the cities of Vancouver and New Westminster, engaged in trade, manu- facturing, and fishing. Rural life there as elsewhere is restricted by nature within narrow confines. This is, indeed, the great feature of the province, a rough and rugged country with its population farming here and there in fertile " pockets," or mining for coal, gold, silver, and other minerals in mountain valleys, and, so far, only sprinkled about in the southern portion of the province. Opposite to Vancouver city, of most ill- chosen and confusing name, twenty to thirty miles away lies the southern and settled portion of the island of Vancouver, which, about thirty miles in width, runs northward parallel with the coast for two hundred and GEOGRAPHICAL 23 fifty miles. It is mainly at present a moun- tainous forest-clad wilderness. But on the southern point stands Victoria, the oldest city and port of the province, and^ though far behind Vancouver City in wealth and population, the political capital of the pro- vince. For a short distance behind this city spreads a smooth, attractive, and gracious farming and fruit-growing country, terminated by the highland wilderness, which constitutes most of the island Victoria and its neighbour- hood has the most perfect climate in British North America. It is that in short of southern England upon its very best behaviour. The wayside growths, the turf, the fields, the very scents, with the moist softness of the air, and the look of the seashore, recall an English country-side. Returning over the Rockies to the prairie country, which is calculated to carry an infinitely greater population than British Columbia, we must notice the two pioneer and dominant cities of the western province of Alberta — Calgary, on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a hundred miles north of the Ameri- can border, and within sight of the Rockies, and Edmonton, a hundred and seventy miles north of this again and further from the mountains. The Bow River, rushing down from the moun- tains in broad, clear, and swift current, pursues later, under the name of the Saskatchewau. a 24 CANADA slower, muddier course through the entire prairie country, uniting with the North Sas- katchewan and emptying into Lake Winnipeg. The Red River runs due north from American territory to Winnipeg, and, there receiving the Assiniboine, the second of the great rivers of the occupied prairie country, continues into the same great Lake Winnipeg, which in turn empties its waters into Hudson's Bay. The shallowness of these prairie lakes is well illustrated in this, the largest of all, for though over two hundred miles long, it has a maximum depth of less than thirty feet. This belt of prairie, now more or less settled for three hundred and odd miles in width, is pressing tentatively northwards. Of the geo- graphy of the vast northern wilderness and the Athabasca country, neither space admits nor utility requires in so brief a sketch any mention. As a field for future population, its limits will be determined by climatic conditions rather than by soil fertility. But all these things are still unproven and belong to the future. Leaving the prairie country, over which, unlike British Columbia, railroads can be run and are being run in all directions with ease through regions that can or will fill their cars with produce, we once more enter the forests of the eastern belt. A portion of the province of Manitoba overlaps into this GEOGRAPHICAL 25 country. The Lake of the Woods, a hundred miles east of Winnipeg on the Canadian Pacific Raih'oad — a real deep eastern lake — is a great lumber centre, and a little farther east is a tract of fertile country, being cleared of woods for farming purposes. It is known as New Ontario, being at the western end of that province, an oasis of farming country neither *' East " nor *' West, " After that all is silence, not likely to be ever seriously broken, for six hundred more miles till we are back again in thickly peopled old Ontario. Another im- portant centre, however, of life and trade, and another oasis in the wilderness must not be left behind unnoticed, and that is the twin towns, practically one, of Port Arthur and Fort William. They stand knit together at the head of Lake Superior, between hard, sterile, desolate heights, and handle all the western traffic that goes down to the eastern centres by the great lakes of Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, and thence by way of the St. La^vrence to the Atlantic. This Gulf of St. LawTence, it is hardly necessary to state, is the great mouth which receives the larger part of the volume of trade and travel that goes in and out of Canada, and by this means can penetrate to its heart at Montreal before unloading cargoes or stepping on shore. Nor will the reminder be needed that this same great waterway is absolutely icebound from 26 CANADA November to April. This monopoly of sum- mer traffic in the pre diice of the west, however, is expected in the near future to be shared by Hudson's Bay, when the necessary railroad connections promised by one political party are completed. Fortunately, just to the south of the Gulf of St. LaAvrence, Canada has a short strip of seacoast which does not freeze up and affords throughout the ^vinter an alternative entry into the country. This is the southern shore of Nova Scotia, and the adjoining coast of New Brunswick, represented by the two ports of Halifax and St. John. If it w^ere not for this, all European access on the Atlantic to the Dominion, except by way of the United States, would be sealed up for five months of the year. As it is now, by means of railroads to Quebec and Montreal, though they traverse in parts much semi- wilderness country, goods and passengers can go in and out of Canada throughout the winter, while the same ports serve as an entry at all times to their respective provinces, as w^ell as a secondary means of access to the Dominion in the summer season. NeA\^oundland, the earliest discovered and the earliest occupied of the lands within Canadian seas, is curiously enough, as it would seem at first sight, the only province which has rejected inclusion in the Dominion of Canada. It forms a barrier between the GEOGRAPHICAL 27 Gulf of St. Lawrence and the outer Atlantic, for its northern point looks over the narrow Strait of Belle Isle to Labrador, easily visible, while its southern extremities look over the wader strait dividing it from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, which province constitutes the lower horn of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Canadian summer traffic passes through one or other of these passages, to enter Canadian waters, and strangely enough, within sight of coasts, in the case of Newfoundland, as desolate to all seeming, and very nearly so in actual fact, as when the Cabots first discovered them in 1496. Nova Scotia is the first of the Dominion provinces to confront the Atlantic traveller, a long, narrow peninsula, nearly three hundred miles in length, with an average w^idth of only thirty to seventy miles. It is tied to the main- land by a neck narrower still, and this main- land is New Brunswick, which formed with it at one time the old French province of Acadie. Spreading along the north shore of both these provinces in the Gulf of St. Law- rence and within easy sight is Prince Edward Island, one hundred and thirty miles long and from five to thirty miles in width. These three provinces, the comparatively small area of the latter being partially atoned for by its thick population, form together The Maritime Provinces, a distinct geographical 28 CANADA group, as against that of Quebec and Ontario. These two groups may be considered the two sub- divisions of Eastern Canada. The wilder and remoter parts of Eastern Quebec on the Lower St. Lawrence merge, to be sure, with the wilder northern portions of New Bruns- wick, but the whole of the west side of the last-named province borders the American State of Maine. This makes a wide gap between the populous portions of New Bruns- wick, which lie to the southward on the St. John River, and on the Bay of Fundy, and a still greater gap between Nova Scotia yet further east, and the civilization of Quebec. A railroad from the maritime provinces now cuts through American territory to Montreal, the heart of Canada. Till recently the Intercolonial line was the only outlet. This labours due north to the south shore of the St. La\\Tence and the frin^re of French Canad- ian settlement, and then turning up the river has a further journey of two hundred miles before reaching Quebec, the gateway of what was called "The Canadas" before the Con- federation of 1867. Nature and international treaties have placed a barrier between these maritime provinces on the one side, and Quebec and Ontario on the other. Canadians speak with traditional bitterness of the Ashburton Boundary Treaty of 1842, which permitted the State of Maine to thrust itself GEOGRAPHICAL 29 up behind New Brunswick to within a short distance of the Lower St. Lawrence. Rail- roads in recent times, impelled more by the necessity of winter ports for the Dominion than winter internal communications, have done much to bind these two divisions of Eastern Canada together. Formerly the mari- time provinces had their faces — their sea fronts, that is to say — ^turned to their near neighbours, the New England States, and their great, shaggy, uplifted backs to the Canadas. Even now it takes as long to go from one to the other as it does from London to the North of Scotland. Ascending the St. La^vrence, as regards proportions, might be roughly likened to steaming up the English Channel. The shores become visible from each other, at about the width of the Straits of Dover, a hundred miles below Quebec. Till then, upon the north shore, which is continuously bold and rugged, and remains so, there are no people to look across, nor ever will be. The south shore, which for a long time is equally bold, carries a small and scattered fishing population, and then descends to a low coast, along which old French agricultural settlements extend, thickening as they approach Quebec. On the bolder north shore, rising in places to moun- tainous heights, but for a shorter distance and in more scattered fashion, the sam.e 30 CANADA simple t>^e of civilization makes itself evident At Quebec, after encompassing the fertile Isle of Orleans, the river suddenly narrows to less than a mile in width, and gives the ancient French city the physical character of an outer gateway into Canada, which, in every respect, it actually is. For one hundred and forty miles the St. La^^Tcnce, in its upward course to Montreal, more than retains its width, spreading about half-way into the lake of St. Peter, and is bordered on both sides with wide stretches of typical French agricul- tural country, with its villages and little towns. The largest steamers, as every one knows, now ascend the river to Montreal, which stands on the south shore of a large island. For the Ottawa, almost as wide here as the St. Lawrence, flows in at this point from the north, and the confluences of the two rivers form something like a lake about twenty miles wide, largely filled by the triangular-shaped island of Montreal, which is the inner portal of Canada. Eighty miles up the Ottawa, navigable thus far for steam- ers, stands the city of Ottawa, the capital of the Dominion. In ascending the St. La\^Tence you pursue from its very mouth a steady south-westerly course, though one speaks for convenience of the " north " and " south " bank of the river. From Quebec to ^Montreal the civilization of the north bank is not very GEOGRAPHICAL 81 deep, and soon fades away at the back into the great northern wilderness. To the south- ward it continues to the United States border, where a rugged and mountainous country, for the most part, divides the nations. South of Quebec this boundary, which hitherto has pushed very near the St. Lawrence, takes a sudden dip downwards, and leaves a hundred miles' width of Canadian territory. Then, turning due west, it decreases this breadth, w^hich is nearly all a w^ell- occupied agricultural country, till about fifty miles above Montreal it runs into the St. LawTcnce, which forms henceforward the international line. At the mouth of the Ottawa, which divides the two provinces, that of Quebec, dominated by the French, w^ho are in an overwhelming majority, gives way to Ontario, which is as overwhelmingly British. The last and highest stretch of the St. Lawrence under its own name, that from Lake Ontario to Montreal, is one hundred and fifty miles long, but is broken by some unnavigable rapids, which have to be circumvented by canals. This fixed Montreal from the earliest times, and will retain it undisputed, as the great commer- cial capital of the Dominion. It never could have had a rival from the earliest days of serious trade. Nature made it and will retain it as the great emporium of the Dominion. The Province of Ontario, after facing its 32 CANADA American neighbours for a long distance across the St. Lawrence, follows the northern shore of Lake Ontario, which separates the nations for one hundred and fifty miles. At the narrow isthmus which divides it from the yet larger Lake Erie, Canadians and Americans are close neighbours again for some twenty odd miles across the narrow rapids of the Niagara River, actually the St. LaAvrence. Again, at the south-western corner of Ontario, where Lake Huron, greater than either of the others, comes down from the north, between Michigan and Canada, towards the western point of Lake Erie there is a short line of con- tact. After that Lakes Huron and Superior keep the nations far out of sight of each other for seven hundred miles, save for a moment at Sault St. Marie, where some brief rapids and a great canal mark the point of contact between the two lakes, and the pressing through of all the north-western water-borne freight. But this is far into the wilds. Populated Ontario consists of a belt, fifty to seventy miles wide, running from the Ottawa River along the north shore of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario. This belt then expands into an axe-head peninsula, much the shape of Wales, and twice as large, but comparatively flat and all of it a fertile, settled-up farming country. As Wales is washed on three sides by the Irish and the Bristol Channels, so is GEOGRAPHICAL 33 the peninsula of Ontario washed by Lake Erie and Lake Huron. Northward of the belt forming the eastern half of Ontario is the great north wilderness spoken of earlier in this chapter, sprinkled thinly with lumber camps and mining settlements. The capital, Toronto, stands at the western end of Lake Ontario ; Kingston, the old mother town of the pro- vince, at the eastern outlet of the lake. The whole of this belt and the peninsula are occupied by small farms, sprinkled thickly with towns, and generously watered by quick flowing rivers of small and moderate size, which are freely used for manufacturing pur- poses to the growing prosperity of the province. CHAPTER II THE CONQUEST OF CANADA The conquest of Canada by Great Britain was not the result of any premeditated design, but of a war undertaken in defence of her American colonies against the far-reaching schemes of France, which, if successful, might have proved disastrous to the British race in North America. In the middle of the 18th century the American States, which now fringe the Atlantic from Canada to Florida, were all, save the last-named, which then belonged to Spain, British colonies, containing nearly two mil ion over-sea Britons or British subjects ; about one-seventh the population of the mother country. Even then most of them were much older communities than are the Australians to-day. With the exception, however, of the New England group — Massachusetts, Connecti- cut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, which were nearer together, of the same Puritan origin, and allied in habit and sentiment, these colonies had nothing to do with each other. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, 34 THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 35 IMaryland, Virginia, and the two Carolinas, to give their order of procession down the Atlantic coast, had each been independently founded, and had grown to prosperity and population quite independently of one another. Their several territories were each more or less the size of England. They had all, like Eastern Canada, been densely clad with primaeval forest. The colonists, who then called themselves Pennsylvanians, Virginians, and so forth, not Americans, had nothing like spread over their own respective territories. The towns were on the coast or tidal rivers, while the farmers and planters still mainly clustered on a seaboard belt, fifty to a hundred miles wide. A British governor presided over each, but they virtually governed themselves through their own little parliaments. They sent all their surplus produce to England from their own ports, and received in return such manufactures and luxuries as they required.^ They saw nothing, and practically knew nothing of their next-door neighbours. Distances were great and means of land transport utterly wanting. Moreover, each province was quite sufficient unto itself, even to jealousy, and produced all the elemen- tary necessities of life. What else it required, ^ There was a considerable trade with the British West Indies, under specified conditions, which were liable to frequent alteration. 36 CANADA with exceptions not worth mentioning, it received from English ports, whether of Enghsh or Continental origin. For Great Britain had let her American colonies go their own way within wide limits on one condition, namely, that they traded with her alone, and that, too, by means of British or colonial ships. England, on her side, gave free entry to their produce, and taxed that of other nations. Furthermore, her fleets and armies were the guarantee of a security which had rarely been threatened in all their history, but without which their existence would not have been worth a month's purchase. This substantially, for the trade and navigation laws were subject to generally well-intentioned variations in detail, was the position of England to her colonies, and the arrangement was considered by both parties a fair one, which in those times it undoubtedly was. Now, from New England, down the back of all these colonies, barely yet reached by their back settlements, and nearly parallel with the Atlantic, ran the great Alleghany chain of mountains, three or four thousand feet high, and of considerable width. This, in 1754, was the limit of British operations, but not of British or colonial aspirations — not, that is to say, of the imperial thinking and farsighted Briton, though such were then, it must be added, but a trifling handful. The average THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 37 Briton at home neither knew nor cared any- thing about such matters, and perhaps naturally so. A thinly settled territory, bigger than half-a-dozen Englands, would have struck even the rare Imperialist of the second George's time as a noble and satisfying inheritance. But there were a few men who saw beyond this into the future, which was fortunate. The colonists, absorbed in their own affairs, and out of touch with world politics, merely saw when they were near enough, in these distant blue mountains, a mighty forest-clad barrier, behind which spread an unknown wilderness, haunted by the fierce Indians their forefathers had slowly pushed back over them. Traders and hunters, however, had brought back reports of this over-mountain country, which fired the imagination of some, and made a few other statesmen-like people think. For this country behind the mountains was the basin of the Ohio, spreading away to the Mis- sissippi, and to-day represented by the fertile " Middle West " of the United States, a richer region than that of the Atlantic provinces. Far away in the west and south-west the Spaniards and, to a less degree, the French, were actually or nominally in possession. But here was an immense no-man's-land that every colonist who thought at all vaguely held as a future expanding ground for his 38 CANADA own particular colony. Certainly, he never dreamed of another European power getting in there. But the question had really as yet no practical significance for the average man on either side of the ocean, when suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, it leaped into being. For precisely the same period of time that the English colonies had been developing into a condition of prosperity that astonished every European visitor, British or foreign, the French had been settled upon the St. Law- rence. Against the two million British colon- ists, however, Canada contained but sixty thousand, mainly peasants. For New France had been treated on precisely opposite lines from the British colonies, and very much governed indeed from home by locally auto- cratic representatives of the French king. Most of its population had been transferred there by the Government in the 17th century and settled along both banks of the St. Law- rence between Quebec and Montreal. The country had been laid out in great estates or seigneuries which were given to military officers or men of some condition, and on them the peasant farmers were settled, pay- ing trifling rents and dues to these little semi-feudal lords oi*^ seigneurs. But neither seigneur nor tenant had the least say in the government. The descendants of these THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 39 people, strictly observing all these con- ditions, represented the Canada of 1754 when the crisis came, which caused such anxiety to England and her colonies, and ended, after seven years' fighting, in the extinction of New France and its occupation by Great Britain. But these peasant farmers and their scanty produce by no means repre- sented the aims and aspirations of the French in North America. The fur trade, more or less a royal monopoly, was the chief material motive, and the missionary zeal of the Catholic Church, largely inspired by the Jesuits, was another. Already the fur trade, side by side with the missionaries, had reached out its arms in scattered posts far into the wilds, even over the north-western prairie countries, and to the south of the great lakes into the Ohio Valley, behind the Alleghanies. The Frenchman fraternised with and attached the Indian. The Englishman, on the other hand, hacked out a farm, destroyed his hunting grounds, and pushed the savage J. back. Through their zealous missionaries and their careless, light-hearted traders, the French had secured the friendship of most of the northern and western Indians. The Five Nations, alone, typified by the Iroquois, celebrated in Cooper's novels, and who occu- pied territory just south of Lake Ontario, were, for reasons set forth in a later chapter, 40 CANADA hostile to the French and friendly to the English. For it should be mentioned that the New Englanders and the French, being neighbours, had waged frequent wars together. Certain enterprising spirits who then con- trolled the French Government of Louis XV., had a little before this conceived a daring plan, which was no less than to build a chain of forts at intervals the whole way down from Lake Erie, through this western country, publicly claim it, and later, perhaps, introduce a stream of colonists, and thus hem in the English for ever to their strip along the Atlantic coast. They even dreamed of some day gaining such strength there as to " drive the English into the sea." France set much store by Canada, feeble and unprogressive as it now in the retrospect may seem on paper. Her Government were alarmed, too, at the rapid progress of the English colonies, feared their pressure westward, their future influence with the western Indians, and the consequent destruction of the French fur trade. Another strong motive, too, was the antipathy then felt by a Catholic Power towards Protestantism and its expansion. From the relative strength of the two nations in America as represented by popula- tion such a plan might well appear a fantastic dream, but it was really nothing like so hopeless as it may look to-day in cold print. THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 41 There was not an English soldier in North America, whOe every Canadian was trained to arms, and at the given word was prepared, and was generally willing, to march anywhere. Some regular regiments, too, were always kept in Canada. The British colonists south and west of New England were regarded by the French, and with some reason, as useless in the field, even could they be got there, so indepen- dent, so absorbed in business, and so jealous were they, as individuals, of the right to do as they pleased, and as provinces, of one another. France was then the first power in the world. Her people far outnumbered the British. Her disciplined armies were far larger than those of England, and moved at the will of an autocratic power, while in sea power the two nations were at that moment fairly balanced. This is how matters stood in 1754, when, after a little diplomacy between colonial and French officials, and some trifling but significant skirmishing between small forces despatched into the wilderness, in which George Washington, then an ardent young commander of Virginian militia, took a leading part, the crisis came. The French officially claimed the whole country behind the moun- tains, and erected the extensive works of Fort Duquesne, besides some others, as an earnest of their pretensions and a commence- ment of more extended operations. For the 42 CANADA moment these distant but pregnant doings got scarcely more than local notice, but happily two Governors, Dinwiddie of Vir- ginia, and Shirley of Massachusetts, almost alone, thoroughly realised all that it meant. But to the colonies most menaced and con- cerned — Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Vir- ginia, who had a great back country future, they were almost as voices crying in the wilderness. But they knew their men, that is the colonists, and appealed direct to the English Government, which in 1755 sent out two British regiments under General Braddock. Governor Shirley at the same time aroused t-he New England provinces, which though less concerned than the others, put a large militia force at his disposal. In the blazing summertime, by a laborious march through woods and swamps. General Braddock led the first expedition ever made by a regular British force into a wilderness. They crossed the Alleghanies towards Fort Duquesne, where at a spot a few miles short of it the French and Indians sprang oh them in the thick woods and cut half their force of about one thousand two hundred regulars and four hundred colonials to pieces. Pennsylvania and Virginia had done little to forward the expedition, and this end of it was a terrible tragedy. Utterly unaccustomed and bewildered regulars in close formation THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 43 had practically formed a target for two hours for seven hundred Indians, mingled with French bush-fighters, to shoot at from thick cover. Then the survivors, about half the number, fled panic-stricken along the back- ward forest trail, reaching Virginia in scattered bands days afterwards, for there was no pursuit. There was no serious fault, nor lack of precaution on Braddock's part. Men drilled for and accustomed to fighting and manoeuvring on European fields, were dropped into the American woods to fight the most formidable forest warriors the world has ever seen, mixed with, and led by bush-fighting Frenchmen. The catastrophe made a great sensation in England and France, who had not yet formally declared war, though that mattered little in those days as regards colonial enterprises. Braddock had died fighting bravely. Young George Washington by a miracle survived to escape. General history, till lately, and light literature have told this tragic tale inaccurately, Thackeray following suit in his novel " The Virginians." Pennsylvania, with twice the population of Canada, but under the Quaker influence, refused any assistance, on the plea that all war was wrong. Virginia and Maryland, still larger, mainly contented themselves with calling the redcoats cowards — afterwards. The Canadian authorities had taken their measure justly, 44. CANADA and now the three colonies were to have a taste of the French, whom they had chosen to regard as a bogey used by tiresome officials to extract money out of their pockets and disturb their comfortable humdrum lives. For hordes of Indians, egged on or led by Frenchmen, flung themselves on the frontiers of the three colonies, and made them for two years scenes of indescribable horror, of fire-swept homesteads and of panic-stricken fugitives. Unfortunately, the punishment fell on the least culpable, the scattered backwoodsmen and their families, whose remote sufferings were regarded almost with indifference by the substantial popu- lous communities nearer the seaboard. The New Englanders, hoAvever, in this same year, had bestirred themselves, and by way of diversion made two expeditions against the more northerly outposts of the French, but with no ultimate advantage to either side. But in the next year, 1756, when war was declared between France and England, the struggle in America began in earnest. The magnitude of the stake at issue was but half understood, its full significance being still hidden in the future. Wise men of both nations realised that it would determine whether the British race were to push on into the heart of the continent, or be confined to the Atlantic seaboard, — in other words. THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 45 whether France or Great Britain were to predominate in North America. Some few vaguely reahsed all that this might mean, and has meant, which we can see plainly enough to-day, though we have to substitute the words " British race " for " Great Britain." The New England colonies were ready to fight the French because they were a con- stant menace to them; not only on the wild, vague, undefined borderland between the two races, but on those northern seas about the mouth of the St. La^vrence and Nova Scotia, for some time now British soil, and on their own immediate seaboard. Fishery and boundary disputes, and the frequent collisions of near hostile neighbours on sea and land had been inevitable during former Anglo-French wars. The middle and southern colonies, whose western development and even future security was gravely menaced, either could not or would not realise the situation. This was mere selfish apathy, not the outcome of any well-considered opinion, for there could not have been two opinions. If fighting was to be done, they expected England to do it for them, though individuals among them came forward in brilliant contrast. They contributed some troops and some money throughout the war, but in proportion to their wealth and fi.ghting strength, these contributions were quite pitiful. 46 CANADA France, then, for the moment had this clear issue in view, and in 1756 sent some good regiments under a first-rate general, Montcalm, to reinforce the regulars already there, the militia, who were hardy men and good bush-fighters, and the French-Indians. England, too, despatched several regiments, and, at first, some very indifferent generals. At present she had no clear intention of capturing Canada, but rather of driving the French out of the Ohio valley, otherwise the great back country to her colonies, and from some other advanced positions they had taken up, and by an attack on various Canadian posts insuring the present safety and future ex- pansion of the colonies and their present trading routes. The British army had been reduced almost to vanishing point since the peace of 1748, which concluded the last European war, when England had fought with the Austrians against France. The regiments had now to be filled up quickly to their strength, and many new ones raised. Leader- ship was at a low ebb, owing partly to the fact that jobbery and favouritism regulated pro- motion. France, to her undoing in America, had taken the side of Austria and the other powers against Frederick of Prussia, who now became England's ally in Europe. Thus matters stood in 1756. The war in America, though there was THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 47 no lack of activity on both sides, produced small results for the first two years. Owing to the icebound winters serious campaigning was only possible from May to November. The area of fighting was in that then shaggy wilderness which stretched southward from the St. Lawrence and the great lakes to the frontier settlements of the British colonies. Though Fort Duquesne was kept in view as one object of capture, it was by striking northward, at Canada itself, that the clearing of her forces out of the Ohio valley in the west was mainly effected. For the whole strength of Canada was now withdrawn to defend her frontiers, and this fighting strength amounted to about six or seven thousand regulars, and about twice as many militia, with large bodies of so-called Christian Indians, living on Canadian soil. The British had at their disposal about ten thou- sand regulars, and as many more provincial militia, the larger portion from New England. Waterways through the tangled wilderness were the only war routes. By lakes, rapids, and rivers, with intervals of rough roads between them, the opposing forces could alone move against each other in any strength. To describe the course of the war between the French and English, its battles, skirmishes, marches, and sieges in these wild woods for the next two or three years, in as many pages, 48 CANADA would be impossible. To rapidly outline it with the names of unfamiliar places and, it is to be feared, of forgotten heroes and others, would make dull fare. It is enough that by the spring of 1758 the British forces were not one step nearer Canada, nor had they reached w^estward in sufficient strength to curb the French and Indians beyond the Alleghanies, who had laid desolate the western frontier. Albany, the present capital of New York State, then a frontier trading town, was the chief British base. It stands a hundred miles up the navigable Hudson River due north from New York city. From thence nature had stretched with slight interruptions a straight two hundred miles of waterway to the St. Lawrence, near Montreal, in great part consisting of the narrow lakes George and Champlain. A second but much more difficult route branched to the left or north-west from near Albany, up the Mohawk valley, and then over a high watershed down to Lake Ontario, where a remote outpost of British power. Fort Oswego, in the neighbourhood of the indeterminate and wavering frontier, looked across to Canada. Mainly up the former, but in a less degree up the latter of these two routes, the tide of battle ebbed and flowed, through the dark wilderness between mountain heights. Red- coated, helmeted, pipe-clayed, pig-tailed THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 49 English infantry, kilted Highlanders (for few concessions to comfort or climate were then made), blue-coated New England militiamen, rustic and democratic, electing their own officers, scouts, or rangers, in deer- skin hunting frocks and mocassins, a motley host, laboured backwards and for- wards, in fleets of boats or by forest tracks, dragging artillery or supplies through the inhospitable wilds. On the French side was the same picturesque variety. The white- coated infantry of old France, the blue-clad regulars of the colony, the militia, with their homespun frocks and red sashes, and the Indians radiant in war paint and feathers. A strange flare of colour, and medley of various types of men and races, was thus struggling in imposing scenes of primeval nature, for as great a stake as men ever fought for, had they known it. In the drear wintry desolation, when the main armies had retired into winter quarters, companies of hardy rangers from both sides made daring raids over frozen lakes, or on snow-shoes by forest trails, while small garrisons held the isolated forts which the past summer's fighting had left to either side. It was a novel w^ar for British soldiers, officers, and men. Our people in those days, unlike these, were quite raw to it, but were fast learning. The colonial militia, except the corps of picked backwoods rangers. 