Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 412
You remember, Mr. Roosevelt, when you opened up that new Friendship Bridge across the river near Gananoque, and all the girls here went wild about it — 1938, wasn’t it? Well, that was there — I mean, those were it. Those people on the two sides of the ribbons you cut had been waiting to come across and hug one another again for a hundred and fifty years.
Now a strange thing was that those Loyalists who had come from New York, all the way around the St. Lawrence, were joined by another group of Loyalists who came across where your bridge is. These were all Highlanders, settled in the backwoods of New York Province, and formed during the war into the King’s Royal New York Regiment. When the war was over, they were disbanded and moved with their families to Upper Canada, alongside the river, and a year later five hundred more Highlanders came out from Glengarry, and presently a thousand more. Thus rose our Scottish Settlement of Glengarry; partly from your people and partly from the homeland. For a full hundred years they still spoke, and preached, in the Gaelic. And of their descendants, some of them, as I write these lines, are close beside me here, at drill on the campus of McGill University as a part of the Highland Regiment, the Black Watch of Canada. Their drill floods all the campus with the moving lines of colour of the khaki and the tartans. And in the pauses of their drill, they sit in little groups upon the grass, like children in a daisy chain, to listen to a sunburned sergeant read from a manual of Active Service in War.
But I turn back to our history. When all those people, and those who followed in their footsteps in the next few years, got settled in Upper Canada, though they called themselves “Loyalists,” they were nonetheless Americans. They brought with them from New England their Thanksgiving Day Turkey and from New York the “York Shilling” that was our count of money there till yesterday, or at least till I myself remember it there sixty years ago. And we had, too, the “little red schoolhouse” framed on the Massachusetts model in a school “section.” I was a “scholar” in one myself. Notice that — a “scholar”: who ever heard in England such a use of the word? It’s ours and yours exclusively. In the “little red schoolhouse” we learned out of the same spellers and readers, practically, as you did: we recited with you William Cullen Bryant’s Prairies and Longfellow’s Excelsior, and wondered, just as you did, where the uncomfortable boy was trying to climb to.
The other loyalists, I say, stayed in the Maritime Provinces and made a new one, New Brunswick, all for themselves. But instead of becoming angry enemies to your Republic, they turned into a sort of outlying part of New England, with Harvard University as the capital of the Maritime Provinces, the Mecca of all its student pilgrims. Thither, when the Maritimes got started in their great export industries — fish and brains — went all the gifted students of the provinces. It is only of late years that with great difficulty we’ve been able to coax them away. Even now they’re apt to slip off to Harvard, as boys run away to sea, and later, like the runaway boys, turn up as notable men, college presidents and doctors and divines. They’re strong on divinity. You have to be in a country as bleak as the Nova Scotia coast.
So that was how our history started and that was the way it kept going on. Quarrels that refused to turn to hate, animosities that broke down into friendship, seeds of dissension sown in a soil that brought them up again as flowers. Such is our history. Are we going to falsify it now?
Let the vanishing feet pass on, and let the armies go, weaponed or weaponless, so that your hearts go with them — that is all we ask, or that at least is the chief thing we ask.... But, by the way, I suppose you couldn’t lend us — you haven’t got a loose dime, have you, Mr. Roosevelt? — but we’ll come to that presently. And if you haven’t, it’s all right. England will give it to us, and then we’ll lend it back again, do you see, like a little boy buying a present for mother.
So, as I say, our history was like that all along. There was the war of 1812. We can’t get it quite straight now, what it was all about, but it makes great “pictures.” Did you see the one with the White House in it? But what that war was for, we can no more make out now than old Caspar could with his. It was something to do with “pressing” sailors, but it’s all gone now, “pressed and cleaned” like the rest of our history, as fragrant as old lavender in a cedar chest. As a matter of fact, as in all our conflicts and quarrels, both kinds of people seem to have been on both sides. Why, in the Upper Canada of that day, of its 80,000 inhabitants, only 35,000 represented the Loyalists and their children, and 25,000 were “American” settlers who had come in on their own account, and the rest (20,000) had wandered in from the old country. And, per contra, ever so many Americans thought the declaration of war was a policy of madness, and the Governor of Massachusetts issued a proclamation (June 26, 1812) for a public fast for a wrong committed “against the nation from which we are descended and which for many generations has been the bulwark of the religion we possess.”
Or take your Civil War! My, didn’t we spring to your help! Yes, sir! on both sides! We fought in the Northern armies, lent money to the South, took in refugees — they annexed our towns of Cobourg and Old Niagara and have never left — we supplied hay and oats at a bare cost (or pretty bare: farmers will be farmers) and when it was over we exulted with the North, shed tears with the South, and have glorified Lincoln and the Union along with you ever since.
