Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 456
5. Government Interference on Behalf of the Working Class; Factory Laws, State Insurance, and Pensions. The attitude of modern governments towards the laboring class is in many respects no longer one of unqualified individualism. The general recognition of the idea of social solidarity and of aggregate social duties towards the workers and the poorer members of the community has profoundly influenced the legislation of our day. The original factory acts adopted in England, to which reference has been already made, have been imitated in all the great industrial countries, and expanded into an elaborate code designed to protect the wage-earner against the rigor of unrestrained competition. Legislation of this kind in the United States falls under state and not under federal jurisdiction. There are still many states of the Union in which, factory industry being but little developed, no protective statutes have been passed. But in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and all the great manufacturing states, factory legislation of a thorough-going character has been adopted. The factory acts of these states prohibit working people from being employed under conditions dangerous to health or life. They contain provisions for fire-escapes, prevention of explosions, fencing of machinery, ventilation, etc., and provide for the appointment of inspectors to supervise the operation of the acts. The hours of labor in the case of women and young persons are also limited by law. The labor of adult women is restricted in all the New England states (except Vermont) and in about ten other states; a ten-hour day is the usual limit prescribed. All the manufacturing states have legislated against excessive hours for young persons (of either sex) and have absolutely prohibited factory labor for children. In Massachusetts, New York, and several other states only children of at least fourteen years of age may be employed; in other states employment is permissible at lower ages. In England, under the general factory law of 1901, similar restrictions on industrial freedom of contract are imposed by the government, both the conditions of work and the permissible hours for employment of women, young persons, and children being made the subject of legislative interference. The German imperial government adopted in 1891 a factory act of similar scope. In the United States, Great Britain, and Germany legislation has not as yet limited the hours of employment of adult males; but in France and in Austria the law regulates the number of hours that even adult males may be employed in factory labor, eleven hours a day being assigned as the limit in Austria, and twelve in France.
The altered attitude of the state towards the working class is seen also in the systems of compulsory insurance and old-age pensions, now operative in various countries of continental Europe, and in certain Australasian colonies. In Germany an imperial law of June 15, 1883, provides for compulsory insurance against illness for all working people whose wages do not exceed $476 a year, the expenses of the insurance being imposed jointly on working people and employers, the former paying two thirds, the latter one third of the cost. A similar law of July 6, 1884, prescribes compulsory insurance against accidents. In each of these cases the government itself contributes nothing; but for the compulsory old-age pensions, established under an imperial statute of 1889, the government contributes yearly towards each pension a fixed sum of $11.90 over and above the amount accruing from the past contributions of the workingmen and their employers. France and Austria have also instituted compulsory state insurance against accidents (in Austria against illness also), and Italy, under a statute of 1899, has state insurance both against disability and old age. The colony of New Zealand, by a law of 1898, established a system of old-age pensions (with a maximum of £18 per annum) to be accorded by the government to persons of sixty-five years of age who had resided thirty-five years in the colony, no previous contribution being exacted from the recipient. Persons possessing an income from other sources are not eligible, or only eligible as pensioners to the extent that their income falls short of the pension. The tendency of the governments of the Australian colonies to interfere vigorously on behalf of the working class is seen in the New Zealand statute of 1894, applying compulsory arbitration to labor disputes, and in a similar statute of South Australia enacted in the same year.
Even the most extreme individualists admitted that the protection which it was the primary duty of the state to afford to the citizen did not merely include safeguards against physical violence and forcible robbery. Protection of an indirect character, intended to prevent fraud or culpable negligence, was admitted to be within the proper sphere of the state action. But in the course of the nineteenth century the category of legislation of an indirectly protective character has been enormously expanded. Such familiar examples as adulteration acts in reference to food, acts in reference to the inspection of steamboats and buildings, the granting of certificates to engineers, druggists, etc., will at once suggest themselves in this connection. Prohibition acts in restraint of the manufacture or sale of intoxicating liquors, acts in restraint of public gambling, etc., represent the same legislative principle carried to a further degree. In practice, the line is extremely difficult to draw between protective legislation — whose intention is to guarantee the individual against external harm and to prevent him from harming others — and paternal legislation, whose object is to compel him in a positive direction for his own good. The attitude of most modern governments is not clearly defined in this respect: but there is a large amount of modern legislation which is practically of a paternal character.