50 CANADA had little discipline, being disbanded each autumn to be freshly enrolled in the spring, and though willing enough were not very efficient. Montcalm, the French general, had proved too clever and adroit for his opponents. The English had scored a few small successes, and the French some more important ones, but as the defenders of Canada, after three seasons' fighting, they had so far decidedly the best of it. British reinforcements had, how- ever, come out, and a great effort to break through Montcalm's defences at the neck of. land separating Lakes George and Champlain, which would open the way into Canada, was now made. On a torrid July afternoon six thousand regulars, with as many more militia to support them, were hurled for four hours in brave but hopeless effort against impreg- nable stockades, from behind which some three thousand French soldiers, under Mont- calm, mowed them down at will. This was the ever famous, and to us disastrous, battle of Ticonderoga, celebrated by Fenimore Cooper in " The Last of the Mohicans." Nearly two thousand men and officers, mainly regulars, fell in four hours, a Highland regiment actually losing half its strength. It was a disaster, however, illuminated by the utmost bravery, though followed by an immediate and humiliating retreat. An incompetent general, Abercomby, was the cause of it all. An THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 51 hour of artillery fire would have swept away Montcalm's defences, with the certain defeat and possible capture of himself and the flower of his Canadian army. Canada occupied, the war would probably have then ended. But Abercomby, after carrying his guns for days, left them now just out of reach in his rear, and hurled his battalions with bayonet and claymore at a hopeless task, till the havoc wrought was beyond repair by so weak a man, and he threw up the whole enterprise. But 1758 was, nevertheless, the turning point. There were no more disasters. Every- thing now went well for the British, partly from their own improved morale and leader- ship, and partly from the failing resources of Canada, and the fatally indifferent attitude of a changed French Government towards their American possessions. Canada was, in truth, half starved. Her small population of primitive farmers barely raised enough food for the colony, with its hordes of fur traders and military garrison, in normal times. Now, having more troops than ever to provide for, and called away themselves by thousands to the war, meat and bread were painfully scarce, for the watchful activity of the British navy prevented relief from France, either in men or provisions, from entering the St. Lawrence. Lastly, a gang of French civilian 52 CANADA officials in Canada itself preyed on the increas- ing destitution of the colony to the filling of their own pockets. Montcalm, the soul of honour, and an accomplished general, had no power over the Governor, Vaudreuil, a weak, jealous man, who suffered this incredible rascal- ity, though not sharing in it. Every possible effort to feed the troops was made by Mont- calm and his French officers, and with partial success. But worse even than this, those French dreams of American Empire which provoked the war had vanished. New men, incapable of such far-seeing aspirations, were in power, and the nation committed to a useless and exhausting war in Europe. Canada was virtually abandoned by 1758, with intimation to Montcalm to hold out as long as he could. Nor was his gallant response to the order a mere fruitless effort for the sake of military and national honour. For a general European peace might come at any time, and if it found Canada still French, French it would probably remain, and all would be well. But the very stars in their courses fought against France, in league with the short- sighted folly of her own rulers. Just when her soldiers were so successfully holding at arm's length the British power in North America, the great William Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, stepped into full control of England's foreign policy and foreign wars. THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 53 His burning patriotism and great genius made itself instantly felt. He replaced in- competent favourites by rising and able young men, and what is more, inspired every leader, naval and military, with an ardour that spread through all ranks of every service. The w^ar against Canada now became, under his policy, a deliberate crusade to drive the French clean out of the country. Even the apathetic people of the more southern colonies, who, for two years, had tasted of the hitherto mythical Frenchman's torch and tomahawk, woke up a little. The New Englanders and New Yorkers, in prospect of a final riddance from " The French Terror," which always hung over their borders, gathered fresh zeal. The year of Ticonderoga, a one-man blunder, was Pitt's first year. He had left Abercomby, safe, as he thought, in an adviser's hands, those of the young Lord Howe, " the best officer," ^vrote Wolfe, " in the British army." But Howe was shot dead while scouting the very day before, and so came about the ensuing madness and slaughter. Glorious and brilliant victory for Montcalm and the French as was Ticonderoga, it proved of little use to them. They could not attempt to follow it up, while the mere defence of Canada was getting a desperate business. For, in this year, Louis- bourg fell. Now Louisbourg was not in Canada proper. 54 CANADA but on Cape Breton island, which then belonged to the French, though Nova Scotia, of which geographically it is a part, was British territory, as yet thinly inhabited. Louisbourg was a fortified town and harbour. It was so strong that it was known as the " Dunkirk of the North," and commanded the outer portion of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the seat of French naval power in North American waters. A base of operations and supply in matters concerning Canada, it was of infinite value to the French and perpetual annoyance to the New England and Nova Scotian colonists. In 1745 the New Eng- landers alone, aided by British ships, had besieged and captured it with great gallantry. It was unwisely returned to France at the peace, and enormous sums had been since lavished on its fortifications. It now held a garrison of three thousand men, besides its armed population, and three thousand sailors manning several battleships in its harbour. Incomplete attempts had been already made on it during this war, but had failed through the dilatoriness which had so far distinguished all our operations. fn the summer of 1758, however, Pitt sent a well-equipped and well-commanded fleet and army to take it, and if possible to proceed against Quebec afterwards. Sir Jeffrey Am- herst was in command of the troops, and THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 55 James Wolfe one of his three brigadiers. After a five weeks' siege, accompanied by a fierce artillery fire, and no little heavy fighting, Louisbourg surrendered. Over five thousand soldiers and sailors were taken prisoners, and with most of the inhabitants, shipped to Europe, and many battleships in the harbour were destroyed. Two years later the town and fortifications were rased to the ground, and the " Dunkirk of the North " was wiped off the map. Wolfe, just risen into notice, clenched his reputation at this affair by con- spicuous dash and ability. The victory made a great noise in England. It was the first success after three years of hope deferred and depressing news, and immediately followed that of the catastrophe at Ticonderoga. Bonfires were lighted and church towers rang peals from one end of England to the other. Amherst, though very thorough, was the most cautious of " Pitt's young men." More- over the news of Ticonderoga had just arrived, so the Quebec scheme, to Wolfe's disgust, was deferred till the next season. This same autumn of 1758, the levies at last wrung out of the middle colonies, with some regular troops under an able Scotch colonel, Forbes, cleared the remaining French out of the western country, suppressed the Indians, the more easily that the star of their French allies was obviously waning, occupied Fort 56 CANADA Duquesne, and re-christened it Fort Pitt. Upon its site to-day stands Pittsburgh, the Birmingham of America, the wild green woods and clear waters of these old days, where British redcoats did their first fighting w^ith savages, vanished or smirched by the smoke and flare of a great manufacturing city. The year 1759 opened with all eyes turned on Quebec, the only hope for Canada, and the main object now of English effort. Pitt's policy was to keep France absorbed to exhaustion in her ill-advised European con- flict, and he plied Frederick of Prussia with money and men, thereby securing the com- mand of the seas and the isolation of Canada. Montcalm now collected the whole of his forces, numbering, besides Indians, some twenty-five thousand men, along the frontier of the col- ony. With more than half that number he entrenched himself at and around Quebec, as the strong citadel and key of the country. If taken, Canada was virtually conquered ; so long as it held out no invader's task was completed. The rest of his forces he left at and about Montreal, under Levis, an able officer. The British were to attack Quebec with a fleet and army from the sea, while all their land forces in North America were to march under Amherst, now Commander- in-Chief, up one or more of the wilderness routes on Montreal. On paper the task of THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 57 the British will seem much easier than it actually was, for there were two great factors against them, generally unfamiliar to fleets and armies of that day. The one was the short season in which everything had to be accomplished, since both sea and land routes were closed by ice and snow for six months. The other was the great natural obstructions, with their possibilities of defence, over which armies had to move. Quebec took the more important of the two blows to be struck in 1759, and James Wolfe was given the command of the army, while Admiral Saunders had charge of the fleet, whose co-operation was vital to success. Wolfe, the overshadowing hero of the con- quest of Canada, was now thirty-one. He was born at Westerham, in Kent, the son of an officer who had served under Marlborough. He joined the army at fifteen, fought the next year at Dettingen as acting adjutant of his regiment, and served in several , campaigns abroad as well as in the Jacobite rising of 1745. Without any particular influence he was a lieut. -colonel at twenty- three, and during the Peace of 1748-1756 made his regiment notorious for its efiiciency. He was at once ardently patriotic and severely critical of our military shortcomings. Tall and slight, and of poor health, due probably to hard campaigning at an immature age, he was, 58 CANADA nevertheless, devoted to manly sports, while at the same time an ardent student, particularly of military literature. He was so assiduous in endeavours to qualify himself for his own high ideal of what an officer should be that he was characteristically regarded as eccentric, though generally popular and beloved by his personal friends, as well as by all ranks who served under him in the field. In short, he w^as a most unique personality, and we know more about him and his short life than about many great men of long careers, for much of his voluminous private correspondence is in existence, and has been printed. The capture of Quebec is a famous incident, impossible to do justice to in brief compass. But, happily, it has been so widely written of that all may read of it with its full dramatic details. I have thought it better, having only one chapter for the whole subject, to show the situation of North America at that day, and why it was we came to be possessed of Canada ; to trace briefly the course of events from 1754, — when we had no thought of acquiring that country, but, on the contrary, were in almost a panic for the safety of our owtl colonies, — to the final expulsion of the French power in 1760. Wolfe arrived before Quebec in May with about nine thousand British troops and a few rangers on board the first fleet of big THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 59 ships that had ever ascended the St. Law- rence ; itself a triumph of navigation, while scarcely a man, soldier or sailor, had ever seen the place before. The city stands on the lofty point of a long ridge, above the angle where the small St. Charles river joins the greater St. Lawrence, just here less than a mile in width. Immediately under the city, however, it spreads out into a broad basin, across much of which extends the upper end of the long island of Orleans. The ridge on whose point the city stands extends for some miles up-stream, in a line of almost inaccessible cliffs. Along these summits at the back of Quebec, which was walled on the land side, lay the open plateau, henceforward of world notoriety as the " Plains of Abraham." For some six miles below the city, across the St. Charles, which was bridged, was a line of lower ridges, looking down on shallows and mud flats, and terminating at the great cataract and wooded ravine of Montmorency, a natural defence against attack from down the river on the north shore. In the well protected city itself and heavily intrenched with batteries along this ridge of Beauport, Montcalm lay with fourteen thousand men, and here he intended to remain, acting absolutely on the defensive, till winter should drive the English away. Nothing should induce him to be 60 CANADA drawn outside, and he was quite sanguine of success. He had only three thousand regulars with him; the remainder, militia, he well knew would be useless in the open against disciplined troops ; but behind defences they were quite at home, and practically as good as any others. Seven miles up the river, where the cliffs dipped to a well -defended bay, he stationed two thousand more men. Wolfe had under him three good brigadiers, Monckton, Townshend, and Murray, while his troops vrere of the first quality and discipline. He planted his batteries opposite the city, where it was just within range of his guns, and his camps on both sides of the river, and on the island of Orleans in mid- stream, con- fronting the long intrenched ridges of Beau- ])ort. The fleet lay in the river ready to assist. Able and eager as Wolfe and his brigadiers all were, brave and disciplined as were the troops, Montcalm's position seemed more impregnable the longer and the closer they studied it. No effort to weaken it nor to tempt him out was left untried. The possible points of attack were very few and difficult, and at these Montcalm could quickly con- centrate an overwhelming force. One great attempt was made to storm the ridge of Beau- port, and four hundred of Wolfe's men fell in a quarter of an hour on the slopes. The country THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 61 round was devastated — a harsh but necessary measure. The city was laid half in ruins, but that was of little use, and Montcalm would not move. He knew better, and was getting confident that the winter w^ould save him. The wxeks flew by — June, July, August — and it was now September. Sickness had reduced Wolfe's force to below eight thousand men. Every scheme had been tried, and at last Wolfe's wretched health broke down, weakened by his incessant labours, and yet more by gnawing anxiety and the prospect of failure intolerable to his high-strung nature. He was at length utterly prostrated, and for a day or two the army, to " its inexpressible grief " — for he was universally beloved — knew that his life was in danger. Rallying, however, and sustained by will- power, excitement, and nervous energy, he left his bed with his mind made up, confiding his plan, however, to no one but the admiral, whose assistance was vital to it. In pass- ing up and down the river he had marked a scaleable place on the cliffs just above the city, and he had formed the bold decision to lead his army up this in the darkness of the night. It is impossible here to relate all the dispositions, so puzzling to his mystified staff, that he made for this seemingly desperate endeavour, but they took som.e days. It must be sufficient that on the night of September 62 CANADA 12th he had four thousand men on board ships seven miles up the river, ready to drop into boats, and that he only then acquainted his officers with the exact nature of the task before them. By water demonstrations he had deceived the two thousand French stationed up the river into a long chase up- stream, thus getting them for the moment out of his way. The remainder of his army and the sailors under his instructions were banging away below Quebec, feigning an intended attack, while Montcalm was absorbed in watching them without a notion that Wolfe with a big force was up the river. With complete success, he himself leading, Wolfe brought his boatloads of troops stealth- ily down-stream under the night shadows of the cliffs, scaled these at the point marked, without serious opposition, and in the morning light presented to Montcalm's astonished eyes the red lines of the British infantry, drawn up on the Plains of Abraham behind the cit}'-, waiting for him to come out — for now he had no choice. So at ten o'clock Montcalm, with all his regulars and a cloud of militia firing and shouting, attacked the silent, immovable British lines. This was the first battle fought in the open in North America. The enemy were met at forty paces, according to strict orders, with a perfectly-timed smashing volley, and while staggering under THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 63 the blow, with a second one. Then the British infantry sprang forward with bayonet and claymore, and drove the French in wild flight, with great loss, though not without some to themselves, into Quebec. Wolfe fell shot through the breast while leading his men in the very moment of victory, and as he lay dying on the field his last and almost only words, on learning the completeness of the victory, were, as all the world knows : " Thank God, I die happy." Montcalm, also mortally wounded, died that night. The French army, with no leader but the inefficient governor, Vaudrueil, lost its head, and with him stampeded up the river towards Montreal, while the militia scattered to their often wasted homes. The city was surrendered to the British, and left for the winter with a strong garrison under General Murray. Wolfe's body was taken home, received with due honours, and buried in the family tomb at Greenwich. The excitement in England, where prospective failure at Quebec had again depressed the country, was tremendous in its rebound, while amid the universal exultation the pathos of the young hero's death was keenly felt in every corner of the land. Amherst had failed to reach Montreal that summer. Obstacles of transport and such like, rather than military rebuffs, combined with his constitutional 64 CANADA caution, accounted for his failure, which did not seriously matter, for Quebec had fallen, and French power in Canada was in its death-agony. Levis, in command of the remnants of the French forces, struggled gal- lantly, even making a dash at Quebec in the early spring of 1760. But that summer saw the inevitable end. Amherst came through from the south, and all the English forces closed on Montreal. Levis, with a remnant of two thousand regulars, laid down his arms, and was transported with all such Canadians as wished to leave the country — not a serious number — to France. The Seven Years' War, so far as it concerned North America, was now over. Canada was placed under military rule, and at the general Peace of 1763 was formally trans- ferred to the British Crown. At this glorious close of the war the American colonies — those that had done little, and those that had done their best — united in a transport of Imperial enthusiasm, such as they had never before experienced, and were certainly never to experience again. They had good cause to. The " French terror " had vanished, and the present and future of the whole country was theirs. But it had been achieved mainly by British arms and fleets, and they gratefully acknowledged the fact. A small party in England wished to restore Canada THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 65 at the Treaty, receiving in return the French West India island of Guadeloupe ; not so much because Guadeloupe exported more valuables than the then poor and wild Canada, but because they felt that there would now be no check on the colonies, and that at the first strain on their loyalty, they would break away from the Mother country. Many foreigners who knew America said the same thing. We know now what true prophets these people proved. And it is also tolerably certain that with France seated in Canada, the Americans would never have ventured to dispense with the protection of Great Britain. Perhaps things are better as they are. At any rate, the Dominion of Canada, with which we are now concerned, would not, as such, be in existence. CHAPTER III FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA BY AMERICAN LOYALISTS When British rule began in Canada in 1763, that country was but a small community of French Canadians on the St. Lawrence, with a boundless wilderness to the westward, the control of which, together with its fur- trading stations, fell into British hands. Canada was not then thought of as a future field for British immigrants, but as a poor, cold, outlandish country. England regarded it as a colony of French people, w^ho would always remain French, and her object was to treat them fairly, and attach them to her rule. It consisted mainly of illiterate peasant farmers, with a handful of gentry, merchants, and priests, who possessed their own code of laws and a Church to which they were all in complete and not unwilling spiritual subjec- tion. Of political life they knew absolutely nothing, and wanted to know nothing. They were moral, brave, hardy, reasonably indus- trious, light-hearted, and unambitious. Eng- 66 FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 67 land agreed to the retention of most of their institutions, aboUshing some slight hardships of the old French rule. The American colonies objected to this leniency; above all, to the toleration of the Roman Catholic Church. They thought that the Canadians should somehow be coerced into becoming English-speaking Protestants. So did the few British merchants, mostly from the American colonies, who came after the con- quest to live as traders at Quebec and Montreal. The English Government thought otherwise, with the result that the Canadians under British Governors remained grateful, peace- able, and loyal, till the War of Independence broke out between England and her American colonies. Among the catalogue of grievances proclaimed by the Americans against the Mother country, was her toleration of the religion and laws of the Canadians. The Canadian peasantry, utterly ignorant of every- thing outside their own surroundings, knew nothing of this contemptuous attitude of their neighbours, and being incredibly simple, were cajoled by unscrupulous American emissaries, secretly despatched among them, into the belief that England's generous treatment was a mere blind to enslave them later on, and that certain laws made as a concession to themselves were really fraught C2 68 CANADA with sinister intentions. So, when an American army made a dash for Canada in 1775, the first year of the war between England and her colonies, the rank and file of the militia refused to march. There were scarcely any British troops in the country. Canada was over-run to the gates of Quebec, which was bravely defended through a whole winter by a motley force of about twelve hundred French and British volunteers, with four hundred regulars, under the governor, Lord Dorchester, against the well-sustained and pertinacious attack of an American force. The colony was thus saved, and soon afterwards cleared of the enemy by fresh British troops and never again molested during this war. At the Peace in 1783 the little French province was the only inhabited territory that remained to England in North America, except Nova Scotia, then containing a mere handful of settlers. Great Britain had fallen, as the world thought, for ever from her high estate. In 1763 success in every quarter of the globe put her on a pinnacle of greatness, never before approached and perhaps never since equalled. Now, in 1783 she was humbled indeed, though destined to recover with a rapidity few would have credited. French- Canada, however, was progressing quite smoothly, governed with much con- FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 69 sideration in the conservative church-and- state and semi-paternal fashion that their higher classes, laymen and priests, and their light-hearted, prosperous, unlettered peasan- try were contented with, when suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, the whole situation of the country and its future was altered. Now, throughout the American war a large number of people in every colony, though more in some than in others, remained staunchly loyal to the Crown. The cause of quarrel was not the simple thing it is represented to be even in many of our own history-books, and in all the more elementary American his- tories. George III. was not a monster laying taxes on the poor Americans for the benefit of England. The arguments for the British side of the question were quite as good as those urged by the colonists, and there were thousands of the latter who failed to see just reason for so serious, and as many in those days believed, so wicked an action as taking up arms against the Crown. Moreover, they saw little likelihood of thirteen separate and still jealous commonwealths forming a federation stable enough for such a formidable task. It was this very incapacity to co-operate in the financial and military arrangements, necessary between England and her Ameri- can colonies after the French war, that 70 CANADA mainly contributed to the deadlock which exasperated George III. and his Government into levying those ill-advised taxes, trifling as they were in themselves. Though not strictly unconstitutional, they nevertheless broke a tradition and frightened the Americans into the notion that the Crown had sinister schemes against their liberties, which was not the case. The colonies themselves had shown since the war, for which they owed England so much, an ungracious and impracticable spirit, which the British Government met with a sad technical blunder. A considerable minority of the Americans, though regretting the King's action, and the passions aroused on both sides by it, believed it to be only a temporary expedient, not likely to be repeated, and they were probably right. They did not believe a temporary blunder justified such a fearful upheaval as an appeal to arms implied. These people were mainly drawn from the educated and propertied classes. They had the courage of their opinions, and fought for them throughout the war. For many reasons, chiefly due to the scattered nature of the popu- lation, it required more courage for a man to declare himself a loyalist than a patriot ; the popular element being generally greatly in the ascendant and aroused to fever heat by oratory of a one-sided and often grossly exaggerated kind. Save in a few wholly FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 71 loyal districts, loyalists' property was seized almost at once, and all belonging to them were subjected to boycotting and the harshest treatment, which retaliation, when the oppor- tunity came, made far worse. The loyalists' fighting strength was formed into regiments in Crown pay, and even the non-combatants averse to the war were, as it proceeded, gradually forced by cruel treatment to take refuge within the various British camps and lines of occupation. At the close of the seven years of fighting, nearly a hundred thousand " Tories," as the Americans called them, of all ages and both sexes, including the fighting men, were huddled in the British lines at New York and elsewhere, stripped of every- thing, land or goods, and reduced to destitu- tion. In negotiating terms of peace the New American Government persistently refused any consideration for these people, whose only crime had been to fight for their king and against the disintegration of the British Empire. In any case the vindictive feeling throughout the several states would have rendered the promise of a but half-established Federal Government of slight avail. It now remained for England to do what she could for these unfortunate destitute and homeless people, who possessed little but the half-pay of the soldiers, and very small pensions for a few widows and orphans. Three 72 CANADA millions were voted to them by Parlia- ment later, but owing to the difficulties of proof and complexity of claims, years elapsed before their distribution. I have said this much about the American war because some forty thousand of these loyalists became the founders of British Canada. The truculent attitude of their compatriots towards them was due to the unbridled passions of a heated period, over which the better minds had no control. The Americans had good cause at a later day to repent bitterly of their short-sighted injustice. No modern American writer of repute ever thinks of seriously defending it, while the difficulties of the British Government before the war are better understood and more intelligently sympathized with by recent historical writers in America than is generally the case in Great Britain. The thunders of Whig and Tory orators at one another in the House of Commons at the time were largely inspired by party rancour and shed little light on the true difficulties of the situation, which really lay beyond the Atlantic, in the complex nature of the various colonies and the tem- perament of their people, of which few British politicians knew anything. Now the obvious method of " first aid " to the refugees was to give them land somewhere under the British flag. Nova Scotia, an FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 73 infant colony but sparsely settled, with its capital established at Halifax, was a natural selection, while experts had examined the Canadian wilderness on Lake Ontario, just west of the French occupation, and reported well of it. Lord Dorchester, who by his defence of Quebec had saved Canada during the war, was the Commander-in-Chief in America, now intrusted with the withdrawal of the troops and the harrowing and otherwise arduous task of shipping this host of refugees to the wild forests, where they had to begin life again. About thirty thousand in all were conveyed to Nova Scotia, and destined to be- come the virtual founders of that colony. Lands were allotted according to rank and other conditions, and each shipload or convoy was dumped into the woods with a supply of axes, necessary farming implements, some material for house building, and a guarantee of two years' provisions from Government. But Nova Scotia must be left for another chapter, when the hardships endured by these enforced pioneers and founders of that and the neigh- bouring provinces will be again referred to. In the meantime the lesser group of these United Empire loyalists, as they were called, a term which all alike carried proudly into exile, were settled in a very similar manner in the wild woods of Upper Canada, as it came to be known, of Ontario, as it is known 74 CANADA to-day. Rough preparations were made at a spot which afterwards grew into the city of Kingston, upon Lake Ontario, while surveys were made from thence eastward along the St. Lawrence towards Montreal, and west- ward along the shores of Lake Ontario. Another beginning on a smaller scale was made at Niagara, then a fort and depot of the Canadian fur trade. This last had been a British base of operations in the war just terminated, and was now to be settled by the irregular loyalist soldiers of New York State, who had operated from there. Between eight and ten thousand was the total number of this memorable body of brave men and women who founded Upper Canada — British Canada — just as their comrades founded the maritime provinces, to-day all united in one Dominion. Like the Nova Scotians, they, in great part, consisted of disbanded colonial regiments with their families. It was necessary to place them quite outside the French country, not merely because of almost certain disagreement as near neigh- bours, but for the still stronger reason that the State religion and the semi-feudal land laws of French Canada, of which more will be said later, made such propinquity impossible. But French Canadian civilisation stopped at Montreal. It had more than enough room, between that city and the down-river FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 75 seigneuries below Quebec. It was, moreover, stay-at-home in habit, and regarded Upper Canada as a blank, except for the fur traders and voyageurs. As a matter of fact, these wild forests proved a much better country than Lower Canada (Quebec). But the early sufferings and trials of the loyalists were terrible — worse than in Nova Scotia, for here they were utterly cut off from the world. Kingston was over a hundred miles beyond Montreal, the frontier of Lower Canada. There were no roads through the dense forest that covered the intervening space. The St. Lawrence was unnavigable, even in summer, owing to the rapids at certain points, while Lake Ontario was still a sea of the dead. Like the rest of the loyalist refugees, most of these people had been in good cir- cumstances, numbers of them persons of high position and liberal education in their several colonies. And now, axe in hand, they had to hew clearings out of the dense forests, upon which to raise a bare subsistence, forests, too, alive in summer with maddening hosts of mosquitoes and other pestilent flies, and in winter bound fast with snow and ice. Market facilities, and even a sufficiency of crops to send to market, were years distant. These people, also, were supplied, though from inexperience very inefficiently, with Government rations. They had very few 76 CANADA animals, and many of these died of starvation, or were eaten to save their owners from it. Even those who had some money had httle chance of using it for lack of anything to buy, while the compensation voted by Parliament for confiscated property and losses took some years to reach the individual whose claim was proved. This first wave of United Empire loyalists in Upper Canada associated with the years 1783-4, strongly reinforced by sympathizers straggling in a little later from various distant points, was the true founding of British Canada. Their unique position, as men who had sacrificed everything for their devotion to the Empire, who had been the sole cause of the settling of this hitherto unexplored wilderness, and had been themselves its earliest pioneers, gave them a strong sense of esprit de corps. It is no wonder that they and their children after them considered themselves its particular and privileged in- heritors, as they slowly won their way to a rude competence, and ultimately to all the reasonable comforts and advantages of civi- lization. This attitude on their part was soon provoked, for the great fertility of the hard- won acres became quickly noised abroad, and the Government, responding to demands, practically opened Upper Canada and the southern untouched portions of Lower Canada FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 77 to all and sundry. These demands did not come from Great Britain. Emigration to North America, as we understand it, except from Ulster, had been insignificant for a hundred years. Only Highlanders and Ulster Protestants, for particular reasons connected with their home conditions, had been crossing the Atlantic in any strength. England wanted all her people. Constant wars taxed her supply of men, nor did any urgent conditions of home life force them away, while above all the authorities were strongly against emigra- tion. England, English-speaking Scotland, and Roman Catholic Ireland, were nothing as yet to Canada in this sense. She was actually founded by American loyalists, and was to be carried far on her course mainly by other Americans of no views at all, except a desire for good land at a nominal price. Upper Canada was proving a better country than any at that moment open to emigrants from the New England States, which were then, be it remembered, nearly two centuries old, and provided with a surplus population. On the invitation of the British Government at Quebec they swarmed in by thousands. Admirable settlers they made too, ready to take the oath of allegiance, or any oath, and keep it, for a good homestead, after the manner of the American settlers now swarming into the North-West. The United Empire loyalists, 78 CANADA in their own townships and counties, resented this influx strongly, but were still too poor and struggling to do more than utter from the depth of the woods dark prophecies of evil. There were by 1791 twenty thousand English-speaking settlers outside the French country, though among the United Empire loyalists there were a considerable number of German and Highland settlers and soldiers from the old colonies. It was full time now to consider some definite form of government for these people, and so it was decided to make a separate province of Upper Canada, with a Lieutenant-Governor, and two Cham- bers, on the British plan (with reservations). A minority of British in the outlying part of Lower Canada, as Quebec was then called, both the few city traders and the United Empire loyalist settlers, as well as later Americans, cried out loudly at this : par- ticularly as the experiment of giving repre- sentative Government to Lower Canada, with its overwhelming French population, was to be tried as well. The Canada Act, however, was carried through the British Parliament, and the two provinces in 1791 embarked on what proved in both cases to be the stormy path of representative government. Lower Canada at its ancient capital of Quebec, with all the dignities of an old and now populous province, Upper Canada in primitive fashion at the FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 79 backwoods village of Niagara (otherwise Newark), with twenty-six homespun-clad, travel- stained legislators, in a wooden hall, under Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe, an English soldier who had commanded a loyalist regi- ment in the war. The Quebec Parliament was mainly French and utterly inexperienced, and was under the able Lord Dorchester, now for a second time Governor of Canada, but of a greater and more significant Canada. The little Newark Parliament, on the other hand, though rustic and primitive in access- ories, possessed the instinct and capacity for self-government bred in the bone. Twenty years were now to pass away before Canada's great and devastating war (1812) with America closed the first chapter in her history, and began another. The period of existence as a French province governed by British officials, followed by the excitement of the Revolutionary War and the crowding of British armies on Canadian soil, and then the confusion of the sudden influx of a large British population, was over. All now was in order, and the new machinery was set going for the twenty years, 1792 to 1812, that form a period quite to itself. For Upper Canada, practically cut off from its neighbour, it was a period wholly of develop- ment. Politics counted for almost nothing in comparison, and need not be touched upon 80 CANADA here. The great fact for the reader to re- member, is that its complexion and personnel remained conspicuously British-American. Englishmen, Irishmen, and Lowland Scots- men still took no part worth mentioning as workers in this early making of Canada. The time of the Napoleonic wars was not a period of English immigration, and Canada in this sense did not yet count. Some batches of Highlanders in clans or bits of clans of a military type were brought over, and settled in the eastern end of the province. But for the rest, immigration continued to stream over the American border into Upper Canada, with the full approval of, and more or less regulated by. Government, but em- phatically disapproved of and resented by the United Empire loyalists. These robust people cherished a mortal antipathy to any one con- nected with the land that had treated them so ruthlessly, and abhorred the political opinions which in these early days of Inde- pendence were, no doubt, somewhat vocifer- ously expressed by the noisier element among the Americans. The United Empire loyalist had, indeed, stiffened into a very Tory of Tories. What is more, however, he had begun to emerge from his early trials in the woods. He was first in the woods, and he was naturally first out of them. The advantageous places, too, had FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 81 fallen, and rightly fallen, to his lot. The settlements to the east and west of King- ston, and around Niagara, were becoming a continuous chain of farms. Communica- tions had been opened, stores and mills