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Title: Canada, an American Nation
Author: Dafoe, John Wesley (1866-1944)
Date of first publication: 1935
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Columbia University Press, 1935
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 2 December 2014
Date last updated: 2 December 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1219

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.






  CANADA

  AN AMERICAN NATION



  BY
  JOHN W. DAFOE



  NEW YORK: MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS
  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
  1935




  TO
  JAMES T. SHOTWELL

  A CITIZEN OF NORTH AMERICA WHOSE CAREER HAS
  CONFERRED DISTINCTION ON THE COUNTRY OF HIS BIRTH AND
  THE COUNTRY OF HIS ADOPTION




PREFACE

When honored by the invitation of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler to deliver
three lectures at Columbia University during the academic year 1933-34,
I, as a Canadian journalist long interested in Canadian-American
relations, thought the time and occasion opportune to discuss an aspect
of these relations to which not enough consideration is given: the
common foundation of early North American feeling and belief upon which
the structures of government in both countries rest.  The lectures are
published as delivered at Columbia University, April 9, 11 and 13 of
this year; but I have added a few footnotes and references in the hope
that they may be of service to the reader.

  J. W. DAFOE

  WINNIPEG
  DECEMBER, 1934




CONTENTS


I. CANADA'S RISE TO NATIONHOOD

One of a Family of Free Nations

The Political Inheritance of Canada

Parallels with Pre-Revolutionary America

Democratic vs. Aristocratic Conceptions of Government

The Passing of the Old Order


II. CANADA AS A DEMOCRACY

The Coming of Responsible Government

The Influences That Made Confederation

The Winning of Legislative Independence

Canada an Actual Democracy


III. CANADA AS NEIGHBOR

Peace, with Friction, for a Century

The Free Interchange of Population

Economic Nationalism and Tariff Wars

Trade Flows Despite Tariff Walls

Advantages of Reciprocal Trade

World Affairs and North American Attitudes


INDEX




{3}

I

CANADA'S RISE TO NATIONHOOD

_One of a Family of Free Nations_

Two kindred nations divide the vast area of North America north of the
Rio Grande.  It is, with the possible exception of South America, the
largest continuous territory in the world given over to a people, the
great majority of whom derive from kindred sources--a people moreover
who are subject to pressures, environmental, linguistic, social and
commercial, which steadily strengthen their homogeneous elements.  Of
these pressures I put first that of language.  The use of language is a
discipline and an education in conformity in its large aspects.  As a
man speaks so he is.  Bismarck is reported to have said that the
greatest political fact of modern times was the "inherited and
permanent fact that North America speaks English."  The purpose of the
British Empire, Cramb said, was to give all men within its bounds an
English mind; and the statement is true if the words "an English mind"
are not given a too narrow construction.  The influences operating
within the United States give an American mind, in whole or in part, to
every resident; and the English mind and the American mind in their
attitudes to fundamental political issues are not {4} dissimilar.  In
his book, _The English-Speaking Peoples_, George L. Beer--whose
premature death was a tragic mishap to the cause of Anglo-American
understanding--has something of moment to say on this point:


In spite of the fact that the population of the United States is
composed of many European strains, there is an essential unity in so
far as the Caucasian native-born elements are concerned.  This unity of
language has given to these Caucasians born in the United States a
common mind and this mind does not differ in essentials from that of
other English-speaking peoples.  As has been said by Professor Hart
"the standards, aspirations and moral and political ideals of the
original English settlers not only dominate their own descendants but
permeate the body of immigrants of other races."  The son of the
immigrant into the United States finds himself at home in Canada,
Australia or Britain while he feels himself a detached stranger within
his own ancestral gates in continental Europe.[1]


With the eye of imagination it is easy to see North America as the
stronghold of the English-speaking world growing in power and numbers
from century to century.

The story of the growth of the American Union from the Atlantic
seaboard states to the mighty Republic of today is one of the great
epics of democracy.  It is the story of a people who in obedience to an
inner {5} urge pushed their territory to the Pacific in something more
than half a century, and then insured the greatness of the land by
declaring at the cannon's mouth that the Union must forever endure.
Your pride of national achievement, your high sense of destiny
fulfilled, your faith in a future of steady advance to ever-rising
levels, find ample justification in this record of achievement.

My purpose in coming before this audience is to speak to the best of my
ability of the parallel development of the other North American
nation--a story which differs from yours in many respects but in its
own way has been, as it seems to us Canadians, as notable a
manifestation as yours of the vision, courage and tenacity of North
American democracy.

At this point a question may arise in the mind of some listener, to be
put against my characterization of Canada as a "North American
democracy."  He may say, in keeping with what was not so long since a
very common idea: "Canada is the colony of a European Empire: her North
Americanism is little more than a geographical expression."

The central theme of this discussion of Canadian-American relations is
the argument that what might be called North American ideas of
government, of social obligations and of the institutions necessary to
the functioning of a democracy have been exemplified by Canada, not
obscurely in a small backward country but in a setting of world-wide
range.

{6}

Canada is a North American nation.  She is also one of a family of free
nations which, in their prenational stage of existence, were integral
parts of that Empire which was thus described by your orator, Webster,
just a hundred years ago: "... a power which has dotted over the
surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts,
whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with
the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of
the martial airs of England."[2]  These younger British nations are not
reproductions, as like as peas, of a majestic motherland.  They are
true national entities, the product of natural evolution and growth,
with well-developed special characteristics and aptitudes.

A Commonwealth gathering of any kind, provided the national delegations
to it are so chosen as to be truly representative, is the most striking
demonstration that this world can furnish of the voluntary unity that
can arise from wide diversities of view and temper where there is no
element of subordination, but instead a disposition to find common
ground in essentials.  Political conferences such as the Imperial
Conferences, which are now held at regular intervals, are least
representative of the actual diversities and essential unities owing to
the limitation imposed by the requirement of maintaining, in each
delegation, a united political front.  Beginning twenty-five years ago
{7} there have been at intervals conferences of the press of the
Commonwealth in which all shades of Dominion opinion have been
represented.  All these conferences I have attended, being now, I
think, the sole working journalist of whom this can be said.  Other
imperial gatherings representative of various interests--educational,
fraternal, religious, commercial--are being constantly held.  In all
these meetings diverging national characteristics, variations in the
rating of values over a range of intangibles, diversity in instinctive
attitudes of mind, reveal themselves naturally and inevitably; but this
takes place within an environment of harmonious voluntary coperation.

What I regard as the most significant of all these Commonwealth
gatherings was one which was held last September in Toronto.  It met
with a minimum of publicity; its meetings were held in private; there
has been restraint in the publication of the discussions and of the
conclusions reached.  Yet I note, particularly in Great Britain,
constant reference to the importance and significance of the meetings
and of the views that were there exchanged.  This was the British
Commonwealth Relations Conference, which assembled under the auspices
of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and its Canadian
counterpart, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs.[3]  To
the calling of this conference there went two years of {8} study and
preparation.  "I wish," said a Canadian statesman, "that the official
Imperial Conferences had preparation one-half as efficient and as
complete as this unofficial gathering had received."  The practical
purpose of the conference was to consider the relations of the British
nations under the conditions of today and to discuss the ways and means
of practical coperation.

The national delegations from each unit of the Commonwealth had been
carefully chosen, not with the view to enabling them to speak with a
single voice, but expressly for the purpose of bringing into the
discussion all the diverse existing elements of opinion.  In the
Canadian delegation the whole range of political diversity was
represented.  At the left was Mr. Woodsworth, the leader of the
Coperative Commonwealth Federation, Canada's newly organized and
potentially formidable Socialist Party.  At the other end of the scale
there were champions of a conception of imperial relationships which
belongs to yesterday.  Political parties in all the British nations
were represented by public men of distinction, but no one actually a
member of a government or holding an official position was regarded as
eligible, it being known that the holding of office inhibits the free
expression of individual opinion.

The discussions which took place during the ten days of the conference
were, to my way of thinking, of high interest and significance.  The
realities of today with respect to the working relationships of {9} the
British nations and, of still more profound importance, the relations
that are practicable between the British nations, individually and
collectively, and the outside world, were presented to the conference,
in the first instance by Canadian speakers, with a vigor and directness
which determined the course and the character of the discussions.
There were three main schools of thought in the membership of the
conference.  There were those who sighed over the vanished Empire.
There were those who desired the Commonwealth to consolidate itself
anew on lines of economic exclusiveness and military preparedness, into
a formidable combination which would play a leading part in the world
drama of tomorrow.  And there was the view that such a consolidation
would add nothing to the security of its members, but rather would put
them in jeopardy; that the Commonwealth must remain a family of free
nations subject to two limitations upon their sovereignty: that which
they voluntarily concede to that spirit of friendly coperation which
is seemly in a family; and externally, the subordination of foreign
policy to their engagement to act collectively with other nations in
establishing and enforcing peace.[4]  This conception of nationalism,
tempered by moral domestic considerations and by obligations, express
and implied, to the world at large, was Canadian in its origin and in
the manner of its {10} presentation to the Commonwealth Relations
Conference.  It at once enlisted support from influential members of
the delegations from Great Britain and South Africa; and, as the
discussion went forward, it could be observed that it more and more
commended itself to the judgment of the conference.  Many of those to
whom this policy was obviously distasteful on grounds of emotion and
sentiment gave their intellectual adhesion to it as showing the only
available road to a future that would protect the Commonwealth against
strains that might destroy it.



_The Political Inheritance of Canada_

I could not but think as I noted these proceedings that here we had, on
a small scale, an example of the processes by which Canadians achieved
nationhood for themselves and at the same time profoundly modified the
structure of the British Empire.  The empire of central authority and
obedient provinces is gone; and the influence that transformed it
flowed largely from a circumstance whose significance, obscured for
many decades, we can now in retrospect appraise.  That circumstance was
that the principle upon which that empire was built was repugnant to
the populations of its colonies in British North America which made up
the bulk of its colonial possessions.  This repugnance was due to the
fact that these colonies in their political inheritance were North
American and wholly democratic.  They had a political instinct which
{11} rejected the theory of government upon which the Empire was
founded; and once the initial economic pressures which dulled this
instinct were relaxed, there began a movement for modifications in the
imperial scheme, as affecting these colonies, which, because it had in
it the germ of the doctrine of equality, made the breakdown of the
Imperial theory, given time, inevitable; because the modifications made
in response to Canadian pressure extended of necessity to the whole
Empire.

Speaking some four years ago to an audience in London, I said that many
of the misconceptions which Englishmen visiting Canada acquired, arose
from their inability to realize that Canada was an American country.  I
went on to say:


Canada is an American country by virtue of a common ancestry with the
people of the United States.  When one talks of a common ancestry
between Canadians and Americans, people say "Yes, they had a common
ancestry in England."  But it is something closer than that.  The
common ancestry to which I refer occupied the American colonies prior
to the Revolution.  The English-speaking provinces in Canada were
settled by citizens of the English colonies along the Atlantic
sea-board.  The generations which laid the cultural foundations of
Canada and their forbears had lived in those colonies for a hundred or
a hundred and fifty years--four or five generations.  They had lived
divorced from English influences, thrown very largely upon their own
resources, and faced with {12} problems upon which the experience of
England threw no light.

Along the Atlantic coast, cut off from people with the aristocratic
point of view, they developed an indigenous American civilization, now
the common inheritance of Canada and the United States.  The difference
between the Americans who came into Canada after the War of
Independence and the Americans who stayed at home was not profound.
The people who were driven into exile were called Tories by the
Americans, but that term was true of only a very small element.  The
great bulk of these people were of precisely the same type as the men
in the American armies, but they did not think that the situation which
had arisen between the colonies and Great Britain was one which could
be profitably settled by an appeal to the sword.  They thought that by
patience and steady resort to constitutional methods the difficulties
could be adjusted.[5]


Let me enlarge upon this, for it is the very fiber of my thesis.  In
discussing the question of the constitutional development of the
Empire, the terms "First Empire," "Second Empire," and "Third Empire"
(which is the Commonwealth) are commonly employed.  Pundits rage
against the distinctions but, as is usually the case with pundits, they
are wrong.[6]  Now, the principles which, if observed, would have kept
{13} the First Empire intact and the English race one and indivisible,
are precisely the principles upon which the present Commonwealth is
founded.  In the Second Empire we see a determined and persistent
effort to replace these principles, which were rooted in democratic
instinct and tradition, with principles in essence aristocratic and
imperialistic; and it took just about a century and a half for the
original conception of Empire relationships--which was American in
origin--to overtake and push aside the bastard idea of centralization
and control which destroyed the First Empire and would have as surely
destroyed the Second, had it not been challenged.

"The Greek colonies," said Goldwin Smith, "took nothing from the mother
countries but the sacred fire and freedom."  The sacred fire that the
English colonists carried with them, when they braved the North
Atlantic in their cockleshells, was the rudimentary conception of
self-government by means of elective assemblies.  But the development
of the idea did not proceed in the homeland and in the over-sea
colonies on parallel lines or at the same pace.  By the American
assemblies practically the whole adult male population was admitted to
a share in the government through their control of the purse.  This was
possible because intrenched privilege and vested interests were not
strong enough to slow up this democratic development.  But in England
oligarchies and class combinations continued in easy charge of the
governmental {14} controls until a time within the memory of living
men.  For two centuries or more there was no general admission of the
people to the franchise; and, after these conditions were modified, the
social authority of these classes kept their political authority
intact.  Bagehot in his _English Constitution_ has an enlightening word
upon the deferential organization of British society, in both its
social and political manifestations.

There appears to have been no understanding in Great Britain of the
extent to which democratic self-government had developed in the
colonies until the taxation policies of the British government were
challenged.  We get a contemporary expression of the alarm and chagrin
to which this revelation of democratic American insubordination gave
rise in a letter written by Sir Guy Carleton, Governor of the newly
conquered Province of Quebec in January, 1768, to his official
superior, the Earl of Shelburne.  The English-speaking residents of
Quebec who had gone into the Province of Quebec largely from the
Atlantic colonies, demanded an assembly; and in his letter Carleton set
out the reasons why, in his judgment, it should not be granted.  He
wrote:


It may not be improper here to observe that the British form of
government, transplanted into this continent never will produce the
same fruits as at home, chiefly because it is impossible for the
dignity of the Throne and Peerage to be represented in the American
forests....  A popular assembly which preserves its full vigour and in
{15} a country where all men appear nearly upon a level must give a
strong bias to Republican principles.[7]


That opinion was inspired by a disturbance in Sir Guy's mind
occasioned, by his observation of events in the thirteen colonies.
Already he was formulating in his mind means by which he could throw
the weight of the conquered province into the scale against the English
colonies; the harvest of his thoughts and plans was the enactment six
years later of the Quebec Act which, as the Declaration of Independence
clearly states, was one of the occurrences which precipitated the
Revolution.  Carleton did not want his project interfered with by a
"popular assembly" with its tendency, in the absence of the restraining
influence of an upper class, to encourage what he regarded as
republican ideas.  Then and for long afterward in the official mind and
in official language, democracy, if the real article, was a term
interchangeable with republicanism.

A quaint expression of the view universally held in official circles
that the Revolution was the result of a usurpation of power by the
popular assemblies is to be found in a letter written in 1790 by
William Smith, Chief Justice of Quebec, to the governor, Lord
Dorchester (Guy Carleton), embodying suggestions about the
Constitutional Act then being drafted.  Smith, who was an exile from
New York, where {16} formerly he had held high office, wrote feelingly:


My Lord, an American Assembly, quiet in the weakness of their Infancy,
could not but discover in their Elevation to Prosperity that themselves
were the substance and the Governor and Board of Council mere shadows
in the Political Frame.  All America was thus, at the very outset of
the Plantations, abandoned to Democracy.[8]


In my next quotations I jump forward some seventy-five years to show
you that in 1863 fear and distrust of democratic assemblies in the
colonies still dominated the minds of the class that governed Great
Britain.  My authority is not official, but it will serve, as it is
from the _Times_ which then, as always, perfectly reflected the views,
antipathies and hopes of the more moderate elements of the governing
class.  My quotations are from an article in which in 1861 the _Times_
thundered against the excesses, as it judged them, of democratic
self-government in Australia.  Said the _Times_:


It is evident that the balance of society and of government in these
communities has been overthrown and that they are now governed by a
single class, and that class the most ignorant and the least
respectable of all....  There is no limit to this downward tendency;
there is no power in the single class which governs these communities
to regenerate itself.  In an evil hour the Colonial Assemblies were
entrusted with the power of reducing at their will the qualification of
electors....  We ought never to {17} have given them universal suffrage
unless we intended to adopt universal suffrage ourselves.


It urged the imperial government to intervene by veto or by
parliamentary action.  Was Parliament--it asked--to allow this state of
things to go on?

I find this quotation in _The Empire_, a collection of letters written
to the London _Daily News_ in 1862 by Goldwin Smith.  He buttresses the
language of the _Times_ by an extract from a speech by the Duke of
Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Colonies.  The Duke remarks that
he wishes the Australian colonies had been less precipitate in applying
manhood suffrage.  Australia is a "country where those established
rights and interests were not to be found which might prove a check to
it in other countries."

Goldwin Smith in these letters, noting the contrasts in government
between Great Britain and the colonies, remarked:

"England is an aristocracy while the whole frame of Society to which
political institutions must conform, is in Canada democratic."

If this was the contrast in 1862 between government at "home" and in
colonies overseas, how much more marked was the difference in 1776!
The clash which ended in the American Revolution was between an
aristocratic government functioning through a parliament which was a
perfect instrument for its will, and the elective assemblies of the
American colonies which were outright democratic institutions.  These
{18} assemblies had been set up promptly in every colony at the demand
of the colonists and their power had grown because there was no
counter-power to say them nay.  They were regarded by the colonists as
essential to their welfare.

Nova Scotia, the fourteenth American colony, erected on territory
wrested from the French, was set going about the middle of the
eighteenth century by the establishment of a military capital at
Halifax.  But the settlers who gave substance to the colony came from
the New England colonies.  They found themselves under the rule of
officials attached to the governor's staff.  To this they at once
offered vigorous opposition, and their demand for an assembly was
pressed upon the home authorities by Chief Justice Belcher, who was
himself from Massachusetts.  The military governor offered a stout
resistance.  An assembly, he said, would "serve only to create heats,
animosities and disunion among the people."[9]  After four years of
agitation the Assembly was established.  As the events of the next few
years were to show, the people of Nova Scotia were more compliant than
the inhabitants of the other colonies with the taxation policies of the
British government, but even they would not submit to the rule of
officialdom.