6. Municipal Control. Mention may be made in conclusion of the wide extension of state activity seen in the sphere of modern municipal control. Under present conditions the supply of water and light to towns and cities and the arrangement for interurban transportation, telephone communication, etc., offer problems of a peculiar character. To a great extent these services are in their nature monopolies; they must be under a single control, and cannot, or at any rate can only at an economic loss, be performed for the community by rival purveyors. Separate telephone systems, separate gas and water companies, with parallel pipes, separate car lines upon the same streets, are plainly impracticable. On the other hand, where these enterprises are placed unreservedly in private hands, the principle of monopoly price, as already explained, asserts itself to the detriment of the general public. It is necessary, therefore, either that the public authorities should themselves directly perform these services for the community, or that the grant of privileges accorded to a monopoly company should be accompanied by special restrictions and special regulation of the prices to be charged. A brief summary of the present extent of municipal ownership may serve to show how greatly the functions of the local organs of government have been expanded under recent conditions. The control of waterworks is the most universal of all municipal activities. Of the thirty-eight cities of the United States having, under the census of 1900, a population over one hundred thousand, all except eight owned their own waterworks in 1903. In this majority are included the cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. In Canada more than three quarters of the towns and cities (including Montreal and Toronto) own their waterworks. In the United Kingdom the municipal ownership of waterworks is almost universal, and in the continental cities of Europe it is the usual rule. Very few gas works in the United States are under municipal operation, but the larger British cities (except London, Liverpool, and Dublin) and most German cities operate their own gas plants. In the case of street railways municipal ownership is very rare in America, but has been adopted in about forty places in Great Britain, including London and Manchester. Municipal electric-lighting plants are extremely common in the United States, being found in Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere, though ownership and operation by private companies is much more usual. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, the majority of electric-lighting plants are operated by the municipalities. Telephone service is rarely found under municipal management, though in some cases, as in Japan and in Australia, it is directly conducted by the general government. Rarer examples of collective activity are seen in municipal house-building, sale of electric power, etc. It is, of course, impossible to enter here into the discussion of the economic advantages or disadvantages of municipal ownership. Reference is only made to it in this connection to illustrate the greatly widened sphere of state control characteristic of the present era.
READINGS SUGGESTED
Leroy-Beaulieu, P., The Modern State (translation, 1891), books i, ii.
Hobson, J., Evolution of Modern Capitalism, chaps. iii, iv, v.
Jenks, J. W., The Trust Problem (1901), chaps., iv, x, xi.
Johnson, E., American Railway Transportation (1903), chap. xxix.
FURTHER AUTHORITIES
Von Halle, E., Trusts (1900).
Taussig, F. W., Tariff History of the United States (5th edition, 1901).
Ashley, P., Modern Tariff History (1904).
Dawson, W. H., Protection in Germany (1904).
Ely, R., Monopolies and Trusts (1900).
Report of U. S. Industrial Commission (1900-02).
Hoffman, F. S., The Sphere of the State (3d edition, 1898).
Bemis, Municipal Monopolies (1899).
Carey, Municipal Ownership of Natural Monopolies (1900).
Report of U. S. Commissioner of Labor: Water, Gas and Electric Light Plants under Private and Public Ownership (1899).
Willoughby, W., Workingmen’s Insurance (1898).
New Zealand Year Book (annual).
Bulletin of U. S. Bureau of Labor. Government Industrial Arbitration (1905).
Sidgwick, H., Principles of Political Economy (1883), book iii.
Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
PREFACE
In the present volume the narrative of personal biography is subordinated to the record of political achievement. The name of Robert Baldwin and that of his distinguished colleague Louis LaFontaine will always be associated with the words responsible government. Baldwin was frequently derided by his contemporaries as a “man of one idea.” Time has shown that this “one idea” of Robert Baldwin, — the conception of responsible government, — has proved the corner-stone of the British imperial system. It is fitting, therefore, that this brief account of the political career of Robert Baldwin and his associates should centre round the evolution of responsible government in the province of Canada. In other works of the present series the periods of Canadian history preceding and following the LaFontaine-Baldwin administrations have already been treated. The biography of Papineau, already published, and the forthcoming biography of William Lyon Mackenzie offer an ample account of the stirring events of the rebellion. Sir John Bourinot in his Lord Elgin and Mr. Lewis in his George Brown have told the story of the administration of Hincks and Morin after the retirement of their former chiefs. The present narrative is therefore especially concerned with the two LaFontaine-Baldwin ministries and with the great political controversy during the administration of Sir Charles Metcalfe.
The author desires to express his sincere thanks for the very valuable assistance and useful suggestions received from Dr. James Bain, Librarian of the Toronto Public Library, and from Mr. Charles Gould, Librarian of McGill University. The author owes much also to the kindness of Dr. A. G. Doughty, C.M.G., Archivist of the Dominion Government.
STEPHEN LEACOCK.
McGill University,
July 31st, 1906.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
FROM THE TIME of the surrender of Canada by the capitulation of Vaudreuil at Montreal in 1760, the government of the province presented an unsolved problem, whose difficulties finally culminated in the outbreak of 1837. In the beginning the country was entirely French, an appanage of the British Crown by right of conquest. Its population, some seventy thousand in number, thinly spread along the valley of the St. Lawrence, was almost entirely an agricultural peasantry. Ignorant and illiterate as they were, they cherished towards their Church an unfailing devotion, while a stubborn pride of nationality remained with them as a heritage from the great country from which they had sprung. Of initial loyalty to the British Crown there could be no question. Still less could there be any question of self-government. Military rule was established as a necessity of the situation. Even when, in 1764, a year after the final treaty of cession, the purely military rule was superseded by the institution of an executive council, this body consisted merely of a group of officials appointed by the governor of the province. Nor is it to be said that this form of government was of itself an injustice. The inhabitants of French Canada had known nothing of political rights or representative institutions. Only in rare cases had offices, favour, or promotion been bestowed upon native Canadians. Even the Church itself, in spite of its democratic tradition in favour of capacity and zeal, had withheld all superior offices from the children of the humble peasantry of the St. Lawrence. To have instituted among such a people a system of democratic self-government on the morrow of the conquest, could only have ended in chaos and disaster.