erected, and as the American shore of Lake Ontario was rapidly settling up, its waters began to be flecked with the first wings of commerce. Moreover, the compensation money from the British Government had been coming in to relieve the higher class of the loyalists, and enable them to take that lead in affairs which education and former ex- perience rendered inevitable. Lastly, a new and rapidly growing province required a considerable number of officials, and by virtue of fitness as well as deserts, such posts when not given to Englishmen — incapable persons with family or political interest as they sometimes were — fell naturally to the loyalist settlers. Their distrust of the Americans was only natural. At the French Revo- lution, and after it, one of the two political parties in the United States, — fortunately the Outs, led by Jefferson — flattered by a Revolution that seemed, in part, the off- spring of their own, worked themselves up into a chronic frenzy of hatred and ill- will and quite illogical abuse of Great Britain. An outburst of Frenchified and fantastically un-American Republicanism — a 82 CANADA grotesque caricature of the Gallic thing — seized on the middle and southern states, and a re-awakened hostility towards Great Britain pervaded half the Union. It may be fairly set down that for the greater part of this first twenty years of Anglo-French Canada, till the blow fell, war with the United States was possible at any moment. So it is not surprising that this filling up of Ontario with Americans aroused remonstrance and sinister forebodings among the United Empire loyalist population, though, of course, it in- creased the value of their property and pro- moted the growth of many villages and little towns of which they were very often the proprietors. But the British Government, through their representatives, unbiassed by the deep pre- judices of the loyalists, had probably taken the measure of risk for and against this allotment of Crown lands to Americans, and the result justified them. Some of these incomers, too, were inoffensive Germans and Quakers from Pennsylvania. Many Americans, again, were really dissatisfied with their new Government, or distrustful of its stability, apparently not without cause. Numbers, no doubt, cared nothing for what might well seem, to a backwoodsman, the distant doings of this or that Government. The financial state of America, too, was very FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 8S shaky and quite unsettled. Independence had naturally brought its burden of novel taxation by a new central Government at Washington, and produced unquestionably a certain reaction that made many people in rural districts almost look back to their former condition as British subjects as to " the good old days." This was inevitable and mere human nature. Great Britain was still powerful and rich, and Canada, it might well be thought, must gather stability from connection with her. Lastly, the dislike of England, already alluded to, was far stronger in the States to the southward than in those adjoining Canada, from which most of the immigrants came. At the same time, there was undoubtedly a strong element of danger in so heterogeneous an incursion, and to some extent it showed itself in later politics and in the war of 1812. But one great safeguard lay in the scattered nature of these settle- ments. Men buried in the virgin forests of Canada in small groups or at long distances from each other, in the first arduous struggle for existence, were at an infinite disadvantage for any sort of serious mischief, even when such was in their thoughts. The United Empire loyalists on the other hand, particu- larly the more leading people among them, were by now out in the daylight, concentrated in close settlements, and not only acquiring 84 CANADA official influence in the colony, but by virtue of means and ability, securing the lead in commercial and professional life. By 1812 Upper Canada had a population of nearly eighty thousand, and the capital had been moved to York (Toronto), a hitherto desolate spot, on Lake Ontario. Lower Canada had, in the meantime, led a far more exciting existence. Quebec, the capital, had grown from a population of eight thousand to twice or thrice that size, while Montreal had followed suit with very similar numbers. The Governor-General resided at Quebec, with supreme command over the whole of British North America, including the now rapidly growing maritime provinces. He had to conduct those long and trying controversies with the United States over the questions inevitable to two sparsely settled countries, with ill-defined spheres of action in a wild, far west, to say nothing of still unsettled boundaries near the Atlantic coast. All this time, too, he was never supplied with a sufficient garrison, and suffered from the natural conviction that in case of war Canada must fall a prey to her more powerful neighbour. " Representative Government " had worked badly at Quebec. The elected assembly, mainly French, had quickly fallen in- to fractious habits. Clever as many members were, they were without parliamentary instinct FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 85 and tradition, and moreover possessed what looked like a real grievance. Now the constitutions given to both pro- vinces were nominally counterparts of that of Great Britain. Speaking broadly a Governor represented the King, a Legislative Council elected for life by the Crown represented the House of Lords, and a popularly elected chamber was a more exact equivalent of the House of Commons. But there was as yet in the Canadian provinces no ministry appointed from both Houses in agreement with the majority in the Commons, and responsible to the country. The Execu- tive was chosen from the Legislative Council literally by the Crown or Governor, not under the advice of ministers. This, though super- ficially resembling the British constitution, was a very different thing indeed, and is generally known as " Representative Govern- ment." The completer form, as practised in experienced England, and known as " Responsible Government," was not due for some time yet in Canada. The old American colonies to be sure enjoyed only Represen- tative Government, but their situation had been quite different. The Governor's Council were usually bred and born colonists in general sympathy with the elected assembly. Above all, the latter had full power of the purse, and if they objected to any proposed action of 86 CANADA their Governor, they simply starved him out by withholding his salary. This had, in fact, been the true weakness of old colonial America. It did not affect the domestic w^elfare of the individual province, but was fatal to any Imperial combination. Indeed, it caused the colonies to drift away from the Mother country, and finally, was a contributing factor to the Revolution. But at Quebec, though the Lower House had from the first partial power over the purse, their withholding supplies made little differ- ence to a Government with other resources, so the earlier colonial assemblies were not much more than debating societies for regis- tering what were presumably the popular wishes. But the earlier French- Canadian legislators — doctors, attorneys, and shop- keepers — largely represented illiterate constit- uencies that had no aspirations whatever. The members, however, fully made up for their unambitious constituents, and aspired to nothing less than the full powers of the British House of Commons. Nay, they demanded more, for they were naturally ill-informed, and did not fully understand the British constitution or the limits which it mercifully laid even on a House of Commons. To have given a small colony of Anglo- Saxons Responsible Government would have been premature, but to have given it to FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 87 one overwhelmingly- French in numbers, and singularly lacking in political temper and experience, in the presence of an intelligent British minority, would have been madness, even on an island removed from the world's alarms by which Lower Canada was sur- rounded. The French Revolution, with its blatant atheism, had naturally disgusted the Canadian Catholic Church and a majority of its laity, who were very conservative in instinct and staunchly Catholic. But a certain class of young men in the cities had been tainted with its worst principles. Moreover Republican France, now in close relationship with one of the two parties in Republican America, began to send out secret emissaries among the ignorant Canadian habi- tants, who had gathered nothing in worldly wisdom, though much in worldly welfare and prosperity since, in 1775, they had nearly given Canada over to the Americans, who would have contemptuously crushed out of existence all that they cherished. Insinuating proclama- tions were now posted up in public places throughout the lower province from " The French of France to their brothers in Canada.'^'' American immigrants had been coming in to the wilderness country south of Quebec, between the French districts and the American border, on the same conditions as the others had gone into Upper Canada. Together 88 CANADA with a minority of United Empire loyalists and other British, they numbered in 1812 about thirty thousand, as against about a hundred and fifty thousand French. The American settlers in Lower Canada evoked less disapproval from the United Empire loyalists and the other British in that province. For owing to political bitterness the relations between French and English were now so strained, that the latter, being at such great numerical disadvantage, welcomed every accession of racial strength, while the Ameri- can immigrants upon this frontier never showed any symptoms of disloyalty. More- over, in face of the great French majority, they were inclined to make common cause with their countrymen who had come in earlier under different conditions. Many causes, impossible to enter into here, had contributed to exasperate the two races against one another. Though even then, it should be remembered, it was, for the most part only in Quebec, the capital, and Montreal, already more populous, that to any great extent French and English lived side by side and met face to face. Here the quarrels between the perfervid French politicians, supported by a violent press, and the British official circles had extended itself to all classes except the Catholic clergy, whose hatred of popular FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 89 politics and their gratitude to the Crown kept them absolutely loyal. There was not so much actual disloyalty as rather a violent quarrel between the two races. The country British, energetic, active farmers, in a hopeless minority in the legislature, bitterly resented what seemed to them a continuous expenditure of futile oratory on the rights and wrongs of the Assembly, without any attempt to promote those public works, roads, canals, and such like, that were the chief need of an undevel- oped country. An old soldier, General Craig, who would have made a splendid war governor, as a peace governor only added fuel to the fire by dismissing the Assembly, with a curt lecture on their useless loquacity and waste of the public time. He went home to die, and in due course Sir George Prevost, an admirable peace governor, arrived to pour considerable oil on the troubled waters. Immediately afterwards the war with America broke out, and the Governor whose brief services prior to it were most valuable, though a soldier, proved unequal to the greater task. England was in the death struggle with Napoleon when the United States declared war. It was the act entirely of the party in power, that old French party then under President Madison, with its chief strength in the southern slave states. The opposition was strongest in the New England provinces. 90 CANADA which, hating Napoleon, made open protest, and fortunately for England and Canada, took little part in the struggle, which was simple enough, for it was a war of invasion and aggression on the part of their Govern- ment. The war party, for no logical reason, had been simmering with hostility against England for twenty years. They had now a grievance in the injury to trade caused by the far-reaching blockades that England, in her struggle for life with Napoleon, and in reply to his measures of a like kind, had been compelled to proclaim. The right of search for deserters on the high seas, insisted upon by the British Government, though in fact a recognized practice from the fact that any Briton could become an American citizen, caused inevitable mistakes and great irrita- tion on both sides. Above all, however, the war party then wanted Canada, and its capture appeared a simple matter. Nearly one hundred thousand regulars and militia were voted by Congress. Thundering procla- mations after the style of Napoleon, only in turgid English, were issued by the political amateurs who were appointed to command the various armies, and the cry, " On to Canada ! " was raised in the middle and southern states with enthusiasm and confidence. The Ameri- cans had in truth been woefully misled by some of their own people in Upper Canada, FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 91 and it is not surprising that the squabbles of French and Enghsh in Lower Canada seemed to make that province an easy prey. It was beheved in the United States, the wash being perhaps in part father to the thought, that the British of Canada were only waiting an opportunity to throw off their allegiance, and transfer it to the Republic. So the Canadians of Upper Canada were addressed in language of brotherly compassion, as unwilling slaves trampled under the feet of a tyrannical Government. The reader can, no doubt, imagine what the loyalists, who formed the active leading element and the prospective fighting strength of the province, thought of all this. The Americans had decided first to capture the Upper Province — a simple matter as it seemed — and from thence attack Lower Canada. In the first place, the former lay more open to attack; in the second, their means for building fleets on Lakes Ontario and Erie were greater than those of the British. Lastly, as we have seen, the New England states, which adjoined Lower Canada, virtually refused to take any part in the war. But, strangest thing of all, at the declaration of war, the French-Canadians threw aside their bitter quarrel with their British fellow- subjects, and almost as one man declared their unswerving loyalty. In the former attack 92 CANADA on Canada, thirty-five years previously, it will be remembered there had been no domestic quarrel whatever, quite the contrary ; but the rank and file of the militia had mutinously refused to march. On this occasion as many French militia regiments as were required came forward cheerfully. And though with some notable exceptions, owing to the American attack being mainly directed throughout the war on Upper Canada, they were less in the fighting line, than on garrison duty, they were ready when wanted, and on such occasions behaved admirably. The case of Canada really did seem hopeless. There were only four thousand regular troops in both provinces, and England was struggling for her life in Europe. And no one knew, with any certainty, how the thousands of American settlers in Canada would act. Unhappily, we have no space here for any account of this desperate and entirely successful three years' defence of Canada against tremendous numeri- cal odds. A noble and able British officer. Governor and Commandant of the Upper Province — Major-General Sir Isaac Brock — had, fortunately, full charge of the earlier operations. With a force half the size of his immediate opponents, he crossed the boundary and captured the whole of the first invading army, numbering two thousand five hundred men, together with its general at FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 9a Detroit. Hurrying back to command the small force of regulars and United Empire loyalist militia gathered at Niagara to repel a more serious attack, he fell dead in the glorious victory of Queenston Heights, where the enemy were hurled back across the river with the loss of one thousand men. The war lasted through 1812, 1813, and 1814. The principal scene of operations was the thirty- mile frontier of the Niagara River, between Lakes Erie and Ontario, and secondly, the eastern end of Lake Ontario about Kingston, and along the St. Lawrence river from thence to Montreal. Little fleets w^ere built by either side on the two lakes, and played their part in combats with one another, and in convoying troops and provisions. The brunt of the fighting throughout the war fell on four or five British regiments, nobly supported by a lesser number of United Empire loyalist militia, only thus limited because more could not be armed and fed. The difficulties of provision- ing fighting troops in that remote, scantily settled country, where the militia had to be drawn during the working season from the very men who were needed to grow the food, was prodigious. American forces raided, burned, and ravaged portions of Western Ontario on more than one occasion, but were always in the end beaten back, and counter-raids made on American territory. 94 CANADA The disparity in the numbers under arms is almost absurd on paper, but the American mihtia proved well-nigh useless. Their regulars, too, for a long time lacked experience. They were until quite late in the war shockingly led, what capacity existed being submerged in favour of amateurs or incompetent men with political influence at Washington. The British regulars, on the other hand, were of the very finest metal, and with rare exceptions, led with skill and dash. Their record through three years of hardship, scanty rations, fierce extremes of climate, and constant fighting against great odds, was no whit inferior to that of their contemporaries under Wellington in the Peninsula, and the more creditable, since the deeds of men and officers out here were unnoticed. No public eye was on them, and posterity to this day knows next to nothing of their heroism, and scarcely realises that they saved Canada. The Upper Canada militia fought well, and with a determination one would expect of the sons of a military colony fighting for everything they held dear against men who represented at that time the mortal enemies of their stock. The Americans in the Upper Province had refused to be regarded as slaves to be rescued, inas- much as, with some troublesome exceptions, they remained neutral. Those in the Lower Province w^ere nearly all New Englanders, FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 95 and adjoined New England, which kept out ol the land quarrel. Toronto, with its public records, was burnt by the Americans, to which an English expedition later replied by burning the capital at Washington. At the close of the war the Americans did not occupy a foot of the soil they had struggled for three years to conquer, while the British actually held two or three posts on American territory. The fiercest battle of the war was that of " Lundy's Lane," close to Niagara Falls. Hotly contested throughout a summer night, it was left undecided, but the British camped on the field, and the Americans retired to their own side — ^permanently as it proved. There had been several American expedi- tions in seemingly overwhelming strength against Montreal. On each occasion, once by a small French force in their front at Chateauguay, and on another by a heavy rearguard attack of British regulars at Chrystler's Farm, the enemy had been forced, or rather intimidated, to a final retreat, the disgrace in both cases being due to utterly incapable leadership. In the year 1814, when Peace was made in Europe on the abdication of Napoleon, and the British veterans from the Peninsula were set free for American service, the possibility of conquering Canada had, of course, utterly disappeared. The Americans, whose trade had suffered frightfully during 96 CANADA the war, were heartily sick of it, and both nations were glad enough to conclude peace in the beginning of 1815, which virtually left everything as it was before. The Americans had suffered disastrously through the entire stoppage of their sea-borne trade. To Great Britain, the war, which she had not sought, had been a side issue, but none the less damaging, not merely from the inter- ruption of her trade with the United States but from the injury inflicted on her commerce by American privateers. Her North American provinces had, on the whole, benefited greatly in a commercial sense, as well as in the prestige gained by what, for them, had been a triumphant war. Upper Canada alone had suffered from its ravages, but then her people had reaped the greater share of the glory, a precious heirloom that they Avill never cease to cherish. This war, together with the United Empire loyalist traditions in which British Canada was founded, accounts for many things that the modern English politician and writer and the holiday visitor to Canada cannot understand. Neither oratory nor journalism deals with them, nor wishes to. They are in the " atmosphere." CHAPTER IV THROUGH REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION It may be noted that the history of Canada, from the time it became a British colony to the present day, falls naturally into three distinct periods of about fifty years each. The Peace of 1815 closed the first ; Federation of all the provinces in 1867 closed the second, while nearly half a century has passed since that day. The first period was full of great events, of war and war's alarms, and the dramatic movement of large populations that founded the Canada we know to-day. It closed with a fierce war in which British and French fought shoulder to shoulder in defence of their common country, and swept away the injurious and widespread impression in the world that the British provinces were destined to be quickly absorbed by the United States, and Great Britain, like France, to be expelled from North America. The second cycle found the Canadians starting afresh, amid a peaceful world, with a D 97 98 CANADA record of achievements both in peace and war, behind them, such as few young countries have possessed. Henceforward, both Canada and the United States w^ere to fall out of touch with European complications, and to cease from serious bickerings with one another. The United States had discovered that excursions against Canada were not the promenades that many had believed they would prove, but above all, that war with a paramount sea power like England meant commercial ruin. The Universal Peace of 1815, however, opened altogether a new era in Canada, for it was only now that British immigration really began to flow in. Hitherto, the colony had been regarded by the British public rather as one of the minor pawns in the great game of war. Now she became all at once an object of immediate interest, as the goal of the great exodus from the Mother country which the Peace brought about. Over twenty years of exhausting war had given Englishmen plenty to do, but the reaction at its close w^as very great. Thousands of soldiers, for one thing, were disbanded, while thousands of other men lost such employments as war created, while the fall in agricultural prices, which had been very high, threw more w^ork- men adrift. It was an old and convenient custom for such countries as possessed it to REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 99 reward their soldiers with grants of unoccupied land. So a great number of retired naval and military officers, as well as of disbanded soldiers, were given grants in Canada, some in the Lower, but mostly in the Upper Province. Other immigrants of all sorts followed. There was an over-supply of agricultural labour at starvation wages in England, and great numbers of handloom weavers in the North and elsewhere were in distress owing to improvements in machinery and concentration of mills in the towns. The Irish Catholics, who were multiplying and swarming in Ireland, on the strength of the precarious potato crop, moved very little as yet anywhere. But from every other part of England and Scotland, Lowland and Highland, immigration poured over to Canada in a steady stream. In some single years as many as fifty thousand souls were actually landed at Quebec out of the old crowded sail- ing ships in which the immigrants were con- veyed, the passage often occupying from two to three months. They came through various channels, such as philanthropic societies and land companies, or independently and at their own expense. Some went to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or the English districts of Quebec. But the great majority proceeded to the better lands of Upper Canada. The difference this influx D2 100 CANADA made to a province of only eighty thousand population may be imagined. But a point to oe remembered is that the great mass of this inflowing population took for a long time very little part in the politics or government of their adopted country. They spread out among the vast forests that covered much mag- nificent land in the uncleared back country, or filled in the vacant spaces between the settled districts, or again worked as labourers for those already established. The mass of them were poor people, without, in those days, a vote at home, and though the franchise in Canada was very liberal, the new comers, busy at making a living, or buried in the forests cutting out the nucleus of homes, under- stood very little of what was going on and cared less. Now the United Empire loyalists had done most of the militia fighting during the war, and as their property lay along the frontier in little towns or farms, they had suffered most from American raids. Even before the war they had been inclined to consider, and not unnat- urally, that Upper Canada was their special heritage. They held this faith still more strongly after their victorious struggle, and disliked the Americans even more if possible than before. The greater part of the best educated and well-to-do people in the Upper province, for reasons already given, were I REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 101 United Empire loyalists, and they gradually developed a sort of clique which virtually governed the country and kept all the offices within its own circle. The Lieutenant- Governors and their officials, who came out from England, found themselves naturally surrounded by this class, since they formed the gentry, as it were, of the province, and generally fell in with their point of view, which was a distinctly aristocratic one. This element was increased by the number of half- pay officers, who came out as settlers and sympathized with their anti-democratic atmosphere, while the numerous British garrisons quartered in the country still further helped to sustain it. The Governor's Council or Upper House of the Legislature was entirely chosen from this class, and they controlled for a long time a majority in the Lower House. But when a growing popular opposition to this state of things resulted in a popular majority, the Upper House threw out all measures distasteful to it with im- punity. The House of Assembly might with- hold or threaten to withhold supplies, but the Governor and his Executive had other mone- tary sources on which to draw for necessary expenditure. The great dread of the United Empire loyalists and their friends, otherwise known as the Tory party, in Upper Canada, was of Republican influences, and the customs 102 CANADA associated with them. Of Americans them- selves they knew chiefly the worst side. Their own savage treatment by them was an un- forgetable testimony to it. The apparent failure of the American system in the recent war against Canada seemed to them another object-lesson in Republicanism. They well remembered, too, how a long continued policy of indifference on the part of the Mother country and weak Governors had made pos- sible the Revolutionary war. They believed in a strong Government, unswervingly devoted to the British connection, and vigilant to keep out American notions. And it is only fair to state that at that nascent period of the Republic there were features in its attitude towards outsiders, both as a nation and as individuals, that were no little exasperating. The loud- mouthed and the ignorant were very much to the front, and the ignorance of the more ignorant American, as regarding all other countries, their people and forms of government, was prodigious and expressed in exaggerated and often foolish language, a characteristic not yet wholly extinct. This party, then, or rather the powerful group and their friends which controlled it, became known as the " Family Compact," since many of the principal Tory families were more or less connected by marriage. The greater part of the opposition to them REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 103 was at first drawn from the American settlers, who had outnumbered the United Empire loyahsts, but, speaking generally, had con- ducted themselves as peaceful citizens. In political life, however, they resented being ruled by what they regarded as an oligarchy with aristocratic pretensions to look down on them. Their leaders were among the most extreme of their party, and made the fatal error of continually holding up American institutions as a model and even hinting at support from the United States. This was regarded as rank treachery by the Govern- ment and the Family Compact party. Though many of these demands were reason- able enough and most of them at a later day became law, the language in which they were sometimes expressed was ill-balanced and tactless, and only calculated to inflame the passions of the United Empire loyalist element, who had not gone into the wilderness and twice fought against Americans and their repudiated principles, to have them now flung at their heads as a model to be emulated. But the opposition got no nearer power. Reasonable and democratic aspirations became identified with Republicanism and disloya] intentions. The Family Compact party in power had virtually the control of large areas of wild Crown lands, and used this for strengthening 104 CANADA their own position, which they honestly regarded as essential to British rule and traditions. They also took measures for suppressing troublesome agitators which, to modern minds, seem harsh and summary. They were not only intrenched behind privilege and material power, but had the strong cry of Anti-Republicanism, with which to rally the whole United Empire loyalist rank and file and the British-born of the population. They overdid this at last ; for a large number of the unprivileged portion of the old loyalist stock and the rapidly growing British born population joined what may be called the American element in demanding that government should be ad- ministered more in accord with the wishes and interests of the people, and, as a first instalment, that the majority now acquired in the House of Assembly should be at least represented in the Council (Upper House) and Executive. This moderate aspiration was resisted, and though the usual method of withholding supplies was adopted, it was not of much avail when the Government had other resources, such as Crown lands, customs, and the subsidy from England that was still necessary to these young colonies. One obstacle to reform was that the ex- tremists with American predilections chiefly voiced them in violent language, and that REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 105 was quite enough for the Tories and the Government. The Reformers were really of two parties, the one loyal and moderate, the other extreme and with strong Republican proclivities. An elected Upper House, an Executive chosen from the popular majority with a Governor carrying out its measures, a form, in short, of what is called Responsible Government, was the extreme demand. In a raw colony, where sufficiently capable men were naturally scarce, and abounding in a doubtfully loyal element, this was out of the question. If Upper Canada had been an island ii^ mid- Atlantic, it was not yet ripe for such a system, but situated alongside of a powerful and none too friendly English- speaking Republic, such an experiment would have been fatal. Tiie situation was further embittered, too, by a group of politicians in England, who were in favour of letting the colonies go, and perfectly ignorant themselves of the complexities of Canadian life, loudly encouraged the firebrand orators at Toronto. The Colonial Office was perplexed by the situation, and the British Government blew hot and cold, so far as the politics and instructions of successive Lieutenant-Govern- ors despatched to Upper Canada were con- cerned. But it did not much matter. Tory and Liberal, in spite of some superficial resemblance, meant a different thing in 106 CANADA Canada from what they did in England. EngHsh visitors, not long enough in the country to understand the subtleties of the question, brought home lurid tales of the state of both provinces as seen through the spec- tacles of their own political proclivities. It became generally known however that political and social affairs both were in a bad way. Immigration, hitherto large and con- tinuous, began to flag, and in 1837 the extreme wing of the reform party in Upper Canada, and the much larger violent French party of Lower Canada — of which a word presently — broke out into insurrection. In Upper Canada it was headed by a violent, pro- American little Scotsman named Mackenzie. It is enough to say that it was a fiasco and easily suppressed by the militia, but simmered on mainly as mere brigandage carried on by Mackenzie and bands of followers, mainly ruffians from the United States side, the Government of that country displaying a rather culpable delay in effecting their suppression. Mackenzie, a newspaper editor and printer, was for long the enjant terrible of the Govern- ment in Upper Canada, and was treated occa- sionally with a severity that only made him a greater hero, but a good deal of reason was mingled with a good deal of madness in his conduct. But he carried only a fraction of REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 107 the reform party with him in sympathy with his final move, and still fewer into action. It is often and truly remarked to-day, that nearly everything Mackenzie and his party, vio- lent or moderate, advocated, is now embodied in the Canadian constitution, as if this were a justification of his methods and demands ! Such a deduction is of course delusive. What at one period is only just and obvious, at another may be madness, and in these early struggles for popular government in Canada, both parties were driven into extremes by the exceptional circumstances of the settlement of the colony, and the great ominous shadow of the United States perpetually hanging over them. The Insurrection of 1837 brought about changes which terminated the existence of Upper Canada as a separately governed colony, a little sooner, perhaps, than would otherwise have been the case. There is little doubt however that the conferring of Representative Government on the French in 1791 was a mistake. It is quite true that it gave them forty- six years of experience before they, too, broke out into a yet more serious insurrection. But this experience was at the painful cost of continuous discord and racial bitterness, while at the end of it they seemed to have learnt almost nothing but a considerable measure of eloquence. There was, of course, 108 CANADA in 1791 no comparison between the capacities of the two provinces for self-government, but, as it was unavoidable in the one case, a misplaced sense of equity more apparent than real extended it to the other, whose people scarcely knew what it meant. Another error was made, too, in the language employed when conferring the boon. For each province was given to understand, though such could never have been seriously intended, that they were to enjoy the full liberties of the British constitution ; in other words. Responsible Government. This was over a hundred years ago. The British constitution, as we know, is not a document, but a matter of slow growth. Things were even vaguer then than they are now, nevertheless the provinces had on paper the full form of a British Government, a Gover- nor representing the King, an Upper House, nominated for life by the Crown, and an elected Lower House. But a colonial Governor had more power than the King at home, while the Upper House was much stronger than the House of Lords. If these provinces got the shadow rather than the substance, it may be remembered that even in the Mother country popular government had not then developed to what we now understand by the word. The electorate was diminutive in number and in scores of constituencies had no appreciable existence, while the rule of a ministry REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 109 (Executive it was called in the colonies) repre- senting the popular majority of the moment, was hardly an established principle. The power of the purse, conclusive in England, was another matter in a new country which the British Government still subsidised, and where the Crown owned large undeveloped properties. But at any rate the Canadians of both provinces could plausibly interpret the charter of their constitution as meaning a great deal more than the Crown had actually intended, or would have been right in in- tending, at that moment. The hope of a better understanding in the Lower Province arising out of the war of 1812-15 soon vanished. The French, an overwhelming majority in the popular House, continued to devote their entire energies to obtaining control of the colony. Nearly all the commercial wealth, which created home markets and provided channels to outside markets for the French peasant farmers, the bulk of the French population, was in English hands and created by English enterprise. Fifty-thousand British agriculturists in their own districts of Lower Canada were equally in advance of the illiterate, unprogressive French habitant. Little attention was paid in this eloquent assembly to those public works for facilitating developments that are the life-blood of new countries, and in which 110 CANADA in this case the welfare of the Upper Province that lay behind was also involved. The methods and characteristics of the French majority were a sufficient testimony of the use they would make of such power should they be able to obtain it. But with the whole of the enterprise in every department of industry in the hands of the British, it was not likely that a Government at the beginning of the 19th century, who had planted thousands of British settlers in the province, would deliver them over to a half-fledged assembly of French- Canadian Catholics. Great Britain had