There could not thus be common ground between the Parliament of Great
Britain and the Assemblies {19} of the colonies, once the dispute
arose; they were on different planes of political development.  They
were contemporary only in the technical sense of time; one party to the
dispute was an oligarchy with medieval ideas about government; in the
other the doctrines of modern democracy, revolutionary for those times,
were astir.  It was impossible for the older body, with its historic
roots, its prestige, its sense of power and authority, even to begin to
understand the political language of the colonies.  Not even the
friends of America in the motherland could grasp the American
contention that their Assemblies were outside the jurisdiction of the
British Parliament and subject only to the prerogative of the monarch.

The terms upon which the American Revolution could have been
forestalled are a matter of record.  Looked at in the light of today,
the concessions were trivial, put in the balance against the disruption
of an empire; but we must look in the history of the constitutional
development of Canada to find a measure for the width and the depth of
the gulf which separated the demands of the colonists and the
convictions of George the Third and his advisers (perhaps it would be
more accurate to say his assistants) as to the only workable polity of
empire.



_Parallels with Pre-Revolutionary America_

There are three statements associated with the American Revolution
which have parallels in the {20} Canadian record; and when the dates
are compared an idea can be got of how impossible it was for British
statesmanship in the seventies of the eighteenth century to understand
and still less to act upon the propositions put forward by the
colonists.

The first is article four of the Declaration of the First Continental
Congress in 1774 as drafted by John Adams: Here the claim was made that
the colonists "are entitled to a free and exclusive power of
legislation in their several provincial legislatures, subject only to
the negative of their sovereign in such manner as has been heretofore
used and accustomed."  But the right of the British Parliament to
regulate the external trade of the colonies "for the purpose of
securing the commercial advantages of the whole empire to the Mother
country" was conceded.[10]

It was not until 1839, more than half a century later, that it occurred
to a British statesman that the division of power between the Imperial
and the Colonial Parliaments suggested by Adams in 1774 might afford a
solution for the imperial problem of that day.  Lord Durham in his
report proposed self-government for the Canadian colonies, to be
accompanied by the "perfect subordination" of the colonies to the
British government with respect to all external matters.

The exception, had there been a settlement in 1774 on these terms,
would doubtless have proved as {21} unworkable in the American colonies
as it afterwards proved in Canada.  Of Lord Durham's reservation in the
case of Canada, in the light of its subsequent abandonment, Sir C. P.
Lucas has said: "He did not seem fully to recognize that when once an
overseas community has been endowed with national institutions it is
difficult, if not impossible, to set limits to its growth as a nation
or permanently to withhold any subject as outside its scope."

The most comprehensively succinct statement of the issue between the
British Parliament and the first American colonies was that made by
Madison.  He wrote in 1800:


The fundamental principle of the revolution was that the Colonies were
co-ordinate members with each other and with Great Britain, of an
Empire united by a common executive sovereign.  The legislative power
was maintained to be as complete in each American parliament as in the
British parliament.  And the Royal Prerogative was in force in each
colony by virtue of its acknowledging the King for its executive
magistrate as it was in Great Britain by virtue of a like
acknowledgment there.  A denial of these principles by Great Britain
and the assertion of them by America produced the revolution.[11]


It was not until 1926--150 years after this issue was put, in the old
colonies, to the test of the sword--that {22} the principle thus
defined by Madison was accepted as the true basis of empire with the
consent of Great Britain, which thus renounced its position of central
authority.  The parallel between Madison's statement and the governing
affirmation of the Balfour declaration in 1926 is exact.  Of the "group
of self-governing communities composed of Great Britain and the
Dominions" the declaration said:


Their position and mutual relation may be readily defined.  They are
autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in
no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or
external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and
freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.[12]


Let me now quote a statement in which the Centralist argument against
the demand of the colonies was put in some twenty words.  Governor
Hutchinson, speaking to the Massachusetts Assembly in January, 1773,
said: "I know of no line that can be drawn between the supreme
authority of Parliament and the total independence of the Colonies."[13]

In the long contest in Canada for responsible government the argument
of Hutchinson was repeated, until it became a commonplace, as the
supposedly conclusive answer to the case put forward by the reformers.

{23}

In the few uncompromising words of Hutchinson we find the explanation
of why force alone could break the deadlock between the American
colonies and the government in London.

Professor W. B. Munro of Harvard--one of the many Canadians who have
found their talents acceptable to American universities and have repaid
the opportunity given them by conspicuously brilliant service--says of
Madison's principle that it "would probably have gained full
recognition at Westminster a whole century or more ago if the American
Revolution had not occurred."[14]  But the Revolution could not be
avoided because the Americans could not accept subordination and Great
Britain would not permit them to stay in the Empire on any other
condition; nor was it then possible for the idea of peaceful separation
to rise in the minds of men.

Therefore the issue moved with all the inevitability of Greek tragedy
through the arena of discussion to the battlefields.  It was a clash of
opposing principles that could not be adjusted within the ambit of a
single political system.



_Democratic vs. Aristocratic Conceptions of Government_

The movement for nationhood in Canada began when in the new British
colonies the settlers from the older American colonies, who had been
driven into {24} exile by the victors, sought to reproduce the customs
and the institutions with which they were familiar; and it closed when
the principle of cordinate membership, so clearly set forth by
Madison, was finally established.  In time it covered a century and a
half.  In its humble beginnings it was instinctive and unknowing.  The
people of Canada were far on the road before they understood whither
they were bound.  Those who resisted and fought the movement realized
what it meant; but they fought against the stars since it was no more
possible for Canada, once it had attained a measure of power, to remain
subordinate to an overseas authority than it was for the American
colonists in the eighteenth century.

A very common observation, at least in Canada, forty or fifty years
ago, was that Great Britain learned the art of governing colonies from
the disaster of the American Revolution.  The statement is inexact.
What the British government drew from the loss of the colonies, as
Professor H. E. Egerton says, was the moral "that democratic
institutions are a menace to the Mother country and should therefore if
possible be avoided."[15]  When Great Britain began to build up a
second colonial Empire on the North American continent, the authorities
were of one mind that the mistakes (as they regarded them) which had
attended {25} the founding of the earlier colonies must not be
repeated.  The new colonies were not to be abandoned, in the words of
Chief Justice Smith, to the fatal spirit of democracy.

At the close of the Revolutionary War Great Britain retained two of her
North American colonies--Canada (or to give it its official name,
Quebec), a French province, and Nova Scotia (soon to be divided into
two provinces, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick).

Here the loyalists, fleeing from the triumphant American states, found
refuge.  One estimate is that 35,000 loyalists went to Nova Scotia, and
20,000 to Quebec, more than half of them going from the province of New
York.  The New England migration was directed, in its entirety, to Nova
Scotia.  It dowered that province with scholars, jurists, men of
affairs, clergymen of note, who became the leaders of the community.
Since there is an intellectual fervor for reaction, as there is for
revolution, there were, for a somewhat lengthy period of time, fewer
signs in that province than in Canada of the coming to life of the
North American spirit of democracy; yet when the revival came, such was
the vigor and effectiveness of the movement, such the competence of the
leadership, that responsible government, the road to nationhood, was
achieved with promptitude and without the convulsions which marked its
attainment in Canada.

It is in the history of Canada that we see most clearly the origins and
the development of the struggle {26} between the democratic conception
of government that was carried there from the English colonies along
the Atlantic, and the imported and imposed scheme of government which
the British statesmen of the day regarded as the embodiment of the
lesson taught by the Revolution.  There is a wealth of documentary
material available in the letters which passed back and forth between
the parties who were planning the new arrangements made necessary by
the influx of the Loyalists.

These refugees came into a territory which had already been supplied by
the Quebec Act with a carefully thought out scheme of government.  The
first effect of the impact of the American influx was the recognition
that the Quebec Act would not do for the districts in which the
Loyalists were finding homes, and that it would have to be modified in
essential respects in the areas occupied by the French-speaking
subjects.  Hence the deliberations and interchanges of views preceding
the enactment of the Constitutional Act of 1791.  By this Act the
Province of Quebec, as it had been constituted seventeen years before,
was divided into the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada.  The latter
included the French towns and settlements, the former the relatively
unsettled areas along the Great Lakes and the upper St. Lawrence, into
which the Loyalist inflow had been directed.  A legislative assembly,
which had been denied by the Quebec Act, was conceded to both
provinces; {27} but exceeding care was taken that these assemblies
should resemble only in name the bodies in the colonies that had
delivered those communities to democracy.  While the Act was in the
making Grenville, the Home Secretary, wrote to Lord Dorchester, the
Governor of Canada, that the Crown must have a "certain and improving
revenue" from sources "beyond legislative control."[16]  If this, he
said, had been the rule in the older colonies it "would have retained
them to this hour in obedience and loyalty."  An appointed legislative
council, made up of a specially created nobility with hereditary
titles, was outlined as desirable.  There would be thus supplied "A
body of men having that motive of attachment to the existing form of
government which arises from the possession of personal or hereditary
distinction," to act as a buffer against change.

We find an almost complete picture of the ideal colony in the British
style in the writings public and private of John G. Simcoe, the first
Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada.  Simcoe as subaltern was at Bunker
Hill; among the troops that surrendered at Yorktown was the light
cavalry regiment, the Queen's Rangers recruited in Connecticut, which
he commanded.  The intervening years had been marked for him by much
fighting and many wounds, and he returned to Great Britain after the
war, still in his {28} twenties, with a reputation for devotion to the
lost cause that brought him high praise from George III, and with a
lively dislike for the victors in the struggle.  His Canadian
biographer speaks of "his blind fidelity to the King's Cause."  When
the project of dividing Quebec took shape he was advised that he would
be given charge of Upper Canada; and in the light of this knowledge he
wrote to a friend in January, 1791, giving in outline some of his hopes
for the new province.  Simcoe could not bring himself to believe that
the separation of the English race was permanent.  The outcome of the
Revolution and the establishment of the Republic was to him some kind
of horrid dream that would pass away.  He hoped that the establishment
of a model government, new colonial style, in the forests of Upper
Canada would in some way contribute to this end.


I mean to prepare for whatever Convulsions may happen in the United
States and the Method I propose is by establishing a free honorable
British Government and a pure administration of its Laws which shall
hold out to the solitary Emigrant, and to the several States,
advantages that the present form of Government doth not and cannot
permit them to enjoy.  There are inherent Defects in the Congressional
form of Government; the absolute prohibition of an order of nobility is
one.[17]



{29}

The fervency of Simcoe's desire to see the lost colonies recovered thus
found expression: "I would die by more than Indian torture to restore
my King and his Family their just inheritance and to give my Country
that fair and natural accession of Power which an Union with their
Brethren could not fail to bestow and render permanent."  The value of
the reunion, it will be noted, is expressed in terms of military power.
In the new province there was to be, Simcoe hoped, "a hereditary
Council with some mark of Nobility."  He would have a bishop, by which
he meant that the Church of England would be established and endowed.
There would be an English chief justice.  The colony was to be the home
of the arts and sciences.  "This colony" he said, "should in its very
Foundations provide for every Assistance that can possibly be procured
for the Arts and Sciences and for every Embellishment that may
hereafter Decorate and attract Notice, and may point it out to the
Neighboring States as a Superior, more happy and more polished form of
Government."

The same note of cheerful appreciation of the superiority of the new
system was sounded when the Constitutional Act was submitted to
Parliament a few months later.  Parliament, Lord Grenville said, was
"about to communicate the blessings of the English Constitution to the
subjects of Canada because they were fully convinced that it was the
best in the world."  The supreme virtue of the Constitution, it was
{30} explained, was found in its happy combination of the aristocratic
and the democratic elements.  In the American colonies unbridled
democracy had run wild without the counterweight of a House of Lords;
while the authority of the Crown had lacked the support of a hereditary
aristocracy and an established church.  These errors, it was declared,
were to be guarded against in the new colonies.  By the scheme thus
adopted the actual power was vested in the governor; an executive
council, appointed by the British government, was to advise and assist
him; there was to be a legislative council of life members to whom
hereditary titles carrying right of membership in the Upper House would
be issued if conditions permitted; and a legislative Assembly, elected
on a wide franchise but with such limitation of control over the
collection and distribution of revenue as to deprive it almost
completely of the power of the purse.  A reserve of land, equal to
one-seventh of all land granted, was set aside as an endowment for a
"Protestant clergy," which term was interpreted for many decades as
meaning only the clergy of the Church of England.

John G. Simcoe, as a Member of Parliament, assisted in the passage of
the Constitutional Act and thereafter set sail for Canada to bring his
model colony into being.  All the circumstances favored him.  There
were no encumbrances or handicaps; the field was clear for constructive
experiments.  The colony was remote from the great world.  Its peoples
were, to a {31} man, British by blood or by inclination, tested by war
and sacrifice.  They were insulated against influences from the new
Republic by the resentments, hatreds, and grievances of a fratricidal
war.  But in spite of these seemingly favorable conditions, Simcoe's
achievements fell far short of his hopes; many of his plans miscarried;
others in their practical application bore little resemblance to the
dreams he had dreamed in England.  In a letter to the Duke of Portland,
written toward the end of his term, he said: "I have endeavoured to
establish the form as well as the spirit of the British Constitution by
modelling all the minutest branches of the Executive Government after a
similar system and by aiming as far as possible to turn the views of
His Majesty's subjects from any attention to the various modes and
customs of the several provinces from which they emigrated, to the
contemplation of Great Britain itself, as the sole and primary object
of general and particular imitation."[18]

Governor Simcoe in this attempted the impossible and was paid for his
temerity in disappointment.  The settlers had brought from their
American homes a desire to continue in their new homes the "modes and
customs" to which the governor objected; they wanted to reproduce the
simple municipal methods of the old colonies; their views about schools
were not those of the governor; they, by a very large majority,
preferred the ministrations of itinerant dissenting {32}
ministers--"sectaries" Simcoe called them--to the services of the
Church of England, which was regarded by the Governor as a sure bulwark
for the Constitution.  Owing to the poverty of the people, the scheme
for creating a nobility had to be postponed (forever, fortunately); his
plan to have lieutenants appointed for the counties was regarded with
such dislike that it did not long survive his departure; his proposal
to turn the towns over to corporations so organized that the elections
would be "as little popular as possible, meaning such corporations to
tend to the support of the Aristocracy of the Country" was rejected as
quixotic by the home authorities.  One of Simcoe's earliest
disappointments wears a comic air.  The settlers chose, for the first
Assembly, members of a type displeasing to the governor.  To retired
officers of the British Army who were available, they preferred "one
table men"--that is, men who drew no social line between their families
and their hired help.  Behind resistance to his purposes, open or
disguised, the governor always detected disloyalty, democracy, and
republicanism.  When he was presented with a petition drafted by Rev.
John Bethune, a Presbyterian minister, and largely signed, asking that
the right of solemnizing marriage be extended to the ministers of all
denominations, he denounced it as "the product of a wicked head and a
most disloyal heart."  Even in the guarded chamber of the Legislative
Council, with its hand-picked membership, the horrid specter of
republicanism {33} raised its head; when two of its members disagreed
with him on a matter of policy, he identified them as republicans.  He
asked forthwith for the appointment of a Captain Shaw "so that the
plotters will have to face another staunch friend of the Constitution."

There was of course not a vestige of desire for the establishment of
republican institutions on the part of those who thus failed to respond
to the ardent young governor's enthusiasms; their resistance was
nothing but the instinctive rallying of the mass of the people to the
defence of modes, customs, habits of thought, social attitudes, and
preference for simple democratic institutions in keeping with the North
American tradition and with convictions which were part of their
existence.  Though they had fought and suffered for the royal cause
they were not prepared willingly to accept a form of government which
they knew to be not in keeping with their needs or their interests.
Not that there was any organized formal resistance; the time for that
had not yet come.

There were indeed influential residents who were enthusiastically in
favor of the Simcoe policy of setting them apart from the generality of
the people and conferring upon them power, privilege, and emoluments.
These were the Loyalist gentry who had lost position, office, and
wealth through their devotion to the cause of the King; and it was
quite in keeping with the spirit in which the colonies of the Second
Empire were being founded that they should be {34} constituted the
upper governing class in the new colony.  Whatever his failures, Simcoe
did succeed in imposing upon Upper Canada a nondemocratic form of
government, in keeping with the blue prints, which in its strongholds
of privilege and advantage held out for nearly half a century against a
rising tide of opposition.



_The Passing of the Old Order_

This was the beginning of the long struggle between the conception,
clearly envisaged from the outset and stoutly upheld, of the
subordination of the colonies to the central imperial authority as the
only possible basis for an empire; and the opposing principle of
self-government which was carried, unconsciously, from the American
colonies to the new settlement, there, growing slowly in darkness and
obscurity, to become in the course of time the solvent, not only of the
difficulties of Canada but of the problems of empire as well.

Not even in outline can the story of that long-extended struggle
between opposing ideas of government be here told.  Simcoe had not been
ten years out of the country before the issue began to take form, and
in another twenty years a majority of the members were demanding a
transfer to the Assembly of the powers exercised by the close
corporation made up of the governor and his nonrepresentative junta of
advisers.  Intrenched privilege fought all efforts at dislodgement by
all the methods open to arbitrary {35} power.  By 1839 responsible
government, which meant control of the executive by the elected body,
was conceded in principle by Lord Durham in his famous report; and it
was conceded, in fact and in practice, nine years later after a
complete demonstration that the country could be governed on no other
basis.

The critical and determining moment for Canada and for the whole Empire
was that in which the issue of responsible government was settled:
though the ultimate significance of the decision thus forced was far
outside the ken of those who brought it about.  They sought a solution
for an intolerable local difficulty by a constitutional expedient which
alone could bring relief; what, in fact, they did was to introduce an
alien principle of government into the imperial system, which in the
progress of the years undid the work of Pitt and Grenville and
Dorchester and Simcoe and transformed the empire of privilege and
central control into a brotherhood of democratic states.