Then you remember — at least I can, ever so well — the Venezuela boundary dispute about the Essoquibo River that broke into sudden tumult round Christmas of 1895. England very nearly called out the Household Troops (out of the bars), and you almost mobilized the Texas Rangers, only they were moving too fast. And in six months it was all over, and nobody could remember where the Essoquibo River was and they hadn’t known anyway, and the Household Troops went in again for another beer, and the Texas Rangers went on ranging.
So have all our emergencies and quarrels and animosities passed and gone overhead like April showers, or summer thunder, only to clear the air.
You see the underlying reason of all this is the queer intermingling of our history and our population. Those loyalists were only just the beginning of it. All through a century and a half our populations have washed back and forward over the line. Why, if at the present moment you count up all the people born in Canada and still alive, fourteen out of every hundred are living in the United States, a total of 1,250,000 in all. And conversely, 350,000 American-born people are living among us. Our Dominion Statistician told your American Statistical Society the other day, when they made him President of it — (we get jobs like that all the time) — he told them that of the people “of Canadian stock,” one-third are living in the United States.
Sometimes the tide rises into a flood in one direction, and then turns to an ebb in the other. Back in the eighties, when the mortgages fluttered down on our farms like snowflakes, there was so great a wave that for every 1,000 added to the native born of Canada, there were 726 outgoing emigrants to the United States: not the same individuals, but the same proportion. That was largely the great exodus of the French Canadians moving into New England so steadily and in so large a volume that the Pelletiers and the Dufresnes began to outnumber the Smiths and the McLeans. About 150,000 French Canadians moved across the line between 1875 and 1890, by which date there were 395,000 people in the United States who were French Canadian born, and of these 275,000 in New England. In spite of “repatriation,” the French Canadians, by birth or descent, in the United States now number about — I forget what.
But a few years later, to even up the balance, there came your American invasion of our Northwest. When the farmers of the Kansas prairies saw their farms blowing away northwestward in clouds of dust, they followed after their farms and landed in Alberta. They came in caravans of prairie schooners, or by the new railways, with carload lots of furniture, children and household goods — people of substance moving into the promised land, as the Israelites had moved, or the overland immigrants in the prairie schooners moving on California. Before this exodus, only about 500 Americans a year had come into our Northwest, but in 1900 there came 15,000; in 1911, 100,000, and 139,000 in the banner year of 1913; in all 600,000. Our official calculation was that the immigrants, at the height of the exodus, brought in money and goods and property to the value of $1,000 per person.
All this interchange of population, one might think, would have to lead to amalgamation, to the “annexation” of Canada by the United States, or of the United States by Canada. “Annexation,” indeed, used to be the bogey of our Canadian politics, the turnip on a stick with a candle in its mouth, used to frighten the electors. It is a dead topic now. It seemed odd the other day to read in the papers that one of our most patriotic statesmen, speaking in Toronto, made a passionate appeal for us not only to get into the war but to get into it good and hard, for fear we might be invaded by Nazis and then the United States would have to drive them out and, as a result, we’d get annexed to the United States. Funny kind of argument, wasn’t it! But, you see, way back in the past, there was a time when many of our leading statesmen, in England and over here, were always afraid of Canada’s getting too friendly with the United States, just as on a respectable farm they don’t like their daughters’ going around too much with the hired man. You can’t tell what may happen. Well, that was us.
Annexation to the United States! What a strange part that idea, that phrase, has played in our history and how completely it has passed out of it. It has served as a sort of bogey or warning — just as children are told that the Devil will get them if they’re not good — or as an invitation out of darkness into light, out of tyranny into freedom, as when Benjamin Franklin came up to Montreal in 1775, expecting to draw down the Canadians as easily as he drew down lightning. But the Canadians, pretty well all French then, weren’t taking any. The United States, or rather, the American Colonies, seemed far too British, too protestant, for their taste. So annexation slept. But in the war of 1812 it was the other way. So many Upper Canadians by that time sympathized with the United States and wanted to join the republic that it has been estimated (see our Canadian Archives, Q. 107, , or else take my word for it) that one-third of the population was on the American side. But as at least one-half of the New England people were on the British side, that only evens things up. That’s the queer way our history’s been conducted all through — both sides on each side. By which means they were able to keep the war of 1812 going till they got word from Europe that it was over. Luckily they had time, while the news was still on the ocean, to fight the battle of New Orleans which gave us that moving picture that I mentioned.
So annexation slept again. In any case, it didn’t matter much whether it slept or woke during the next generation (1815-45), because by that time the people were migrating out of the British Isles in all directions, with ever so many places to go to and all good — with a choice of the old flag or a new flag or no flag at all — the States, or to British North America or Australia or New Zealand or the Cannibal Isles. The migration to British North America between 1820 and 1845, apart from an odd year of slump, was anything from 10,000 to 66,000; to the States, from 10,000 to 63,000; to the Antipodes (apart from a banner year of 32,000 in 1841), from 1,000 to 15,000. The King of the Cannibal Isles kept no statistics of newcomers. He dealt with them as they came.