in fact made a grave mistake in rushing the province into popular Government, and was now reaping the fruits. The politicians were largely young doctors, lawyers and journalists, filled with theories derived at second-hand from the British constitution, the French Revolution, and the American democracy. The bulk of their constituents were peasants, who could rarely read or write, who were quite ready to be entertained in the country by inflammatory speeches, cared for nothing outside their parishes, lived in much rude comfort, and hadn't even the shadow of a grievance. The French politicians, however, were not satisfied with demanding the full rights of the British Parliament, which none of the politically REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 111 educated British provinces had yet been given, but they even demanded an elective Upper House, which would have amounted in this case to single chamber government in the French interest. Compromise, which in the past has been the soul of the English political system, they couldn't even compre- hend. The revenues of the province, speaking broadly, were derived from an old Crown custom duty on spirits and molasses, secondly from the Crown lands, and thirdly from the duties charged on imports by the province. The last was in the hands of the Assembly, the two first provisionally retained by the Crown. The main efforts of the French- Canadians, supported by a few British mem- bers, was to get control of the whole revenue. This was actually conceded in consideration of a fixed Civil list as provision for all the salaries necessary for the officials, judges, and so forth. But as the Assembly insisted on an annual scrutiny of these salaries, which amounted to placing the machinery of govern- ment at their mercy, and struck out the word " fixed," another deadlock ensued, which lasted till the Revolution in 1837. In brief the French-Canadian legislature, by far the least capable in Parliamentary wisdom and experience of any then meeting under the British Crown, demanded more power than was possessed by the English House 112 CANADA of Commons. Indeed even more than this, the virtual suppression of a minority re- presenting the whole progressive element in the Colony. It must be admitted that the British did not meet this demand in a meek spirit, while lack of wisdom had been shown in not apportioning offices with equity between the races. The official and military element, too, behaved with a good deal of social arro- gance, so much so indeed that a large British following would have certainly joined the French, had the latter been less extravagant in their demands, and less vituperative towards everything British when these were not granted. If the French forgot the unex- ampled generosity of Great Britain towards them at the Conquest, the British now ex- hibited an unfortunate display of contempt for the French, as if for an inferior race, and the mutual passions of the two were lashed to white heat. An immense amount of time had been wasted in futile and often foolish oratory in the Assembly, and in 1835, as if to give a specimen of this verbosity, a petition of ninety-four Resolutions, which could readily have been expressed in twenty-five, was forwarded to England, breathing rebellion if the answ^er were unfavourable. Naturally it was so, and a rebellion broke out, headed by Papineau, a well-educated, hot-headed, REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 118 eloquent leader of a band of fiery or dreamy politicians, with wild ideas of setting up a Republic under the United States, so far as they had definite ideas at all. It must be said at once that a majority of the French would have nothing to do with the rising and disapproved of it, while the Church issued solemn denunciations of the rebels. The rebellion, however, was much more serious than that in Upper Canada, if only from the fact that a far greater number of deluded men, peasants of one or two districts, and to\vnsmen, took the field. They hadn't a chance against the regular troops quartered in the Colony, to say nothing of the British militia of the province, and indeed, some French militia were reported willing to act against them if wanted. Papineau escaped to the States before facing a shot, but some of the leaders and their followers fought bravely though quite uselessly. A good deal of property was destroyed, and some hundreds of lives on the insurgent side were sacrificed. These two rebellions coming together awoke the British Government to the unsatisfactory state of the Canadas. In the next year, 1839, Lord Durham, a liberal-minded and able statesman, was sent to Canada to report on the situation, and was armed with very wide powers. The constitution of Lower 114 CANADA Canada was temporarily suspended, and Lord Durham's celebrated " Report " is a masterly description of the state of the country. In Lower Canada he found, not two political parties, but " two nations warring within a single state." The Liberals he had expected to find in the French party were in everything — except declamation and a desire to oust the English and control the Govern- ment — more reactionary and conservative in mind and habit than any community he had ever seen. The Tories, on the other hand, with the exception of a determination not to be controlled by Frenchmen, were the party of energy, enterprise, and progress. In short, the ideas of the two races were quite irreconcilable. Their antecedents seemed as hopelessly divergent as their views of life. The French- Canadians were not to be blamed. They were easily led, as they still are, by rousing speakers, but otherwise, a quiet life in their own parishes of the kind they had always enjoyed was all they asked for. They cared nothing for development, for opening out the country, for canals or roads. They disliked the British, and dreaded being sub- merged by them, and their leaders adopted the expedient of endeavouring to submerge the British, politically. The latter in their turn with characteristic complacency despised them, and unhappily showed it to an extent REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 115 that no high-spirited people could possibly have borne. The cure for all this was to be a Union between the two provinces, with a common Parliament and Government. The French stoutly objected, but the British of Quebec were naturally delighted. In Upper Canada, their constitution not being suspended the consent of its Legislature had to be gained. The popular party offered no objection to the Union, as it prom'sed to lessen or abolish the domination of the Family Compact. The latter could have defeated it, for the Tories then possessed a majority in the Assembly, as well as the prestige of having suppressed the rebellion. To their lasting honour, under the urgent appeal of the Home Govern- ment, the Compact leaders supplemented the patriotism they had so often shown on the battlefield by the even greater sacrifice of their political power. For the Union meant their extinction. So in 1842 the two Canadas were united, their populations being now about equal, some half a million in each. There were two Houses in the new Parliament, a Legislative Council, appointed by the Crown, and an elected Assembly composed of an equal number from each province, now to be called Canada East and Canada West respectively, and united under one Governor, resident at 116 CANADA Quebec. The United Parliament was to sit at Kingston and Montreal. It was hoped by blending the French and English in nearly even numbers — for the latter had about a seventh of the representation in Lower Canada, and were solid in the Upper Province — that the racial split might be broken and parties formed on other and more sensible lines. It was a reasonable experiment, and though the twenty-five years of Union were disfigured by bitter racial animosities and a great deal of heated action and violent talk, the period served some good purposes. French politicians, by constant association on tolerably equal terms with those of a race to the manner born as it were, acquired inevi- tably a better instinct for the game of state- craft, as played by men of British blood. By degrees they produced from their ranks quite a number of men who were as capable of taking a cool-headed, well-balanced, un- prejudiced view of the welfare of the country generally as the best of their colleagues from Upper Canada. More than one French- Canadian who had carried a musket in the rebellion, lived to be a loyal minister of the British Crown. This twenty-five years, though for the most part stormy, and as an experiment, upon the whole unsuccessful, was, nevertheless, iavaluable as a political training. Above all it REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 117 proved the stepping-stone to Responsible Government. It is impossible here to touch upon the many causes of dispute that made politics so bitter during this period. When com- munities of about equal size, of different race, language, faith, and ideas, and very little knowledge one of the other, are united in one popular form of government, it can easily be imagined what friction must occur. There were British Tories and British Radicals, and thirdly the French, a situation w^hich would seem, on the face of it, to give the latter a controlling voice. But on racial questions the British closed their ranks, while on others the French were by no means at one. As a whole, influenced by their Church, they were anti- American, while the British Liberals, though generally loyal, represented American ideas, which the strongest French interests disliked, and the British Tories detested. So, in spite of fierce racial controversies, culminating sometimes in outside mob riots, a great deal of useful legislation was passed dealing with public works, municipal governments, and education. Responsible Government did not come even now suddenly and loud proclamation. It seemed destined in all the North American colonies to come of itself at the right and proper moment, and then quietly to remain an 118 CANADA accomplished fact. It was expected at once in 1841, though it is rather doubtful if our present definite conception of its meaning was even then quite fully recognized. The Executive in the Union Government consisted of eight members selected by the Governor or Crown from both houses, and it was understood that they were to be in sympathy with the Parliamentary majority. This understanding was not immediately acted on. It seemed even to conscientious and highminded Governors like severing the last link of the Crown's authority. The same occurred with regard to patronage, which with full Responsible Govern- ment falls, of course, to the advisers of the Crown, otherwise the party in power. There was no further trouble in money matters, for a fixed sum for the Civil list had been settled, and the Lower House had full control of the rest. It was in 1848 that Responsible Govern- ment, though steadily approaching, came, as it were, in a moment. Lord Elgin, an able and enlightened Governor, when the Liberals were returned to power after a stormy election, accepted all their recommendations for the Executive, now gradually getting to be called the Ministry, and established a precedent that was finally recognised. Patronage, too, passed automatically out of the Governor's hands, or rather was now exercised by him in accordance with the nomination of his REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 119 ministers representing the party in power for the moment. That full Responsible Government came thus gradually to its final accomplishment may be set down to the happy political instinct of the British race, who, from long and strenuous contentions between the too hasty and the too cautious, have so frequently evolved the right policy at just the right moment. When the two pro- vinces were separate, it would have been madness in the one and premature in the other. Even w^hen united, it was probably a wholesome thing that so great a change in coxonial government should have taken seven years of tentative experiment and controversy before fulfilment. The same result was accomplished at about the same time in the other three British provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, as will be recorded in a later chapter. CHAPTER V FEDERATION The Federation of all the British North American provinces had been in the thoughts of more than one far sighted Governor- General even in the 18th century, and was discussed by others after the war of 1812. But the vast distances between them, in the days before steam, had proved an insuperable deterrent. Now, however, in the early sixties, when steamships were crossing the Atlantic, and running upon all the lakes and rivers, when the Grand Trunk Railway, with diverging branches, had pushed right through the two Canadas, and the Inter-colonial Railway from Quebec to the maritime provinces was already projected, the time seemed ripe. Other causes, too, were working in its favour in the two Canadas. One of them was a sense of insecurity, another, the most urgent, perhaps, was the virtual failure of their own political Union. As regards the former, the American Civil War, 1861-5, had stirred afresh the old ill-feeling between Great Britain and the 120 FEDERATION 121 United States. Hitherto the political party in America most hostile to Canada and England had been the one chiefly domi- nated by the southern and slave-holding states, in short, the democratic party ; which had been for most of the first half of the century in power at Washington. The old Federals, now known as the Republican Party, had succeeded to office before the war, and had waged that tremendous contest which consolidated all the northern states, whatever their former politics, in a successful effort to maintain the Union against the over- strained doctrine of States' rights. This last embodied the right to secede at any time from the Union, while negro slavery, though its suppression was not the actual motive of the war, was its most conspicuous result. The institution of slavery, however, was the main cause of those differences of opinion regarding the respective rights of the states and the Central Government which provoked the quarrel. It was now the northern states that were in ill-humour with England. For, rightly or wrongly, they accused her of conniving at privateers in the southern or rebel interest, a dispute long afterwards settled by our payment to the United States of the famous " Alabama " claims. Still more resented was the fact that the sympathy of a strong party 122 CANADA in England as well as in Canada had been outspokenly given to the south. This was partly the generous admiration for a weaker side struggling gallantly against odds, partly ill-concealed but only human satisfaction at the domestic difficulties of a nation which had once successfully rebelled against us, and was now in its turn struggling against rebellion. The apparent breakdown, as it seemed, too, of a much-vaunted Republic, whose perfections had been shouted across the border at Canadians for eighty years, and of which the average Englishman liked only to see the worst side, was not unpleasant. So in 1865, with the south crushed, and the victorious north crowded with soldiers in ill-humour with us, Canadians felt uncomfort- able. Moreover, disbanded Irish soldiers, under Fenian auspices, began to make raids in force on Canada, and had several encounters with Canadian troops, followed by very lukewarm efforts at repression by the American Government. All these things helped to make for Federation, which had been openly discussed even during the American Civil War. For in 1864 the three maritime pro- vinces, the weakest of the five, had formally considered a Union of some kind among themselves, with an eye to economy as well as to dauG^er. The proposal fell through automatically, when the two big Canadas FEDERATION 123 proposed a general Confederation. For having failed to get along together they had other motives for change besides external danger. One other incident at this moment helped to advance the cause of Federation. A Reciprocity Treaty with the United States had existed since 1850. At its expiry in 1865, that country, hoping to impress on Canada how much she lost by remaining tied to the Mother country, and outside the Union, and in its displeasure with everything British, refused to renew it. So a feeling that unity of defence in trade as well as in war would be a good thing, took vague shape. Still there were immense internal difficulties to be overcome. French Canada not unnaturally dreaded a Confederation which would be overwhelmingly British, in spite of the com- pensating fact that she would again have the sole management of her provincial affairs. Upper Canada, divided between Liberals and Tories, could not see alike on any single question. In both provinces politics were so bitter and personal that however strong the reasons for Federation, only a great man could have brought it about then, and, having carried the two Canadas, have reconciled the claims of the three maritime pro\iices. For the people of these last were jealous of the preponderating strength 124 CANADA of the Canadas, and being practically all of British loyalist stock, with comparatively trifling domestic differences, mistrusted pro- vinces where French Catholics, American sympathizers, and intolerant Orangemen made constant discord. John A. Macdonald, the greatest statesman British North America has yet produced, and the Conservative leader in the United Parliament of the two Canadas, was the man who mainly brought about this happy con- summation. He has been often likened to Lord Beaconsfield for his foresight, his tact and shrewdness in managing men, and his Imperialistic proclivities. Oddly enough, too, there was a touch of personal resemblance. To relate here how Sir John Macdonald, as he afterwards became, gradually won over the leaders of the antagonistic elements, French and British, and his own political enemies in the Canadas, would be too long a tale. And to understand it fully would require a know- ledge of the various cleavages of the country, religious and racial, and even the personal animosities, which counted for so much. It is pleasant, however, to remen bsr that Sir John was cordially supported from the start by an enlightened French- Canadian statesman, Sir George Cartier. When the Canadas had been at last won over to Federation the maritime provinces FEDERATION 125 had to be smoothed down, and their natural dread of being swamped — for immigration came comparatively little their way — allayed. Their people may be roughly described as half farmers, half sailors, and their interests are rather different from those of Canada. Nova Scotia, again, was the senior British province in age, and had no little pride of her own. She possessed, moreover, at that moment the two statesmen who in Canadian history rank next to Macdonald : Joseph Howe, a Liberal, who had virtually won Responsible Govern- ment for his province, and was elderly ; and Charles Tupper, a young, indomitable, and Imperialistic Conservative. Financial con- cessions in the way of railroads or the assump- tion of provincial debts entered into most of these propositions. Howe blew hot and cold, and rather sullied the close of a noble, well- spent, and patriotic life. Tupper, in after years Sir Charles, so well-known in the nineties as Agent- General for Canada in London, proved a host in himself, and Federation was carried through the Legislature, though not without much opposition. But the Nova Scotian Government did not go to the country on the question, which was much resented. With less difficulty, though not without obstacles. Sir Leonard Tilly brought in New Brunswick after a general election, while httle Prince Edward Island reserved its adherence 126 CANADA for two or three years, which did not much matter. The British Government all this time had been strongly in favour of Federation, and done everything it legitimately could to bring it about. The leaders of both English parties favoured it, and their divergent motives for so doing are instructive and amusing reading at this time of day. Disraeli and his school supported it from a belief in the future of Imperialism. Others, wearied with the cease- less discord and trouble that appeared to be chronic in the two Canadas, welcomed Federation merely as a fresh experiment. Many Liberals openly supported it because they expected and publicly expressed the hope that the colonies would soon separate from the Mother country and set up for themselves, and they considered that Union would strengthen their hands for that end. Everything being now ripe across the Atlantic, a convention of delegates from the several provinces met at the Westminster Palace Hotel, in London, in the winter of 1866-7, settled the details, and in March of the year 1867 the " British North America Act " passed without opposition through the Impe- rial Parliament, and received the Queen's assent. The new Constitution came into effect upon July 1st. The Federated pro- vinces received the designation of " The FEDERATION 127 Dominion of Canada," and the capital was fixed, for reasons of general convenience, and for security of situation, as well as to save contention, at Ottawa, hitherto an obscure country town. In 1870 the North- West was taken over by arrangement from the Hudson's Bay Com- pany, and the nearer portion of it, under the name of Manitoba, came into the Confedera- tion as a province. A year later British Columbia, for a long time a province with an organized government though small popula- tion, joined the Union under the prospect of the now seriously proposed Canadian Pacific Railroad. Little Prince Edward Island abandoned what would have been an absurd position, and followed suit in 1873. Newfoundland, as we know, has remained resolutely outside to this day. The new Canadian Constitution was modelled chiefly on that of Great Britain, wilh some features, as was only natural, borrowed from that somewhat similar Confederacy of the United States. Experience, however, enabled its framers to take warning from the weak points in the American scheme, which had been so conspicuously brought out by discord and civil war, and are even still in many ways a cause of difficulty. The much longer existence, however, and con- sequent individuality of the old American 128 CANADA colonies before they came together, had made them extremely chary of the measure of power they conceded to a Central Govern- ment. Their Constitution had been a compromise between leaders like Alexander Hamilton, who wanted great concessions from each state, and a strong Central Government, and those like Jefferson, who wanted to take as little as possible from the state, and scented " monarchy and aristocracy " in a powerful Federal Government. They could not see that slender ties, without a historic bond of Union, made for possible disintegration at home and weakness abroad. Even the com- promise brought about, as we know, the greatest civil war of modern times, and cost a million lives. So the Canadians reversed this system. The provinces ceded all their former powers to the Crown, and received back just such measures of provincial self-government that their repre- sentatives had agreed upon as desirable. Their powers are clearly defined in the Constitution. Everything that is not so belongs to the Federal Government. In the United States the Government had received its power from " Sovereign States," with defined limitations. Everything outside what they had actually parted with in 1789, even if unforeseen situations arose, was jealously regarded as the concern of the individual FEDERATION 129 state. Even to-day this is sometimes extremely awkward both in small and great affairs. California, for instance, can pursue any course towards Chinese or Japanese residents, regardless of the relationships between the two national Governments. Most states, again, have different divorce laws. Great Britain and Canada, in framing the new Constitution, were determined to have none of these anomalies. In it there is a Governor- General appointed for five years, holding practically the same place that the sovereign does in the Mother country. The Legislature consists of two Houses — a Senate and a House of Commons — the last elected for not more than five years under manhood suffrage, with the usual reservations. The sena- tors are nominated for life by the Governor- General in Council. They must be over thirty years of age, and possess a certain property qualification. Their function is identical with that of the British House of Lords, prior to 1911. The Cabinet, always representing the majority for the time in the House of Commons, may be chosen from both Houses. In short, the parallel between government at Ottawa and at Westminster is so complete, save in the greater power of the Upper Chamber, that no further words are necessary, unless to say that both senators and M.P.'s have an allowance of £200 a vear. This is laO CANADA the more necessary as, unfortunately, men of means and standing in the country do not often adopt a political career. A Lieutenant-Governor presides over each province, but the position is now always filled by a Canadian. In Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island the provincial Legisla- ture consists of two Houses like the Federal Government. In Ontario, which, in 1867, became the new designation for Upper Canada, New Brunswick, and the Western Provinces, there is only an elected chamber. A cabinet in each province represents the majority at the time, and the practice is that of Responsible Government, as in the Federal Parliament. The Dominion Parliament has control of the general affairs of the country, the regulation of trade, the postal system, the public debt and borrowing of money on public credit, military and naval matters, navigation, quarantine, fisheries, coinage, banks, bankruptcy, patents, Indian affairs, naturalization of aliens, cus- toms and excise, marriage and divorce, public works, railways, penitentiaries, and commer- cial law and procedure. The provinces have control of direct taxa- tion within their borders, of provincial loans and the management of public lands within their territory, the management of prisons, hospitals, asylums, and charitable institutions ; the control of education and municipal FEDERATION 131 institutions, and the administration of justice, and provincial courts, while at Ottawa are held the criminal courts and the High courts of appeal. It is enough to say that Confederation in Canada has fulfilled the expectations of its most sanguine advocates. Difficulties, of course, there were. The maritime provinces had contamed a strong minority opposed to the scheme as tending to overlook the interests of the smaller stars of the constellation, and lessenmg their importance. This feeling was not at once allayed ; while British Columbia, which came in on the prospect of the Canadian Pacific railroad, threatened secession when that great work lagged in fulfilment, and became for a time the bone of contention in Federal politics. But the two Canadas gained enorm- ously by the wider sphere and greater dignity of the Dominion Government. The French began to produce broad-minded statesmen, instead of merely clever, factious orators, while in the Quebec Parliament, the chief storm centre of old days, the English minority and the French majority managed their local affairs without any further serious friction. CHAPTER VI THE FRENCH IN CANADA It is high time now to say something about the original owners and occupants of this Canada which fell into our hands in 1760, and, out of troubles and tribulations and many- narrow escapes, has blossomed into a great country with a strong sense of unity and a growing sense of nationality. We have made some acquaintance with the French- Canadians in the preceding chapters, as enemies in the field, well worthy of our steel, and in the council chamber as a seemingly factious people, restive in double harness with their British mates while dragging the wheels of the political chariot. Their old civilization and condition has been inci- dentally alluded to ; but these chapters would be but an incomplete sketch of Canada without some words as to its oldest European inhabitants. The practical claim of France on Canada is much older than that of the English on the North American seaboard to the south of it. J 32 THE FRENCH IN CANADA 133 It was in 1534 that Cartier, a Breton mariner, sailed up the St. Lawrence and planted forts where Quebec and Montreal now stand. But after a few seasons of going and coming, some excitement in France, and wonderful dreams of Eldorados and other marvellous things in the mysterious land beyond, common to the romantic 16th century, the hardships proved greater than the scanty rewards, and the whole thing was abandoned. France, otherwise occupied, forgot all about Canada till such time as the English were busy settling in Virginia and New England. Then she returned in the person of another brave adven- turer, Champlain, and planted the rude beginnings of Canada beneath the rock upon which the city of Quebec now stands. The early French settlers on the St. Law- rence were inspired by rather different motives, and at any rate adopted different methods, from those followed by the pioneers that the great Chartered Company in England, whose rights covered nearly the whole Atlantic coast, sent to Virginia, and still more different from those of the Pilgrim Fathers who shortly afterwards landed on the New England coast. The practical spirits of the French settlement took to fur trading and exploration, farming being practised as a mere necessity of existence. But the missionary spirit was quite as strong as either. Clerics and saintly ladies, often 134 CANADA of noble birth, faced infinite hardships, while the warriors of the community met the irreconcilable portion of the Indians with great bravery. No efforts were spared nor dangers flinched from in winning over the more friendly to the Cross. The Jesuits took a leading part in this work. Churches, hospitals, and in time convents, grew up side by side with warehouses. For fifty years — a cycle easy to remember, that of the first period of French Canadian history — Canada contained few people but fur traders and religious enthusiasts, who together never numbered more than two thousand souls. Half of them w^ere settled in and about Quebec, and the remainder up the St. Lawrence at Three Rivers, still the "Halfway House " to Montreal ; and in 1641 Montreal itself became a settled post. The two elements did not agree very well, the rigid morality which the priestly party endeavoured to force on the wild traders being a cause of constant iriction. But the incessant conflicts with the savages compelled the handful of French adventurers, a majority of whom were employees ot a trading company, to sink differences which were inevitable, and are of small importance here. Now, the Iroquois, thus briefly designated the Five Nations, as stated in a former chapter, were seated just to the south of the Canadian THE FRENCH IN CANADA 135 border. They were the ablest and most formidable of all the North American groups. Though but a fraction of the whole, they had spread the terror of their name throughout the wilderness, from the north of Canada to the Mississippi, having defeated and some- times quite dissipated the nations that they there encountered. The French from the first got on well with the Canadian Indians, gathered them to their missions, or established missionary outposts among them, and in a strictly limited sense, converted great numbers of them to the Christian faith. This fact from the first made the fierce Iroquois their deadly enemies, as the French from their trading and missionary intercourse with them became identified with the Canadian tribes as their allies and patrons. These last, though warlike enough, had an invincible dread of the Iroquois, whose prestige was immense. So the French had often only themselves to depend upon when these savages made fierce raids on their settlements, sometimes up to the very gates of Quebec. But the missionary zeal of the French priests, supported by a religious enthusiasm that just then had hold of certain classes in France, seemed to grow rather than abate under these war clouds. Many of them risked, and most of them met, a dreadful death in their daring exploits, suffering the horrible Indian torture with incredible stoicism, 186 CANADA sometimes penetrating alone into the very camps of their enemies, to earn, as they held, a martyr's crown. Holy women, often nobly born, conducted hospitals and missions on the very edge of this bloody wilderness, with always a precarious margin of escape from the tomahawk, and worse. The Iroquois were on good terms with the New Englanders and the Dutch of New York, which colony belonged to Holland till 1661. They had a certain code of honour in these alliances, and were, moreover, interested in this one from trade motives. In time they became possessed through these means of fire-arms, though a bow and a quiver-full of arrows in the woods were at no great disadvantage against the clumsy musket of the 17th century. The charter of the fur-trading company, which had carried on the business part of this precarious existence, and failed, in the opinion of the French Government, to attend properly to the religious and other sides of the undertaking, was revoked about 1663. At this time, the early days of Louis XIV., France was rising to the zenith of her com- manding power in Europe. Colbert, a Minister of far-sighted colonial views, was in charj^e, and he was determined to take Canada seriously in hand and make a success of it. So it became a royal province, the sovereign's power being deputed to a triumvirate con- THE FRENCH IN CANADA 137 sisting of a Governor, a Bishop, and an Intendant, the last being entrusted with the legal and financial side of the administration. Several thousand immigrants in the next few years were despatched to the colony, among them a French regiment, whose men were settled, like the others, as farmers in the Richelieu valley, the danger spot where the Five Nations were accustomed to break into the country. The French views of colonization, however, were utterly different from those of the English, with whom every man took his own way, settled as a free holder on any land his means or opportunities allowed, and had thenceforward a share in the local govern- ment of his district and colony. The French methods, as regards Canada, at any rate, were paternal and aristocratic. The banks of the St. Lawrence, between Quebec and Montreal, and one or two other districts, were parcelled out in large tracts of several square miles in extent. These were given or sold to men of the lesser noblesse, or to others prepared to buy the privilege, who became the seigneurs or lords of manors, and these seigneurs were the recognized aristocracy of the country. Most of the immigrants sent out were of the peasant class ; and to provide against the excess of men over women, shiploads of selected girls were despatched by the Government, and 138 CANADA placed in the charge of the religious houses at Quebec, till husbands were found for them, which was never very long. For about twenty years from 1663 onwards, these consignments of men and women were despatched, the larger part from Normandy, sailing out of Dieppe, the lesser part from the west coast, sailing from Rochelle. There was very little immigration from France to Canada after that period, and it is safe to say that the great bulk of the two million French Canadians now in North America are des- cended from people who arrived in Canada before 1686. This gives them a peculiar interest, as they retained in the seclusion of Canada the language and many of the customs of France in the days of Louis XIV. They still retain the former and many of the latter. In spite of hard and fast semi-feudal land laws, they found a rude comfort and even free- dom, such as on the crowded estates of France, with their many vexatious restrictions, was unknown. These peasants — a designation which they repudiated, calling themselves, as they are still called, " habitants " — were settled on the uncleared forest manors or seigneuries. Their individual farms were laid out in long narrow strips, so that each one might have a frontage on the St. Lawrence, then the chief highway. They might be two hundred THE FRENCH IN CANADA 139 yards wide and a mile deep, inconvenient for farming purposes, but sociable and safer in trouble, as the houses stood in a continuous line. This was the French system ; and to-day you will see it prevailing over the face of most of Lower Canada, in great contrast to that of Ontario and the maritime provinces, where homesteads, as in England, stand conveniently within farms approaching to a square in shape. These habitants paid a nominal rent to the seigneur, who lived in a rude manor house on the property, and always erected a mill at which his tenantry were bound to grind their corn at a fixed but low toll. They also owed their lord military service, while he was further entitled to a twelfth part of the purchase money should a tenant sell his holding. The seigneur, on his part, exercised full magisterial powers over his people, in cases other than murder and treason. He held his manor from the King on military service, and swore fealty to the Royal Governor, with all the old mediaeval ceremonies. He was responsible, however, to the Crown for his conduct towards his tenantry and estate, and for failure was liable to forfeiture, a penalty occasionally exacted. The seigneurs, however, had no more political power than their tenants. They were governed absolutely from Quebec, which 140 CANADA in turn was under constant instructions from Paris. The inhabitants neither expected nor wished for any other system. There was no farming outside these seigneuries. A French-Canadian could not go into the woods behind these limits and cut out a farm, as the English did in their own colonies. A man on his own account, without an overlord, and owing fealty and duty to nobody, was outside calculation in the Canadian system, except, of course, around the remote trading stations or forts. This was what made French Canada later on so strong in war. The French Government thoroughly believed in all this. It made for strength and obedience. The Roman Catholic Church, too, cherished it. It kept the peojDle under religious discipline, and in touch with their priests ; it preserved to them an almost European tradition, of living from father to son in the same neighbour- hood, as there was ample room for subdivision on the uncleared parts of the seigneuries. The habitants raised very large families, and the population increased rapidly. Education was confined to the higher class, and