The revolutionary character of the innovation was not hidden from those
who resisted the change.  What Governor Hutchinson said to the
Legislature of Massachusetts in 1773 was said over and over again by
the public men of Great Britain, by the resident governors to those who
demanded the granting of responsible government.  They posed the great
constitutional dilemma to the advocates of change.  How could the
governor of a colony, an official of the British {36} government
subject to instructions from his superiors and responsible to them,
also be obedient to the will of the people as expressed by a popular
assembly?  The thing, it was pointed out, simply could not be done.
The ultimate authority had to be either the British government or the
popular Assembly.  If the latter, what would become of the Empire?
Lord John Russell in his instructions to Poulett Thomson (afterwards
Lord Sydenham), the first governor of Canada (created by the merger of
Upper and Lower Canada in 1840), told him in effect that the case for
responsible government was just so much nonsense.  If the governor,
Lord John explained, were to obey his instructions from the Queen (that
is from Lord John and his colleagues of the British government) he
could not accept conflicting advice from his executive council.  If the
conditions were such that he must accept the latter then "he is no
longer a subordinate officer but an independent sovereign."[19]  And of
course by the same token the colony would become an independent nation.
The logic could not be answered in terms; but it had to give way to the
overriding logic of hard facts.  It became evident that the colony had
to be subjected to the autocratic rule of the governor, backed by
force; or the people must govern themselves with the governor balancing
himself as well as he could between two conflicting
responsibilities--that {37} to his elected advisers and that to the
government overseas from which he derived his commission.  Once this
was made clear there was nothing for it but to concede self-government
involving popular control of the executive.

If the British colonies had remained separate from one another and
therefore small and impotent, the anomalies of the relationship created
by this change might never have become apparent, and the "perfect
subordination" in external matters which Durham stipulated might have
continued.  But other influences brought about first the union of the
Canadas and later the federation of the colonies, thus creating the
physical basis for a nation and making inevitable the emergence of
conditions and situations which required the assertion and the exercise
of powers inherent in nationhood.

Sixty years ago voices in Canada began to question the theory that the
external affairs of Canada were the concern of the British government
solely.  Edward Blake, afterwards leader of the Liberal Party, in 1874
spoke of Canadians as "four million Britons who are not free" because
they had no control over foreign policy.  In 1882 David Mills, another
Liberal leader, declared that if the rule that external relations must
remain in the hands of the British government was unchangeable, it
would be the destiny of the Empire to fall to pieces.  No open effort
was made to modify the theory but there was, as occasion arose, a
polite {38} usurpation of the powers, which, according to the original
design of Empire, were the exclusive possession of the central
authority, with a ready consent by the British government which showed
that it recognized that the old order must pass away.

The situation was anomalous and potentially dangerous.  That it could
so long continue, giving rise to so little friction, is a high tribute
to the capacity for practical adjustment and for putting realities
above theories and dignities which inheres in British methods of
government.

It needed only some international event of first importance affecting
the Empire to make the anomaly no longer tolerable; and this the War
supplied.  The declaration of the relationship among the British
nations, necessitated by the development of events, which was made at
the meeting of the Imperial Conference in 1917, in war time, was a
reaffirmation of the principle put forward unavailingly by the leaders
of the American colonists on the eve of the Revolution.[20]  This
theory of empire relations, accepted as a basis of adjustment by the
British in 1917, was redefined in terms wider and more exact at the
Imperial Conference {39} of 1926, and given formal legal sanctions in
the Westminster Statute of 1931.

Thus the Second Empire passed; and the British Commonwealth of Nations
came into being, firmly based upon the foundation stone of principle
which had been rejected in favor of an appeal to the sword just 150
years earlier.  The wisdom of the potential rebels of 1774 and 1775 was
thus vindicated; but a little too late to save all North America to the
Empire.  But if North America by reasons of the mistakes of long ago is
now and must remain divided politically, it is nevertheless in a larger
sense a unity.  It remains a stronghold of democracy, a citadel of the
English-speaking world.



[1] Beer, George Louis, _The English-Speaking Peoples, Their Future
Relations and Joint International Obligations_; New York, 1917, p. 190.

[2] Daniel Webster, speech May 7, 1834.

[3] A Study of this conference has been published: _British
Commonwealth Relations Conference_, ed. by A. J. Toynbee, London,
Humphrey Milford, 1934.

[4] For an interesting comment on the international aspects of the
Conference discussions see _The Drift Towards War_ in the _Yale
Review_, 1934, by Philip Noel Baker, a member of the Conference.

[5] _Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs_, London,
Nov. 1930.

[6] Dr. Alfred Zimmern chose the title _The Third British Empire_ for
his book embodying a series of lectures delivered at Columbia
University under the auspices of the Julius Beer Foundation (New York,
1926).

[7] Kennedy, W. P. M., _Documents of the Canadian Constitution,
1759-1915_, Toronto, 1918.

[8] Idem., p. 191.

[9] Martin, Chester, _Empire & Commonwealth; Studies in Governance and
Self-Government in Canada_, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1929, pp.
68-69.

[10] The full text of article four is given in _The American
Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation_, by C. H. McIlwain, New
York, 1923, p. 115.

[11] _The Writings of James Madison_, ed. by Gaillard Hunt, New York,
Putnam, 1910, VI, 373.  Also Robt. L. Schuyler, _Parliament and the
British Empire_, New York, Columbia University Press, 1929, pp. 196-97.

[12] _Imperial Conference_.  _1926_.  _Summary of Proceedings_.  Cmd.
2768, p. 14.  _Kennedy's Documents of the Canadian Constitution_, p.
703.

[13] Quoted in McIlwain's _American Revolution_, p. 123.

[14] Munro, W. B., _American Influences on Canadian Government_,
Toronto, 1929, p. 48.

[15] Egerton, H. E., _The Origin & Growth of the English Colonies and
of Their System of Government; An Introduction to Mr. C. P. Lucas's
Historical Geography of the British Colonies_, Oxford, The Clarendon
Press, 1903, p. 16.

[16] Kennedy's _Documents of the Canadian Constitution_, 2d. ed., pp.
199 ff.

[17] _The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe, with
Allied Documents Relating to His Administration of the Government of
Upper Canada_.  Collected and edited by Brigadier General E. A.
Cruikshank ... for the Historical Society.  Ontario, 1923-31, pp.
17-18.  Hereafter referred to as the _Simcoe Papers_.

[18] Simcoe to Portland, Jan. 22, 1795, _Simcoe Papers_, p. 265.

[19] Russell to Thomson, Oct. 16, 1839, Kennedy's _Documents of the
Canadian Constitution_, p. 423.

[20] The text of the constitutional declaration adopted by the Imperial
War Cabinet, 1917, at the instance of Sir Robert Borden, Prime Minister
of Canada, will be found in Kennedy's _Documents of the Canadian
Constitution_, p. 698.  It declared that the impending readjustment of
the constitutional relations of the component parts of the Empire
"should be based upon a full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous
nations of an Imperial Commonwealth."  See also Zimmern, _The Third
British Empire_, p. 28.




{43}

II

CANADA AS A DEMOCRACY

_The Coming of Responsible Government_

I have already sketched, in the merest outline, the growth, development
and final emergence of Canada as a democratic nation.  Some of the gaps
in the earlier sketch I now propose to fill in, because this is
necessary if we are to come to an intelligent estimate of the part
which American influences played in the making of Canada.

After the loss of the thirteen colonies a vast stretch of the North
American continent remained British, but this wilderness was broken by
only two struggling colonies: Quebec, newly taken from the French,
alien in language and religion; and Nova Scotia.  From those
inauspicious beginnings there has grown the Dominion of Canada of
today, a country which, though far outdistanced in population, wealth
and strength by its vast neighbor, is nevertheless not negligible among
the nations of the earth.  For the making of this nation there had to
be a steady extension of its physical basis and the progressive
development of its institutions of government.  In the founding of the
various colonial settlements which in due time came together to form
the Dominion of Canada there was no thought of nationhood or of
democracy; they were {44} intended to be and to remain provinces
subordinate to the rule of Great Britain.  It was fifty years before
they attained a working measure of self-government; and it was not
until after this stage was reached that the processes of consolidation
and expansion began.  It took another sixty years for the Federation to
emerge and develop to its present appearance of finality; and it was
only yesterday that its constitutional development came to its full
flowering.

To this long development of growth, change, and adjustment, external
influences from the neighboring republic contributed; the country was
in special degree open to them because, with the exception of Quebec,
it lacked such defensive and repelling powers as differences of
religion, of language and institutions.  I have already tried to
indicate the extent and value of the endowment in political instinct
and belief which the foundation populations of the English Canadian
colonies took with them from their earlier environment.  This was
derived, not from the new Republic, but from a political society
antecedent to it; but the impact of the Republic and its people upon
the newer British communities continued, and has been during the whole
period of our existence, and is to this day in almost every aspect of
our national life, a factor of high importance.  Before I deal with the
institutions and the governmental system which are the working agencies
of the Canadian democracy, it will not, I think, be out of place
briefly to consider some of the {45} American influences which were
inescapable in view of the circumstances.

For the earlier years I limit my inquiry to Upper Canada, where the
interlacement of interests was greatest.  I have referred to the
Loyalist immigrants as constituting the foundation population of Upper
Canada.  This population was soon overlaid by a second and a larger
influx from the United States.  Governor Simcoe abounded in
strongly-held convictions; one was that a large proportion of the
people of the United States were yearning to resume their British
citizenship.  He therefore let it be known, through the border
settlements, that those who held these sentiments would be welcome to
Upper Canada, where there was free land for the asking.  The trusting
governor assumed that the activating motive, when an immigrant made his
appearance, was rather a desire to renew allegiance than to obtain
land.  The Duke de la Rochefoucauld, who visited Governor Simcoe,
records in his account of his travels a conversation between the
governor and an immigrant whom he met by chance on the forest trail.


You are tired [said Simcoe] of the federal government; you like not any
longer to have so many kings; you wish for your old father.  You are
perfectly right.  Come along, we love such good Royalists as you are:
we will give you land.[1]


{46}

The immigration thus induced continued in increasing volume until, by
the time it was stopped by the war of 1812, about half the residents of
Upper Canada were Americans who had come into the country during the
preceding eighteen years, many, perhaps most, of whom were of
Revolutionary stock.  Only a small proportion of these settlers,
however, showed sympathy with the invaders in the War of 1812 and found
it necessary, when the attempted conquest failed, to leave the country.
Nevertheless those who remained fell under the suspicion of the
government.  Efforts were made to deprive them of a citizenship which
previously had been assumed to have been bestowed with the grant of
land, and to harass them in various ways.  This was due perhaps less to
their American birth than to the fact that, in the political alignment
then taking place, they allied themselves solidly with the reform
elements which were demanding an extension of popular government.  This
question of the status of American-born residents was in issue for
nearly twenty years until a Reform majority in the Assembly forced a
satisfactory settlement.

The twenty years before the so-called rebellion of 1837 constituted a
highly critical period in Canadian history which still awaits adequate
treatment by historians.  It is customary to deal with it as though the
issues between the conflicting parties, which were fought over during
this period, were plain to see and easy to understand, whereas they
were in fact {47} somewhat complex.  The factor, which still awaits
critical examination and appraisement, is the extent, character and
purpose of the contribution to the political struggle made by the
powerful American elements in the Reform Party of Upper Canada.

There is no mystery about what the government party believed in and
fought for.  The control of the province was in the hands of a highly
efficient and thoroughly organized upper class which filled all the
offices, dominated the professions, distributed the public revenues in
ways most pleasing and profitable to themselves, practised nepotism
unblushingly, and held all the reins of government.  Each governor in
turn was absorbed into this organization.  He was indispensable to it
because he threw over its programs and performances the prestige of the
crown.  But it was not a mere governing clique; it had a popular
following which enabled it to win alternate elections.  A Reform
control of the Assembly with its protestations, inquiries and
memorials, almost invariably led to a Tory rally with victory at the
next election.  And the cry by which victory was won, with the governor
often sounding the note, was that the reformers desired to bring in
American systems of administration and government, looking to
separation from Great Britain, and ultimate union with the United
States.  The stock observation upon this charge has been to denounce it
as a libel on the reformers who, it is declared, sought only to
regularize government methods by bringing {48} them into conformity
with the British practice.  That this was indeed the purpose of that
substantial wing of the Reform Party which accepted the Baldwins,
father and son, as leaders is undoubted; but research work in the
political literature of the time certainly tends to give some measure
of support to the Tory charges, at least to this extent, that many of
the changes and reforms urged by elements in the Reform party were
obviously suggested by the experience of the United States.  This was
especially the case when the formulation of policy was in the hands of
Marshall Spring Bidwell, a native of Massachusetts.  He led the party
in the disastrous election campaign of 1836, when Sir Francis Bond
Head, the new governor, took the stump on behalf of the Tories.[2]
Exasperation over their defeat resulted in the extreme elements of the
party, under the leadership of William Lyon Mackenzie, a perfervid
Scot, raising the standard of rebellion and declaring for a republic.
This so compromised Bidwell, though historians acquit him of
complicity, that he obeyed the order of the governor to leave the
country.  He thereupon removed to the state of New York, where he had a
career as a lawyer of some distinction.

{49}

These events were naturally regarded by the victorious party as amply
justifying their estimates of the Reform program and the ends it had in
view.  When, subsequently, in consequence of the effect upon English
public opinion of the uprisings and their suppression with drastic
punishments of exile and death, they found it necessary to give an
account of the reasons for the outbreak, the American residents in
Upper Canada were cast in responsible roles.  A Committee of the
Legislative Council by an official report gave themselves, in their
capacity as members of the ruling combination, a testimonial of
complete innocence; in their identification of the guilty parties they
had this to say:


Your Committee are of opinion that the proximity of the American
frontier--the wild and chimerical notions of civil government broached
and discussed there--the introduction of a very great number of border
Americans into this province as settlers who, with some most
respectable and worthy exceptions, formed the bulk of the reformers,
who carried their opinions so far as disaffection ... emboldened a
portion of the minority to rise in rebellion in the hope of achieving
the overthrow of the government with foreign assistance.  Is it [the
report went on to ask] because reformers or a portion of them can
command the sympathies of the United States and of Lower Canadian
rebels that the internal affairs of a British Colony must be conducted
to please them?[3]


On the morrow of their triumph, which as they {50} doubtless thought
permanently insured their position, the Tories met with humiliation and
overthrow.  Though the rebellion in Upper Canada hardly exceeded a riot
in dimensions, it outweighed in political effectiveness the much more
serious uprising of the French Canadians in Lower Canada, because it
was an indication of the alienation of a formidable political party in
an English-speaking province from the scheme of government which Great
Britain had established and was delighted to uphold.  The affair was
altogether too reminiscent of the American Revolution.  Lord Durham was
dispatched posthaste to Canada in the capacity of High Commissioner;
and at the same time Robert Baldwin rose to a position of undisputed
leadership in the Reform Party.  It did not require the recent
discovery in the Durham papers of a memorandum from Baldwin to
Durham[4] in which the doctrine of responsible government is set forth
in detail, to make it evident that there was a measure of understanding
and agreement between Durham and those reformers who sought a solution
for the problem in the application to Canada of the British system of
responsible government and parliamentary control.  In the report of the
Committee of the Legislative Council, already referred to, in which the
exasperation of the doomed oligarchy finds acrid expression, Lord
Durham is accused of taking his {51} information about Upper Canada
from some person unnamed in the report "who has evidently entered on
his task, with the desire to exalt the opponents of the Colonial
government in the estimation of the High Commissioner and to throw
discredit on the statements of the supporters of British influence, and
British connections."

Lord Durham, in his great report, and in the dispatches which preceded
it, took a line which was maddening to the oligarchy.  In place of
falling in with its idea that the way to combat American influence was
to discourage intercourse and to keep, by arbitrary rule, a firm
control over the population, he saw the situation of Canada, existing
and in the future, in the light of its relations to the United States.
He saw that the conditions of living in the British colonies, as
controlled by such factors as municipal institutions, provision for
education, participation by the people in the government, contrasted
most unfavorably with those in the adjoining states; and he knew that
the perpetuation of these conditions would strengthen the desire,
already sporadically present in the colonies, for absorption by the
United States.  Attempts to check this by the application of force
based upon the power of Great Britain would strengthen the
interventionist mood of the American people, already somewhat in
evidence.

There are two pregnant passages to this effect in the report:


{52}

If by such means the British nation shall be content to retain a barren
and injurious sovereignty, it will but tempt the chances of foreign
aggression by keeping continually exposed to a powerful and ambitious
neighbor a distant dependency, in which an invader would find no
resistance but might rather reckon on active coperation from a portion
of the resident population....[5]

The maintenance of an absolute form of government on any part of the
North American continent can never continue for any long time without
exciting a general feeling in the United States against a power of
which the existence is secured by means so odious to the people.[6]


The side note to the paragraph in which this significant statement is
made reads: "Importance of preserving the sympathy of the United
States."

The purposes of Lord Durham were to meet the demand for self-government
by concessions, based upon British practice and precedent, which would
be in themselves so satisfactory and so capable of development that the
disgruntled element would accept them in lieu of possible American
expedients to which it had been giving consideration; and further to
check the tendency to look to union with the United States as the only
road to the deeper satisfaction of citizenship by giving it the vision
of nationhood.  "If we wish," he wrote, "to prevent the extension of
this [American] influence it can only be done by raising {53} up for
the North American colonist some nationality of his own; by elevating
these small and unimportant communities into a society having some
objects of a national importance; and by thus giving their inhabitants
a country which they will be unwilling to see absorbed even into one
more powerful."[7]  In these parts of his report Durham as in a vision
foresaw the future nation and its essential foundation: self-government
on British lines; the union of the North American colonies; and the
development of the spirit of nationality.  Time and the labors of
others turned the vision into reality; and his estimate of the
consequences of these changes has been justified in the widest measure
by actual results.  They removed from Canada that desire for the
adoption of American institutions which, if acted upon, would have been
the forerunner of political union.  This general statement is not
affected by the episode of the Montreal manifesto of 1849, calling for
annexation, which was an expression of temporary pique by the most
British element of the population, enraged by their ejection from
power, and the simultaneous loss of their preferential markets in Great
Britain.