Kingsford, History of Canada, Vol. IX., p et seq.
The government thus established by royal proclamation was systematized and consolidated by the British parliament through the Quebec Act of 1774. This statute established in Canada a province of magnificent extent. Northward it extended to the Hudson Bay Territory; on the south it bordered New England, New York, Pennsylvania and the Ohio; westward it reached to where all trace of civilization ended with the Mississippi River. The Ohio valley was already dotted here and there in its forests and open meadow lands with the cabins of adventurous settlers. Of the rest of Canada the valley of the St. Lawrence was the only occupied part. Thither had come already, since the conquest, a few British immigrants, for the most part small traders and needy adventurers. The upper portion of the province was still a wilderness. The Quebec Act restored to the country the old French civil law, the “Coutume de Paris,” under which it had lived before the conquest. It retained the English criminal law. It repeated the guarantee of freedom of worship already extended to the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church, and, in permitting to the clergy of that Church the enjoyment of their “accustomed dues and rights,” it legalized the collection of the tithe. The government was committed to a governor with a legislative council to be nominated by the Crown, to which was added by Major-General Carleton (1776), in accordance with instructions from England, an executive (or privy) council of five members. The Act declared it “inexpedient to call an assembly.” Fox, indeed, pleaded in the House of Commons in favour of representative institutions, but was met with the argument that a Protestant government could not safely entrust power to a Roman Catholic legislature.
14 Geo. III., c. 83.
See V. Coffin, The Province of Quebec and the Early American Revolution (1896), Ch. II. p et seq.
The tithe was, however, only to be collected from persons professing the Roman Catholic religion.
Sir H. Cavendish, Debates on the Quebec Act, (1839), p-8.
It is a disputed point how far the concessions thus granted to the French were adopted as a means of preserving the country from the infection of the revolutionary discontent, widespread in the colonies of the Atlantic sea-board, and of preventing the French habitant from making common cause with the malcontents of New England and Virginia. Such, if not the purpose, was at any rate the effect of the Act. The pulpits of Massachusetts were loud with denunciation of the toleration of popery embodied in the statute. The American congress (September 5th, 1774) expressed its alarm in documentary form, and the small British minority already settled in Lower Canada forwarded to England a petition of energetic protest. The fact that the British government, in the face of bigoted opposition, passed and maintained the statute which stands as the charter of religious liberty for Roman Catholic Canada, may be said to have laid the foundation of that firm attachment of the Canadian French to the Crown, which, after the lapse of four generations, has become one of the fundamental factors of the political life of Canada. The effect of the Act in preventing the adherence of the habitants to the cause of the American revolution is undoubted. The clergy of the province threw the whole weight of their influence in favour of the British side. The agitators sent into the country found but few sympathizers of influence, and the attempt at military conquest ended in failure.
The issue of the Revolutionary War and the separation of the revolted colonies from Great Britain had a momentous effect upon the destinies of British North America. That province now became a haven of refuge for the distressed Loyalists, who abandoned the United States in thousands rather than sever their allegiance from their mother country. Of these nearly thirty thousand found their way into the Maritime Provinces. Others, ascending the St. Lawrence or coming by Lake Champlain, settled in the Eastern Townships of Quebec or near to Montreal itself. Still others, pushing their way up the river or passing over the rough wagon-trails of the forest country of New York, embarked on Lake Ontario to find new homes upon its northern shores. Liberal grants of land were made. Settlements sprang up along the Bay of Quinté, on the Niagara frontier, on the Grand River, on the Thames and as far west as the Detroit River. By the year 1791 there were some thirty thousand settlers in the districts thus thrown open. The newcomers, impoverished as most of them were, made excellent pioneers. Their conviction of the righteousness of their cause lent vigour to their arduous struggle with the wilderness. The sound of the axe resounded amid the stillness of the pine forest; farmsteads and hamlets arose on the shores of the lake and beside its tributary streams. But with the coming of the Loyalists Canada became a divided country. The population of the upper country was British, that of the lower, French. French law and custom seemed to the new settlers anomalous and unjust. British Protestantism was abhorrent to the devout Catholics of French Canada. The new settlers, too, accustomed to the political freedom which they had enjoyed in the colonies of their origin, chafed under autocratic control, and in repeated petitions demanded of the home government the privilege of a representative assembly.