was provided in Quebec and Montreal by the Church. The inculcation of obedience to their King and Church, and a proper horror of heretics, Avas nearly all the education thought desirable for the habitants, who were, indeed, conscious of no further want. They were THE FRENCH IN CANADA 141 hardy, fairly moral, and reasonably in- dustrious, and, if backward farmers, were comfortably off in a simple way, though profoundly ignorant. All of a suitable age belonged to the militia, were accustomed more or less to firearms, and used to the woods, and when called out to fight the Indians or New Englanders, marched readily to war. In forest fighting, with all the endurance it demanded, they were ex- tremely useful soldiers. The se'gneurs had very little money. Their rents and dues were very small, and, having no particular occupation, they engaged with alacrity in Indian wars, or led their retainers in raids against the New Englanders, w^ho retaliated in kind. War became a brutal business in these northern woods, since, from frequent contact as friend or foe with the Indians, New England borderers, as well as French- Canadians, caught some of their devilry and scalped each other like Iroquois. The devoted missionary zeal of the Jesuits, extend- ing to the formal conversion of thousands of Indians, could not touch their callous, merciless nature, and could only check their atrocities. This the priests sometimes did at the peril of their own lives, when personally on the spot. Another section of the Canadian people was engaged in the fur trade, which offered a rare field for the more adventurous and reck- 142 CANADA less, to whom the benignant sway of the priest, and the lip-homage, at least, to the seigneur, were irksome. Far away into the west to Niagara, Detroit, to Michillimakinac, and to Sault St. Marie, where great steamers now pass through the canals between Lakes Huron and Superior : further even than that, away over the Red River, across the prairie country these adventurous French traders and mis- sioners pressed their way, even before the English conquest of 1760. This wild life, too, produced many fearless explorers. La Salle, the best known, had discovered and traversed the Mississippi in the 17th century. It was the possession of these few extended posts, the pride in their explorers, the superior knoAvledge it gave them of the far West as opposed to the more stay-at-home, plodding British colonists, that bred among the French later on an idea that the West ought to be theirs. The feeling was natural, and we have shown in a former chapter wnat a bold bid they made for putting it into effect. As a rule, men of strength and character were sent out to govern Canada. The most notable was Count Frontenac, a hard, deter- mined, courageous soldier, with a good many ideas. All these Frenchmen had a profound belief in the individual weakness of the British colonies to the south of them, though it was modified somewhat in the case of THE FRENCH IN CANADA 143 New England. Frontenac had actually succeeded in cowing the Iroquois. He now aspired, since war was going on between England and France, to no less an achievement than the capture of New York, and the forcible deportation of the twenty thousand English and Dutch living in that province. For this purpose a fleet was collected in Nova Scotia, where the French had strong footing, while an army was to march overland. Far better equipped, if not better men than he, failed in their combined enterprises, in the next century, over this same country of infinite distances by sea and land; and Frontenac practically never got started. But he sent raiding parties of so-called Christian Indians and French rangers over the frontier, who perpetrated the savage and ferocious butcheries that were expected of them. New England and New York were now thoroughly roused, and boldly determined to strike at the heart of Canada. Massachusetts fitted out a fleet carrying a force of two thousand men, while New York dispatched another army up the Champlain route to Montreal, on a small scale like the Wolfe and Amherst combination sixty years later. Here, again, the adequate organisation was lacking. The route from Albany to Montreal that thwarted well-equipped forces at a later day proved too much for New York's little 144 CANADA army. But Sir William Phips, the Massa- chusetts commander, and his fleet of small ships, got up to the walls of Quebec, and by a messenger, led blindfold into the redoubtable Frontenac's presence in the citadel, he offered that haughty noble an hour to give up the city. Frontenac and his staff were livid with rage, and all but he were for shooting the hapless envoy on the spot. For two thousand five hundred men lined the defences, and Phipps had with him but two thousand militia. His answer, growled Frontenac, would be sent by his guns. The Boston men, however, landed, and, half-starved and half-frozen, fought gallantly under the w^alls for three days, when they retired to the ships, which, badly riddled by Frontenac's cannon, carried them home with difficulty. This first siege of Quebec is Known out to few English folk. It has not, however, been forgotten in Massachusetts, lor, though unsuccesstul, it was a spirited enterprise. There is little calling for notice here of the fifty years that passed away m Canada before the Canadians were called upon to fight m earnest for their country. Changes in Church or State had in no way touched them, and the Iroquois still held the balance of power. If they attacked the French with success, the whole of the northern and western Indians began to tremble and talk about the THE FRENCH IN CANADA 145 English. If the French gave the Iroquois a lesson the Indian nations shouted again for the French. If the Five Nations had ever turned against the British Colonies, with the French and the rest of the savages behind them, it would have been a grave matter. But the British managed to keep them con- sistently friendly or neutral. They did little in the great war of 1755-60, for the early French victories effectually shook their confidence; and nothing but the genius of Sir William Johnson, an Irish gentleman, who lived in picturesque backwoods pomp on their borders, and had the gift of Indian diplomacy highly developed, would have kept them neutral. When the long war was over in 1760, and the British took possession of Canada, the Canadians, though staunch enough to the last, were sick of fighting. Quebec was a heap of ruins, and the farms over large districts were wasted by the English — not wantonly, for Wolfe was in command, but by the stern necessities of war. The districts untouched by its scorching trail had suffered the neglect inevitable when a nation of farmers is called to arms. They had been swindled and cheated, too, by a gang of official ruffians at Quebec, who found part of their deserts afterwards in French prisons ; and this made these years of misery harder to bear. To the mass of the people, English rule, with its 146 CANADA calm, and the returning prosperity it brought, came as an immense relief. It is curious that the class which most frankly recognised this, and were ready to acknowledge it with their swords and tongues when danger threatened, were the gentry and clergy, whose feelings of national honour were much more sensitive, and who had suffered such pangs in defeat and conquest as the bravest resist- ance cannot avert. The stolid habitant had little of this. He went back to his parish and his farm after the war, and such slight changes as might affect him were greatly to his advantage. The corvSes — levies, that is, of enforced labour for government service — were abolished, while the English criminal law, more merciful than the old French code, was adopted with universal approval. The seigneurial system was left, and, indeed, was not abolished for nearly a century. The British Government wished in this matter to meet the desires of the French, and in so doing faced much unpopularity with the Anglo- Americarh trading community that settled after the conquest in Montreal and Quebec. The French Catholic Church was left absolutely intact, as it was found, and as it remains to this day. It was, and is, practically established, that is to say, its clergy are supported by a tithe or dime, literally about a twenty-sixth of the value on THE FRENCH IN CANADA 147 produce — a legal payment which can be enforced by law, A man can only escape it by calling himself a Protestant, and as prosel3i:ism is never attempted, and the people are all ardent Catholics, such an apparent subterfuge would be, in the ordinary way, incredible. Under the old French rule the tithe was not a legal enactment, for the simple reason that it was a matter of course. A habitant refusing his church dues to the parish priest, if the supposition were possible, would have been peremptorily dealt with by the paternal autocracy. The Quebec Act of 1774, which is sometimes called the Charter of French-Canadian liberties, legalised the tithe payment, as the British Government were not prepared to follow the vigorously paternal rule of the French king's officials, and enforce, if the need should arise, mere custom, particu- larly as regards a communion to which they did not belong. Those framers of the Act con- sidered, at the time, that it was equitable to place the revenues of the universal Church of the Canadians out of danger, in a country that was to be ruled for the immediate future, at any rate, mainly by Protestant aliens. There was no question of hardship to the tithe-payer, even if he had grudged the payment ; it was a purely technical matter. But the American Revolutionists made this and the concession of their land laws to the 148 CANADA French- Canadians prominent items in the list of indictments they formulated against the British Crown. The civil law of French- Canada was for years a source of endless trouble to the Government. The guarantee given to the Canadians at the surrender of Montreal in 1760, and afterwards confirmed, promised that their religion should remain unmolested, and likewise their laws, so far as was consistent with the safety of His Majesty's Government. Their criminal law they all gave up gladly. But when it was attempted to introduce English law, juries in civil cases, and so forth, in place of the old French system — a prodigious confusion arose. What with English judges, jobbed out from home, who could not speak French ; with litigants who could not understand English law, or even the English language, and sometimes French judges who knew neither and quietly followed the French code, things got into a hopeless muddle. The wholesale trade of the country having fallen into the hands of British merchants in the cities, they loudly demanded English law. The British authorities were really anxious to be just, and a vast amount of evidence was called for and given by experts. French law, moreover, had been very cheap, and the habitants, like their Norman cousins, were constitutionally litigious. THE FRENCH IN CANADA 149 The seigneur had, no doubt, settled most of such disputes in former days ; but the seigneurs after the conquest had dwindled in number and consequence, and British residents of grasping habit were freely appointed as magistrates, with only their fees as remuneration. These fees, following Eng- lish custom, were too high, and many of the magistrates, trading on the litigious nature of the habitants, provoked them to expensive suits till numbers of the poor fellows found themselves stripped of everything. Ultimately, a civil code was evolved, mainly according to French custom, but largely modified by Eng- lish adaptations, which worked quite smoothly and, subject to some alterations, obtains to this day. One instance of these early difficulties may be cited. The French habitant, with a touch of cunning thrift that lay at the bottom of his otherwise unsophisticated nature, saw no sport at all in being confined for a day or two in a jury box without pay, while members of the seigneurial class stoutly objected to sitting cheek by jowl with " butchers, bakers, and peasants." Many British Canadians, mostly New Englanders, made these concessions to the French a cause of bitter complaint against the Crown, and thought that the Canadians should be dragooned into Britishers ; that Catholicism, if not actually suppressed, should, as then in England, be ignored and carry 150 CANADA political disfranchisement ; that the French language should be rigorously excluded in all public proceedings, and that the feudal land system should have been wiped out. It was argued that a small population of sixty thousand mainly illiterate people could be thus moulded with patience and a strong hand. With a handful of priests and seigneurs out of the way, a simple matter by means of compensation, a little rigour in spiritual matters for a generation was, it was said, better than an age of discord and danger to the British rule. Great numbers of intelligent Anglo- Canadians to this day think some such course should have been followed, and thus the main cause of Canada's future difficulties disposed of. It was considered that the French, later on, showed factious ingratitude for a generous treatment which was then without example in history. Harsh as such a measure, put into bold words in this amiable 20th century, may sound to the reader unconversant with the complications of that and the ensuing period, they are not wholly without logic. One obvious objection to this is that, in the Ameri- can invasions of 1775 and 1812-15, active sympathy on the part of the French would have insured Canada to the Americans. The retort is that the British Government, on the first occasion, would not have relied on the Canadian rural militia, who did remain in THE FRENCH IN CANADA 151 hostile neutrality, but would have garrisoned Canada to the small extent required for the purpose. As regards the war of 1812, the retort is the same. This school of opinion argues that by a firm but benignant material rule of a people who were accustomed to one-man government, a rigid exclusion of outside French influences, and a steady non-recognition of language or sectarian or racial aspirations, this wedge of old-world France, the mass of it illiterate, could have been automatically reduced, with- out any practical hardships, to a nullity before the rapidly-increasing English-speaking popu- lation. Left to himself, the habitant was a contented, light-hearted, amazingly unsophis- ticated peasant, with no ambitions beyond his domestic affairs; and six-sevenths of the sixty or seventy thousand French- Canadians were of this type. Even to-day this description of him would stand with some modification. But to-day the city population is large; then it was trifling. This opinion has it that the aspirations of the clever Frenchmen in higher life would have been forced into English channels, and in time the old regrets would have passed away. Such views are stated here because they were very generally held and loudly voiced by the British community, largely from New England, who settled after the conquest in Quebec and Montreal. If they 152 CANADA could have foretold the loyalist influx and the filling of Upper and part of Lower Canada, they would have been still more insistent. There are great numbers of Canadians of the old British stock who more or less hold these views to-day, and think the early policy of Great Britain as regards the French to have been unwise. Their views are not written in newspapers, at least not often. It would not do, or serve any useful purpose. Visitors do not hear them, the present, for one thing, being of such absorbing interest. But any one who knows Canada is familiar with this retrospective view, now only, of course, of purely academic interest. But such British Canadians as feel strongly on the desirability of a closer union, whether formal or informal, and a drawing together of the over-sea Dominions with the Mother country, have one unanswerable point to make in support of such historical regrets. This lies in the more than indifference of the bulk of the French to anything of the kind, and the unmistakable hostility to it of a strong party among them. The former are not in the least to be blamed if the latter may frankly be accused of ingratitude. It is natural and even inevitable ; and the position of the French- Canadians makes for a provincialism encour- aged by their unenterprising temperament. The attitude of the French- Canadians to-day THE FRENCH IN CANADA 153 is simplicity itself to any one familiar with the Dominion, and even with the elements of its history. The French now and at all times, save for some sporadic, and rather anti-British than pro-American, outburst in the past, are unequivocally opposed to absorption in the United States. Individ- uality and recognition as a French community is their persistent aim, narrow in scope though it may seem. They know perfectly well that absorption into the great Republic would reduce them to relative insignificance. Not even a theoretic advantage presents itself to any sane French- Canadian, while the dis- advantages are obvious to a school-boy. The French- Canadian's loyalty or, if you will, adhesion to the British connection, is fixed for him by fate. Thirty or forty years ago, it used to be said, when a leaning towards annexation was not uncommon among British Canadians, that in the event of an Anglo- American war a French- Canadian would be found lining the last ditch; and this was figuratively true. It would still be true but for the fact that there are no longer any annexationists to be found among British Canadians born. But when it comes to enthusiasm for the British Empire as a whole, or a readiness to forward her aspirations elsewhere — just or otherwise, matters nothing — the French- 154 CANADA Canadian is quite cold. It is unfair, perhaps, to expect otherwise of human nature. These sentiments are fine things, but they are racial. French loyalty is indisputable, but it is quite uninterested in the British Empire outside Canada, and objects to assist it, for good or ill, in any other part of the world. Even in matters concerning the defence of the Colonial Empire, including Canada, it is more than lukewarm from some fear that ships thus paid for by themselves might be used in distant seas, even though such action made for the safety of Canada. A large party in British Canada resent this negative attitude, and they who hold that England should have taken stronger measures in old days, point to it among the other results of a mistaken mag- nanimity. Where, they say, is any gratitude shown for a liberality that the French, it is quite certain, w^ould never have dreamed of showing in the 18th century, had the situa- tions been reversed ? The French, on the other hand, deny that more should be required of them than a loyalty to the British connec- tion, and to the King, as to which there is no sort of doubt. They cannot be expected, they maintain, to feel the same as men of British blood, in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, about things outside Canada. For it must be understood at once that, though the British and French are now pulling together THE FRENCH IN CANADA 155 pretty well in politics, and have each the welfare, according to their different liirhts, of their country at heart, they have little in common as individuals, and scarcely mix at all in private life. This is of less consequence, as with certain exceptions they occupy differ- ent parts of the country. Broadly speaking, the only rural English in the province of Quebec are collected in a particular quarter known as the Eastern Townships, which were settled over a century ago by British people, now steadily giving way ; while in Ontario the French are so relatively few as to count for nothing. But in the great city of Montreal, of over four hundred thousand inhabitants, where the French are much more than half the population, the two races in no class of life mingle together to any extent worth mentioning. Religion is one great barrier, for the Canadian Roman Church, w^hich has great power, objects to mixed marriages. The use of different tongues is an equally effective one. And, as the two peoples have different ideas and traditions, there is nothing to break these barriers down. The typical French-Canadian is neither restless nor ambitious. He loves Canada, mainly represented in his mind by the old province of Quebec, as an old country is loved by its inhabitants. He does not think of it as stretching from the Atlantic to the 156 CANADA Pacific, or feel any particular pride, like the British Canadian, in the conquest of the wilderness, or the opening out of new pro- vinces, or in census statistics, unless to regret that even his own prolific race cannot keep pace with the British, even without immigration. He is not nearly so enterprising and prominent in mercantile life as his British compatriot, while as a farmer the habitant lags far behind. He does not regard money- making as of such supreme importance as his neighbour, and is inclined rather for a quiet, contented life. When compelled to, he leaves French-Canada with a pang, and generally returns to it if possible. The habitants, considering the condition of the world around them, are still in most parts extraordinarily simple-minded. They now receive a free rudimentary education entirely controlled by their Church, and framed with a view rather to religion and morals than to material opportunities. Among the more educated classes of the French, who all live in or around the cities and towns, there is, of course, a certain proportion imbued with what may be called the North- American spirit, while in professional and political life there is no lack of ability. But it is the rule, not the exceptions, we are concerned with here. France practically lost touch with Canada after the Revolution. Every circumstance THE FRENCH IN CANADA 157 from the British conquest onward conspired to part the Motherland from her old colony so effectually that a re-union passed out of possibility, and even out of desire, in quite early days. The powerful Catholic Church alone has set its face resolutely away from a Motherland whose religious vagaries have seemed shocking to it. It has consistently and at all times declared its unflinching loyalty to Protestant kings that are, at any rate, the symbol of an established Christian faith, though a once hated one, and at whose hands they have themselves been so well treated. A strong sentimental feeling for France, nevertheless, still exists, but is more apparent among the class who are affected by literature, and the literature read in French- Canada is almost entirely French. The University and collegiate education of the province is admirable. It would be ridiculous to pretend, however, that the two races like one another, though the term dislike in any active and personal sense would be too strong. They have made no blend, as the English and Dutch Protestants in New York State, for instance, did long ago, though such would have no doubt proved an excellent one. But the pushing, active, material, and unsym- pathetic Briton lives side by side with the easy-going, light-hearted French- Canadian ; and so they seem likely to continue without 158 CANADA any fusion to speak of to the end of the chapter. It must not be thought, however, that all the French are enclosed within the ring-fence of the province of Quebec, any more than it must be supposed that there are no British outside its towns or its Eastern Townships districts. For of these last there are many groups, mainly in the western parts of the province. A curious instance of race fusion, though it is quite unique and dates back to the very earliest possible period, 1761, is found on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, eighty miles below Quebec — practically the terminus on that bank of civilization. For two un- cleared seigneuries here were given to a couple of Highland officers, who planted upon them their disbanded soldiers. These men, cut off from everything British, married French wives. Their children became French and Catholic, and there are whole districts to-day of French habitants bearing Scottish names, and having nothing but that fact and the vague tradition of their Scottish ancestry to remind anyone of their origin. In the old days, wherever the French fur trade had a fort and station, there naturally grew up a small resident population indepen- dent of seigneurial custom. Around Detroit, for example, on both sides of the boundary line, a large residuum of French population THE FRENCH IN CANADA 159 remained. At the Sault St. Marie, and, above all, on the Red River, where Winnipeg now stands, there is a great deal of French blood. French-Canadians, too, are to be found following various avocations all over Canada. Thousands of them work in the lumber camps, regardless of situation. Some have settled permanently in the new North- West. But this in no way alters the fact that the province of Quebec is, so to speak, their fatherland, to which, unless when actually settled as farmers, most of them look forward to returning. Thousands of them go to work, too, in the New England factories, there maintaining a separate existence, and accom- panied by their priests. The earnings there gathered are frequently taken back to be spent or invested in their own country. Whatever their virtues or their failings, the French-Canadians, as a whole, though gather- ing a minor share of the wealth of the country, are possibly the happiest of all Canadians, and, after all, that is a great deal. CHAPTER VII THE MARITIME PROVINCES The one exception in the eastern half of the present Dominion of Canada to a natural open space fit for habitation is the salt marsh country on the inside or western coast of Nova Scotia. It is barely a pin's head on so vast a surface. But, historically, these salt marshes have some importance, since it was they which attracted and fixed the earliest perma- nent settlers in Acadia, the name for long applied to Nova Scotia, and the adjoining mainland, now New Brunswick. These first comers were Frenchmen from the western district of the Loire, speaking broadly, who had been accustomed at home to dyke out and cultivate salt marshes. The French- Canadians, as opposed to these other French- men who were and still are known as Acadians, came mainly, as we have shown, from northern France, and became, of necessity, sons of the forest, whether as farmers and axemen, or as fur traders and voyageurs. The Acadians, however, took at once to the rich marshland THE MARITIME PROVINCES 161 and, for this very reason, never took kindly to the axe, or the labour of clearing forests off much poorer land than their own, which needed only the less toilsome and more familiar work of banking out and dyking. This is interesting as the only bit of eastern North America where man ever lived in or cultivated this kind of country, where he had little to do with trees, except those apple orchards with which, true to the cider instincts of their Motherland, the Acadians surrounded their simple homesteads. The pioneering days of Acadia are concerned with the same generation and connected with the earliest permanent settlement of Quebec. English at first, as well as French, took part in these little early settlements, with their frequent disputes and their royal charters, granted one year and revoked the next. They are so confusing that, for readers who only want the broad story, it is better to keep clear of them. England's early claim to Acadia and Canada was on the strength of Cabot's discoveries in 1497. That of France was on account of many settlements, none of them permanent, as the last chapter showed, till that of Champlain at Quebec in 1620. From a desire to avoid confus- ing our story with details about parchment colonies or little companies of adven- turers without definite aims, I omitted to 162 CANADA mention that an English admiral, Kirk, sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1629, and found Cham- plain and his people so near starvation that Quebec was surrendered at once, and Kirk figured almost more as a deliverer than a conqueror. The people were left undisturbed, but the country remained nominally English, till the Treaty of 1632, three years later. It is worth noting, in view of all that came after, that France insisted on this restoration for her " honour's sake," rather than for material value; and, Charles I. being on the throne, England gave in, though reluctantly. This is important because it formally recog- nized the right of France to Canada and Acadia, for the latter had been frequently a tilting ground of adventurers of both nations. There are a considerable number of baronets to-day in England who bear the name of Nova Scotia on their patents, for James I., about the time of his leaving Scotland for his double crown, granted the whole ot Acadia, regard- less of a prior French settlement, to Sir William Alexander, afterwards Lord Stirling. So far as it went, this was a purely Scottish enter- prise, the only Colonial venture ever made by that nation before the Union of the crowns, which occurred at this time. Shadowy grants were paid for, not always without compulsion, in order to interest people, and " Nova Scotia baronets " were freely made, sometimes, it is THE MARITIME PROVINCES 163 said, against their will. The settlement came to nothing, but the name Nova Scotia, which a century later was resumed, has significance as derived from the only Scottish colonial enterprise undertaken under purely Scottish kings. In 1632, then, we get a clear start, with France in recognized possession of what are now the maritime provinces, as well as of Canada. The Acadian population of the salt marshes, on the Bay of Fundy, unmo- lested, and outside the current of the world, increased to several thousand souls. They had nothing to do with the organised, semi- feudal, much-governed French of Canada. There were no seigneuries or vassals here. They were communities of peasants, governed or guided by their priests, and yet more unsophisticated than their compatriots in Canada. Imaginative poetry has painted the Acadians in glowing colours ; hard fact draws a rather different picture. Besides these earth tillers, on the fertile west coast of Acadia, were numerous settlements of French fisher- men on Cape Breton Island, which is merely the northern part of Nova Scotia cut off by a narrow strait. There was no serious trouble between them and the Micmac Indians of the country ; on the contrary, there was a good deal of intermarriage, and when the wars with England began, this close alliance 164 CANADA made great trouble for the British Govern- ment and the British settlers. For, after Marlborough's wars, by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, a most favourable one to England, Acadia was ceded to her. But no definition as to whether Acadia included the present New Brunswick, which it vaguely did, was expressed. So a good store of desultory quarrelling was laid up for a later day. Cape Breton, however, was reserved by France. It is poor soil, but was a great resort of her fishermen, and regarded as an invaluable training ground for her navy. She then began to create and fortify Louisbourg, which, as we have seen, became a dominant power in the North Atlantic. In the meantime, the Acadians increased in Nova Scotia, as the province was henceforward designated. No British to speak of w^ould settle in a country where sullen, unfriendly French peasants were more or less allied with bloody Micmac Indians. The priestly word had gone out to both that a British heretic was a limb of Satan, and that, when safe, his killing was a meritorious action. For thirty-five years a solitary garrison or two of New England soldiers, under a British officer as Governor, represented the British power in Nova Scotia, bored to death in the lonely woods, and occasionally interested in forbearing efforts to make the Acadians take the oath of allegiance THE MARITIME PROVINCES 165 to the British Crown. But the priests, repre- senting Quebec, its government, and its Church, denounced such logical and natural procedure as a high offence, not only against their race, but against the Almight)^ There is nothing, therefore, to be said either for or against the stubborn attitude of these unfortunate people. All this was during Walpole's " Long Peace," when England was fat and prosperous at home, and not keenly alive to colonial trifles. So when in 1742 that first war with France broke out which preceded, with an interval, the Seven Years' War, the anomalous spectacle was presented of a British colony whose inhabitants, untaxed, and treated with entire forbearance, had refused, not from individual reluctance but from superstitious pressure, to yield allegiance to their king. But Louisbourg, w^hich had market connec- tions, as well as political influence, with the marsh inhabitants of the Bay of Fundy, had, by maritime annoyances and a land raid or two, roused the New Englanders, who were then most in touch with Nova Scotia, to the most dashing performance achieved by any American Colonists prior to the Revolutionary war. Supported by four British warships, four thousand New England militia, farmers and mechanics, led by an amateur, besieged Louisbourg, with a most skilful combination 166 CANADA of artillery fire and impetuous attack, and finally captured it. The town had been fortified at vast expense by the great engineer, Vauban, was garrisoned by two thousand regular troops, and had been declared impreg- nable. This remarkable performance, coming at a time when the war was going poorly in Europe, created enthusiasm in England, and bells were rung and guns fired in honour of the brave New Englanders. To the disgust, however, of the latter, at the peace of Aix-Ia- Chapelle, in 1748, France, which was ready to give up almost anything for Louisbourg, was again placed in possession, and made it stronger than ever. Great Britain now turned her attention to colonising Nova Scotia, and this is interesting as the first attempt at any organized move- ment of the kind, all our colonies, hitherto, having been founded by chartered companies or individual enterprise. It was felt that a counterpoise to Louisbourg must be created, a,nd large numbers of disbanded soldiers, j without means of living, as was always the ! case after war in those hard, old days, [were at large, and unprovided for. It is a recognized fact of this period that the French idea of a good harbour in founding a settlement, or naval station, was one with a narrow mouth that could be easily closed, while the English fancy was the exact opposite. THE MARITIME PROVINCES 167 namely, a harbour with an open mouth from which ships could sail out readily and strike at an enemy. Louisbourg and Halifax are cases in point. So, on the beautiful harbour a hundred and thirty miles west of Louisbourg, Halifax was tounded, m the year 1749, by some four or five thousand immigrants, the Government assistmg with the usual pre- limmaries of convoy, survey, house-building, and provisions. The military type of settler from the mother country was not well suited to the plodding labour of colonial pioneering, and the near neighbourhood of the new town was infertile. Still, Halifax got a good start. New Englanders took heart and came into the province, while Germans, Swiss, and more British from Europe, to the number in all of three or four thousand, followed soon afterwards and broke fresh ground on the coast. But the French, always sangume that Nova Scotia would some day again be theirs, set them- selves to make imand colonization impossible for the English. The Acadians, now nearly ten thousand in number, on the fertile western coast of the narrow province, were instigated by truculent priests, officially in- spired from Louisbourg and Quebec, to make life impossible for the owners of the province, outside the range of their guns. The Mic- mac Indians proved even more effective 168 CANADA agents. The French and EngHsh each had garrisoned forts, opposing one another on the isthmus which joins Nova Scotia to the mainland, for that mainland, afterwards New Brunswick, was still claimed by the French, though without treaty warrant. The province being in this electrical condition, when about 1754 war was again imminent, the British Governor at Halifax had to take steps to insure the good behaviour of the Acadians, now these forty years British subjects. Once more an oath of allegiance was proffered, and again rejected ; how much on account of priestly coercion and how much from native doggedness cannot be discussed here. A final opportunity was now offered to the Acadians, for war had already broken out. They could either, they were told, be enemies and treated as such, or friends and remain quiet. Obviously no middle course was possible. Misdoubting the threats of the long-suffering British Governor, Lawrence, they once again rejected his terms, though solemnly warned that this was their last chance. Yet they were thunderstruck when they found that it really was so, and that their wholesale removal from the province was actually and literally to be enforced. Then only, at this eleventh hour, these hapless dupes came forward with belated offers to take the oath. " No," said the Government, THE MARITIME PROVINCES 169 " you are too late, allegiance thus proffered is not worth having." Nor was it. Then followed that memorable deportation which Longfellow has idealized in his celebrated poem of " Evangeline." About six thousand, with such portable goods as they could carry away, were transported in British ships to various parts of North America. The remainder had either already taken the oath or escaped into the woods. A portion of the exiles ultimately found their way back again. The lot of the rest was miserable, for no one seems to have wanted them, and least of all their own compatriots in Canada. These people have been idealized by imaginative writers from Longfellow onwards. But the scant evidence of outsiders who knew them suggests small cause for such ornamenta- tion. They were in part, no doubt, the ignorant tools of French agents, priests and others, whose whole object was to make a British province uninhabitable to British settlers, in the hope of recovering it. A great war had virtually begun, and armies were already in the field. A population of ten thousand souls in a British province, deeply dyed already with assassination, and avowedly unfriendly, was at that time, in that situation, an impossibility. The innocent, beyond a doubt, suffered with the guilty, and their fate was hard, but for this they had their 170 CANADA compatriots alone to thank. In another chapter we have seen how Louisbourg was captured by the British in 1758, and utterly destroyed, and the French power extinguished upon the continent. Thenceforward Nova Scotia enjoyed unbroken peace. Settlement went slowly on