From this time forth there was universal acceptance by Canadians of the
British parliamentary system as the most effective agency of democratic
government.  Confederation came thirty years later, supplying the
physical basis of a nation; and in this area the rising {54} spirit of
nationality, employing the machinery of self-government, built the
Canada of today, which divides the North American continent with the
United States and exemplifies north of the line the British principles
of democratic government in contrast with those which are known to the
world as American.

But I have been very inadequate in setting out the antecedent causes of
this great and beneficent development if I have not made clear to you
that the direct and indirect effects of the impact of the United States
upon the colonies bulks high among these causes.



_The Influences That Made Confederation_

The second great contribution by the United States to the making of the
Canadian nation had to do with the creation of the Canadian Federation.
It would not be correct to say that the inspiration for federal union
came from the desire of the colonies to follow the example of the
United States; but it can be said that confederation could not have
been brought about at the time it was affected had it not been for
conditions which were the Canadian reaction to American events.  One
might also say that if confederation had not been brought about at that
time, it might have been found impossible later to accomplish it.  In
quieter times, with political feelings less in control of human wills,
the economic resistance to a union of the colonies might have proved
all-powerful.  We have a {55} conventional account of the making of
confederation which takes little note of the forces that operated
behind the faade, which misplaces the sequences of cause and effect,
and misjudges the significance of events.

From the beginning of the second Empire there had been, at intervals,
suggestions of a union of the British colonies in North America under a
common direction; but confederation was not the culmination of
leisurely academic discussion.  The project, which was launched in 1858
and proceeded rapidly to completion, had its origins in the realities
and necessities of the times.  One of its roots was the attitude of
indifference or fatalism following the conceding of responsible
government by leading British public men.  They accepted the view that
in striving for self-government the people of the colonies were taking
the first steps toward an inevitable separation; this found expression,
sometimes in official documents, in the highest quarters.[8]  Disraeli
thinks that these wretched colonies, soon to be independent, are in the
meantime "millstones around our neck."  Earl Grey can see no British
interest served by retaining them.  Lord John Russell, speaking as
Prime Minister in the House of Commons, looks forward philosophically
to their independence.  This feeling continued {56} throughout the
fifties: and was strengthened by the realization, following the
outbreak of the American Civil War, that the North American colonies
were dangerous liabilities--they were referred to by the permanent head
of the Colonial Office "as a sort of damnosa hereditas."  Tennyson
lashed out in anger at this mood:

  And that true north of which we lately heard
  A strain to shame us, loose the bonds and go.


My own reading of those times is that the movement for confederation,
which began in the province of Canada in the late fifties, was the
reply of leading colonials to this British attitude, of which they were
aware, and which they resented.  The colonies, divided and weak, did
not want independence.  The people knew that to independence there was
an inevitable sequel: absorption by the United States.  There may have
been a desire in the thirties of the nineteenth century for annexation
to the United States, but with the granting of self-government it
vanished.  The Canadian public man who first realized the situation was
Alexander Galt, a son of John Galt, the Scotch novelist; and he set
himself resolutely to deal with it.  He is the real father of
confederation.  Reading and collating his speeches from his first
advocacy of the project to his post-confederation comments upon it, one
can see what was in his mind.  If the colonies were united they would
have some chance of surviving even {57} if they were told to "loose the
bonds and go"; perhaps as a confederation Great Britain would be glad
to retain them as a cordinate or subordinate nation.  In 1858 he
journeyed to England to acquaint the government with his plans and
enlist its sympathy.  His representations to Bulwer Lytton, Secretary
for the Colonies, that as things were shaping in British North America,
there must be a choice between the confederation of the provinces and
their absorption by the United States, left that gentleman and his
colleagues quite unimpressed.  Returning from England empty-handed, he
was unable further to interest his colleagues in the project.

But events were moving.  D'Arcy McGee, newly arrived in Canada from
Ireland, via the United States, where he sojourned some years, allied
himself with Galt; and as his occupation was that of a lecturer, he
familiarized audiences in all the British provinces with the idea that
it was necessary for their existence that the colonies should come
together.  The outbreak of the Civil War in the United States, followed
by difficulties between the governments of the United States and Great
Britain, made the colonists conscious of the dangers of their position.
It suggested possibilities to which they had to give attention--the
possibility of war between the United States and Great Britain; the
possibility of the northern states, in the event of losing the South,
finding compensation in overrunning the colonies, which they could
easily do with their {58} mighty armies.[9]  The southern confederacy
had open and powerful sympathizers in Canada, some of them highly
placed; the relations between the British countries and the United
States were in a dangerously strained condition; the newspapers of the
northern states were filled with threats, to be carried out in the
future, against Canada.[10]  To understand the situation, it is
necessary only to read the speeches by public men, in which
confederation was recommended to the people.  McGee in a public address
warned Canadians of their danger:


That shot fired at Fort Sumter was the signal gun of a new epoch for
North America which told the people of Canada, more plainly than human
speech can ever express it, to sleep no more, except on their
arms--unless in their sleep they desire to be overtaken and
subjugated....  I do not believe that it is our destiny to be engulfed
into a Republican union, renovated and inflamed with {59} the wine of
victory, of which she now drinks so deeply--it seems to me that we have
theatre enough under our feet to act another and a worthier part; we
can hardly join the Americans on our own terms, and we never ought to
join them on theirs.[11]


"Events stronger than advocacy, stronger than man, have come in at
last," said McGee, speaking in the Canadian Parliament in support of
confederation.[12]  It was in this speech that McGee spoke of the three
warnings that Canada had been given: The warning from England that
Canada must look after her own defense; the warning from the United
States--the notice to abrogate the reciprocity treaty, the threat to
arm the lakes, the enormous expansion of the American Army and Navy;
the breakdown of parliamentary government in the colony.  If this be
discounted as the rhodomontade of a professional orator, we can turn to
the speech of George Brown, in the same debate, for a still apter
quotation: "The civil war in the neighboring republic; the possibility
of war between Great Britain and the United States; the threatened
repeal of the reciprocity treaty; the threatened abolition of the
American bonding system; the unsettled position of the Hudson's Bay
company, and the {60} changed feeling of England as to the relations of
great colonies to the parent state; all combine at this moment to
arrest earnest attention to the gravity of the situation and unite us
all in one vigorous effort to meet the emergency like men."[13]

These reasons for union by the provinces were as potent in Great
Britain as in Canada, for though official and political opinion there
still tended to the acceptance of the belief that the colonies would
ultimately become independent, there was deep apprehension over the
possibility that they might be absorbed forcibly by the American
republic.  Speaking in the Commons in 1862 the Secretary of State for
War, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, expressed this opinion quite bluntly:
"I for one can only say that I look forward without apprehension, and I
may add, without regret, to the time when Canada might become an
independent state, [hear, hear,] but I think it behooves England not to
cast Canada loose or send her adrift before she has acquired sufficient
strength to assert her own independence."

To avert this fate of absorption by the United States, believed to be
impending, the British government began to back the movement for
confederation with all the influence it could command.  That the scheme
did not crash because of opposition in the {61} Maritimes was plainly
due to the open and somewhat unblushing intervention of British
authority.  With all difficulties surmounted, the Dominion of Canada
came into being July 1, 1867.

The Dominion of Canada thus constituted included only the provinces
between Lake Superior and the Atlantic Ocean; but within four years its
area was multiplied seven times by the transfer to it by the British
government of its North American territories, and the inclusion in the
federation of the province of British Columbia.  Again the reason for
this rapid and, in an economic sense, rash expansion was political; and
again the impulse to political action came from the United States.  In
the years following the Civil War "manifest destiny" was a bright
alluring star to many American statesmen.[14]  In Washington Senators
Sumner and Chandler and Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State, were
fascinated with the prospect of taking over Canada in part payment of
the bill against Great Britain, on the score of the "Alabama" and other
activities, which Senator Sumner worked out at two and a half billion
dollars--a proposition upon which the British minister was actually
sounded.  Americans of the northwestern states thought the hour had
struck for taking into the Union the vast wilderness of Rupert's Land.
A Minnesota senator proposed in the Senate a resolution favoring a
treaty which would {62} transfer to the American Union all British
territory west of 90 degrees' longitude.  In the isolated, helpless
pioneer province of British Columbia, far out on the Pacific Coast,
there was an open and active agitation for union with the United
States, drawing support and encouragement from the other side of the
boundary.  The purchase of Alaska meant to Seward that the whole
Pacific coast was to become part of the United States.[15]

With these warning signals flying, the Canadian government and the
British government in coperation moved swiftly to checkmate the plans
of the Washington expansionists.  The northwestern territory and
Rupert's Land within three years were added to Canada, carrying the
Dominion's boundaries west to the Rocky Mountains and north to the
Pole.  British Columbia, with a legislature to deal with in which the
policy of annexation commanded strong support, was a more difficult
problem; but steady pressure from the British government and a pledge,
impossible of fulfillment, from Canada that within ten years a
transcontinental railway would be built, finally proved effective; and
in 1871 the motto of Canada "from sea to sea" was made good.  Thus
within thirteen years, from the launching by Galt of his drive for
federal {63} union, the whole of British North America, with the
exception of two islands (one of which came in two years later) was
brought under a common national authority.  The pressure that drove the
statesmen forward in a race, as they believed against time, was the
fear, real or imagined, that unless they succeeded in their plans the
American dream of "manifest destiny" would be achieved.



_The Winning of Legislative Independence_

The new Dominion of Canada, though it spanned a continent, remained a
colony; this was made most clear by the British North America Act which
brought it into being.  Its self-governing powers were limited to
domestic questions; and even in these spheres it was subject to an
overriding authority when the British Parliament passed laws imperial
in their scope and intention.  The governor-general was also an
imperial official with special responsibilities.  The right of the King
to disallow Canadian legislation, upon the advice of his British
ministers, was affirmed.  The external relations of the Dominion were
wholly in the hands of the British Foreign Office.  Thus the Dominion
of Canada began its existence in 1867 with a system of government
substantially in keeping with the terms of the compromise which had
been submitted to the British government by the first American Congress
ninety-three years before, and had been rejected by it.  The "perfect
subordination" of the colony to the {64} metropolis in all matters of
external policy stipulated by Durham still continued and had the
appearance of permanency.

The inadequacy of the system by which Great Britain looked after their
external affairs was recognized at once by the Canadians when they came
to have dealings with the United States.  Their instinctive feeling was
that their interests would be better served if they attended to the job
themselves.  Even before confederation the British American colonies
sent unofficial representatives to Washington in an attempt to save the
reciprocity treaty, to the great scandal of Lord Lyons, the British
Ambassador, who in vigorous letters to the Governor-General of Canada
and the Foreign Minister of Great Britain, protested this irruption of
amateurs into his preserve.  The movement by which Canada won the right
to control her foreign affairs was in the established tradition.  It
began deferentially, pursued its purpose over a long period of years,
established precedents from which new advances could be made, and
attained its end at last by an aggressive stroke.  In 1870 the
propriety of Canada seeking power directly to negotiate commercial
treaties was urged unavailingly in the Canadian Parliament by Galt.
Recognizing Canadian feeling on this question, the British government
in 1871 appointed Sir John A. Macdonald, the Canadian Prime Minister,
one of the six British plenipotentiaries who negotiated the Treaty of
Washington.  His experience with his {65} British colleagues--knowledge
of which became general in Canada--strengthened the Canadians in their
belief that they had better look after their own affairs in treaty
making, in fact if not in form.  "My colleagues," Sir John A. Macdonald
wrote, "were continually pressing me to yield; I was obliged to stand
out and, I am afraid, to make myself extremely disagreeable to them."

The lesson of this was not lost and three years later when negotiations
were renewed looking to the settlement of questions outstanding between
the United States and Canada, the Canadian government insisted that the
British plenipotentiaries should be only two in number: George Brown of
Canada and the British Minister at Washington.  The treaty was
completed and signed.  It provided, among other things, for the renewal
of the former reciprocity treaty; for reciprocity in coasting; for a
joint commission to look after boundary waters; and for the enlargement
of the Canadian canals, including those on the St. Lawrence.  This
enlightened treaty was evidence of vast improvement in the relations
between at least the governments of the two countries.  Had it been in
effect for the twenty-one-year period, for which it was negotiated, it
would have profoundly affected for all time the relations between the
two countries.  Do you ask what became of this treaty?  It has its
place of rest in what John Hay called the "grave-yard of treaties"--the
United States Senate.

{66}

The precedent of 1874 was thereafter followed in all treaty
negotiations in which Canadian interests were predominant.
Negotiations were in the hands of the British plenipotentiary who was
appointed at the instance of the Canadian government.  The resulting
treaty or convention represented the view of the Canadian government;
but the ratification rested with the British government.  This
procedure, however, did not quiet the agitation in Canada for the right
of direct negotiation.  In 1882 and again in 1892 the Liberal
opposition raised the issue in Parliament, contending that the
proximity of Canada to the United States and the intimacy of their
relationships made it necessary that they should be able to deal with
one another directly.  When they attained office the Liberals did not
press this claim but in practice they kept the making of commercial
treaties in their own hands, the purely British contribution being
nominal.  In the negotiations which led up to the reciprocity agreement
of 1911 the part played by the British Minister at Washington was that
of simply introducing the Canadian Ministers to the American Secretary
of State.

Twelve years later a Liberal government in Canada seized the occasion,
offered by negotiations with the government of the United States, to
claim--and give practical effect to the claim--that Canada was in
control of her external relations.  The antecedent circumstances
suggested that the time was ripe for this final step.  In 1917 there
had been the declaration by the {67} Imperial Conference that the
relationship among the British nations was one of equality.  Canada's
representatives at the Peace Conference attended under powers given by
the King upon the advice of his Canadian ministers.  Canada, as a
member of the League of Nations, was subordinate to no other member
nation.  Canada's status of nationhood and her equality with Great
Britain had been affirmed by leading public men in Canada and in Great
Britain alike.  The Canadian government, having meditated upon these
developments, decided, when the need of an arrangement with the United
States for the protection of the halibut fisheries of the north Pacific
became pressing, to put this claim of nationhood to the test by
undertaking to make the treaty one between the Dominion of Canada, a
nation of North America, and the United States, another North American
nation.  The Canadian government appointed Mr. Lapointe, Minister of
Justice, plenipotentiary, securing powers for him from the King; Mr.
Lapointe negotiated the treaty, and signed it alone as the
representative of Canada and not as the representative of the British
Empire as previously had been invariably the case.

The significance of this act was not realized until the deed was done;
there then arose a tremendous clamor in Canada, in Great Britain, and
in all parts of the British Empire.  In strict law Canada was in 1923 a
dependent country wholly incapable of {68} completing an international
instrument.  What the Canadian government did was calmly to assume that
the constitutional right to equality and nationhood, which had been
recognized, carried with it, of necessity, the legal power to make
these rights effective.  This daring innovation, entirely at variance
with the traditional British way of having legal rights slowly overlaid
and destroyed by successive deposits of precedents representing the
growth of constitutional rights, brought definitely to a close the
experiment in imperialism upon which Great Britain embarked on the
morrow of the American Revolution.  One of the formerly dependent
colonies had in fact established its independence of control by the
British government and the British Parliament, and thereby revealed the
fact that the Second Empire had made way for the Commonwealth.  The
situation created by Canada in 1923 had to be accepted and regularized;
and there followed in inevitable succession the recognition by the
Conference of 1923 of the right of the Dominion to make treaties, the
Balfour declaration of 1926, the meeting of the constitutional
committee in 1929, and the passing of the Westminster Act in 1931.

To the chain of events, with the results which I have indicated, no
conscious contribution was made by the United States nor by any agency
American in character.  I have already said the United States pursued
its own interests and applied the policies which it regarded as
appropriate; the conditions thus created, as {69} they affected Canada,
led to adjustments which affected, one way or another, national
movements.  These Canadian developments toward parliamentary
independence and nationhood were displeasing to many Canadians; they
hoped for a federal union of the British nations instead.  In
expressing their regrets at what has come to pass they are somewhat
inclined to hold the United States in large measure responsible for
what happened.  But those Canadians who promoted this movement toward
nationhood and were always conscious of the objectives they sought will
give the American government and their people a clean bill of health in
this regard.  They undoubtedly contributed, but this was done by
inadvertence.

Let me illustrate this by a brief reference to an American-Canadian
episode, long forgotten, I imagine, by Americans, which, in my
judgment, is one of the prime reasons why Canada today is in complete
charge of her external affairs.  My reference is to the Alaskan
boundary controversy, which was settled by the finding of the Alaska
Commission in 1903.[16]  A majority made up of the three United States
commissioners and Lord Alverstone, the nominee of the British
government, made the award; the two Canadian commissioners refused to
sign it on the ground that the finding was political, not judicial, and
that it ignored the just rights of Canada.  The details of {70} this
controversy cannot be here stated even in outline; it is necessary for
the present argument only to say that from the circumstances antecedent
to the meeting of the Commission and from the proceedings of the
Commission itself, the people of Canada came to suspect that the
Commission was a political, not a judicial body, which would, under
diplomatic pressure from Washington, reject the Canadian case.  The
confirmation, to the Canadian mind, of these suspicions by the course
taken by the Canadian commissioners was followed by an outburst of
popular wrath, surprising in its depth and intensity.  Instinctively,
the sure safeguard against future mishaps of this kind occurred to
great numbers of Canadians, and expression was given to their feelings
by Canadian public men who had an intimate knowledge of the
circumstances which attended the hearing of the dispute.  "The
difficulty as I conceive it to be," said Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime
Minister, in Parliament, "is that so long as Canada remains a
dependency of the British Crown, the present powers that we have are
not sufficient for the maintenance of our rights."  He foretold a
demand upon the British Parliament for additional rights "so that if we
ever have to deal with matters of a similar nature again, we shall deal
with them in our own way, in our own fashion, according to the best
light we have."  Mr. A. B. Aylesworth, one of the Canadian
commissioners, in a newspaper interview expressed the same view.
Clifford Sifton, a member of {71} the Canadian government, who had had
charge of the Canadian case, was outspoken.  In the future, he said, in
similar cases, all the commissioners should be Canadians; "a somewhat
radical readjustment will have to be made before a great while."

It is my belief that the movement for enlarging Canada's powers to
those of nationhood took definite form at that time.  Perhaps on this
point I might repeat what I have already said in my biography of
Clifford Sifton:


In this strong illumination of the inadequacies of the existing
relationship and with the revelation to themselves of their national
spirit, the Canadian people passed at a single stride from the plane of
willing dependency to one of conscious aspiration for the powers of
nationhood.  A definite turning was taken, although the goal lay far
down the years.