Then came (after 1845) the slump caused by free trade, free navigation and free competition, with such a big dose of freedom straight out of Manchester that it was just like the Kingdom of Heaven — to those who had was given and from those who had not was taken even what they had. Canada, half-developed and rickety, went under. “All the prosperity of which Canada is thus robbed” — it is Lord Elgin, the Governor of 1849, who says this, not me— “is transplanted to the other side of the line, as if to make Canadians feel more bitterly how much kinder England is to the children who desert her than to those who remain faithful. The conviction that they would be better off if annexed is almost universal among the commercial classes at present.” So there you were! No wonder that the commercial interests, along with a lot of other interests, presently got out at Montreal an Annexation Manifesto (1849) in favour of “friendly and peaceful separation.” We used to keep this wicked document hidden away in our archives, but now that it doesn’t matter we can admit that it was signed by a prime minister and three cabinet ministers of the later Dominion and with most of the best names in the city. We can laugh it off at that. That’s the beauty of our joint history. It all laughs off so easily.
But the Manifesto didn’t matter, because the wind turned around and blew the other way. There came the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 and the Crimean War and wheat at $2.50 a bushel, and then your Civil War, with hay and hogs for everybody to sell till the Upper Canada farmers got so rich that they built brick houses and frame barns (in place of logs), and then put mortgages on them and built more of them — bigger and brighter — till they got so far into debt that they have never got out of it; in fact, so far into debt that they had to put on more mortgages still. That’s the way with farmers. In a burst of prosperity, they put on mortgages — that’s called expansion — and when debt comes they put on more, which is called contraction. The two together make the economics of large farming as opposed to small, or subsistence, farming. In the latter, subsistence farming, you just live; in the big stuff, you just don’t. But, of course, there’s no need to tell Americans about that. It’s been part of your economic history as much as ours: only being a bigger country you were able to do it on a bigger scale, especially in the west where there’s room. I’ve seen it. In one of the big agricultural states of the Mississippi valley, I have been driven for half an hour over one and the same mortgage. The grand old estates in Scotland have nothing on us. But I only mention it to show the similarity of our history, and the sympathy of it.
Annexation came back in 1891, but it was just a shadow of itself, not much reality to it. We had all got hard up again in Canada with the premature break of the Manitoba Boom, and a lot of our people turned again to Annexation as a sort of old family remedy — just as farmers turn to Painkiller and Bloodbitters for pretty well everything. It was mostly for election use, anyway, but the cry didn’t work. So instead of joining the States we did the other thing and let down the bars of the Northwest and advertised for American farmers, and we got the invasion that I spoke of above.... And this time we got such a “boom” in the Northwest that the first one, of the early Eighties, sounded like a whisper. While it lasted we had time to bring into the West, as I said, 600,000 of your people, and build half a dozen big cities and run railroads all over Hades in the prairie grass, ready for cities not built yet. That’s the way we do it, like carpenters putting up a grandstand before the rain comes. There is going to be another boom in the Nineteen Forties, and if we work fast we can build a metropolis or two and half a dozen universities while it’s still on.
So after that we never really needed to fall back on Annexation any more, and never have — except once, more or less in fun, just to make an election. That was back in 1911, which begins to seem like ancient history now, all peace and sunshine and such a thing as a “World War” just a fanciful dream of the imagination. Elections in days like those had none of the grim reality of life and death in which we live now. They were made up of fifty per cent business and fifty per cent humbug. You had, of course, to start an “issue,” and if there was none in sight in a clear sky you had to make one, as an Alberta rainmaker makes rain. So this time the Liberals said to the Conservatives, “How about annexation?” — and the Conservatives said, “First-rate, which side do you want?” — because both sides had had each. It was like the way in which the “scholars” in the little red schoolhouse used to decide on who should have first innings by throwing a baseball bat and matching hands on it. So the Liberals took Annexation and lost out on it.
Looking back on it now after nearly forty years, it all seems coloured with the evening light of retrospect. Nor do I remember any great angers over it at the time. One of our great arguments on the platform (I was a Conservative in that election) was to quote a letter of your good Mr. Taft, the President, in which he had spoken of our becoming an “Annex” of the republic. I think he meant it as a compliment, just as one speaks with pride of the expansion of a hotel. But naturally for us, “Taft’s letter” became the target of heroic denunciation. We used to carry it around, copies of it, to election meetings and have it on the speaker’s table, beside the water jug, as Exhibit No. 2 — right after the telegrams from all the distinguished people who would not be at the meeting — a little touch that lends class to a political gathering. It’s not who’s there that counts; it’s who’s not.
Years after we gave a big dinner to Mr. Taft at the University Club in Montreal, when he had long finished being President and was up here as an “arbitrator” to decide whether the Grand Trunk Railway was worth nothing or less than nothing. In introducing Mr. Taft, the Chairman read out from bygone newspapers those old denunciations of Mr. Taft and added, “Look at him! The man has the face of a Mephistopheles!” And Mr. Taft, smothered with laughter, admitted that he had.