under an established Government at Halifax, till the great influx of the expelled loyalists after the American War of Independence. We told in a former chapter of this re- founding, this real beginning of active and populous life in the maritime provinces. For when nearly thirty thousand people, strong in the most valuable elements that make for strength, descended upon a scattered com- munity of about fourteen thousand of mixed and very ordinary composition, it was inevitable that the latter should be in a sense submerged. It was mentioned also how a wing of this loyalist influx occupied the mainland — for Nova Scotia is nearly an island — and, with St. John as their base, moved up the great river of that name and founded the province of New Brunswick. The history of the maritime provinces, compared with that of the two Canadas, is uneventful. Politically it mainly centres in the struggle for Responsible Government, achieved about the same time as in the Canadas, but unaccompanied by such violence and bitterness as there obtained. THE MARITIME PROVINCES 171 From the horrors of war or even from serious dread of it, these provinces, owing to their situa- tion, have always enjoyed complete freedom. The loyalists here had not quite such a hard beginning as those of Upper Canada, though it was hard enough. They were nearer the outer world, for one thing, had the advantage of sea traffic and markets, and could more readily avail themselves of their pensions and compensation money when it came. They were, moreover, always in a large numerical majority. The later Ameri- can influx which poured into Upper Canada, and so complicated matters, had no counter- part in the maritime provinces, while the Acadians counted for nothing politically. Such later immigrants as came in there were mainly Scottish Highlanders, simple, law- abiding folk, who, for the most part, settled in particular districts, especially Cape Breton, and retained their own tongue. The loyalists had it virtually all their own way, and had no rivals. The higher-class people among them, accustomed to leadership in their old states, came naturally to the front. The same intense hatred of the new American notions, and determination to keep their adopted country free from every taint of them, which animated the Upper Canadian Tories, dis- tinguished those of the sea-board provinces. But in this they had an almost easy task. 172 CANADA For half a century, though the constitutions of the two provinces — for Prince Edward Island, virtually settled at the same time, needs a separate word — were identical with those of Canada, the actual Government was in the hands of a very similar oligarchy. In Nova Scotia Halifax left all the other little towns that sprang up immeasurably behind. It never had an approach to a rival, and, as the capital, dominated the province. British ships and regiments gave it a worldly-wise atmosphere, and materially helped the leading circles of the loyalists to maintain British traditions. An exclusive society arose, from which the Legislative Council was selected, and the elective Assem- bly for half a century gave it little trouble. There was scarcely any American element as in Canada to make protest, while the old country immigrants were not of the kind to intervene much in politics. The mass of the loyalists in whose way favours did not come more or less accepted the leadership of names they knew, and there was probably no cause of serious complaint. For class distinction counted for much in those days, even in America. During the war of 1812-15, the maritime provinces prospered greatly, doing a flourish- ing export trade while the United States' ports were closed, victualling British ships THE MARITIME PROVINCES 173 and armies, and profiting no little by the privateering that was then going forward on all sides. The life of the Nova Scotian was rather different from that of the Canadian. The land, with some exceptions, was not so good. The climate, though a trifle milder, was inclined to fog. Wheat, the staple that made Upper Canada, did not do well. On the other harid there was always the alternative of the sea. Fishing, shipbuilding, and trading combined were at least as important as farming to the maritime provinces ; while lumbering, which among other things supplied masts for the British navy, was a leading industry, particularly in New Brunswick. Mention has been made of the Highlanders as being the only immigrants in any number from Great Britain to Canada prior to Water- loo. At least ten thousand had gone into Canada, and twice that number had by that date found their way into these provinces. A few had been planted as regiments or fragments of regiments. But from all sources the Highlander long preceded the Lowland Scotsman, who later on contributed so power- fully to the prosperity of the colonies and gathered so much for himself. The success of the Lowlander, as a colonist in the 19th century, is natural, coming of a hardy, per- severing race of men from a highly industrial country. But that the men of the West 174 CANADA Highlands and islands, Gaels of an utterly different breed and tradition, did so well from the first in Canada has always been something of a puzzle. Circumstances rather than their own volition accounted for most of these Gaelic immigrants. After the rebellion of 1745 the Highland chiefs were turned into ordinary landlords. They had no more use for crowds of men existing as a matter of clan right and pride, and as a warlike following. The Highlands had hitherto been not far removed from barbarism, a region in which personal industry and systematic farming had practically no existence. The code and standard of life had, in truth, been nearer that of the Iroquois than of Lowland Scotland, which, in such matters, was virtually identical with England. Labour, even for the common man, was despised. Herds of stunted cattle ran at large, and the women mainly sowed and gathered the wretched crops. The accessories of even the humblest civilization were entirely absent among the masses. War, desultory fishing, and the chase had been their only seri- ous occupations. National feeling, too, had scarcely existed, for the Highlander and Lowlander had hated one another as heartily as ever Scot and Englishman. And as the Highland chiefs drew a considerable annual revenue of blackmail for leaving their south- THE MARITIME PROVINCES 175 ern neighbours' cattle alone, this is not surprising, even if race, habits, and language had not made mutual respect impossible. But when all this ceased to be, and the Highland chief, as an ordinary landowner, striving to keep up with Lowland lairds and English squires, had to look for a rent roll from economic management, and find tenants capable of producing it, thousands of these faithful, listless clansmen had to go, often to make way for sheep. There was no room for them. Sentiment apart, it would have been as bad for them as for their landlords, and even for the country, that they should have remained in squalor on a wet and poor soil. You may compare to-day the crofter of the west Highlands, the descendant of those who remained, with the farmers of Nova Scotia, and of Glengarry, in Ontario, the descendants of those who went. The contrast is painful. But it was not merely as farmers these expatriated Highlanders made a happy success of it. Their sons and grandsons succeeded in the highest walks of trade and commerce, and many of the most powerful firms in Canada bear Highland names. It is altogether a wonderful thing, not very easy of explanation. Sometimes there was harsh treatment, and outsiders and philanthropists did what the ex-chief should have done. Sometimes 176 CANADA the landlord bore all the expense of immigra- tion himself, or, in some cases, the clansmen had, in the interval, wandered to the cities and striven to make a living in that uncon- genial atmosphere. Many of the earliest emigrants went to North Carolina and Western New York. But this was before the Revolu- tionary war, and as they nearly all fought on the side of the Crown they came afterwards to Canada and Nova Scotia among the United Empire loyalists. Later sentiment likes to picture the homesick Highlander lamenting his native glen, and sets his lament sometimes to music. There is no evidence that he ever looked back, and it would have been strange if he had. Lord Selkirk, himself a philan- thropic Lowland peer, took a shipload to Prince Edward's Island, where they soon pros- pered. But that was nothing to the thousands who poured into Nova Scotia and Canada. About twenty-five thousand in all came into the maritime provinces, those who were Roman Catholics, a considerable number, with their priests, and those who were Presby- terians, with their ministers. But the wonderful thing is that a race whose hereditary habit was industrial sloth and feudal attach- ment since time began, developed in the first or at the latest, in the second generation, all the qualities necessary to the colonist. The elementary virtues, valour in war, loyalty to THE MARITIME PROVINCES 177 those in authority, domestic affection, were natural enough. But the way that the Highlander, speaking generally, took his place beside Lowlanders, Englishmen, Ulstermen, Germans, and races with centuries of peaceful industry behind them, is a mar- vellous and strange thing, as if these qualities had been lying dormant for centuries, only waiting their opportunity. All this Highland influx took place before Waterloo, and before other British settlers in any number cast eyes on Canada. Many of the expelled Acadians wandered back in time, and rejoined their friends to form, as they still do, an element of the population, though a small one numerically, and of little force in the community. Nova Scotia after Waterloo, when the great immigration set in from Britain to British North America, may be described as made up of United Empire loyalists, later imported Highlanders, some Swiss and Germans, and lastly Acadians, oc- cupying separate districts, and speaking different tongues ; the loyalist stock being overwhelmingly prominent in matters political and social. At this day Nova Scotia is mainly composed of these elements, for she did not get very much of the later rush of immigration. Responsible Government was won in both provinces, between 1840 and 1850, by the gradual pressure of the people's party 178 CANADA upon that of the old oligarchy. Though there was a great deal of asperity, there was scarcely any admixture of Americanism or disloyalty, and at the right moment in both provinces, their respective Governors recognized the principle of an Executive, or ministry chosen from the party in power for the moment. Joseph Howe, who led and won the long fight in Nova Scotia, was himself the son of a United Empire loyalist, holding semi-official position. Nova Scotia has now four hundred and sixty thousand people. The great majority are the descendants of this old population, and this gives the province a certain con- servative and old-fashioned tone. I do not mean in the way of aristocratic ideas, though a certain amount of this lingers in Halifax, which, with only forty thousand inhabitants, has been left far behind in the race by the other old and chief cities of the Dominion. And yet Halifax is larger than the next half- dozen towns in the province, outside the Cape Breton collieries, all put together. Ontario is bustling, modern, and in many ways very American. Its United Empire loyalist origin, which even forty years ago, in spite of the layers of British immigration overlying it, was a constant topic of private and public reference and local pride, would appear at first acquaint- ance to be almost crowded out. The country THE MARITIME PROVINCES 179 is just as loyal, and the old influence undoubt- edly is at the bottom of it. But it seems on the surface a different kind of loyalty, which is natural when a majority of the people are come of a later generation, and have no inlierited share in the old struggles, and, in truth, know very little about them. But in Nova Scotia it is quite different, though most of the people, being descendants of Americans, incline to that nation in speech and type. There is no bustle there, save some stir in the north of Cape Breton Island, where coal, steel, and iron have made a new little world of their own. Three men out of every four you meet in Nova Scotia are of United Empire loyalist or Highland descent, and if of the former, will tell you so very quickly and with just pride. Their story does not, of course, include any direct participation in the sufferings and triumpns ot 1812-15. Nor has there been the same close contact with Americans which has acted both ways with Canadians, increasing the anti-American feel- ing m former days, but m the long run super- ficially giving a more go-ahead American atmosphere to the country. Nova Scotia is Sicepy by comparison. She has never known an exhilaratmg leap forward. Her best lands were all filled up generations ago. But the spectacle of Canada, east and west, making such mighty strides due, in chief part, to 180 CANADA successive waves of immigration, while Nova Scotia moves scarcely at all out of the quiet rut of an old country, is rather a sore point. Her census in 1911, 460,000, shows no advance in the last decade ! Thousands of American tourists seek the comparatively cool breezes and pleasant scenery of Nova Scotia every summer, while the Annapolis Valley exports large quantities of apples. But outside Halifax and a few particular spots, the visitor finds a people with most of the characteristics of those who are behind rather than abreast of the world ; comfortable enough homesteads, but gener- ally unprogressive farming, and extremely primitive roads, though railroads are fairly numerous. This is from no lack of elemen- tary or advanced education. The maritime provinces are as well provided in both respects as any part of the Dominion. The small minority who go to the higher colleges are like other people with similar advantages through- out the Dominion and elsewhere. But the mass of the country people have lived outside the stream both of the old and the new world, and a plain education at the village school, however sufficient for ordinary purposes, does not in the least affect the outlook of a secluded community. I lay stress on this be- cause people in Great Britain are apt to think that all parts of the Dominion, and even of THE MARITIME PROVINCES 181 the United States, because they are com- paratively new countries, are necessarily full of go-ahead life, and this is a great mistake. Many such regions are, to all intents and purposes, old countries. Their people have only themselves to look to, and by skill, science, or energy, to improve and develop what they have. A country, for instance, of hundred-acre farmers owning their own farms, and by manual labour making a respectable living, is quite a happy state of things. But from the New World point of view, it doesn't lead to anything unless manufactures arise or minerals are discovered, and factories and mines cannot be everywhere. There is really nothing to be done except by scientific or intensive culture to wring more out of each hundred acres. But a yeomanry bred to ordinary farming, and able to make a plain living by it, are not easily wound up to such reforms, though governments may make efforts. Besides, there is no crowding to stimulate it. The Nova Scotian does not need to divide up his farm between his sons. They go away, and generally prefer to go away, either to sea or into business in the towns, where life is gayer and opportunities of advancement greater, or to the West. As a matter of fact, the young Anglo-Canadian of all the old provinces for thirty or forty years has shown a notorious distaste for farming. 182 CANADA The farmers' sons have left its heavy, con- tinuous toil, and its limited prospects, for trades and professions which seem to them to offer a brighter life and future possibilities, which the plough, by its very nature, shuts out. There has been no " gentleman farming " for a living amongst any Eastern Canadians since far-away days, when the hair-pay officers tried it and mostly failed. The higher- class Canadians, to use a convenient term, have virtually never touched it. Large farm- ing, involving the employment of considerable labour, has never paid, or been seriously practised in any of the old Canadian provinces. The low price of produce has never warranted a large employment of high-priced xabour, and the Canadian farm hand is almost averse to working for a man wno does not labour beside him in the field. Farm life is a democ- racy of its own, apart from town life, wnich runs on different lines. The young Canadian of liberal education, the son ot the bauKcr, the merchant, tne lawyer or doctor, and such like, despises and always has despised the laborious and limited career of a hundred- acre farm, and of the dull social lite tnat it means to him. Farming has no romance for the Canadian, and the well-educated man would regard it as throwing nis lire away, to say nothing of money — and a good hundred- or two hundred-acre farm in the old provinces THE MARITIME PROVINCES 183 costs a good deal. Townspeople in England of all sorts quite frequently envy a farmer's life. This feeling is virtually unknown among townsfolk in Canada. But to return more particularly to Nova Scotia, it will be understood that a whole region of working farmers continuing from father to son, with no fresh stimulating element among them, and removed from contact with the rest of the world, can appear to the outsider backward and, in a way, unsophisticated. One common phenomenon about the country people of many parts of Old Canada, and I should add also of the United States, is a fixed idea that the people of Great Britain are behindhand in everything, and that they know very little. With people remotely situated from the world's point of view, who still practise all the little pioneering devices necessary to self-support in a half- tamed or recently tamed country, this delusion is still possible. The Briton comes from a country that has emerged from that stage ages ago. He has no skill, for instance, in slashing down trees merely to get them out of the way, nor in splitting rails for clumsy fences, already in advanced Canadian districts becoming things of the past, nor in improvising makeshifts when implements go wrong. Even the country Briton is at fault in all kinds of rough-and-ready jobs that the Canadian does 184 CANADA because there has never been any one else to do them for him. But in an old country these things are done better and more cheaply by the men whose particular business they are. Canada, in its best districts is coming in all these things to be like a perfected country and all those rude accomplishments, handed down from a pioneering time, will some day be only retained in the backward districts. But the rural Canadian thinks the Englishman at fault because he is awkward at such things, which belong really to a more primitive, not to a more advanced, condition. He looks upon him as a weakling, because he deprecates a working-day lasting from sunrise till after dark. This is partly, of course, the inherited self-imposed tyranny of a workiiig farmer caste, where a class of regular labourers scarcely exists. But already this rather dismal creed, which was valuable in pioneering days, is giving way on the best Ontario farms. The Englishman, on the other hand, in the maritime provinces, and in parts of Ontario, sees an old country not farmed nearly so well as an average English county, yet with many exceptions to prove, if proof were needed, that this is perfectly feasible. He finds a people who, though friendly enough to the Old Country, are vaguely convinced they are ahead of it, though almost everything in their lives THE MARITIME PROVINCES 185 demonstrates the reverse. All this is natural enough to a people who live out of the great world, and practically never come in contact with any one of a different type from them- selves. In a crowded country like England this particular form of simplicity and prejudice is impossible. The London daily papers are in every village. Even the agricultural labourer at least sees men of every condition, and is familiar, at least, with the spectacle of noble and historic buildings, as well as of a lavish modern civilization. There is a greater difference in the waj^s of life and points of view between town, even the smaller town, and country in the old provinces of Canada than in Great Britain, where all classes are represented in the country and in various ways mingle together. In Canada the country people are practically all of one type — of plain education, manners and speech, and all occupied in manual labour on their own farms. They live frugally, though plentifully enough, without any enterprise towards a varied diet, or much taste for such simple graces of life as you would often find in England among people of less substance than they represent. There is a tendency to despise evidences of refinement, and to grudge all time not expended in practical work. This is a relic of pioneering days, and so notorious that the city and town people in Canada, who 186 CANADA live well and enjoy themselves, though they work as hard as any one, make it a matter of time-honoured jest. As the farmers do not make much money this has all the more force. Town and country do not see much of one another. Social position or distinction, whether inherited or acquired, with the usual habits and customs everywhere belonging to it, is limited to the towns in older Canada, and has nothing to do with land or its ownership. " Fishing farmers " are numerous in Nova Scotia, and the people of this province pride themselves on being many-sided in their pursuits, characteristics which may account for a certain backwardness in farming. In politics and letters they have turned out more men of ability for their numbers than any other of the Canadian provinces, though outstripped in the material race by Central and Western Canada. The maritime people, particularly the Nova Scotians, pride themselves on the above distinction and on their overwhelming preponderance over the rest of the Dominion in United Empire loyalist blood. The coal and steel industries of Cape Breton are so remotely placed that they do not greatly influence the ord nary life of the province. They occupy the country around Sydney, near where the great fortress of Louisbourg once stood. New Brunswick has one large city, St. John, which has outgrown Halifax, and, like THE MARITIME PROVINCES 187 that city, but to a greater extent, is an impor- tant open winter port for the Dominion traffic. The story of New Brunswick runs very much with that of Nova Scotia. The shape of the province makes for some difference as the original settlers pushed inland up river valleys. It is a rougher and more mountainous country than its sister province, but had greater spaces available for immigration, and received between 1830 and 1840 a larger influx for a short time than Nova Scotia, but in population has always remained just behind, at the last census showing a slight increase. Twelve loyalist regiments were among its original settlers. Its forests, valuable for lumbering, are more extensive than in Nova Scotia, and this, curiously enough, was a business that the Highlanders, who had no trees in their own country, took to most readily in the maritime provinces, and it is work that can be combined with a freehold farm. But, unlike Halifax, St. John is not the political capital of New Brunswick, Frederic- ton, a small town eighty miles up the St. John river, filling that position. In popula- tion and characteristics, and in the fact of its being, save as regards St. John, a com- paratively slow-going country, the province is much like Nova Scotia. It still possesses, however, vast uncleared forests which contain big game, and many famous salmon rivers. 188 CANADA While Nova Scotia is the resort of the general American tourist, though it, too, contains some game and many fish, New Brunswick, with its moose, caribou, deer, and salmon, is a paradise for the wealthy sportsman. Prince Edward Island, first seriously settled by American loyalists, has a population of ninety thousand, showing at the last census a marked decrease, and, as before mentioned, is an island peopled by yeomen farmers much of the type we have just touched upon, and with Highland blood very much in evidence. Charlottetown is the little capital, and it seems rather absurd that this small country should not have been attached to one or other of the neighbouring provinces, as it is within easy sight of their coasts. However, it has its Parliament, and more than that, its two Houses and Executive. It was granted originally to a number of proprietors for mili- tary or other services, real or supposed, on the usual terms of planting settlers. For the most part they neither planted settlers nor gave up their proprietary rights, while many had sold these rights, making the complication still greater. The political energies of the island were mainly occupied in endeavours to shake off this incubus, and free the rents that were still demanded from the actual settlers who had cleared and made the country. About the time of Federation, THE MARITIME PROVINCES 189 after a hundred years of dispute, this question was finally settled. It is a happy, contented, aloof fragment of the Dominion of Canada, and though an island, surrounded by good fishing grounds, more interested in agriculture than in fish, and when the Gulf of St. Lawrence is frozen in winter, carries on its communi- cations with the outer world across the ice. The maritime provinces provide an interest- ing contrast in many ways to the rest of British Canada. Their people are popularly known as " Blue noses," and are proud of the soubriquet, bestowed upon them long ago by the Yankees. For in the loyalist exodus they emphasised the fact of being " true blues " so forcibly that their enemies adopted this sneering application of it, which was frankly accepted as a badge of honour, and proves a convenient colloquial term to-day for the whole group. Some day, perhaps, these provinces will undergo a material transformation, for they abound in mineral wealth. But at present they go quietly and happily along, only here and there feeling the impetus that is pushing the Dominion forward at such a rate. The visitor to Canada finds something of relief in an almost old- fashioned people, not wholly given over, though doubtless they would like to be, to material growth, and its, in some ways, rather deadening effect. CHAPTER VIII THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES AND THE RISE OF THE NORTH-WEST The prairie country is generally known, and has hitherto been always known, as the North- West. It begins about one thousand six hundred miles west of Halifax, and con- sequently about two hundred miles west of the half-way line across the continent ; while its most southerly point lies further north than the populated parts of Eastern Canada. Till 1869 the North-West had no existence for Canada. It was an unknown wilderness, used as a fur-trading ground by the Hudsons Bay Company, and under their jurisdiction. Early in the century Lord Selkirk, the philanthropic promoter of High- land immigration to Canada, had planted a handful of Scotch agricultural settlers there, who were brutally used by the fur traders. The antagonism of the traders, who resented all intrusion, together with the inaccessible nature of the country, and the bad reputation of its climate, hid it from the world as behind a curtain for many generations. 190 THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 191 It took the officials and servants of the fur companies ten weeks to travel through the wilderness by canoe from Montreal to Fort Garry, which stood on the site of Winni- peg. Before 1870 Canada terminated where the fertile western peninsula of Ontario abuts upon Lake Huron. The former steady influx of settlers had practically ceased. All the good land in Old Canada had been occupied, and most of it converted into finished farms, while the rest was rapidly becoming so. On maps and plans there were still great tracts of forest behind the northern edge of the good and settled up countries, offered for settlement. But oversea immigrants, who had the other colonies and the United States for selection, would have none of it ; it was too poor. The Canada of that day was, in short, filled up. If any were to open up the forest regions still available, it was such natives of the country who had no better alternative, and they did so in a halting fashion. Would-be immi- grants knew now what clearing land in Canada meant. The heavy, continuous axe work, the slow progress, the years of waiting till the stumps could be removed : this was well enough on good land. It had raised thousands of poor labouring men to the position of comfortable farmers. But going through these years of toil to possess only indifferent land at the end of it was quite another matter, 192 CANADA and this was thoroughly understood. The Canadian provincial governments and land companies placarded the English railway stations, offering free grants or cheap lands, in vain. They were not worth touching. The British public, with so many other outlets, was quite right. The " Backwoods of Canada " for fifty years had been almost s^Tionymous with the word emigration, and the departing emigrant was, as a matter of course, going to be a " backwoodsman." The expression lasted among stay-at-home people in England long after it had ceased to have any meaning. For years after the movement to the prairies had set in the friends of the settlers there still spoke of the absent ones as " backwoodsmen." Parliamentary orators still occasionally do so. In 1870 Canada seemed as if she had stopped and would grow w^ithin the limits nature had set here merely as an old country grows ; as Nova Scotia has done, for instance. Rebellions and wars seem always to have marked im- portant changes in Canada's history. The Canadian Government took over at this moment the " Great Lone Land,'''' as a much read work of the day called it, in 1869, from the Hudsons Bay Company. The latter had clouds of half-breed French-Indian and Scotch- Indian employees who had homesteads around Fort Garry, which had become a little town. The change caused fear and discontent THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 198 among them, and they now rose in rebellion, deposed the Government, and judicially mur- dered a prominent Ontario man. This brought up a military expedition under Sir Garnet, afterwards Lord Wolseley, who laboured for weeks through the old wilderness trail of the fur-traders. The usurping Government, so- called, collapsed at the approach of force, and Riel, a visionary, partly-educated French half- breed, who was the head of the insurrection, fled to the States. This was the first peep the outer world had into the great North-West. Manitoba was now made a province. Fort Garry, on the Red River, was named Winni- peg, and the present writer saw the old wooden fort still standing in the embryo city a few years later. Manitoba became a subject of both interest and mystery in Old Canada. A few people went up there to farm with the vague hope that some day a railroad might reach them, for there was no market then for produce. They grew heavy crops of everything, the fiat rich prairie land being of extraordinary fertility. Grasshoppers sometimes, and at others early autumn frosts, or destructive hail-storms, did serious damage. It was to the interest of the fur- traders to make out that farming was too risky from all these causes to make the country a desirable one for settlement. In the seventies, however, the present Canadian 194 CANADA Pacific railroad was first thought of. People could even then get into Manitoba through Minnesota by rail, but when on the edge of it there was nothing more. The railroad promoters, however, who were identified with the Conservative party in the Dominion Government, thought it would be a glorious thing for the Empire to be able to carry troops across the continent to the East, in case of need, as the United States railroads would not be available for such a purpose. It was understood by now, too, what hundreds of miles of splendid land lay awaiting the plough. But people were greatly divided as to whether the average man or woman could stand a series of such terribly cold wmters, and whether the risk to crops was not too great for any real and extensive settlement in the country. British Columbia had pricked up her ears at the prospect of a railroad, and joined the Federation on the strength of a promise that it should be constructed. For a poor country, as Canada then was, it seemed to many a mad undertaking. It meant seven hundred miles through a rocky wilderness with costly engin- eering from Montreal to Winnipeg, and eight hundred miles across a prairie barely touched by settlement, terminated by a climb over the unexplored Alpine ranges of the Rockies. Whence could the profit THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 195 ever come for such a line ? It became for years the chief subject of political con- tention at Ottawa, the Conservative Govern- ment, under Sir John Macdonald, the prime mover of Federation, being active supporters of it, while the Liberal party were oppon- ents of, at least, any immediate action. The Grand Trunk, which had then run for years through the best parts of Canada, had so far proved a dead loss. So had the Inter- colonial railroad, recently constructed to the Maritime provinces. Here were two thousand miles to be compassed through a country as yet producing almost nothing, and just half of it naturally barren. But the idea of its coura- geous advocates was to carry the people by the railroad who would settle on it and make it a success. The late Sir John Macdonald, with Lords Strathcona and Mountstephen, were the life and soul of what looked to some a hopeless enterprise. Their faith was as great as their energy. The first lived to see it successfully doing its work, the last two have lived to see it paying handsome dividends; and so far from being sufficient to serve the prosperity it has created, another great line is being built parallel to it. There were few capitalists in Canada in those days. The railroad was built mainly with British and European capital, but the financial difficulties and ups 196 CANADA and downs which were caused by the enormous outlay on construction were almost sensational, like the engineering feats that carried the road over the Rockies. By 1881-2 the four- hundred-mile section was finished between Port Arthur, the head of Lake Superior, and Winnipeg ; and as Port Arthur could be reached in two days by fine steamers from the heart of Ontario, this opened the North- West to the world. So, while the road was still being made through wild Ontario to the east, and over the prairies to the west, the world rushed in. A few thousand people had already spread over the nearer prairie, but nobody had as yet heard very much of it. In 1881-2 there was a great boom. Thous- ands rushed to Winnipeg, which reached a population of thirty thousand in two years, and small towns sprang up along the railroad towards the Rocky Mountains. The boom was overdone, prices had risen to absurd figures, speculation was mainly in paper, and there was a disastrous reaction. But the boom opened the country to the world's knowledge, left thousands of new settlers behind, and put an end to the still lingering notion that Old Canada, ending at Lake Huron, was the limit of the country for all appreciable time. The farmers' sons of Ontario and the Maritime provinces, and often the farmers themselves, left for the promised land. The THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 197 most contradictory stories were told about its crops and prospects. It was a common pleasantry in Old Canada that nobody who returned from Manitoba could ever speak the truth again. Agricultural matters were very bad just then in England, and nearly as bad for the same reason in Canada. A dozen years previously English land had been considered the soundest thing in the whole world, and now a regular cataclysm had overtaken it. Hundreds of English farms were tenantless and derelict, and lands were vainly offered at prices which even a century before would have been thought impossible. Well-established Canadian and Eastern American farms suffered from the same cause, in an only less degree. This cause was the opening of the American West by railroads, and the pouring in of cheap produce grown on virgin soil. It was the fall in grain, never appreciably to rise again, which first upset all these old countries. The Continent sought safety in high protective duties. Great Britain faced it, but half the country went into grass, while the half that could not grow grass had terrible years, and has never fully recovered its old prices and prosperity. Old Canada suffered too. Its lands went down, but its yeoman freeholders changed all their methods by degrees, and went into grass, 198 CANADA dairying, fruit, and such like. But this is anticipating a little. For, in spite of the railroad and immigration to the North- West, it was a long time before its new population had much visible success. The last links of the Canadian Pacific railroad, those through the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver, were completed in 1886, and by this time the North- West was an accepted fact. The aspect of the Dominion had now wholly changed. Suddenly, as it were, she had added to herself a territory that would carry, as soon as they could be put on it, an agricultural population larger than that of all the old provinces put together. So much seemed even then certain. How much under the mark this estimate is likely to prove has now been long understood. Above all there was here no laborious clearing. The prairie pioneer began at the point where the old backwoods settlers only arrived after about twenty years of work. He began, too, with generally better land, of almost inexhaustible fertility. The farmer of the old provinces had, this long time, almost everywhere been compelled to farm as in England, with manuring, rotation of crops, and so forth. A great deal of this North- West would grow grain for thirty years with unim- paired vitality. The lighter land would grow it for perhaps half that time before requiring. THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 199 like Ontario, Britain, and every other old country, the application of more costly methods. This, with the further knowledge of another valuable asset of a different kind in British Columbia, was the new horizon that broke on Canada when the Canadian Pacific railroad reached the prairies in 1881. For then the completion of the road so long doubted was