So little did the United States authorities know about the
constitutional developments that were going on in Canada that the
enterprise upon which Canada embarked in 1923 in entering into direct
diplomatic relations with the United States nearly suffered shipwreck
at their hands.  The draft of the halibut treaty made by the United
States Department of State made the British Empire as a whole the other
party to the arrangement.  When this difficulty was straightened out
and the completed treaty was submitted to the Senate, that august body
added a reservation that made it, in effect, an empire treaty.
Incidentally, by {72} the wording of the reservation, it was revealed
that the Senate thought that Canada was a part of Great Britain.  This
setback to their plans did not seriously embarrass the Canadian
government.  The Canadian Parliament ratified the original treaty and
awaited with dignity and patience the withdrawal by the United States
of its reservation.  This was done quietly and discreetly the following
year.  Perhaps this was the first time an outside nation brought the
United States Senate to time; if, so, it was a considerable achievement
for Canada in the first exercise of her claimed powers.

With the acceptance, by all parties, of the principle that each British
nation could, at will, take charge of its foreign affairs, Canada
proceeded to establish a number of legations.  It was inevitable that
Washington should be chosen as the home of the first of these
legations, since it was the variety, complexity and importance of our
relations with the United States that led to recognition by Canada of
the necessity of taking charge of her own affairs abroad.  We have sent
distinguished Canadians to Washington and have had the honor of
receiving worthy representatives of the President of the United States.
That these two nations should have intimate and direct diplomatic
relations is so reasonable, so in keeping with commonsense, that the
arrangement takes on the appearance of being part of the natural order
of things; and there is difficulty in remembering that less than ten
years ago this was a subject of bitter controversy in Canada.


{73}

_Canada an Actual Democracy_

The recorded facts are, I think, conclusive that it was the essential
North Americanism of the Canadian people that led them into courses of
thought and action with which the theory of government embodied in the
Second Empire could not be permanently reconciled.  If Canada had been
an island a thousand miles removed from the American coast the
constitutional development of Canada would have been, in all
likelihood, along very different lines; the federation of the British
nations with a common government might have been attainable.  Canada
must take the responsibility in history of having first made unworkable
the original plan of empire government: a central authority that
commanded and colonies that obeyed; and of then making impossible the
solution which would have been preferable to Great Britain and to the
Australasian Dominions.  The present British Commonwealth of Nations
resulted from the adoption of successive expedients for the purpose of
keeping Canada in the family; this is the plain fact, simply stated.

What those in Canada who resisted the movement, and those in the other
British nations who deplored it, could never understand, was that in
this there was no attempt to imitate the institutions and political
customs of the United States, and certainly no intention of furthering
a merger of the two countries.  They could not realize that this was an
indigenous development, looking to the building up on the North {74}
American continent of a nation which would be free to develop in its
own way, and also to borrow and adapt methods and institutions from
kindred nations near at hand or overseas, provided that this put no
impediment in the way of the development of national sentiment.  They
should have been satisfied that there was no intention that the new
nation should play the "sedulous ape" to the United States by the fact
that there was everywhere in Canada an acceptance of the British
methods of government as the readiest, the most adjustable and the most
effective means of equipping a democracy to govern itself.  In the
organization of our parties, in the methods by which political
campaigns are waged, in superficial aspects of our federal system,
there are resemblances between Canada and the United States; but in the
thing that really matters, the means by which the Canadian democracy
makes the policies of the country and determines its courses, we have
adapted to our own ends the British methods of government which have
developed down the centuries.  In our adaptation of these methods to
the service of democracy we, with Australia, set the pace for Great
Britain.  In the home land of representative and responsible government
it was long held that this system was workable only if the body of
political power, which made governments and to which they were
answerable, was aristocratic with a mere infusion of democracy.  But in
the British colonies there was not the offset of an organized
aristocratic society and, once {75} responsible government was
conceded, democracies of these colonies had put into their hands the
most direct and effective system of popular government yet devised--to
the great alarm of the governing society of Great Britain, as I have
already shown by appropriate quotations.  In the extension of the
franchise, to the ultimate granting of adult suffrage, the Dominions
were decades in advance of Great Britain.

Lord Bryce, in his _Modern Democracies_, saluted Canada as "an actual
democracy."  In Canada, he said, "better perhaps than in any other
country, the working of the English system can be judged in its
application to the facts of a new and swiftly growing country,
thoroughly democratic in its ideas and its institutions."[17]  This
system of government developed in a unitary state; and many of the
misconceptions about Canada, as well as most of our internal troubles
arise from the fact that these had to be adapted to a federation.  The
Dominion of Canada could only come into being as a federal state, as
Sir John A. Macdonald admitted when he reluctantly gave up his hope of
a legislative union.  We speak of the Constitution of Canada but we
have no instrument of government comparable to that of the United
States.  If Canada were a unitary state we should no more have a
written constitution than Great Britain has.  There is no
constitutional limitation upon the legislative power in Great Britain
or in Canada.  But in Canada the legislative powers {76} have been
divided between the Dominion and the provinces in proportions which it
apparently defies the wit of man and the learning of judges to define.
After sixty years of judicial interpretation the confusion is greater
than at the beginning.  This arises in part from the fact that the last
word on our Constitution is said by a court--the Judicial Committee of
the Privy Council--which has no native understanding of a federal
system.  This was very strikingly shown many years ago when no less a
person than the Lord Chancellor, hearing argument in an appeal from
Australia, expressed his puzzlement at the claim that the law, which
was the occasion for the lawsuit, was unconstitutional.  His Lordship
could not really understand how an Act of Parliament could be
unconstitutional.[18]  When the constitutionality of an act is
challenged in Canada, the action means nothing more than the charge
that the act has been passed by the province when the power is actually
vested in the Dominion; or it may be the other way about.

When the Canadian statesmen were framing our Federal Constitution they
went to the United States not for a model but for warnings.  The
Conference at Quebec was held while guns were thundering on {77}
southern battlefields; in the fact of the Civil War justification was
found for provisions sharply differentiating the Canadian from the
American Constitution.  Professor W. B. Munro in his valuable little
book, _American Influences on Canadian Government_, says that Alexander
Hamilton might be called "the grandfather of the Canadian
Constitution."  Sir John A. Macdonald, who was the chief framer of the
Canadian instrument, was thoroughly acquainted with the discussions
which took place over the making of the American Constitution in 1787.
There is in existence his annotated copy of Madison's _Debates in the
Federal Convention of 1787_ with special underlinings and markings of
Hamilton's draft constitution.  Some of the principles offered by
Hamilton and rejected by the Convention are to be found in the Canadian
Constitution, among them these: Life senators; appointments by the
federal government of the state governors; veto powers over state
legislation by federal authority (through the governor); extensive
powers to the central authority, exercisable for the common defense.
Macdonald, forced by political conditions to forego legislative union,
built a constitution which he thought fell little short of that which
he desired, with the provinces having little more than municipal
powers.  "This," he said in his speech in the Confederation debates,
"is to be one united province with the local governments and
legislatures subordinate to the general government and legislature."
By enlarging the {78} powers of the central authority not only by
express enactment but by allocating to it all residual powers "I am,"
he said, "strongly of the belief that we have, in a great measure,
avoided the defects which time and events have shown to exist in the
American constitution."[19]  This conception of the effect of the
provisions allocating the powers was emphasized by the explanations
given to the British Parliament by Lord Carnavon, the Colonial
Secretary, introducing the Confederation measure.

Alas for the plans of constitution makers!  Professor W. P. M. Kennedy
of Toronto University, whose writings on the Constitution of Canada are
standard works, writing in the _Round Table_ recently said that "it is
doubtful if the fathers of Federation would today recognize their
offspring."  And he repeats an observation which has become a
commonplace in the discussion of this matter:


We now witness on the North American continent singular political
developments.  The American Republic began with a theory of State
rights.  To-day we watch the ever-increasing growth of Federal power.
Canada began its political existence with the scales heavily weighted
in favor of the central authority.  To-day the Canadian provinces enjoy
powers greater than those of the states of the American Union.  In both
federations the most cherished aims of the founders have been
nullified.[20]


{79}

This state of topsy-turvydom in Canada is the result of an attitude of
mind on the part of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council which
it took up some fifty years ago and in which it persisted until a very
recent date.  It refused to see in the British North America Act
anything but a British statute; it interpreted it by arbitrary rules of
construction which excluded consideration being given to its historical
origins.  By this construction the powers assigned to the provinces
have been given a scope which has not only swallowed up, in large part,
the reserve powers of the federal government, but has actually limited
the powers conferred upon the central authority.  Out of the control of
"property and civil rights" by the provinces was developed a theory of
interpretation which has completely destroyed the balance between the
Dominion and the provinces which the makers of the Constitution
planned.  Incidental to this great development of provincial powers,
the Dominion virtually renounced the use of its power to disallow
provincial legislation.  Recent decisions by the Privy Council on the
cases dealing with control of the radio, and the right of women to sit
in the Senate, reveal a change in attitude and an inclination to
recognize the need of giving the central authority all the power that
can be given it under the Constitution to meet the needs of this
changing world.  But the damage has been done.  And it is at this
juncture that there has arisen in Canada a powerful and widespread
demand, largely {80} induced by recent developments in the United
States, for the exercise by the Dominion of controlling powers over
industry, which are far outside the bounds of its jurisdiction as fixed
by judicial decisions.

There is perhaps a bare possibility that the courts might, following
the precedent of the American courts, recognize an emergency right in
keeping with Lord Haldane's observations in the Toronto electric case:
"No doubt there may be cases arising out of some extraordinary peril to
the national life of Canada, as a whole, such as the cases arising out
of a war, where legislation is required of an order that passes beyond
the heads of exclusive provincial competence."[21]  Failing this, the
situation can only be met by an amendment of the British North America
Act so redistributing the legislative powers as to give the Dominion
the powers that a central government requires and will require in
increasing measure as time goes on.  There is therefore today a loud
clamor for the immediate modernization of the British North America
Act.  One hears on all sides and from the most unexpected quarters the
question, delivered in truculent tones, whether the needs of Canada
today and tomorrow are to be denied by invoking the dead yesterday.
The awkward situation now emerges that while we have no domestic
machinery for amending the Constitution, the procedure by which the
amendment of the Constitution by the British Parliament can be invoked
is not known, {81} and is at this moment the subject of angry
controversy.  In view of the fact that the Constitution has been
amended at least a dozen times, this statement sounds absurd.  Yet it
is the literal truth.

It is now ten years and more since in Parliament and in the press the
view began to be urged that Canada, in anticipation of the time that
could be easily foreseen when the reconstruction of our Constitution
would be required to meet the necessities of the changing conditions,
should provide herself with a definitely worked-out procedure by which
changes in the British North America Act could be initiated and carried
out with promptitude.  Practical suggestions when made looked either to
the American or the Australian model.  The Dominion Parliament, it was
suggested, should enact the amendment which would become valid when
ratified by a sufficient proportion of the provinces or by direct vote
of the people as in Australia.  Had this been agreed to, the British
Parliament would have been happy to transfer to the Canadian people the
power to amend the Canadian Constitution which is now vested in it.
But the proposition was resisted.  Both government and opposition
parties objected to the question being raised, since it touched
susceptibilities of race and religion.  It was argued that the present
arrangement was satisfactory since the British Parliament would amend
the Constitution upon request.  Request by whom?  This is the point
about which the controversy rages.  Incidental to the {82}
strengthening of the powers of the provinces the "compact theory" of
Confederation has gained strength, This is a claim that the British
North America Act is a treaty between the provinces; that in
consequence it can only be changed if the governments of the nine
provinces and of the Dominions are agreed; and that any province at
will can veto a suggested amendment, in which case the British
Parliament is estopped from making the amendment.  The contention is
grotesque; but it has a sufficient political backing to deter the
Dominion Parliament from attempting to initiate amendments should there
be provincial opposition.[22]  We are therefore a country bound by an
unchangeable constitution at a time when the Canadian people--like the
people of other lands--are avid for change and impatient at
restrictions embodying bygone ideas.  Practical statesmanship is
seeking to lessen the pressure, meanwhile, by working out agreed
policies where powers are divided between the Dominion and the
provinces and making them operative by conjoint legislation.  There are
cases in evidence at the moment.  In order to get an ironclad law
permitting control of the sale of wheat, the western provinces, by
legislation, are seeking to give the Dominion Parliament power over
property and civil rights to the extent necessary to carry out the
agreed-upon plan.

If a critic were to say that this inability to modify {83} the
Constitution so that it will march with the times is a serious blemish
on Canada's claim to be "an actual democracy" the force of the
challenge would have to be admitted.  If he were to say further that
the admission that the British Parliament has, at least in theory, the
right to change our Constitution, and that a British court has the last
word about our laws, tends somewhat to blemish the picture of national
independence which I have drawn, I should concede the point, pleading
only that we have admittedly the right and the power at will to remove
these anomalies once we can agree among ourselves that this should be
done.  These are vestigial remnants of a past phase of our development.

Against the assertion that Canada is a democracy where public opinion
rules and can speedily make itself effective without having to overcome
the resistance of vested interests and privilege, it could be said that
this claim is inconsistent with the fact that we have in Canada a
second chamber known as the Senate.  The objection, I shall admit, is
in form unanswerable; but in fact it has but little value.  Our Senate,
I agree, is for a democracy an astonishing institution.  The senators
are limited in number--twenty-four from each of the four geographical
divisions; the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario and the West.  They are
appointed for life by the government of the day.  They tend therefore
to represent not the views of the present nor the hopes of tomorrow but
the beliefs of yesterday.  It {84} invariably happens when a new
government takes office in Canada that it is confronted by a
politically hostile senate.  In theory this body could bring to naught
the decision of the people to bring in new men and new measures,
because it claims cordinate powers with the Commons except with
respect to the introduction of money bills.  In practice, however, it
exercises only a suspensory veto.  Though there have been one or two
exceptions to the rule, it does not stand out against public opinion if
the latter remains constant.  There have been a sufficient number of
cases where its rejection of measures has been accepted by the Commons
and the country to give senators a good talking point in making a
defense of their institutions.  There are periodical manifestations of
the Senate's private conviction that it ought to play a joint part with
the Commons in the government of the country--sometimes expressed in
action by the rejection of bills, sometimes in talk.  There is such a
demonstration going forward at this moment, taking the form of speeches
vigorously defending the Senate's part and threatening a larger use of
its powers.  The Canadian Senate is undoubtedly an anachronism in a
democratic state, and its amendment is one of the problems of tomorrow.

Despite these blots on the scutcheon I make bold to say on Canada's
behalf that there is no country in the world where there is a more
complete acceptance of the democratic principles of government, or in
{85} which these are more thoroughly exemplified.  There can be no stay
of proceedings by the invocation of privilege or power based on
particular rights to prevent the popular will having its way with men,
with policies, or with governments.  No believer in democracy, in these
days of disillusionment, will say that the popular will, as formulated
and applied under existing conditions, provides ideal government; but
it does, with all its defects, provide the best available government
for these times and, what is of supreme importance, it keeps open that
road to the future in which hopes and aspirations for humanity, not now
achievable, may come to fruition.



[1] _John Graves Simcoe_, by D. C. Scott, "Makers of Canada Series,"
Toronto, 1910, pp. 56 ff.

[2] "He [Sir Francis Bond Head, the governor] sincerely believed he was
fighting for British connexion and British institutions and perhaps he
was.  The programme with which the Reformers confronted him--elective
Legislative Council, control of all revenues by the Assembly, the
British Government to keep its hands completely off colonial
legislation--was an American programme."  Chester New, _Lord Durham, A
Biography of John George Lambton, First Earl of Durham_, Oxford, The
Clarendon Press, 1929, p. 343.

[3] Kennedy, _Documents of the Canadian Constitution_, pp. 374 ff.

[4] _Report of Canadian Archives_, 1928.  The text is given in Kennedy,
_op. cit._, p. 335.

[5] _Lord Durham's Report on the Affairs of British North America_, ed.
by Sir C. P. Lucas, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1912, II, 264.

[6] _Idem_, II, 297.

[7] _Idem_, II, 311.

[8] For an accurate, condensed account of the attitude of British
political leaders toward the British North American colonies, see
British Opinion and Canadian Autonomy," in _British Supremacy of
Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854_, by J. L. Morison, Glasgow, 1919.

[9] This apprehension was felt in the highest quarters.  Queen Victoria
in her diaries, under date of Feb. 12, 1865, writes of a conversation
which she had with a cabinet minister about "America and the danger,
which seems approaching of our having a war with her, as soon as she
makes peace; of the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada but
we must struggle for it; and far the best would be to let it go as an
independent kingdom under an English prince."

[10] The advisability of Canada assuming independence as a protection
against American imperialism was urged by Goldwin Smith in a letter to
the _London Daily News_, Jan. 1862, occasioned by the Trent incident.
"There is," he wrote, "but one way to make Canada impregnable and that
is to fence her round with the majesty of an independent nation.  To
invade and conquer an independent nation, without provocation, is an
act from which in the present state of opinion, even the Americans
would recoil."  _The Empire: A series of letters published in the Daily
News, 1862, 1863_ by Goldwin Smith.  Oxford & London: John Henry &
James Parker, 1863.

[11] Thomas D'Arcy McGee, _Speeches and Addresses Chiefly on the
Subject of British American Union_, London, 1865, pp. 34-35.

[12] _Parliamentary Debates on the Subject of the Confederation of the
British North American Provinces_, 3d Session, 8th Provincial
Parliament of Canada, Quebec, 1865, 1032 pp., pp. 132 ff.  Hereafter
referred to as _Confederation Debates_.  Also Skelton, Isabel (Murphy),
_Thomas D'Arcy McGee_, Quebec, 1925; Toronto, 1930, pp. 496 ff.

[13] George Brown, the leader of the Liberal Party who joined forces
with his political and personal enemy, John A. Macdonald, to make
Confederation possible.  The quotation is from _Confederation Debates_,
p. 114.

[14] Keenleyside, H. L., _Canada and the United States: Some Aspects of
the History of the Republic and the Dominion_, New York, 1929, pp. 139,
160, 161, 165, 302.

[15] To Senator Sumner the acquisition of Alaska had a still wider
significance.  Speaking in the United States Senate April 7, 1867, he
said: "The present treaty is a visible step in the occupation of the
whole American continent.  As such it will be recognized by the world
and accepted by the American people."

[16] There is a full discussion
 of the Alaskan boundary controversy from
the Canadian standpoint in J. W. Dafoe's _Clifford Sifton in Relation
to His Times_, Toronto, 1931, Chap. VIII.

[17] Bryce, James, _Modern Democracies_, New York, 1921, I, 453.

[18] This was the case, Commissioners of Taxation vs. Baxter, Nov. 28,
1907.  The discussion between the Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury and
the Australian lawyer is quoted by John S. Ewart in _An Imperial Court
of Appeal_, Ottawa, 1919.  It opened with Lord Halsbury observing "I am
not aware that there is any power in this Board to disregard an act of
Parliament," and closed with his declaration: "I do not know what an
unconstitutional act means."

[19] _Confederation Debates_, p. 32.

[20] See _Constitutional Issues in Canada, 1900-1931_, ed. by R. M.
Dawson, London, 1933, p. 50.

[21]_ Idem_, pp. 442 ff.

[22] For an examination of this issue, see "The Compact Theory of
Confederation," by N. McL. Rogers, in _Proceedings of the Canadian
Political Science Association_, 1931.




{89}

III

CANADA AS NEIGHBOR

_Peace, with Friction, for a Century_

In the treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation negotiated in 1794
between the United States and Great Britain--commonly called the Jay
Treaty--its purpose is declared to be "to promote a disposition
favorable to friendship and good neighborhood."  On several grounds
this treaty is notable.  As John Bassett Moore has pointed out, it was
the result of the first recourse in modern times to arbitration.
Though it confirmed many of his countrymen in their belief that Jay was
the most English of Americans, to his disadvantage, its suggestion that
the two nations should live in amity so improved relations along the
border that Americans in large numbers moved into Canada.  From New
York State and Pennsylvania many thousands of families--some of them
Quakers, many of them Mennonites--traveled the forest trails to Upper
Canada; while in the eastern townships of Lower Canada whole townships
were settled by immigrants from Vermont and New Hampshire.  Racially
that section of Canada became an extension of the adjoining
states--most of the typical names of New England are to be found in
that district to this day.  This migration and the welcome given to the
newcomers by the {90} authorities were signs that the bitterness of the
Revolutionary War was dying out and a "disposition favorable to
friendship and good neighborhood" was taking its place.  This era of
good feeling withered in the atmosphere of contention which attended
the dispute between the United States and Great Britain over neutral
rights at sea and was completely obliterated by the War of 1812-14.

In the Anglo-American record this war is but an incident; but it has
affected relations between Canada and the United States injuriously and
sometimes tragically from that day to this.  Canadians have never
accepted the theory that this war was a by-product of the Napoleonic
struggle; and their estimate of the origin of the war and the ends it
was to serve is now pretty generally accepted by historians.  This was
a war of conquest inspired by the aggressive and ambitious believers in
the "manifest destiny" of the United States who had been sent to
Congress in the 1810 elections, from the states west of the
Alleghenies.  It was entered upon light-heartedly as being nothing more
serious than a military picnic.  "How pleasing," said Andrew Jackson,
"the prospect that would open up to the young volunteer while
performing a military promenade into a distant country."  The
republican standard as the result of this promenade, he predicted, was
to be planted on the Heights of Abraham.[1]  In the two {91} years' war
there was a succession of sanguinary encounters along the border
between relatively small bodies of men, and when hostilities ceased
Canadian soil was inviolate except for two small towns on the Detroit
River held by the Americans, against which there were ample set-offs in
the way of British occupation of United States territory.  The war in
the totality of its results was a draw; the governments, sorry and
ashamed, made peace without a single reference being made to the
supposed causes of the conflict.  But to the people of Upper Canada it
was not a draw.  They had put into the field, in reinforcement of the
British regular forces, every man who could carry arms; and it became a
matter of proud conviction to them and to their descendants that by
their sacrifices and their valor they had saved their country.

By the Treaty of Ghent in 1815 peace was restablished--this is the
famous and widely advertised peace which has now endured for 120 years;
but the disposition toward friendship and good neighborhood which Jay
and Grenville in 1794 sought to induce was, at least on the part of the
Canadian people, destroyed.  It is not possible to appraise the
consequences, political and economic, which have flowed from the
persistence in Canada, for more than a century, of this feeling of
latent suspicion and hostility to the United States, which at any time
could be readily stimulated into open political activity.  This feeling
did not derive solely from the resentment left by the War of 1812; {92}
it was fed from time to time by clashes of interest and of policy
between the two countries which usually had the ending which comes when
iron and earthen pots collide.  In speeches at international gatherings
it is, I have observed, the usual thing to portray the 120 years of
peace between the two nations as an idyllic period of mutual admiration
and competition in concessions.

This is, of course, a fairy tale.  For at least a century, first in
Canada and afterwards in the Dominion, no general election was ever
fought without at least an attempt being made by the Party of the Right
to make political use of this anti-American sentiment.  The formula was
simple.  In its earlier form the Party of the Left was charged with
disloyal sentiments and separatist tendencies, its fell purpose being
to transfer the country to the United States.  The classic contest of
this kind took place ninety years ago; and it injected a virus into our
political life which was to affect successive generations of voters.
In that struggle Sir Charles Metcalfe, the Governor-General, took the
active leadership of what he called the "British party."  The reformers
were assailed as traitors and annexationists.  The Mohawk Indians of
the Bay of Quinte put the issue to the liking of the governor when they
presented him with an address in which they said that "the question is
simply this, whether this country is to remain under the protection and
government of the Queen or to become one of the United States."  Though
the governor won a sweeping victory in {93} English-speaking Upper
Canada, the steadiness of the French Canadian electors nullified its
effect and turned it, with no great lapse of time, into a defeat.  Sir
Charles went home a broken man.  Lord Elgin came out to bring in the
rgime of limited self-government which his father-in-law, Lord Durham,
had recommended.  But the recollection of Sir Charles Metcalfe's
success in stampeding a whole province by successful flag-waving became
to political campaign managers a tradition of tactics; and as occasion
offered the issue, so beautifully expressed by the Mohawks, was
projected into election contests, sometimes with the deadliest effect.
The outstanding instances were the reciprocity campaigns of 1891 and
1911; in both cases what looked like certain victory for the Liberals
was turned into defeat by a resurgence of ultra-Imperialistic and
anti-American feeling.

Yet there is the fact which may well appear amazing and incredible to
older countries that in spite of occasional friction, misunderstanding,
conflict of interests, and clashes of feeling, Canada and the United
States have kept the peace for so long a period of time that the
possibility of war between them no longer finds a place even in popular
imagination.  The thing to our minds in inconceivable.  The traditional
European policies of defense when propounded to Canadians as necessary
for their security seem amazing in their absurdity.  A personal
illustration may be in point.  Some twenty-five years ago, a young {94}
Englishman, who was then beginning a public career which carried him to
heights just short of the first rank, spent some time in Winnipeg; and
while there took time off to expound to me what he said were the
principles which governed the foreign policy of Great Britain and all
other European powers.  The fundamental rule was that a country must
regard every other country as a potential enemy unless it had an open
or a secret understanding with it.  Failing this, defensive
preparations must be made.  I at once applied the rule to the relations
between Canada and the United States and put the problem up to him.  We
had no formal understanding with the United States.  Should we arm
against them?  Should we dot the frontier with Martello towers as our
grandfathers did?  Should alert sentries challenge the wayfarer by
night and day?  The young man was game.  He contented himself with
saying that the rule was absolute.  I am afraid I answered by saying
that it was absolute nonsense.  I said that the course of prudence,
common sense and security for Canada was to continue to do nothing.
But what if the Americans swooped down on us?  In that case I said it
would be a case of a head-on collision between a steam roller and a
bulldog and it would be just as well, if it had to occur, that it
should take place without premeditation.  About the time of this
conversation there appeared in England a book working out in detail a
defensive plan for Canada against the United States.  The sites for the
forts were carefully {95} chosen and that sort of thing.  The writer
was a major general of the British Army, Canadian born, a member of one
of our most notable families.[2]  The budding young statesman and the
veteran soldier were both alike obsessed with the Old-World idea of the
frontier--its perils and its responsibilities.  "Frontiers," Lord
Curzon once said, "are indeed the razor's edge on which hang suspended
the modern issues of peace and war, of life or death, between nations."
But not in North America, thank God!

There has been, I believe, a great ebbing in the strength of this
hereditary anti-American feeling in the past few years; and this
abatement is due chiefly to two causes.  With the definite achievement
by Canada of the status of nationhood, one pretext for political
excitation of this feeling has been removed.  The relationship between
Canada and Great Britain has now been defined and accepted; in it there
enter no elements of overlordship or paternalism.  Our loyalties are
reciprocal; they are those of kinsmen, not of master and dependent.
The cry of "separatism" has thus become politically no longer
profitable; if raised, as it still is tentatively, it encounters a
pro-Canadian reaction powerful enough to give pause to the political
engineers looking for results.  Its availability for political use is
thus gone; and with it has gone the twin appeal to the fear that the
United States, with the {96} connivance of Canadian politicians, might
gather us in for the purpose of putting a few more stars in the
American flag.  Those feelings of timidity and apprehension have
evaporated.  There is now an almost universal acceptance of the fact
that Canada has launched her ship on the great tides and currents of
the world and will sail a course under her own captains, to whatever
destinies lie in the inscrutable future.  No man can foretell what the
centuries may bring; but at this time its political absorption by the
United States seems much the unlikeliest future for Canada.  I use the
word absorption, which has a definite meaning.  This does not exclude
the possibility of an understanding or even an alliance.  If the world
takes the road which the fates--if we may dignify the present madness
of the nations with so heroic a name--seem bent on forcing it to take,
something like this may indeed be necessary for the preservation of
that North American civilization which is our joint possession.



_The Free Interchange of Population_

In this anti-American feeling to which I have referred, there was
something paradoxical.  There was, so to speak, nothing personal about
it.  The United States which threw its shadow over the lives of
Canadians of a certain way of thinking was a large-looming, threatening
corporate entity; but it was dissociated in the minds of those who
entertained these apprehensions from the individuals who made up the
entity {97} and their business and personal activities.  A typical
individual of the class I have in mind might have very extensive
business or personal relations with the United States; in his manner of
speech, in the wearing of his clothes, in his preference for sports, in
his fraternal affiliations, in his methods of business organization and
operation, in his attitude, let us say, to organized labor, in his
social customs he might be hardly distinguishable from the typical
American of similar business and social standing.  I have never known
these political attitudes to stand in the way of business advantage or
of personal advancement.  I recall the case of a young man of some
promise as an educationist, who was extremely active in saving Canada
and the British Empire from the traitorous conspiracies,
American-inspired, which he saw all about him.  One day we missed him;
and upon inquiry it was found that, having been offered a better post
in the United States, he had, practically without a moment's
consideration, left Canada and the Empire to their fate.  His case was
that of tens of thousands of others.  Staying at home they would resist
with great stoutness and in a mood of unchallengeable sincerity,
policies of business coperation with the United States which promised
material advantage to Canada as a whole and to themselves individually;
but as individuals they followed without hesitation the trail of
fortune if it led south of the boundary.

To a lesser degree this was true in reverse.  {98} Americans followed
their fortunes into Canada and there found themselves at home.  I am
speaking of course, of the earlier, freer, and happier days, and not of
today when to change one's habitation from one country to the other
takes on almost the importance of an international incident, with much
attendant official perturbation and activity.  When the land rush was
in progress in Western Canada thirty or more years ago American farmers
by the thousand went into that country under the lure of the prospects
of cheap land, with no more sense of change than if they moved from one
state to another.  There was a story in Western Canada of two recent
arrivals in Alberta from the United States, who proceeded from their
holdings to a political meeting which they had heard was being held in
a near-by hamlet.  The time was 1900.  A presidential campaign was
going forward in the United States and a general election campaign in
Canada.  The meeting was an extremely lively one, the opposing
candidates appearing on the same platform.  The Liberal candidate was
the late Frank Oliver, the Conservative R. B. Bennet, the present Prime
Minister of Canada.  Going home from the meeting one American settler
said to the other: "Well they were sure fine speakers but could you
make out who was for Bryan and who was for McKinley?"  This freedom of
movement went on unchecked for decades; the shuttle of life plied
incessantly knitting these kindred races more closely together and
building up {99} elements of the populations which had two countries,
one of birth, one of association.  As was inevitable under the
conditions which existed, the United States was heavily the gainer by
this interchange of population.  For the five last decades of the last
century it is estimated that half the natural increase in the
population of Canada was lost to the United States.

The United States census of 1920 showed that of living native-born
Canadians one in every seven was a resident of the United States.
Speaking last year to the British Commonwealth Relations Conference on
the subject of Canadian-American relations I said, supporting my
argument that Canada in her relationship with the other members of the
Commonwealth could not ignore her North American environment, that
going back a century and taking the case of a young Canadian couple
just married it could be said that, as a general rule, one half their
descendants would today be in the United States.  I had my own family,
on the paternal side, in mind when I made that statement.  Later a
number of Canadians who heard my remarks compared notes with me; and in
every case I found my estimate under instead of over the mark.  This
tendency to move southward was particularly marked in families that
derived in the first instance from the United States or from the
original colonies.  Families flowed into Canada and out again, a
generation or so later.  I never move about in the United States
without encountering people of old {100} American stock who have a
Canadian page, so to speak, in their family history.  When I called
upon the editor of a daily newspaper in one of your important cities a
few years ago he told me that his family had detoured through Canada
for two generations and that his father had been born in a little
Canadian town in which I have myself a particular interest.  An
American friend of a somewhat aggressive type had a Canadian mother who
was the kinswoman and bore the name of one of your great presidents.
These cases could be multiplied by the million.  They are not matters
of no consequence; they are back of the influence that make history.
The strains of common blood between the United States and Canada, the
result of some five generations of a free movement of population which
took little note of national boundaries or political friction, are deep
and strong; and their effect on the personal, social and business
relationships between the peoples of the two countries has been
wide-reaching.

This free movement of population has been stopped by economic forces
operating through governmental machinery.  The young man from Canada
seeking work in the United States these days finds the frontier barred
against him; and we are equally on the alert in keeping any jobs that
may be going for our own people.  Immigrants to Canada from the United
States last year numbered 13,196; the corresponding figure, twenty
years earlier, was 139,000.  There has also been, {101} in each
country, a tendency to deprive the nationals of the other country of
positions they hold; this has been particularly the case in semipublic
institutions like hospitals.  The old easy relationship along the
frontier by which people could live in one country and work in another
has come to an end; along the Canadian side of the Detroit River the
effect upon the towns and upon thousands of individuals has been
catastrophic.  The closing of the American frontier to Canadian youth
has sadly restricted a Canadian industry--the equipping of young men in
our universities for opportunities in the United States.  An inquiry
some years ago showed that 13 percent of the graduates of Canadian
universities were living in the United States.  A university in the
Maritime provinces gave American addresses for 34 percent of its
graduates.  Some years ago the entire graduating class in engineering
in a Canadian university found within a year occupations in the United
States.

But unfortunate as these conditions may be for individuals, they
represent no great diminution in the social, educational, personal and
business contacts that go on between the two countries.  The temporary
movement of people back and forth across the boundary totals up in the
course of one year, it is estimated, to 25,000,000 passages.  Radio has
come in to strengthen and supplement all the other agencies that tend
to widen our acquaintance with one another.  Interests over a wide
range of activities give to radio on the {102} North American continent
an international effectiveness unapproached elsewhere in the world.  To
the intelligent user of radio there is plenty of golden grain in the
chaff that pollutes the air.  Already the radio has become
indispensable.  When your outstanding political leaders take to the air
they are heard in Canadian homes from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  It
has been of extreme value to me as a journalist to be able to follow
the presidential campaign of 1932 by listening night after night to Mr.
Roosevelt and Mr. Hoover and by the same means to post myself as to the
"New Deal" by listening at first hand to expositions of it.  The radio
of course may be, and often is, an agency to repel as well as to
attract, to annoy as well as to please, to excite enmity instead of
encouraging amity; but on balance it must be regarded as making a
considerable contribution to the cause of "friendship and good
neighborhood."

The sum of all these agencies has been the development of a type of
Canadian whose cousinly resemblance to conventional Americans is
sufficiently marked to shock many of our worthy overseas kinsmen.  Much
of the misunderstanding of the years when the issue of equality was
being fought out arose from a feeling, by many who hoped for a
consolidated empire, that people who so resembled the Americans in
their speech, their business methods, the architecture of their houses,
the setting which bounded their lives, could not really be counted on
to keep Canada in the {103} British family.  The disparaging idea
behind this was that Canadians were of necessity an imitative people.
If therefore we were truly British, our manners, customs, and methods
would have been carefully imported from England.  Since that had not
been done but instead there were obvious resemblances to Americans, it
followed as the night the day that we were but Yankees in disguise
seeking a convenient occasion for breaking up the Empire and coming out
in our true colors.  For years we had an unfailing procession of
travelers who passed through our country, getting shocks, viewing us
with alarm and posting home to issue warnings and lamentations.  For my
own part I got very weary of the performance; and finding myself some
few years ago addressing an understanding audience in London, I
exercised my right as a kinsman from overseas to speak with some
frankness.  Upon that occasion I said:


The Americanisation of Canada, implying ultimate absorption by the
United States, becomes a profound conviction with many visitors from
Great Britain after they have been in our country two or three weeks.
Clergymen, bishops especially, seem particularly prone to this
delusion.  They come to Canada in the expectation of finding a replica
of England and, when they discover the Canadian variation from English
customs and standards and note their resemblance to the habits of the
American people, they at once jump to the conclusion that Canada is
about to be lost to the Empire, and come home to impart {104} the sad
news to the English people.  Often they accompany the announcement of
this startling discovery with demands that Englishmen should rush out
to Canada to save the country from the Canadians and keep it on the
true path of Empire.