a foregone conclusion. Though immigrants poured in from Old Canada and Great Britain tolerably fast for the next fifteen years, spread over Manitoba and more thinly over the territories that, with temporary governments, stretched to the Rocky Mountains, along the railroad and the few branches that were built from it, it cannot be said that the results satisfied expectation. Many reasons for this com- paratively slow progress could be given, but a few will suffice. The grasshoppers, to be sure, quickly ceased their visitations. The wheat crops, the great staple then, as ever, of the country, answered all the expecta- tions formed of them. In Old Canada the main crop is sown in the autumn, the deep snow protecting it through the winter. But in the North- West there was not enough snow for this purpose on the windy, open prairies, while the frost w^as even harder. So the wheat is sown in the spring, which throws the harvest on into September, when night 200 CANADA frosts often ruined the grain before it had hardened. Destructive hailstorms, though in a far less degree, proved disheartening. The precise extent of this annual damage matters nothing. It was enough to make a noise in the world, and greatly influence that part of it interested in immigration. Nor was the average man in Old Canada generally enthusiastic about the North- West. It had hit him for the time rather hard, and helped to depreciate the value of bis land, which the continuously low price of grain aggravated. Like his English counterpart, he was suffering from the competition of virgin soils in the Western American States, and from improved transportation all over the world. He had not yet adapted himself to another style of farming. He could no longer sell his farm if he wished to, at the standard price of a few years earlier, and very often not at all. Buyers looked westward, and perhaps his own son, helpmate, and successor, had gone West, or, disheartened by low prices, into business. Between 1881 and 1891 a dozen or fifteen good agricultural counties in Ontario actually declined in population. Yet the Canadian North- W^est, though it progressed steadily, did none too well. The first generation of settlers had to learn how to deal with a totally new country. The winters were terribly severe. The Canadians THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 201 were used to a zero, and often a ten and twenty " below," winter temperature, but the prairies went at times far lower than this. To the immigrant from Britain this was harder still. Most of the new settlers, too, were people of small means, and not able, or often not experienced enough, to protect themselves properly from the climate. When people are properly housed in warmed buildings and their stock in good barns, when they live near together, are within easy reach of a railroad or town, and have telephones and telegraphs, a winter like the North-West matters little, as there is no farm work to be done in it. But in the early days the settler had often no near neighbours, and neither himself nor his animals were well housed. He was sometimes forced to leave a wife and children alone while he made long and even perilous trips for trifling but necessary things. Women frequently went mad from the solitude of the prairie. But, above all, the price of grain remained low, and the cost of transport to the world's markets was still so high that even with a good crop securely saved, it did not leave the prairie farmer enough profit to tempt outsiders, with half-a-dozen other fields to choose from, to a life, the hardships of which had been noised very much abroad. Farmers in Old Canada consoled themselves in their natural grievance against the North- 202 CANADA West by enlarging on its drawbacks. The Americans, eager for immigration to their own West, made great play with the Manitoba winter. British capital avoided the country as if it were not yet " proven," and immigrants of substantial capital from Great Britain went to the American West, to say nothing of other British colonies, at the rate of thirty or forty for one who went to the Canadian North-West. There is no doubt that for many years the country had a bad name, and that its well-wishers were disappointed at its slow progress. But this is comparative. A steady flow of immigrants, mostly of the less well endowed sort, went from Great Brit- ain, and so did the farmers' sons and others from the Old Canadian provinces. These last were the most successful. They were used to working from daylight to dark, and knew how to work. The British were generally from classes unused to farm work, and though they did not necessarily fail, they took a long time to realize what the Ontario man took as a matter of course, that he was a pioneer, and only hard work was to be thought of. The Englishman in the last thirty years has lost something of his old reputation. He is apt to be on the alert for a grievance with his employer, if he has one, or if on his own account, with his surroundings, and is credited with an inclination to promote discontent. THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 203 The Scotsman, somehow, steers clear of this reproach. For he is apt to keep his own counsel till he knows what he is talking about. In 1885 there was a serious rising in the North- West of half-breeds and Indians. The causes were complicated, but in effect it was the old story of civilization versus hunting grounds and savagery. Several thousand volunteers from Old and New Canada took the field, and there was some sharp fighting, with considerable loss of life, before the rising was suppressed. The leader was the old rebel, Riel, who had led the rebellion at Winnipeg in 1870. He was now captured and executed. The Indians throughout Canada, it should be stated here, have been treated with the utmost consideration and perfect good faith, from the earliest times, by the British and Canadian Governments. They are, after all, but few in number — some hundred thousand in the whole of the Dominion. In the old provinces they have been leading more or less civilized lives in " reserves," while in the west they live within ample bounds allotted to them, but lead a more nomadic existence. The city of Winnipeg, as the sole entrepot, the Chicago of Western Canada, as it had been fondly styled, did not grow as a Chicago should. None of the small towns strung along the railroad increased as western towns in a rich country should increase. Population and 204 CANADA production made steady progress, and hun- dreds of contented farmers who had come up with little or nothing were to be found in the land. But that the North- West, till within the last year or two of the last century, had disappointed expectations, there is no doubt. All Canada, indeed, had gone very slowly for the previous twenty years. Both in east and west there was a vast amount of solid well-being and quiet progress. But for a new country that had just annexed a fertile slice of a continent, things were not right. Comparisons between Old Canada and the Eastern States in material advance were inevitable and unpleasant. Population barely maintained the rate of an old country ; Canadians went to the United States by thousands. The West of Canada, again, com- pared equally badly with the American West when it came to figures. Nobody quite knew why, but everybody knew it was so. At the close of the last century the Canadian North- West suddenly woke up. Nothing par- ticular happened up there. It had been going steadily and slowly along, w^hen the outside world suddenly discovered it had mis- judged the country. Two things, however, contributed to show the world its mistake. A very active immigration policy on the part of the Dominion Government in Great Britain, and even in parts of Europe, coincided with THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 205 the exhaustion of all the free grant and cheap lands worth having in the United States. Then suddenly a rush began to the Canadian North-West. There were millions of acres of good land unoccupied and owned by the Government, by the Canadian Pacific railroad, which had received great areas as part pay- ment, and by the Hudson's Bay Company, which had received them in consideration of their old rights. There were free grants on conditions of settlement and cultivation, and other lands at a nominal price. The American habit for generations among a considerable class had been to take up land on a frontier, make a good improved farm of it, sell it at a high price during a buoyant time, and then move on westward to repeat themselves, or in the person of their children, the same process. They had now got to their farthest West, and settled that up in good farms, worth £10 or £15 an acre. There was no further move possible till suddenly they discovered that North- West Canada offered yet another shift as promising as any they or their fathers had ever made. Nay, better, for they soon saw that no wheat land in America had ever been so certain and produced quite such good stuff as this new country. So, all through the Western States, times being good, American farmers sold their well-equipped fenced farms 206 CANADA at high prices and removed to the Canadian North- West, where they could take larger tracts of land, which would grow into money as their old farms had done, and where there was room to settle their sons around them. Coming like this, they w^ere mostly men of capital, and still more of complete experience for the life, which was precisely what they had been used to. They cared very little for the trifling differences in government, and, as a matter of fact, they soon saw that such difference as existed was in favour of the Canadian administration, particularly in the matter of law and order. Many of them, too, were Canadians or the sons of Canadians, who had gone to the Western States when Canada offered nothing to the poor man but a backwoods life, when the best of the back- woods period was over. Other Americans, of course, not situated precisely as were these, also went. But this was the type that led the movement, and a more valuable one could not be. They began by tens of thou- sands, increased up to fifty thousand per annum, and took in millions of pounds. What is more, the country proved all that they expected. The question was, and is, what effect such a large element — till recently American citizens — might have in weaning the North- Western Canadians from their allegiance to the Mother country. Canada, THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 207 however, has developed very strong national feelings, coupled, as every one now knows, with a staunch devotion to the Empire. And the Canadian verdict on this new element in their midst is that they are making " good Canadians." On that satisfactory and author- itative assertion we must leave it. No doubt the spectacle of hard-headed Americans pouring into Canada was an object- lesson to Great Britain, and banished any lingering doubt as to the desirability of the North- West. Two hundred thousand immi- grants have gone in annually of late from the United Kingdom, and largely to the North- West. They are of all sorts, and not generally ready-made sons of the soil, like most of the Americans. But a fair proportion are valuable immigrants, and the children at least of those who are less adaptable will play their part. The change in the state of the country in the last dozen years is miraculous. Winnipeg has leaped up to a population of 140,000. The small towns along the railroads, which languished for years, have all grown mar- vellously. It is in the country outside the towns, however, that the most interesting change has taken place. All the way from Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains, with the exception of some intervals of barren country, there is a continuous procession of comfortable homesteads, as in Ontario, often 208 CANADA of brick or stone, with large outbuildings, sheltered by plantations, all within easy sight of one another and representing farms of from a hundred and sixty to six hundred and forty acres. Though wheat is the great cash crop, mixed farming is widely practised, oats, hay, and stock of all kinds being everywhere prominent. The fields out here are large, and being fenced with wire, the country retains its wide open aspect, utterly different from Old Canada, with its small railed-in fields and abundance of wood. Most of the vegetables and small fruits known in England flourish here, as in Ontario. Apples, however, do not succeed well, and the orchard is the one familiar object of country life lacking. To the original province of Manitoba two western provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, filling up the interval to the Rocky Mountains, have been formally united to the Dominion Con- federation. In the three prairie provinces there are now 1,300,000 people out of seven and odd million in the whole Dominion. Ten years ago there were 400,000. In the history of British colonization there is no counterpart to the rapidity with which the North- West has grown in a dozen years. The old troubles have been largely overcome. In the newer districts, generally pressing in a northerly direction, the pioneer has, of course, to face the ordinary hardships. But a multi- THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 209 plication of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, and elevators (great storehouses on railroads where the farmers sell and deposit their wheat), and many other modern inventions have made the life of even the most extended settlements less formidable. Moreover, there has been a great tendency to settle new dis- tricts collectively. A knowledge of the coun- try, too, what seeds to sow, and all that belongs to agricultural science, has reduced the danger of early frosts, and even the climate, which is generally the case when a wilderness is reclaimed, has softened a little. One great factor in the progress of the country remains to be told. Though the price of wheat in the world has never recovered its old figures, yet the North-Western farmer, owing to the widely recognized top quality of his grain and to improvements in transporta- tion, gets about double the price he used to. Formerly, from the cost of getting it to Europe, the North-Western grower only received about half of even the low-marked price in England. Growing wheat on the virgin soil of the prairie is far cheaper than in Great Britain or in Old Canada, w^here manure and expensive preparation are necessary. But at the old North- West prices, even with a successful crop there was not much profit left at 2s. or 2s. 6d. a bushel. It is not surprising that the world did not rush in to face a new 210 CANADA and a cold country for such results, though the people already there, and those going in, could live on such conditions and look forward to better ones, of which they, being on the ground, would reap the benefits. They have done this last to a greater extent and more rapidly than the most sanguine expected. Wheat now fetches in the North- West about the same price as it does in England, say 4s. a bushel. The reader will understand that this represents profit and prosperity. A great problem in the North- West is labour for harvesting. A farmer on the prairie can seed far more wheat than he can harvest, and nearly every settler is himself a farmer. The latter have to depend largely on the year's inrush of immigrants, and expensive temporary importations of harvesters from Eastern Canada, not herself well supplied with labour. As the area increases with expand- ing settlements, this supply will cease to be adequate. In future the North- Western farmer will probably have to limit his w^heat land by the prospect of what his household can harvest. This will not be altogether a bad thing, as it will hasten the movement towards more generally mixed farms. As you draw near the Rockies, the rainfall hitherto, together with the moisture left in the frozen, snow-soaked ground, sufficient for agriculture, becomes precarious. So, great THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 211 areas are placed under irrigation ditches fed by the numerous fresh streams rising in the mountains, and sold in smaller plots at much higher figures. Irrigation farming is in fact another business. It means heavy and sure crops on a small area, and has its own advan- tages, which are paid for at the start. Cattle ranching is also carried on in the drier countries about the foot hills of the Rockies. The North-West has no history comparable in interest to the recent history of its settle- ment and agriculture. These are almost everything. But the settlement as regards population is not greatly unlike that of old British Canada. Communities of kindred folks may be found all over the country. There are foreigners, such as Mennonites, Douk- hobors, Galicians, and Italians. There are Highland crofters. Lowland Scottish, Welsh- speaking Welsh, French-Canadians, Scandi- navians and Swiss, while many townships, though not so exclusive, are associated in origin with particular districts of Ontario, the maritime provinces, or England. Humanly speaking, the filling of this vast country, millions of acres of which, said to be fertile and habitable, are not yet touched, will proceed at a rate calculated to make it the centre of population in the Dominion of Canada. As the home of a northern race it has the great essential of enormous areas, prolific in beef 212 CANADA and bread, with all the accessory products that belong to the main supports of life. Gold, silver, coal, iron, fruits, wool, tropical products, timber, can all create wealth and population. But these by themselves are not comparable, for the up-building of a hardy race, to a deep rich soil in a bracing climate, where both the essentials of a local subsistence and food products that the outer world must have are grown at the door over thousands of square miles. The long cold winter, so severe on the ill-protected earlier settlers, is now felt to be no more inconvenient than that of old Canada. Some, indeed, prefer it as steadier and brighter, while a generation born and grown to man's estate in the country have proved its qualities for producing healthy men and women. The old doubts, which were very widespread and very natural, have long been forgotten. CHAPTER IX BRITISH COLUMBIA The early history of British government in this province began some years before the founding of Manitoba. And it did not come by way of Canada, nor had it anything to do with Canadians. It arose out of the gold rush to California in 1849, which led to the discovery of gold in British Columbia in 1857, and a great influx of gold seekers the following year. Hitherto the Hudson's Bay Company, having reached their long arms across the Rockies, about 1806, had a monopoly of trading with the numerous and rather dangerous Indians of the Pacific slope. About 1821 numerous trading posts were established on the mainland, and some years later one on Vancouver Island, where now stands Victoria,the capital of the province. The Hudson's Bay Company were always anxious to get full control of these wild western territories, where they made it their business to keep settlers out rather than to bring them in. They or their associates had thwarted 213 214 CANADA for fifty years every attempt of outsiders to settle in Manitoba, and to the last depreciated the country's agricultural possibilities with all the weighty authority of experience. In 1847 they were granted the sole possession and government of the island of Vancouver, on condition of colonizing it and supporting a British Governor, but they did neither the one nor the other. In 1858 came a rush of thous- ands of gold miners to Victoria, the Hudson's Bay station on Vancouver Island, with a view to working the discoveries on the adjacent mainland. Upon this the Company were deprived of authority, and both the island and the mainland made a British colony under a British Governor. For a time they remained separate colonies. New Westminster, at the mouth of the Fraser, being the capital of that on the mainland. In 1867, however, the island of Vancouver and the mainland were united under one government at Victoria. The history of both sides of the Straits had been one of gold rushes, followed by reaction, during which a good deal of farming and building went forward. Victoria particularly, blessed by nature with a delightful situation on the sea, a fine harbour, with the winter climate of Devonshire, and a summer con- tinuously fine and never over hot, became a favourite resort of naval officers, leading traders, and other men of authority on the BRITISH COLUMBIA 215 Pacific coast. British warships were con- stantly there, and the capital, as well as the surrounding districts, grew up as an isolated colony of Britons with few of the character- istics of a new Canadian settlement. It was the same on the mainland. Besides gold digging on the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, farming and ranching were carried on in the valleys by men of British stock, from the old country very largely, though frequently after an interval of residence in the States. There was no road through the Rockies to Canada, from which the province was entirely shut off. In 1871, when it was received into the Dominion, people in Old Canada knew little more of the British Columbians than they knew of the Australians. This has left its mark on the province. All through the Canadas, people speak and have always spoken with what is practically an American accent and intonation. In Victoria, however, the traveller will hear again the English voice and accent. Everywhere else in North America one carriage passes another, as on the European continent, to the right. In British Columbia they have kept, unconsciously, the English fashion. These seem small things, but they mean a good deal. When the Province joined the Dominion Federation in 1871, on the prospect of the railroad which did not reach it for fourteen years, its population was 216 CANADA about seventy thousand, with the two towns of New Westminster and Victoria nearly- facing each other across a narrow strait twenty to thirty miles wide. The island of Vancouver rises up parallel to and within easy sight of the mainland for over two hundred miles. Only the southern corner, where Victoria stands, is cleared and populated ; the rest is a rugged, timber-clad, highland wilderness. This lower point actually faces the State of Washington, and the latter's Olympian range, seven or eight thousand feet high, rising sheer from the sea, presents a magnificent spectacle from the city of Victoria. New Westminster, at the mouth of the Fraser, is within a few miles of the United States boundary line. When the Canadian Pacific Railway came down the Fraser River it rejected for its terminus and port the old chief town of the mainland, and cut across to the Burrard inlet, where the sea presses into a long, narrow harbour. On its banks arose the present city of Vancouver, the San Francisco of British North America. A more foolish name than that bestowed upon it could hardly have been selected, as, facing the great island of Vancouver, it will be for ever a needless cause of confusion to all the world not con- cerned with the local geography. Equally unhappy was British Columbia in the reten- tion of its old capital, situated, as it is, on an BRITISH COLUIVIBIA 217 island, never likely to be thickly inhabited, and three hours' distant from the mainland, while centres of population are filling up in patches hundreds of miles away in various parts of this large province. So Victoria remains the political capital, Vancouver, with already a hundred thousand people, the commercial capital, and New Westminster, discarded by the C.P.R., the headquarters of the important salmon fisheries and canning establishments. New West- minster, however, is only a few miles from Vancouver, and some day, no doubt, the bigger city will extend to it. The whole sea- coast civUization of the province is, for the moment, pressed down into this southern corner. Mountains and highlands, densely clad with heavy timber, pine, cedar and hemlock — ^thicker and taller than the woods of Eastern Canada — press upon the shore. And there is very little settlement as yet north of Vancouver city, upon the coast-line, which is Norwegian in character, and indented by fjords. The rise of Vancouver is really much more wonderful than that of Winnipeg ; for the central situation of the latter, between the prairies and Eastern Canada, made its future inevitable, the whole wealth of the former being compelled to flow into and through it. But the site of Vancouver was a desolate forest in 1880. It stands 218 CANADA with its back, as it were, to the Dominion, facing the Pacific, and when it was founded, the trade of the country with the Orient and Australasia, by w^ay of the Western Ocean, on any serious scale, was an unproven matter. Nor is there any smooth country with the promise of a thick population spreading inland from the city or sea-coast, but a broken, mountainous region densely covered with sombre forest, only permitting of settlement here and there in valleys and strips. In 1900, Vancouver City had 80,000 inhabitants. Ten years later it had 100,000. It is a well- built, handsome town, spreading with its suburbs along a low ridge beside a deep inlet of the ocean, where the largest steamers trading with China, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as with the American coast, go in and out. Above the city and harbour the mountains rise to the height of from two to three thousand feet. Lumbering is an active industry both on the mainland and on Vancouver Island, where there is also coal, the timber, particularly the Douglas fir, pitch pine, and cedar, being about the best in the world. These trees grow in vast forests to the height of from two hundred to four hundred feet. Their trunks are of proportionally enormous girth, and what is more, stand so near together that the effect is sombre and almost overwhelming to puny man, making BRITISH COLUMBIA 219 slow way between them. There is nothing in the least like these forests in Eastern Canada. There are great sawmills, too, whence planks and roofing shingles are despatched to the prairies, where, as can be imagined, the demand for building materials is large and constant. The salmon fishing and canning industry dominates the mouth of the Fraser River, New Westminster being its chief headquarters, and the men engaged in the fishing department are largely Japanese. The number of salmon that run up the Fraser and other rivers in the autumn to spawn, 'and thence up its many rapid tributaries, is incredible. You may see them in November literally jostling one another in the pools of quite small streams, and the carcases of the many that by a curious provision of nature die on the way upstream strew the banks, creating an intolerable stench. In Vancouver City and Victoria, you feel at once you are face to face with Asia. It is a strange jump from the intensely Anglo- Saxon atmosphere of the prairies to find whole streets inhabited by Chinese and Japanese, both in Vancouver City and Victoria. The fisheries, laundry work, and domestic service are their chief sources of occupation, but a Chinaman will work equally well on the farm or in the lumber camps. He has an inherited instinct for keeping a bargain in the 220 CANADA spirit as well as in the letter, and works as faithfully in the absence as in the presence of an employer. These people only come for a certain time ; when they have made enough money, they return and live on it for the rest of their days. A heavy tax is charged on their admission, for there is great opposition among the working-class whites, who would exclude them entirely if they could. The position of labour in British Columbia generally is at cross purposes. This is not a half-way house for immigrants, being at the end of all things, nor, like the other provinces, is there any considerable number of immigrants work- ing their way by wages towards the position of farmers. The rough, mountainous surface of the province is only available for settlement in valleys and plateaus between the ranges, better adapted to people with more or less capital, and mainly occupied by them. So the working-class element outside the mines is small, highly paid, and very indifferent as to the service it renders. Naturally enough, though, this state of things greatly retards the development of the country. The working man objects to the Chinaman who, though not particularly cheap, carries out his bargains of labour so effectually and punctiliously. Save for occasional small consignments from England, there is no domestic labour to BRITISH COLUMBIA 221 be had except the Chinaman, who, in this department, is very competent, and will do all the housework and cooking of a well-appointed moderately-sized town house. White British Columbians will not go into service, and at the same time object to the presence of the China- man even as a servant, and use their voting power in this direction. The real scarcit}^ of labour all through the agricultural and fruit-growing regions of the province tends to limit the operations of farmers to what they can accomplish with their own individual pair of hands. This is all very well in a wheat country, which offers even thus a satisfying lift in the world to working men with very little money to start on. But the orchards, the irrigated fruit farms, the park-like stock ranches that fill the intervals between the mountains of British Columbia, do not greatly lend themselves to this type of man. They require more capital, and the settler with more capital cannot do justice to it, however ready he may be to work like a labourer, if he cannot make sure of getting sufficient assistance. You cannot cultivate and, above all, gather and market apples, peaches, grapes, cherries, and all the small annual fruits that do so well in British Columbia by machinery. A large capitalist can attract, by various means, a regular supply out of the scant labour market, but the average man 222 CANADA cannot do this. Again, the anomalous situa- tion prevailing to a large extent in the North- West, reaches its climax in British Columbia, except where the Chinaman is available in the sea-coast cities. The wife of a British Columbian, for instance, whether well-off or not, has generally to do the cooking and housework — in short, the whole drudgery of the home. This is an anomaly when there is no financial need for it, and is a great disadvantage. The climate of the elevated region between the sea coast and the Rocky Mountains is much colder than that of the former, and less cold than that of the prairie. It is better than either for the worker. Invigorating without any trying extremes — a bright, dry, but never very hot summer, with a small rainfall and a steady, hard, but not excessively cold winter. The rainfall varies so greatly, however, within the same area that you may find in the same valley twenty miles of ordinary farms corresponding to those of Ontario, and growing the same crops, followed by a long stretch of a more rainless district under irrigation, cut up into smaller plots, and devoted to fruit, w^hich is the main staple of agricultural export. A great deal of this middle country, which is the favourite and most eligible portion of the province for settlers, is a pleasant combination of open BRITISH COLUMBIA 223 country and forest, and being very hilly, and often interspersed with long, clear lakes, is the most beautiful inland scenery in the whole of the Dominion and not unlike parts of Scotland. It is the type of country that an Englishman, who had seen the whole of the Dominion, would almost certainly pitch upon as the most attractive to settle in, other things being equal. As a matter of fact, great numbers of people not only from the old country, but from Old Canada, who possess small or moderate fixed incomes, do come to this middle region of British Columbia, and occupy themselves in fruit farming on a small scale. Everything is conducive to a happy life but the lack of labour indoors and out, and how this presses on a family depends entirely on their numbers, age, strength, and so forth. Communications are maintained either by steamers up and down these valley lakes or by small branch railroads, but the province is so broken up by mountain and hill ranges, and the occupied spaces are so detached and straggling, that any attempt at geographical detail here would be futile and confusing. And, again, when one speaks of the province which runs north for seven hundred or eight hundred miles, it must be borne in mind that only the extreme southern portion, and then in this fragmentary fashion, is as yet occupied. The Grand Trunk Pacific, the 224 CANADA new railroad, will cross the Rockies, two hundred miles north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and then shooting north-westward, will run through the centre of the province to its port on the Pacific, four hundred miles north of Vancouver City. All this is now practically a rugged wilderness lying in the lap of the future, and does not concern us here. Bears, mountain sheep, moose, and wapiti range the British Columbia mountains. The buffalo, which grazed the prairies in literally countless thousands before the settle- ment of Manitoba and were then exterminated, did not exist to the west of the Rockies. At the far north of British Columbia is the gold- bearing territory of the Yukon, which first made such a stir in the world fifteen years ago, and is now an established mining country producing annually about as much as British Columbia. For gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal account for a considerable amount of the industrial life of the province. In the deep troughs of the Rocky Mountains, and between these and the Selkirks, mining towns have sprung up, surrounded, whenever the valleys are wide enough, by agricultural enterprise or cattle ranches, while in the south-east is a great and busy coal district. The wonders of the railroad journey through the Rockies have often been described. These mountains are not quite the height BRITISH COLUMBIA 225 of the Swiss Alps, though in far north- west British Columbia the coast range reaches nineteen thousand feet, the height of Snowdon placed upon the top of Mont Blanc. Nor are many of them capped through- out the summer with snow. But they are more precipitous and jagged than even the Alps. Their awe-striking desolation and utter absence of human life, and the knowledge that this continues for hundreds of miles to the northward, produces a different feeling from any experienced in the Alps. For there the mountains, awesome though they be. are surrounded and interspersed with an ancient and luxuriant civilization of towns, villages, and pastures, which give a beauty and a contrast that is quite lacking in the Rockies. For these are only magnificent and terrible, with their lonely lakes and leaping cataracts. This thin thread of railroad, however, to be followed presently by another, makes a very great difference. It binds the Dominion and it binds the Empire literally with a rod of iron. Slowly though it crawls up and down the steep gradients and round the sharp curves through the long hours of a day and a night, men and products are dragged backwards and forwards upon it in a cease- less stream, and telegraph messages flash from ocean to ocean along its track. No two countries more useful to one another 226 CANADA could be placed alongside than these two contrasting regions of mountain and prairie. The prairie has no timber (in a commercial sense) and no standard fruits. Building of all kinds is continuous and extensive, and must be so for generations, while fruit is also a necessity of life. Their neighbour produces both these things in inexhaustible abundance. There is a coal region in the prairies, but British Columbia coal is, or will be, much handier to large portions of it. Grain is produced in many of the valleys of the mountain provinces, but for a steady supply to the mining districts the prairies are depended upon. Lastly, the prairie provinces, though with an always pleasant summer climate, have a winter one which, if endurable and uninjurious to most people, and enjoyable to some, proves more than others can bear. A great many people, too, who can bear it get wearied of it. To these people British Columbia, with its wide choice of both climate and scenery, offers a complete change. The Eastern Canadian can get no relief from a frozen up winter short of the more southerly of the United States or the West Indies. The prairie Canadian can remove himself across the Rockies and enjoy, if he choose, either a far more modified Canadian winter, or that of Devonshire, where green turf mats upon the roadside, and English ivy climbs up the BRITISH COLUMBIA 227 chimneys, and soft damp winds blow from the sea, while snow-capped mountains rise thousands of feet into the sky behind. All kinds of people are either mingled together or collected in racial bunches in the valleys of British Columbia, or towards the mouth of the Fraser River, the only agricul- tural wedge of country on the sea coast. Their occupations are mixed and manifold, but the proportion of British-born people is greater than in any other province, and what may be called the American spirit and in- fluence is less marked, more particularly at Victoria on the island of Vancouver, with its beautiful neighbourhood of fruit and grass and grain, and clear rushing streams. RS CHAPTER X THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY When in 1868 the New Dominion Government settled down in their fine Parliament buildings at Ottawa and began a fresh chapter in Canadian history, things fell into working order more rapidly than might have been expected under such a totally fresh departure. Still, almost every man there may be said to have brought with him political experience, and whether he approved of Federation or not, and there were many who did not, particularly in the maritime provinces, he felt the greater dignity of the House of which he was now a member and the wider sphere of action he was called to. When it is said that the terms "Senate" and "House of Commons" were substituted at Ottawa for the " Legislative Council " and " Assembly " in general use hitherto in the provinces, and that the British model of procedure was almost exactly followed, and further that each province was represented by the same number of senators but contributed to the Lower House according 228 THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 229 to its population, that will be sufficient for the purpose of these brief pages. Though Sir John Macdonald, as first Premier, under Lord Monk as first Governor-General, started with a Cabinet of six Conservatives and six Liberals, and called his Government