It is the hope of some of us that we are near the end of these fears
and misconceptions.  The characteristics of Canada, social, political,
business, linguistic, journalistic, religious, are our own affair.
They are what they are because they suit us; they are integrated with
the whole life of the nation; they help to produce that national whole
called Canada.[3]




_Economic Nationalism and Tariff Wars_

It is possible that my earlier observations that anti-American feeling
in Canada is lessening may have been, in some degree, misleading.  What
I was referring to was the national hereditary dislike born of "old
far-off unhappy things and battles long ago."  The Americans had their
own brand of feelings of this kind.  Their faith in "manifest destiny"
made them impatient over the erection to their north of a country
British in character and spanning the continent, which thus barred the
expansion of the United States.  Thus the American House of
Representatives protested in 1867 against the formation of the Dominion
as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine.  The opinion was widely held
that the Canadians really {105} wanted to be annexed to the United
States but were in some way held back from giving effect to their
wishes by British force.  One of the obscure influences behind American
tariff policy toward Canada was a desire to hasten what was believed to
be an inevitable drift of Canadian public opinion.  When the attitude
veered from unyielding refusal to make any arrangement to the gracious
friendliness of the Taft rgime, the revelation that, in many American
minds, this was just an alternative method of applying pressure, gave
such body to Canadian suspicions that the one opportunity in seventy
years for the making of a sensible, workable arrangement between the
two countries was lost.  As one who was active in the campaign for the
adoption of the Taft-Fielding reciprocity arrangement, I can testify
that the blows that destroyed it were delivered by its United States
friends.[4]  When the Speaker of the United States House of
Representatives said in more than one speech, that he was for the
agreement because it would hasten the day when Canada would become a
part of the United States; when a United States senator spoke of
annexation as "the logical conclusion of reciprocity"; when even the
President of the United States made references to Canada coming to "the
parting of the ways," the linked business interests of Canada which
resisted {106} the agreement for reasons which seemed good to them but
which still, after twenty-three years, have to me the appearance of
irrationality, were so reinforced by an outburst of traditional
anti-American sentiment that the agreement was rejected and the
Canadian government responsible for making it was dismissed from
office.  The traditional Canadian fear of the Americans, the
traditional American hope for northward territorial expansion, upon
that occasion, came into violent collision with much resulting
wreckage; but with something gained, in this important respect, that
both traditions lost prestige by the outcome.  Canada's contemptuous
and scornful rejection of the only bona-fide friendly business offer
ever made her by the United States added to American enlightenment as
to Canada's fixed intentions not to be merged with the United States on
any terms whatever; while we in Canada have had plenty of opportunity
to reflect upon the unwisdom of permitting feelings derived from an
ancient blood feud to warp our judgment in matters affecting
present-day international relationships.  The emergence of these
particular prejudices, in anything like their former virulence and
force, to hamper or destroy the efforts of our statesmen to improve
relations between the two countries need not be feared.

But unfortunately it does not follow that there is now between the two
North American nations perfect harmony and complete understanding with
a {107} readiness on the part of each to appreciate the other point of
view and a manifest willingness to adjust difficulties.

New attitudes of mind have appeared, as intransigent as those they have
displaced, though perhaps they will prove less deep-seated.  The
Penguin Island philosophy that neighbors are enemies still operates in
the economic sphere--never so powerfully as today.  If there are in the
world two nations willing to trade freely with each other their
whereabouts are not known to me.  Willingness to trade with one another
on the basis of an economic division of labor and a sharing of
aptitudes and advantages is not possible even in the British family of
nations.  The Ottawa Conference of 1932, widely advertized as the
forerunner of a family arrangement of this character was in fact a
ceremony by which Great Britain introduced herself to her young
relatives as a convert to their philosophy of "Ourselves first; the
family next if it does not cost anything; and the outside world last of
all."  The young nations are not so happy as they were two years ago at
the success of their large contribution to the influences that
transformed Great Britain into a protectionist Britain-first country.
Unless they have their heads in the sand they can see the walls in
building that will shut their agricultural products out of the British
market--this is what the policy of "Britain first" will mean for them.
It is the opinion of a friend of mine, editorially associated with one
of {108} the great English papers, that the growth of economic
nationalism in Great Britain is rapidly destroying, in the dominant
Conservative party, the imperialistic sentiment which has looked
forward in hope to the reconsolidation of the British Empire by
something in the nature of an imperial Zollverein.

If this is how the modern doctrine of national self-containment appeals
to a country like Great Britain, with its long free-trade tradition,
its but slightly impaired position as a creditor nation, its obvious
dependence upon export trade, what will be its harvest in the United
States where it must have the appearance to many of being a world-wide
confirmation of national trade policies which it has pursued, with
occasional interruptions, for more than a century?  To many the most
puzzling feature of the world confusion of today is the universal
resistance, apparently instinctive and spontaneous, by nations large
and small, rich and poor, to all those influences tending to bring them
closer together, influences which naturally arise from what Mr. Owen D.
Young, in a contribution to the _New York Times_ a few months ago,
called "the compression of the world."  In this article he admits that
he believed, as did all people with a liberal outlook, that this
compression "would be the forerunner and the issuer of a world more
closely integrated in peaceful effort, in business interchange, in
financial stability, in economic development, in psychological
neighborliness."  But the result has {109} belied these hopes.
Perhaps, Mr. Young says, "A compressed world raises barriers instead of
breaking them down, nations by these means seeking to protect their
individuality."  Discussing this disturbing phenomenon before
audiences, I have ventured an observation which I trust time will show
to be based upon something more than idle hope.  I have sought to find
something of promise in the situation by suggesting that this is an
instinctive rallying and getting together of the powers and
principalities of the world of yesterday in a last desperate attempt to
stave off, for another generation or so, the coming of the new world of
human brotherhood and international peace; and that the violence of the
reaction is the measure of the strength of the movement they seek to
block.

If this is not merely the entertaining, by an effort of the will, of
those "hopes undimmed for mankind" which Morley tells us it is
befitting one should hold "at the close of the long struggle with
ourselves and with circumstances," the hope may also be cherished that
perhaps, despite the dark unpromising record of the past, these two
North American nations may set the example, which the world so greatly
needs, of friendliness and neighborliness by beginning to tear down
tariff walls instead of adding to their frowning heights.  Unless
international trade is rejected _in toto_ as an affliction of the human
race there is now, as there has been any time these hundred years, an
unanswerable case for the interchange of trade, on {110} at least a
fairly generous scale, between the United States and its neighbor to
the north.  It is depressing to recall that of all the attempts made in
that period of time to make a trading arrangement, some ten in all,
only one was a success, the short-lived Elgin-Marcy treaty which was
negotiated just eighty years ago.  Nor was it by a presentation of the
economic argument that that success was scored, but by a cleverly
insidious appeal to other motives.  The report was sedulously
circulated at Washington at that time that, if reciprocity was refused,
the British colonies would apply for admission to the American Union as
separate northern states--which was a prospect so harrowing to the
slave states of the South that they saw to it that Lord Elgin's demands
were met.



_Trade Flows Despite Tariff Walls_

In controversies in Canada over the value of the United States market
to us one encounters--this was particularly true of the 1911 discussion
over reciprocity--the bold claim that it is of no value because the two
countries, in their relation to one another, are competitive and not
complementary.  The relationship is both competitive and complementary
and on both counts interchange of trade is profitable.  In the battling
about tariffs which has been going on in the past few years one fact
long hid, not only from the people generally but from such exalted
persons as prime ministers, ambassadors, ministers of finance, {111}
secretaries of state--perhaps even presidents--is now almost
universally accepted; and perhaps the future economic historian of
these times will say that the widespread learning of this lesson was
ample compensation for the defeat which the cause of freer exchange
suffered, because it made possible the ultimate overthrow of the
delusive idea that there is national profit in artificial trade
restriction.  The fact, no longer open to successful challenge, is
this: that international trade is done with goods; and not with goods
on one hand and something called money on the other.  Even the people
whom we might call "self-containers" will agree to this.  Such small
dribbles of international trade as they will graciously permit are to
be made up of interchanges of needed goods.  This being so, it follows
that by so much as a country restricts imports that would otherwise
flow into it because there is profit in doing so, it restricts the
export of goods that would otherwise find a profitable market abroad.
Therefore a country cannot increase employment at home in the aggregate
by shutting out imports.  The delusion that this can be done is the tap
root of the tariff monstrosities to be observed in the world today.  I
was, for a few days, an onlooker at the Ways and Means Committee in
Washington when the Hawley-Smoot tariff was in the making; every one
taking part seemed to accept without question the theory that an import
shut out would mean that the goods thus barred out would be produced at
home with a net increase of {112} employment exactly equivalent to the
work which would be put into the substitute for the discarded import.
Your politicians had no monopoly of this patent remedy for
unemployment.  In the Canadian general election of 1930 it was declared
on the platform and propounded in the columns of the press that there
was available for additional employment in Canada no less a fund than
$600,000,000 a year, this being the volume of imports that, it was
pointed out, could be shut off.  Knowledge of this principle that
international trade is exchange of goods and that the employment we
lose by bringing in a product is offset by the employment we gain in
the making of the product which goes out in exchange, is now within the
intellectual consciousness of the public; but it has not yet become
operative.  That is to say men do not yet act on this knowledge.  But
this is a matter only of time.

Trade relations between Canada and the United States have been subject,
in special measure, to the handicaps of legislation embodying the
economic delusion to which I have made reference.  The fact that the
two countries are so alike in their resources and their natural
equipment has strengthened the popular appeal of the delusion.  We both
have lumber; why permit the exchange of lumber products?  And so with
wheat, flour, coarse grains, dairy products, vegetables, coal, and with
all manufactures based upon natural products.  I have been encountering
all my life the {113} argument that the point at which American and
Canadian competition should begin is the outside markets toward which
they direct their surplus products.  The answer is written large in the
history of the relations between these two countries.  "True ideas,"
William James says, "are those that can be assimilated, validated,
corroborated and verified."  The idea that, given a chance, trade
between Canada and the United States will expand enormously to the
enrichment of both countries, can stand all these tests--has indeed
been verifying them, in the face of difficulties, for the last half
century or more.  Since the abrogation of the Elgin-Marcy reciprocity
treaty in 1866 Canadian-American trade has been carried on by the
enterprise of business men in the face of official discouragement.  For
the last forty years, less the period of the Underwood tariff,
Washington has been alert and resolute in expedients to keep Canadian
imports at a minimum; and Ottawa has replied in kind.  "Reciprocity in
trade or reciprocity in tariffs" was the war cry of the Conservative
Party in the "National Policy" campaign of 1878; and reciprocity of
tariffs it has been.  Yet trade, searching for markets, infinitely
resourceful in seeking out channels, has succeeded, not in full measure
but in very considerable degree, in defeating the purposes of
Washington and Ottawa.  The best comment on theories that Canada and
the United States are not natural complementary trading units is that
which is made by our trade statistics.  As long {114} ago as the
fifties of the last century the trade between the United States and the
British colonies multiplied itself fifteen times within three years
from the coming into effect of the reciprocity treaty; and this is
still the experience.  Take down the fence or even lower it by a rail
or two and the tide of commerce rises like a flood.  Under the
opportunity of the Underwood tariff, which imposed no duty, Canadian
cattle entered the United States in 1920 to the number of 600,000 head.
Duties imposed by the Fordney-McCumber tariff cut that number down to
less than one-third within two years; but adjusting itself to the new
conditions the trade climbed again by 1930 to the 200,000 mark.  Then
came the prohibitive rates of the Hawley-Smoot tariff: and last year a
market was found in the United States for 2,107 head.  There you have,
in epitome, the history of tariff relations between Canada and the
United States.  A trade is developed by ingenious and resourceful
business men until its volume excites the cupidity of powerful national
interests which figure out that this market could be made useful to
them; as things have been in the past it has always been easy to induce
the legislators to destroy the trade thus marked down for destruction.
It was only necessary to claim the market as a right, to point out the
national benefit that would accrue from "keeping the money at home."  A
trade did not need to be large to bring the avengers of national
economic integrity upon it.  The ingenuity and persistence of the {115}
successful campaign by which our poor little trade in maple sugar was
done to death some three or four years ago, seems to me a perfect
example of the tactics which have been employed over so many years to
strangle trade between the two countries.

In spite of tariff obstructions the trade between the two countries
keeps at astonishingly high levels.  Canada buys much more from the
United States than from the rest of the world.  The percentage figures
remain fairly constant however tariffs may change.  In 1900 (fiscal
year) 59.2 percent of our imports came from the United States.  In
1913, two years after Canada had been swept in an election by the cry
that we should have no "truck or trade with the Yankees," 65 percent of
our imports came from the United States; in 1929, it was 68 percent; in
1932 it was 60.8 percent.  We not only buy more from the United States
than from any other country but until the last two years we sold more
to the United States than to any other country--contrary to common
belief.  The comparative percentage of our exports to the United States
over a term of years ending in 1932 was over 40 percent in the case of
the United States and less than 30 percent in the United Kingdom.  In
the fiscal year 1932 (ending March 31 of last year) for the first time
in many years our exports to Great Britain exceeded those to the United
States; and this will be true to a lesser degree of the fiscal year
just closed.  These percentage decreases took place on a greatly {116}
restricted volume of trade.  Now that this volume is rising it is noted
that the United States is again taking first place.  In both January
and February of this year the United States bought more from Canada
than Great Britain did; and the increase in percentages is rather
startling.  In January, 1934, Canadian exports to Great Britain
increased over the same month last year by 39 percent, while in the
case of the United States the increase was 83 percent.  With an
improvement in trade the old ratio will tend to restablish itself.
With respect to our total trade the United States for a long period of
years never failed until 1933 to account for more than half of it; in
1930 the percentage was 58.



_Advantages of Reciprocal Trade_

These statistics are full of enlightenment--particularly to Americans
if they would but study them.  They show that Canada supplies the
United States with one of its most valuable markets.  In 1929 the
United States sold more goods to 10,000,000 people in Canada than to
the 40,000,000 or more in Great Britain, the 70,000,000 in Germany, the
170,000,000 in Russia, the 400,000,000 in China--in fact Canada was
that year the best customer of the United States in the whole world.
In its trade with Canada in 1929 the United States fell short of taking
payment for its exports in imports by $368,000,000, necessitating the
transfer to that country of credits arising from Canadian exports to
other parts of the world.  It would not be {117} unreasonable perhaps
to think that the United States should have regarded the trade
relations with Canada as ideal; should have gone to some trouble to
preserve them and to keep so valued a customer in a friendly frame of
mind.[5]  But the very next year by the Hawley-Smoot tariff higher
duties, many of them prohibitive, were imposed upon every Canadian
export to the United States that caused inconvenience to a domestic
producer.  The proceeding was insensate except on the explanation that
the tariff makers did not know what they were doing.  They were in fact
bemused by the mercantilist fallacy.  They thought they could cut down
the $521,000,000 of imports from Canada, the sight of which as they
flowed over the already high tariff walls gave them inexpressible pain,
without the outflow of $868,000,000 of exports to Canada being cut down
by a dollar.  Thus the already "favorable balance" of $368,000,000
perhaps would be doubled to the great advantage of the United States.
The incredible shrinking of the trade between the two countries since
that time is of course part of the general record of the depression;
but the steady narrowing of the favorable differential between exports
and imports is due directly to the United States tariff and to tariff
retaliation by Canada.  In the ten months of the last fiscal year for
which figures are available the United States's advantage in
Canadian-American trade {118} was just $30,000,000.  Thus it can be
seen that the Hawley-Smoot tariff back-fired.

At the moment negotiations are going on between the two countries
looking to a betterment of trade relations through tariff adjustments.
Being familiar with the history of the tariff relations between the two
countries for the past eighty years, I have been profoundly skeptical
of the possibility of any satisfactory reciprocal arrangement.[6]
Speaking to an audience in Chicago seven years ago I said that it would
be futile for the two countries to attempt to exchange tariff
concessions.  "These," I said, "are apparently impossible to obtain;
and if they were obtained they would not endure beyond the moment when
one party to the arrangement found, or imagined it found, that the
other party enjoyed an advantage."  The prospects today are brighter by
just the degree of economic enlightenment that has come to the people
of the two countries by their experiences of the past few years; unless
this is very considerable the arrangement will be wrecked, either in
the making or the ratification, by the inability of one side or both to
see that the other party to the understanding must get concessions for
concessions given and that these must not be recallable as soon as
there is political clamor from interests that find themselves
unsheltered from competition.

{119}

The desirability of a trade arrangement that will permit, within much
freer limits, the flow of commerce is to Canada very great.  More than
any country in the world Canada is the result of political, not
economic, forces; and the economic disharmony between its geographical
divisions is too great to be adjusted by policies of national
exclusiveness.  Unless we can trade with the outside world our
condition must be one of stagnation, with a standard of living falling
to ever lower levels, and with increasing strains upon the bonds that
keep our federation together.  No other country, no combination of
other countries can do for us, in this respect, what the United States
could do to her own net profit when the balance is struck between
advantage and disadvantage.  The general advantage to both countries
would be immeasurable; but the line-up in each country of the opposing
interests and prejudices to any arrangement that may be made will be
formidable.  As has always been the case each country will be told that
its interests have been sacrificed by incompetent negotiations and
that, unless the people arise and destroy the agreement, they will be
delivered to be shorn to hereditary and inveterate enemies.  This has
always been the line of attack; and it has never yet failed.  Dealing
with the recurring agitations in both countries over their tariff
relations, Dr. O. D. Skelton, in his _General Economic History of
Canada_, says: "It is curious to observe the persistent belief in each
of the countries concerned {120} that its case was rooted in immutable
justice, but that its negotiators were as babes in the hands of the
wily and unscrupulous representatives from across the border."[7]  The
present negotiations, if successful, will register the extent to which
these hitherto invincible prejudices have lost their wrecking power;
and the result may show that the economic feud which has reduced the
potential wealth of North America by billions of dollars to the
impoverishment of both countries is over; and that the day for
intelligent, self-respecting, neighborly coperation has begun.

This view, it might be contended, gets little support from the fate of
the St. Lawrence Seaway Treaty which has just been rejected by the
United States Senate.  There the old cry--that the United States
interests had been sacrificed to the greater shrewdness of Canadian
diplomats--once again proved its power.  Canadians cannot, however,
find in this unfortunate circumstance anything to support a feeling of
superiority; because we know that if the treaty had not been killed in
the United States Senate the arguments there employed with such effect
would have been heard in reverse in the Canadian Parliament.  The
Canadian public would have been told that the Americans had taken our
negotiators into camp; that in consequence we had got much the worst of
the arrangement; that the United States was securing rights of
intervention {121} in the control of the St. Lawrence which would
destroy our sovereignty over those waters; with more nonsense of the
same kind.  And large numbers of Canadians would have believed all this
and would have regarded the ratification of the treaty as a disaster.
But prejudices hold their power by lessening margins.

Moreover the record of our diplomatic negotiations is not one of
unrelieved failure.  There is a considerable list of useful if minor
conventions in operation between the two countries; and there has been
one great and hopeful achievement which, in its usefulness and wisdom,
is unique among the world's diplomatic instruments.  I refer of course
to the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 between Great Britain (on behalf
of Canada) and the United States.  This treaty created what is, in
effect, an international court, a single homogeneous body, which for
twenty-five years has been settling, without a single failure and
always with complete unanimity, disputes arising over the boundary
waters of the two countries.[8]  The Commission, on behalf of both
governments, has carried out a number of investigations into matters of
the highest importance.  There is also a provision by which this
Commission may, by the action of both governments, be clothed with
power to deal with all questions or matters of difference arising
between the two {122} countries.  Within the past few months I have
watched this Commission at work dealing with the highly complicated
question of how the waters of a boundary river should be allocated and
controlled; and the technical competence of the court, the confidence
and respect which it commanded from those who brought their cases
before it and above all the complete absence of anything indicating
that the court was made up of two national halves, vindicated the faith
that self-respecting and efficient coperation between the two
countries is attainable if we can but discard those attitudes of fear,
suspicion, and selfishness which have too often warped our minds.  The
Joint High Commission is the proof that, even under conditions as they
are, these two countries can develop conjoint North American
institutions; and it is a symbol of the fuller friendship and
coperation that the future will bring.



_World Affairs and North American Attitudes_

No discussion of Canadian-American relations would be complete without
at least some reference to a development which is still below the
horizon but of which there are signs visible to those who do not flinch
from facing facts.  This is the possibility of the emergence of a
common isolationist attitude on the part of the North American nations
against the outside world--North America _contra mundum_, not in an
aggressive but in a defensive sense.  The statesman and the student of
affairs who do not realize that {123} conditions are developing which
might make this plan of possible escape from the terrors and dangers of
a mad world attractive to North American minds must be keeping their
eyes partly shut.  Jesting talk is not always idle and I attach not a
little significance to the remark which is not uncommon in gatherings,
social and otherwise, where Americans and Canadians meet: the remark
that since it is apparent that there is throughout the world a trend
toward prewar conditions tending to certain war, the North American
nations should come to an understanding to withdraw from world affairs,
letting the rest of the world go to perdition at whatever rate of speed
and by whatever methods seemed good to it.  If the League of Nations
disappears, if the collective system of keeping peace breaks down, if
older nations begin to align themselves into groups keeping a
precarious peace and arming themselves for inevitable war, there will
be an instinctive urge on the part of the North American peoples to
retire behind their ramparts and look on.

Of the natural disposition of the North American peoples to take
attitudes toward outside issues, between which there are resemblances
and sympathies, there have been some striking manifestations.  This was
first noted by me in Paris during the Peace Conference when the
Covenant of the League was in the making.  Upon the Commission which
drafted the Covenant Canada was not represented, Lord Robert {124}
Cecil (now Viscount Cecil) and General Smuts being in attendance on
behalf of all the British Nations.  But as the successive drafts of the
Covenant came into the Canadian offices its provisions were subjected
to critical analysis.  Sir Robert Borden, the Canadian Prime Minister,
prepared a memorandum in which the proposed Covenant was submitted to
searching but constructive criticism designed to bring about
modifications which would make it more acceptable to Canadian--and
therefore to North American--opinion.  The dangerous implications to
Canada of Article Ten and of the articles providing for sanctions were
expounded to me, as to others, by C. J. Doherty, Minister of Justice
for Canada, and a member of the Canadian delegation, with a wealth of
knowledge and a clarity of vision that, to my way of thinking, far
out-ranged the somewhat similar criticisms preferred months later
against the Covenant in the Senate of the United States.  The Canadian
delegation was alert to note and to offer resistance to suggestions
that the League should have powers of control over domestic questions,
such as regulation of immigration and the distribution of raw
materials.  At that stage the representatives of the United States at
the Peace Conference were enthusiasts in their support of the
provisions of the Covenant; but, as the sequel showed, the doubting,
somewhat hesitant, attitude of Canada was more truly representative of
North American opinion.  Canada entered the League while the United
States {125} stayed out; and in the League has sought to modify the
provisions about which North American opinion has been critical.  Thus
after some years of effort Canada succeeded in lessening the
obligations imposed by Article Ten; while reluctance to give a
governing body in Geneva large powers in the application of sanctions
was revealed in the attitude of Canada toward the Treaty of Mutual
Assistance and the Geneva Protocol.

Canada's attitude of opposition to the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese
Treaty at the Imperial Conference in 1921 was equally significant in
its revelation of North Americanism in Canadian foreign policy.  The
facts are not fully known; the episode is shrouded in obscurity.  But
certain statements about it can safely be made.  The British government
desired the treaty renewed and assumed that this would be agreed to
without question by all the British nations at the Conference.  When a
proposal to this effect was made at the Conference it was warmly
supported by Australia and New Zealand.  When the Prime Minister of
Canada, Mr. Meighen, declared that the treaty should not be renewed the
British government was surprised and pained; and the government of
Australia, through its Prime Minister, Mr. Hughes, was vociferous in
its demand that Mr. Meighen's objection should be disregarded.  The
British government thought of the matter in the light of supposed
advantage to the Empire with its varied interests all over {126} the
world.  The words that Mr. Meighen used are not on record; but the
burden of his case was that the preservation of good relations between
the United States and the British nations was the first interest of the
Empire and that these good relations would be placed in jeopardy if the
treaty were renewed.  Undoubtedly he suggested that there was between
the United States and Canada on this question a considerable community
of opinion.  In the end he brought the British government to his way of
thinking.  The opportune discovery was made that the treaty did not
expire for another year; and within that year the Washington Conference
was held and treaties entered into which made it possible for the
Anglo-Japanese Treaty to be dropped without too much laceration of
Japanese susceptibilities.  This is as yet the most striking
illustration of North American policy, with Canada as agent,
influencing world policies.

I have dealt with the possibility of the North American peoples, in the
event of the collapse of the existing world structure, seeking to
escape the ruinous consequences of this catastrophe by policies of
withdrawal.  That they could escape by these policies is highly
doubtful.  The world is now so small and so closely integrated that
whether they like it or not the nations are members of one body.  I
should like to close these remarks on the note not of a foreshadowing
of contingent common policies of isolation, but of policies of
coperation to the end that the catastrophe, {127} foreseen and feared,
will not arrive.  There is in Canada, at least on the part of a
considerable section of the people, a searching of hearts as to whether
we have not made a contribution to the causes which have brought the
world to its present plight by a too great insistence upon our right,
under all circumstances, to retain freedom of judgment and action.
There are certainly some signs of a similar stirring of conscience in
elements of the population of the United States.  There is in Canada
beyond question a growing hope that the collective system of
maintaining peace--by upholding the Covenant of the League or by the
enforcement, when necessary, of the engagements of the pact of
Paris--will be made effective and enduring.  The Canadians who hold
this hope understand that it is idle unless the maintenance of peace by
collective action--which involves the application of appropriate and
effective pressures to breakers of the peace pacts--becomes a ruling
principle of policy for North American nations.  We--I speak as one of
the Canadians who cherish these hopes--believe that as our peoples come
to realize that in this dwindling world there must be peace in all
continents or in none, Canada will be willing to go beyond a pious
expression of faith that nations which have pledged their word to
abstain from war will keep their pledge of readiness to coperate with
other nations of good intent for the purpose of seeing to it that these
engagements are not treated as scraps of paper.  We trust that, if
Canada should {128} become of this mind, she will be the interpreter of
the desires and intentions not alone of the northern half of the North
American continent, but as well of her great kindred neighbor without
whose coperation Canada's sacrifice and the sacrifice of all the
English-speaking peoples and of all the nations which profess the
democratic faith would be fruitless.  Time, destiny, her geographical
position, the genius and resourcefulness of her people, her
immeasurable potentialities, have made the United States of America the
decisive factor in this crisis of humanity.  I trust that it will not
be deemed out of place if, in saying the last word in this course of
lectures which I have been privileged to deliver, I should in paying
tribute to your power speak also, with all respect, of your
responsibilities.



[1] Letter in the Essex Register, May 6, 1812, quoted by Keenleyside in
his _Canada and the United States_, etc., p. 770.

[2] _Canada and Canadian Defence_, by Major General C. W. Robinson,
1910.

[3] _Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs_, Nov.,
1930.

[4] The provocative statements by American politicians are reported and
their effect on the reciprocity campaign estimated in J. W. Dafoe's
_Clifford Sifton in Relation to His Times_, Toronto, 1931, pp. 367 ff.

[5] Though Canada ceased to be the best market for United States
exports, she was still in 1933 the second-best customer of the United
States, with Great Britain in first and Japan in third place.

[6] See _Great Britain and the Dominions_, University of Chicago,
Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation, Lectures, 1927, pp. 249 ff.

[7] _Canada and Its Provinces: a History of the Canadian People and
Their Institutions by One Hundred Associates_, Adam Shortt and Arthur
G. Doughty, general editors, Toronto, 1913, IX, 132.

[8] See _Papers Relating to the Work of the International Joint High
Commission_, Ottawa, 1929.




{131}

INDEX


Adams, John, his formula for empire (1774), 20

Alaskan boundary dispute, 69 ff.

American influences in Canada: references to, by Lord Durham, 52; fear
of U.S. prime factor in bringing about confederation, 59 ff.; in
extending area of Dominion to Pacific, 61 ff.

American Revolution, 15, 17, 19, 23, 24

Anglo-Japanese Treaty, 125

Annexation: as a subject of political discussion, 47; manifesto of
1849, 53; suggestions by U.S. public men after Civil War, 61; exploited
for political purposes, 92, 93, 105

Australia, 16, 17, 74

Aylesworth, Sir A. B., 70



Baker, Philip Noel, 9 _n_

Baldwin, Robert, 48, 50

Balfour declaration (1926), 22

Beer, George L., _The English-Speaking Peoples_, 4

Bidwell, M. S., 48

Blake, Edward, 37

Borden, Sir Robert, 38 _n_, 124

Boundary Waters Treaty (1909), 121

British Commonwealth Relations Conference (1933), 7

British Empire: First Empire, 13, 21, 23; Second Empire, 24, 26, 30;
transformation into a commonwealth by concession of equality to the
Dominions, 38, 39, 68

British North America Act: enacted by Imperial Parliament, 61; as
affected by judicial interpretation, 79; proposed amendment of, 80;
controversy as to methods of amendment, 82

Brown, George, 59, 60 _n_, 65

Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount, _Modern Democracies_, 75



Canada: provinces of Upper and Lower Canada created, 26; union of Upper
and Lower Canada, 36, 37; Dominion of Canada created, 61 ff.

Canada and the United States: common origin of early colonists, 11;
common customs and institutions, 12, 31, 33, 44; parallels in Canadian
and American history, 19 ff.; immigration and emigration, 25, 45, 46,
89, 97 ff.; political influence of American immigrants, 47, 49;
Durham's proposals to check American influence, 51 ff.; Canadian fears
of American aggression and confederation, 57 ff.; diplomatic relations,
64 ff., 71, 72, 120; Alaskan boundary dispute, 69 ff.; American
precedents and the Canadian Constitution, 76 ff.; War of 1812-14, 90
ff.; anti-American political feeling in Canada, 92 ff.; similarity of
customs, 96, 97, 103; business and social contacts, 101; tariff
policies and trade, 105 ff., 110 ff.; attitude towards world affairs,
122 ff.

Carleton, Sir Guy (Lord Dorchester), 14.  _See also_ Dorchester

_Clifford Sifton in Relation to His Times_, 69 _n_, 105 _n_

Confederation, compact theory of, 82

Confederation of British provinces: scheme proposed by Galt, 56;
British coolness toward suggestion, 57; advocated by McGee, 57, 58;
advocated by George Brown, 59; British government supports plan, 60;
consummated (1867), 61; Rupert's Land added, 62; British Columbia taken
in, 62

Constitutional Act (1791), 15, 26, 29

Constitutional development from Empire to Commonwealth: William Smith
on causes of American Revolution, 15; John Adams's formula (1774), 20;
Madison on issues of revolution, 21; Constitutional Act (1791), 26, 29;
Simcoe rgime in Upper Canada, 28 ff.; agitation for responsible
government, 34 ff.; Lord Durham's inquiry and report, 35, 50 ff.;
separatist attitude of British statesmen, 55; movement for federation,
55 ff.; British North America Act (1867), 61; Washington Treaty (1871),
64; abortive Brown-Fish Treaty of 1874, 65; agitation in Canada for
treaty-making rights, 66; declaration of equality at Imperial
Conference (1917), 67; Canada makes halibut treaty with United States
(1923), 67; dominion and treaty-making rights recognized by Imperial
Conference (1923), 68; Balfour declaration (1926), 22, 68; Westminster
Act (1931), 39, 68



Dawson, R. M., _Constitutional Issues in Canada 1900-1931_, 78

Disraeli, Benjamin, 55

Doherty, C. J., 124

Dorchester, Guy Carleton, 1st Baron, 27.  _See also_ Carleton

Durham, John George Lambton, 1st Earl of, 20, 35, 49, 50 ff., 93



Egerton, H. E., 15

Elgin, James Bruce, 8th Earl of, 93

Elgin-Marcy Reciprocity Treaty (1854), 110, 113, 114



Fish, Hamilton, 61



Galt, Sir Alexander, 56, 64

_Great Britain and the Dominions_, 118 _n_

Grenville, William Wyndham Grenville, Baron, 27, 29



Haldane, Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount, 80

Halibut treaty (1923), 67, 71

Halsbury, Hardinge Stanley Giffard, 1st Earl of, 76 _n_

Hamilton, Alexander, 77

Head, Sir Francis Bond, 48 _n_

Hutchinson, Thomas, Governor of Massachusetts (1773), 22



Immigration from the United States: loyalist, 25; post-Revolutionary,
45, 89; status of American settlers, 46; in recent years, 98, 100

Imperial Conference, 1917: constitutional declaration of autonomy of
Dominions, 38 _n_; 1921, Canada opposes renewal of Anglo-Japanese
Treaty, 37; 1923: rights of dominions to treaty-making powers
recognized, 68; 1926: adoption of formula of empire, 7, 68

_International Affairs_, 12 _n_

International Joint High Commission, 121, 122



Jackson, Andrew, 90

Jay-Grenville Treaty (1794), 89

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 76, 79



Keenleyside, H. L., _Canada and the United States_, 61 _n_

Kennedy, W. P. M., _Documents of the Canadian Constitution_, 15 _n_, 22
_n_, 27 _n_, 38 _n_, 49 _n_, 78



Lapointe, Ernest, 67

Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 70

League of Nations, 67, 123, 127

Legislative Council of Upper Canada, report charging American sympathy
with rebellion of 1837, 49; Durham report attacked, 50

Lewis, Sir George Cornewall, 60

Loyalists, immigration of into Quebec and Nova Scotia, 25

Lucas, Sir C. P., 21



Macdonald, Sir John A., 64, 75, 77

McGee, T. D., 57, 58, 59 _n_

McIlwain, C. H., _The American Revolution_, 20

Mackenzie, William Lyon, 48

Madison, James, on the causes of the American Revolution, 21 ff., 77

Martin, Chester, _Empire and Commonwealth_, 18 _n_

Meighen, Arthur, 125, 126

Metcalfe, Sir Charles, 92

Mills, David, 37

Morison, J. L., _British Supremacy and Canadian Self-Government_, 55 _n_

Munro, W. B., 23, 77



Newcastle, Henry Pelham Fiennes Pelham Clinton, 5th Duke of, Secretary
of State for the Colonies (1862), 17

Nova Scotia: establishment of assembly, 18; achievement of responsible
government, 20



Ottawa Conference (1932), 107



Quebec, original province of, 14, 25, 26, 28, 43, 44

Quebec Act, 15, 26



Rebellion (1837), 48, 49

Reciprocal trade arrangements, Canada and United States: abortive
agreement of 1874, 65; agreement of 1911 rejected by Canada, 105, 106;
Elgin-Marcy treaty (1854), 110, 113, 114

Responsible government issue: arises in Upper Canada, 34 ff; conceded
in principle, 35; in fact, 37; agitation for, ending in rebellion, 46
ff.; Durham's inquiry and finding, 50 ff.; Baldwin's memorandum, 50

Robinson, Major-General C. W., _Canada and Canadian Defence_, 95 _n_

Rogers, N. McL., 82 _n_

Russell, Lord John, 30, 55



St. Lawrence Seaway Treaty, 120

Senate, Canadian, 83

Sifton, Sir Clifford, 70, 71

Skelton, O. D., _General Economic History of Canada_, 119, 120

Simcoe, J. G., first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, 27 ff.; his
distrust of democracy, 31 ff.; invitation to American settlers, 45

Smith, Goldwin, 13; _The Empire_, 17, 58 _n_

Smith, William, Chief Justice, 15

Sumner, Charles, 61, 62 _n_



_Times, The_ (London), 16

Toynbee, A. J., _British Commonwealth Relations Conference_, 7

Trade between Canada and the United States, 115 ff.

Treaties, of the United States with Great Britain or Canada:
Jay-Grenville (1794), 89; Ghent (1815), 91; Elgin-Marcy (1854), 110,
113, 114; Washington (1871), 64; Boundary Waters (1909), 121; St.
Lawrence Seaway (1933), 120



United States and Canada, _see_ Canada and the United States



Victoria, Queen, apprehensions about Canada (1865), 58 _n_



War of 1812-14, 90

Washington, D.C., Canadian Legation established in, 72

Washington Conference (1921), 126

Washington Treaty (1871), 64

Webster, Daniel, 6

Westminster Act (1931), 39, 68



Young, Owen D., 108



Zimmern, Alfred E., 12 _n_






[End of Canada, an American Nation, by John W. Dafoe]