Liberal- Conservative, this was a mere rally, a call into being, as it were, of the two political parties, and they soon fell into line. The French of the lower province played a mixed part, mainly Conservative, in neutral questions, but flaring up in race or religious issues, irre- spective of political parties, and with a ten- dency to follow into either camp a leader of their own race who touched their imagina- tion. The Liberals started their federal life as Free Traders, the Tories as Protectionists. The Americans had just thrown the Liberals over, as related in a former chapter, and further cherished a very natural hope that by barring their own doors against Canadian trade they would drive Canada into annexa- tion. A year after Federation the famous old Nova Scotian statesman Howe created an awkward moment for Canada. In a combination of personal pique and honest conviction he fired the whole province with a fervid cr}'^ for secession, under the plea that their interests were in perO, reviving the old grievance that their Parliament had voted for 230 CANADA Federation without an appeal to the people. Howe went to England and laid the urgent appeal for secession of an apparently united province at the steps of the throne. The British Government, however, would not give way. On his return Howe was approached by Sir John Macdonald and others with forcible representations of the disaster he was provoking. With further concessions to Nova Scotia and with skilful arguments flattering to its leader, the old man was won over, and the Nova Scotian Assembly was gradually convinced of the hopelessness of opposing both Ottawa and Westminster. Formerly overlooked for cer- tain reasons in the Federal Government, he was now placed in the Cabinet. But his day was really over. A majority of his old friends and supporters in Nova Scotia, of which he became Lieutenant-Governor, refused to forgive him for his final face-about, though it was not discreditable, and he died in 1873. Nova Scotia remained strong in Anti-Federationists till they gradually died out about the end of the century. Thus ended a little drama, and the only serious hitch the Confederation as such ever had. The two chief questions with which the Dominion Cabinets were occupied for the first twenty years were the Canadian Pacific rail- road and the Tariff. The railroad for yeard THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 231 virtually overshadowed everything. Otherwise the Conservatives, who were its abettors under Sir John Macdonald as related, were Protectionists. The Liberals, who were opposed to it, or at least to any forward action, were then Free Traders. So the railroad and the Tariff, though as matters of policy quite unconnected with one another, were the two main questions on which Canadian parties were in conflict. We have seen how the first business was carried through. Visitors to Canada in the seven- ties used jestingly and even slightingly to report that Liberal and Conservative stood merely for a railroad to be or not to be. They were almost right, only they did not realize what that railroad meant, as, I trust, by this time, the reader does. But there was more than this : the party who carried it through pledged the credit of the country and of its greatest bank, incidentally staking, it is said, their own financial stability at a serious crisis. The risks were great, and their opponents were not without cause for alarm. But the daring policy won and was crowned with a success that has made historic heroes of leaders who were once called madmen by thousands of men who were no fools. So much for the railroad which was to lift Canada into another sphere of existence. But the Tariff, of 232 CANADA course, is an abiding question, as in all countries. Now at the beginning of Federation, when Canada, which had enjoyed free intercourse in all raw material with the United States, found herself shut out by high duties, there was naturally depression. It was not felt so acutely at first, since for some years after 1866 America was staggering under the results of a gigantic civil war. By the seventies, however, she had pulled herself together and was pouring manufactured goods over the low barrier of the Canadian frontier, and threatening to crush out the weak infant industries of that country. But agriculture was still flourishing, for grain was high, and the farmers were naturally Free Traders. Free Trade in Canada, however, signifies a tariff for revenue only, as opposed to a tariff for fostering native industries by keeping foreign goods at such a price that home-made articles can compete with them. To the British Free Trader a mere difference between fifteen and thirty per cent, duty, which these two policies roughly represent, may not seem to constitute two bitterly opposed schools of thought. But direct taxation in a young and growing country was outside contemplation, and still is so in Canada. Free Trade there means tariff for revenue, not Free Trade in the fullest sense. THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 233 Depression increased in Canada. Annexa- tion was freely talked of in many quarters, and even farmers who were still getting tolerable prices for grain were feeling the failure of local markets in other ways. The Americans were not ill-pleased at the success of the lesson they considered they were reading to a contumacious colony that per- sisted in its absurd old-world connection. Canada was weak and poor — ^three million and odd souls against forty million — and things were in a bad way. Then, in 1879, Sir John Macdonald carried through his famous measures known as " The National Policy," or, in brief, a duty averaging about thirty per cent, on all imported goods. This is of vital importance, as it has remained ever since, till the past year or so, the basis of Canadian policy. When in 1896 a Liberal Government, after seventeen years of outing, came into power, the Free Traders had vanished from the land. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, whether converted or not, had no choice but to sustain Macdonald's policy. \^hatever the private opinion of individuals, the Liberal Party for the next three elections maintained their position by continuing the policy of their opponents. Nor is there any doubt but that in this, as in their other measures, they expressed the general sense of the Dominion. They came into the long tenure of power 234 CANADA they were to enjoy till 1911 as a change of men rather than of measures. Macdonald and the other Conservative leaders had passed away, and the traditional British disposition to " give the others a chance," came into effect. But the new Government found there was nothing for it but to continue their opponents' policy. Sir Wilfrid Laurier did go to Washington to see if he could negotiate something in the way of Reciprocity, but the Americans would have nothing to say to him. In 1896, though Canada had laid the foundations and something more of her manufacturing prosperity, her great day had not yet come. The Canada of 1896 was almost insignificant in the world's eye, including that of the United States, compared to the Canada of 1911. Politics became now little more than a matter of " Ins and outs," though the " ins " remained in. Visitors to Canada asked in vain the difference between a Liberal and a Conservative. Nobody could tell them, for there literally was none, and there was not now even a railroad question. All over Canada, to be sure, you might find farmers objecting to the high tariff, which appeared to them to be making manufacturers wealthy at their expense. But then no practical effect could be given to such opinions in a country which all this time was astonish- ing the world and itself by its leaps and THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 235 bounds forward in the path of wealth, pro- gress, and importance. The farmers of the old provinces, too, were recovering from their long depression by the growth of local markets and increased facilities of transportation both internal and across the seas. So there was the curious spectacle of a party remaining continuously in power in great measure because there was no possible cry with which to turn them out. On the face of it, they had stolen their opponents' policy, and, of course, they had to sit down under that accusation. A legitimate enough party cry, but it breaks no bones, and was hardly fair, as the Liberals had no choice, for during an unprecedented prosperity they could hardly reverse a policy which the over- whelming sense of the country believed essential to its continuance. Moreover, they acquitted themselves to the general satisfaction not only of their own country, but to that of both parties in the Motherland. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, simply as a French Canadian, carried the bulk of his countrymen with him. In the Boer war, however, when the question of sending troops to South Africa arose, backed by his whole French following Laurier would have opposed it, but the British, regardless of party, made it evident that in such case he would be hurled from power on the spot, and he wisely gave in. Sincerely devoted to the 236 CANADA British connection, and as nearly an Imperial- ist as could be expected of a French Canadian, Sir Wilfrid, if not a great leader like Mac- donald, proved himself a wise, shrewd, and capable Prime Minister. One of the earliest acts of his Government was to grant preference, that is, a reduction of about one-third of the duty on British goods, which greatly increased the volume of British trade with Canada. Mentally, he is hardly a typical French- Canadian. He has a sincere admiration for Great Britain, and is intimate with its literature traditions, though loyal enough to his own race, who, indeed, often complain that he is *' too English," while the English com- plain that he is "too French" — a fairly obvious compliment to his impartiality. Within recent years, however. Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal party struck out upon a line of policy that the country at the Autumn elections of 1911 rejected so decisively as to inflict nothing less than a catastrophe on the party, and bring about the return of the Conservatives to power in overwhelming majority. However political opinions may differ, the fact remains that Laurier had utterly failed to gauge the temper of the Canadian people. The recent Reprocity treaty, introduced by the Liberal party and favoured by President Taft and a majority of the American people, may THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 237 be roughly described as a free interchange of raw products. The resources of Canada in this respect are immense, while the popula- tion and its exploiting powers are still comparatively small, though with an abso- lute certainty of constant and rapid increase. The resources in raw material of the United States are also still very great, but the population and capital engaged in exploiting them are infinitely greater than those at the disposal of Canada and would turn with avidity to the latter as a field of enter- prise. One objection of the Canadians to the proposed treaty was that they preferred to conserve their own natural resources for their own people to-day and for future generations, though the prospect of an immediate inflation of business activity was naturally tempting. The manufacturers were opposed to the Treaty for obvious reasons, the farmers as a whole were expected to benefit by it. But these calculations and assumptions matter little now. For to the surprise of both the Ameri- cans, the British at home, and in a measure of the Canadians themselves, the country pronounced its overwhelming verdict, almost uninfluenced by the usual considerations of trade interests. Rightly or wTongly the Canadians interpreted their decision as between a rapprochement with the United States, leading they knew not whither, and a 238 CANADA continuation of those close bonds that hither- to and never more closely than at this moment have united them to the Mother country. The elections of 1911 for this reason will live in history as the most remarkable in the annals of Canada. To revert to other matters, one of the first things that happened after Federation was the withdrawal of practically all those British garrisons which had been such a feature in Canadian life since the earliest days. The Dominion Government now took over the defence of the country with a volunteer organ- ization very similar to the British, and a small permanent force to garrison Quebec and one or two other places. A British officer of high rank superintends military affairs, while an excellent Military College at Kingston feeds this volunteer service with officers, the whole thing being controlled by the Canadian Government. Quite recently Canada has undertaken to a certain extent her naval defence, built some ships of war, and taken over the naval establishments and harbours of Halifax and Esquimault on Vancouver island. In early day;5 the Church of England outside the F;rench districts, without being actually established, had a strong preference in the way of privilege, and even land grants. In every British colony it was the Church of THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 239 the governing classes and the Crown repre- sentatives, and at that time even marriages by Nonconformist ministers were not considered valid. Large tracts of wild lands were set apart for the Church in Ontario, and a certain number of rectories were built by the Crown. As settlement increased, largely fed from Presbyterian and Nonconformist sources, and the popular voice began to make itself heard, the Church lands, which remained uncleared amid the growing settlements, became a political question, which was bitterly contested for nearly half a century, till they were ultimately applied to education and similar purposes, though the Church retained its official prestige to some extent and its social prestige, closely run by the Presbyterians, to its full extent. Religion, save in the case of the French Catholics, fell into the voluntary system far more suitable to a new country. Education may be briefly dismissed as conducted upon more or less the same lines as in the Mother Country, free elementary schools, being supplemented by intermediate schools for those who wish it. In the French province the Church handles the funds allocated for this purpose and controls French education. In the British districts of Quebec, how- ever, the school rates are handed to a Protestant Council, who administer them as in Ontario. Flourishing Universities in all the 240 CANADA provinces provide for higher education. The Canadians are not great readers of much beyond light Hterature, of which the bulk comes from American sources. Their news- papers stand midway between the frankly sensational vulgarism of many American publications and the higher standard and tone of British journalism. Unfortunately, though some improvement has recently taken place, all British news reached the Canadian press through American press agencies, and the Canadian drew his notions of British statesmen and political doings from pictures served up for the American public, and very often at the hands of Irish- American journalists. This was not calculated to make its readers appreciate that fusion of historic tradition with modern demand, of stately ceremonial with democratic freedom that has been the strength of England, as every educated American or Canadian who has seen it face to face recognises. Nor did it present British statesmen with their world- wide responsibilities and outlook in their true light. It was generally written to flatter a populace who were only familiar with " politicians," and knew nothing of world-statesmanship and the kind of men it bred. In spite of Federation and the great ocean- to-ocean railway and Sir John Macdonald's THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 241 ** National " Policy, the Dominion did not pro- gress as it should for fifteen or twenty years. The North- West, as related in another chapter, took a long time in thoroughly proving itself, while the immigration of intending settlers to the old provinces had virtually stopped by the seventies. There was little good land left to be cleared. Supply in trade and manufactures overtook demand. Everything was low in price ; farmers did badly, and land went down in value. The population of Ontario, the most powerful and prosperous of the old provinces! increased very little, and the young men of Canada went by thous- ands to the United States, the progress of which, in the eighties and first half of the nineties, compared to that of Canada, was a continual cause of invidious comment. Nobody quite knew why it was, but in Great Britain beyond question the feeling was general that Canada somehow lacked enter- prise. There was little sign coming from that country of the wealth realised by Australians, for instance. There was little sign abroad of any wealth coming from Canada. What there really was, modest comfort, that is to say, very widely diffused and steadily growing, was locked up in statistics which made no outside appeal. It was regarded, in short, as a poor country. Canadians themselves always thus spoke of it, partly influenced by the 242 CANADA depressing contrast between themselves and the United States. They claimed, however, that they were surer and sounder, and so they were. The banking system, for one thing, was infinitely better, and the ordinary law courts on a higher plan. But there were very few rich men. The income of the well-to-do class in the cities was modest, and expenditure, speaking generally, restricted, while the farmers worked as hard for a bare living as they had formerly done for a substantial annual balance. The popula- tion, however, was very sound. There was comparativ^ely little of the Continental alien element that poured into the United States, and little of the scum in the Canadian cities which defaced those to the southward. British capital which had flowed into Australia, the Argentine, and the United States, avoided Canada, as offering no scope, and the North- West, so far the great speculative feature of Canadian opportunity, though it had given homes to thousands of poor men, had certainly not encouraged the capitalist. French- Canada all this time increased in population by her own fecundity. Emigration naturally avoided the province, and the province did not want it. The French were quite content, for their temperament is different. They did not care as a people for material expansion. An Ontario man, if the census shows a THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 243 disappointing increase, feels it personally. "Development" is the fetish of the Canadian British. The average French-Canadian excites himself no more about the industrial growth of his province than does a man in Somersetshire or Normandy. The Anglo-Canadian, who goes to the other extreme, cannot understand this, and it is one of the many things that make such a gap between the two races. But the North-West came nobly to the support of Canada, and in a dozen years lifted her from this very moderate position to be the most materially envied country in the world. In the nineties the Canadian Govern- ment adopted an active immigration policy, mainly, of course, in Great Britain, but also on the Continent of Europe, which succeeded admirably. It was helped by a succession of good crop years in the North- West, and by the wonderful and unexpected rush of Ameri- can farmers into the country, that dispelled any lingering doubts. If it was good enough to draw American farmers with money into the surprising situation of British subjects, it was assuredly a good enough country for British enterprise and British money. And when the North- West found itself, as we have elsewhere described, the manufacturers of Ontario, who had been steadily asserting themselves in a limited market, and even shipping certain articles to Europe, now 244 CANADA leaped to the situation and blessed the " National Policy " and Sir John Macdonald. The whole North- West, filling up by emigra- tion and natural increase at a rapid pace, is now their market. Shipping and banking, every department of industrial life in Ontario together with Montreal — ^just outside its bounds, but the commercial capital of Canada — has been lifted into another sphere of prosperity. There are now, too, plenty of millionaires and great numbers of wealthy people. Canadian syndicates are not even content with operating in their own vast half- developed country, but are to be found exploring the resources of South America. The illimitable wilderness north of Quebec and Ontario is no longer a mere field for hunters' and voyageurs' tales, but mineral deposits are located, familiar by name, and in many places worked by powerful companies and with great success. Railroads are built, and others are projected through rugged woody wastes that twenty years ago would have sounded like a fairy tale. A portion of this great tide of emigration flowing from Europe to the west has stuck in Ontario, mostly men with only their labour to sell, and owing in part to the long winters, when outdoor work is at a stand- still, has sometimes found itself in temporary want. American capital, too, has not confined itself to western agriculture, but has flowed in THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 245 to share and stimulate the manufacturing and mining prospects of Ontario and some parts of Quebec. Summer residents from the United States, attracted by the rather cooler summer and rather cheaper living of Canada, have brought new life and adornment to the once stagnant little lake-shore towns, and created others on the wider waters of the St. Lawrence below Quebec. The French habitant, un- changed, simple, and backward as ever, but in a small way fond of money, drives his products to summer watering-places and chaffers in his 17th century French or in English patois with fashionable folks from Philadelphia and New York, Montreal and Toronto. A fresh stimulus has been added to lumbering, which formerly only handled timber that could be sawn up, a few, that is to say, trees to the acre, in certain districts. Now the manufacture of paper from wood pulp has made almost any kind of timber valuable, and huge areas of hitherto worthless back country are yielding their tribute to the national wealth. It is only people who knew Canada well, and knew how it stood in its own estimation and in that of the world, prior to about 1898, can realize the transformation that has come over it. There was no particular reason why all this should not have come some years earlier, and that is the odd part of what the 246 CANADA future historian will have to tell of as a wonderful epoch. If it has surprised the world it is not too much to say it has surprised the Canadians themselves almost more. For they know that the conditions which suddenly set the ball rolling had been there, but lying fallow, as it were, and though steadily insisted upon, rejected by the world for years. But it must not be supposed that in Canada every one is rich and that every one is making money. The farmers of the maritime pro- vinces and of Ontario, which last are by far the most progressive, do neither better nor worse, as a whole, than the farmers of Great Britain. While the latter comprise many classes of men, from the capitalists who occupy the large farms which are the rule in numbers of Scottish and English counties, and middling men of two or three hundred acres who employ labour, to the small man of fifty acres who does his own work, the Ontario farmers are by compari- son all of one class, nearly all farming their own farms of one hundred to one hundred and fifty acres. Since grain went permanently down they have had to adapt themselves to dairying, poultry, pigs or pedigree stock, or some other speciality, and the value of their land has now come up again to what it was in the seventies, just as the value of English farms in many counties is slowly coming back to THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 247 what it then was. They are practically all of the same class, intelligent working farmers, with an ordinary common school education, but born and trained to hard manual labour. There is no " gentle- man farming " in old Canada. The sons of the professional and higher mercantile classes never dream of touching farming in the old provinces, and very little in the west. Even rich men rarely play at it. There are few attractions, as in Britain and some other countries, in rural life. Labour is very scarce and very dear. There is no sport, for that is all in the backwoods, and no society, for the agricultural districts are entirely composed of small farmers, who toil unremittingly from daylight to dark, and their women folk work equally hard in and about the house. The fruit districts of Western Ontario afford perhaps a partial contrast socially and industrially to this general level. Agriculture is still the leading industry, even of old Canada, and this is the almost universal form it takes in all the old provmces, only more intelligent and progressive in some parts than in others. The homesteads are very well built, quite often of stone or brick, and the farm buildings admirable. They look like the homesteads of larger farms, and a stranger driving through a good district of Ontario with a continuous 248 CANADA procession of them to the right and left of him, would be surprised to learn that the inmates — the owner and his son, perhaps — did the whole manual work of the farm, working about twice as hard as an English farm labourer. The indoor life is frugal and even monotonous to a degree. Rigid economy in expenditure has been the rule of life to generations of Canadian farmers, till it has become almost a second nature, and it is not surprising that the admitted dreariness of the life has helped to send thousands of Canadian farmers' sons into other and more ambitious spheres, which a cheap college education facilitates. This ownership of land in sufficient parcels by the cultivator greatly simplifies the life of a nation. As regards the farmer himself, there is as much to be said on one side as the other : whether, that is to say, he is better or worse off with a large part of his capital tied up in ownership with its obligations of buildings and repairs and such like, and greater diffi- culties of escape in case of need or inclination, or whether, with all his capital free to put into his operations under the English land system, a lease, that is to say, or its equivalent. Out- siders, in thinking of these matters, are influenced by the quasi-sentimental view that has really very little significance with the practical class actually concerned, either in Canada or Great Britain. They have in their THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 249 minds, too, the ownership of a cottage and small holding, which is an utterly different matter. The Canadian farmer will sell his farm for profit or convenience, though he often cannot do so, as readily as he would sell a shop. He is without any sentiment regard- ing it. A British tenant of the same or larger calibre would far more often than not forego an opportunity to buy his farm even at an advantageous price, and consider that he was better situated as tenant. The farmer-pro- prietors throughout the old Canadian provinces certainly do not make more on an average than British tenants representing the same amount of invested capital, say, £1,500 to £4,000, and are often mortgaged. Market prices are lower, labour is far more costly. The British tenant of an average 200-acre farm leads a much easier and generally a more cheer- ful and varied life, and at the end of it is neither better nor worse off, on an average, than the yeoman of Eastern Canada. The prospect in a new country like the western prairies, where the emigrant gets land for little or nothing, and it grows in value with time and his own improvements, is, of course, quite different. But even that is a pretty hard life. The provincial Governments, particularly that of Ontario, are very active in promoting the welfare of agriculture and the establishment of agricultural colleges. The old seigneurial 250 CANADA tenure was done away with by purchase in Quebec fifty years ago, and the French habitants are now all freeholders. In some districts near the great centres these people have adapted themselves to some extent to improved farming, but as a class they still remain like a bit of 17th century France in a corner of North America. Great as have been the changes in the Dominion since the opening of this century, the future holds far greater ones in store. The material side of it may be surmised with toler- able certainty, but the political future has possibilities that no man can foresee. The slow, insidious magnetism of the mighty Republic on the one side, the ties of Empire, deeply felt at present by a majority of British Canadians for sentimental reasons, and by the French for practical reasons, on the other, are opposing factors in the situation that time and material progress may increase or modify. Above all, national feeling — not to be con- founded with political independence — has gathered great force in the present generation of Canadians. Canada, in short, is strangely placed between a mighty kindred nation who would peacefully assimilate her if she could, and an equally mighty but remoter Mother- land, who is no longer likely to be indifferent to the attachment of the greatest star in the Imperial constellation. November, 1911. BIBLIOGRAPHY KiNGSFORD, W. — History of Canada. 10 vols. Up to the present the standard history of Canada on an ex- haustive scale. Roberts, C. D, G. — History of Canada, in one thick volume, by a well-known Canadian author. It is of recognised value and written in an attractive style. BouRKiJT, Sir J. G. — History of Canada, in one moderate- sized volume. Is an authoritative work, the author of which was for some time Clerk of the House of Com- mons at Ottawa. Parkman, Francis. — For all concerning French Canada prior to the British conquest, the works of this eminent American historian stand alone among publications in the English language. They are not only authoritative but are well-known for their attractive qualities, descrip- tive powe"S, and charm of style. Montcalm and Wolfe, The Old lie lime in Canada, The Jesuits in North America, Pioneers of France in the New World, and The Discovery of the Great West, may be quoted as the most important. Seeley, Sir J. — The Expansion of England. A short volume setting forth in clear and interesting fashion the causes which made England a world power, and empha- sizin-j; the vital importance of her over-sea possessions. Lucas, Sir C. (editor). — Historical Geography of the British Colonies. The volumes relating to British North America will be found crowded with useful detail, setting forth more minutely than any other work not only the physical character of the country, but the origin and antecedents of the early settlers of its respective districts. Bradley, A. G. — The Fight with France for North America. A description in one volume of the war in North America (1755-1760), in which the British, aided by the forces of the various American colonies, fought the French for supremacy in North America, and ultimately, with the conquest of Canada, expelled them from tl.e c untry. Bradl, y. a. G.—The Making of Canada (1763-1815). This volume is a sequel to the above, and describes the attempt of the American Revolutionists on Canada, the founding of British Canada by the refugee loyalists from the American War. the political difficulties of government in the Anglo-French colony, and finally the war of 1812-15, in which British and French Canadians success- fully defended Canada against the Americans. 261 252 BIBLIOGRAPHY Peowse, Judge. — History of Newfoundland. One thick volume profusely illustrated, by a well-known New- foundlander, telling the whole story of this our oldest colony in a popular and interesting way from the 16th century to the present day. ^ WiLLSON, Beckles. — Nova Scotia. This is the most recent work on the above province by a well-known Canadian author in one volume, and tells its history with a full description of its scenery, industries, and present con- ^ dition, in a popular and attractive manner. '' Beige, G. — Manitoba. A history of the province prior to the completion of the railroad. The author, a University Professor, and well known as a writer on the North- West, has resided there from early days before the founding of the Province of Manitoba. Lucas, Sir C. — The Canadian War of 1812-15. One volume. The best and most recent work on the attempt of the Americans to seize Canada, and the three years of brave resistance offered by a small force of British troops and Canadian militia. This war, which saved Canada to Great Britain, is practically shirked in most English histories, and little understanding is displayed of the serious business it was, and of the valour and endurance displayed against great odds. WiLLSON, Beckles. — The Great Company. 2 vols. A history of the Hudson's Bay Company which at one time con- trolled the whole wild north from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Bego, a. — History of British Columbia. 1 vol. Doyle, J. A. — The English in America. This work, in one volume, describes the founding and early history of the English colonies in North America before the Revolu- tionary War. Cambridge Modern History, vol. vii. This volume deals with the American War of Independence and the History of the U.S. till the present time. Among Biographies, those of Sir John Macdonald (Pope), Sir Wilfrid Laurier (Willison), Joseph Howe (Longley), deal with these three most interesting political personalities and their times in an intimate way. INDEX Abercomby, 50, 51 Abraham, Heights of, 59 Acadia {see Nova Scotia) Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 166 Alabama Claims, 121 Alaska, 20 Albany, 48, 143 Alberta, 16, 18, 208 Alleghanies, 36, 39, 42, 48 Amherst, Lord, 54, 56, 63, 64 Appalachian Range, 10 Ashburton Treaty, 28 Assiniboine R., 24 Athabasca, 24 Australia, 218 B Beaufort, Lines of, 59 Belleisle, 27 Braddock, Gen., 42, 43 British North America Act, 126 British Columbia, 19-23, 127, 131, 194, 213-227 Brock, Sir I., 93 Cabots, The, 27, 161 California, 129 Canadian- Pacific R.B., 131, 224 Cape Breton, 27, 163, 178, Carolinas, The, 35 127, 179 Carolina, N., 176 Cartier, Jacques, 133 Cartier, Sir G., 124 Champlain, 133, 161 Champlain, Lake, 43, 48, 50 Charles L, 162 Charlottetown, 188 Chateauguay, 95 Chatham, Lord, 52-56 Chinese, The, 219-222 Chrystler's Farm, 95 CivU War, American, 120 Colbert, 136 Columbia R., 22 Craig, Gov., 89 Detroit, 93, 142, 158 Dieppe, 138 Dinwiddle, Gov., 42 Disraeli, 126 Dorchester, Lord, 68, 73, 79 Doukhobors, 211 Duquesne, Ft., 41, 47, 56 Durham, Lord, 113 Dutch of N. York, 157 Eastern Townships, 153, 158 Elgin, Lord, 116 Erie, L., 25,40. 91,93 Esquimault, 238 Evangeline, 169 253 254. INDEX F Family Compact, The, 102, 103, 115 Five Nations, The, 39, 135, 141, 143, 144, 145 Forbes, 55 Fort William, 25 Fraser R., 22, 227 Frederick of Prussia, 46, 56 Fredericton, 187 Froutenao, Count, 142, 143 Fundy, Bay of, 28 G Galicians, 211 Garry Fort, 191, 192, 193 George III., 69, 70 George, Lake, 48, 50 Glengarry. 175 Grand Trunk R.R., 120, 195 Grand Trunk Pac. RR., 223 Guadaloupe, 65 Halifax, 26, 73, 167, 170, 172, 173, 178, 186, 238 HamOton, A., 128 Holland, 136 Howe, Lord, 53 Howe, Joseph, 125, 178, 229, 230 Hudson's Bny, 10, 12, 24, 127, 190. 192 Hudscn R., 48 Huron, L., 25, 142, 191, 196 I Intercolonial R.E., 120 Italians, 211 James L, 162 Japanese, 219 Jefferson, 81, 128 Jesuits, 134 Johnson, 145 Kingston, 23, 74, 75, 81, 93, 116, 238 Kirk, 162 Labrador, 27 La Salle, 142 Laurentian Mts., 10 Laurier, Sir W., 233, 234, 235, 236 Levis, 64 Loire, The, 160 Louis XIV., 136 Louis XV., 40 Louisburg, 53, 55, 164, 165, 166, 167 M Macdonald, Sir J., 95, 124, 125, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 240, 244 Mackenzie, W. L., 106, 107 Madison, 89 Maine, 28 Manitoba, 127, 190-212 Maritime Provinces, The, 160- 189 Maryland, 35, 42, 43 Massachussets, 42, 143 Mennonit«s, 211 Michigan, 32 INDEX 255 Michillimackimc, 142 Micmacs, The, 1G3, 164 Minnesota, 194 Mississippi, 37, 135, 142 Mohawk R., 48 Monckton, Gen., 60 Monk, Lord, 228 Montcalm, 46, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63 Montmorency, 59 Montreal, 25, 28, 30. 31, 38, 48, 56. 63, 74, 88, 93, 95, 116. 133. 140, 143, 146, 191, 194 Mount Stephen, Lord, 195 Murray, Gen., 60, 63 N Napoleon, 89, 90, 95 New Brunswick, 10, 11, 26, 27, 28, 29, 99, 119, 125, 160- 189 New England, 34, 36, 44, 45, 47, 54, 91, 93, 95, 141, 143, 165, 166, 167 Newfoundland, 26, 127 New Jersey, 34 New Ontario, 25 New Westminster, 22 New York, 34, 48, 71, 74, 143, 176 New Zealand, 218 Normandy, 138 Nova Scotia, 10, 11, 14, 26, 27, 45, 68, 72, 73, 99, 125, 130, 143, 160-189 Ohio, 37, 39, 46 Ontario, 10, 11, 14 28, 31, 32, 33. 76, 77, 70, 82. 83, 84, 103, 107, 116, 130, 139, 155, 175, 196, 222. 238, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249 Ontario, Lake, 25, 32, 33, 73, 74, 75, 81, 91 Orleans, I. of, 30, 59 Oswego, 48 Ottawa, 30, 129, 131 Ottawa R, 30, 32, 129, 195, 228 Papineau, 113 Pennsylvania, 34, 42, 43, 82 Phips, 144 Pittsburg, 56 Port Arthur, 25, 196 Prairie Provinces, 190-212 Prevost, Gov., 89 Prince Edward Island, 10, 27, 119, 125, 127, 172, 176, 1S3 Quebec, 10, 11, 28, 29, 30, 31, 38, 54-64, 73, 77, 78, 79, 84, 86, 99, 115-120, 130, 133, 135-140, 144, 145, 146, 155, 159, 162, 163, 238, 244, 245, 250 Queenston Heights, 93 R Red River, 15, 24, 142, 159, 193 Richelieu R., 137 Riel, 193 Rochelle, 138 Rocky Mountains, 16, 17, 18, 19-23, 194, 196, 198, 207, 210, 211, 213, 222, 224, 225, 226 256 INDEX s St. Charles R., 59 St. John, 26, 170, 186, 187 St. John R., 28 St. Lawrence R., 12, 25-32, 38, 45, 47, 48, 51, 54-62, 74, 75, 93, 138, 158, 162, 189 St. Peter, L., 30 Saskatchewan, 16, 208 Sault St. Marie, 32, 142, 159 Saunders, 57 Scandinavians, 211 Selkirks, The, 19, 224 Selkirk, Lord, 170, 190 Shirley, 42 Simcoe, Gov., 79 Stirling, Lord, 162 Strathcona, Lord, 195 Superior, L., 9, 12, 25, 32, 142, 196 Swiss Settlers, 231 Sydney, 186 Three Rivers, 134 Ticonderoga, 50, 53 Tilly, Sir L., 125 Toronto, 33, 84, 95 Townshend, Gen., 60 Tupper, Sir Chas., 125 U Ulster Emigrants, 76, 77 Utrecht, Treaty of, 165 Vancouver L, 22, 23, 213-219, 227, 230 Vancouver City, 22, 23, 198, 213-219 Vaudreuil, 52, 63 Victoria, 23, 213-219, 227 Virginia, 35, 42, 43, 133 W Washington, George, 41, 43 Westerham, 57 Winnipeg, 15, 16, 159, 194, 196, 203, 207 Winnipeg, L., 24 Wolte, Gen., 55-64, 145 Wolseley, Lord, 143 Woods, L. of the, 25 Yukon, 20 II LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 017 299 043 5