Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 460
Among those who had warmly espoused the side of Reform in Lower Canada, but who, like Baldwin and Hincks in the Upper Province, had had no sympathy with armed insurrection, was Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. LaFontaine, the son of a farmer of Boucherville, in the county of Chambly, was born in October, 1807. His grandfather had been a member of the assembly of Lower Canada from 1796 until 1804. LaFontaine was educated at the College of Montreal, where he distinguished himself as well by the natural alertness of his mind as by a stubborn self-assertion which rendered somewhat irksome to him the narrow, clerical discipline of the institution. After studying law in the office of a Mr. Roy, LaFontaine entered upon legal practice in the town of Montreal. Here in 1831 he married Mlle. Adèle Berthelot, daughter of a Lower Canadian advocate, who died, however, a few years later leaving no children. Into the political struggle of the time LaFontaine threw himself with great activity. He was elected a member of the assembly for Terrebonne in 1830 and became a supporter, though not entirely a follower, of the turbulent Papineau. Between the two French-Canadian leaders, there were from the start marked differences both of opinion and of purpose. Papineau, aware of the great influence of the clergy, was anxious to conciliate their interests and enlist their support. LaFontaine, bold if not heterodox in his views, stood out as the champion of Le Jeune Canada, against the traditional dominance of the priesthood. Although LaFontaine had no sympathy whatever with violent measures, he distinguished himself during the constitutional agitation as one of the boldest of the agitators. His first action in the legislature was to second a motion for the refusal of supplies, and throughout the years preceding the rebellion, both from his place in parliament and in the press, he exerted himself unceasingly in the cause of the popular party. When the storm broke in 1837, he endeavoured in vain to dissuade his fellow-countrymen from taking up arms. A few days after the skirmishes on the Richelieu (December, 1837) he went from Montreal to Quebec to beg Lord Gosford to call a meeting of the legislature with a view to prevent further violence. On the refusal of the governor to do so, LaFontaine took ship for England. Fearing, however, that his complicity in the agitation preceding the Canadian revolt might lead to his arrest, he fled from England and spent some little time in France. Thence he returned to Canada in May, 1838. This was the moment when Sir John Colborne was busily employed in extinguishing the still smouldering ashes of revolt. Wholesale arrests of supposed sympathizers were made. An ordinance passed by Sir John Colborne and his special council, appointed under the Act suspending the constitution of Lower Canada, declared the Habeas Corpus Act to be without force in the province. The prisons were soon filled to overflowing. Among those arrested was Hippolyte LaFontaine, an arrest for which legal grounds were altogether lacking. LaFontaine, since his return to Canada, had written a letter to Girouard, one of his associates in the constitutional agitation, in regard to the frontier disturbances of 1838, recommending, in what was clearly and evidently an ironical vein, a continuance of the insurrection. On the strength of this and on the ground of his having been notorious as a leader of the French-Canadian faction, he was arrested on November 7th, 1838, and imprisoned at Montreal. The evident insufficiency of the charges against him, led shortly to his release without trial. The collapse of the rebellion, the flight of Papineau and O’Callaghan, and the arrest of Wolfred Nelson and many other leaders, naturally induced the despairing people of Lower Canada to look for guidance to the moderate members of the party who had realized from the first the folly of armed revolt. In the period of reconstruction which now followed under the rule of Lord Durham and Lord Sydenham, LaFontaine was recognized as the leader of the national Reform party of Lower Canada, energetic in its protest against the proposed system of union and British preponderance but determined by constitutional means, when the union was forced upon them, to turn it to account in the interest of French Canada.
L. O. David, Biographies et Portraits, (Montreal, 1876), p et seq.
Kingsford, Vol. IX, .
1 and 2 Vict. c. g. For the Habeas Corpus Act question see R. Christie, History of the Late Province of Lower Canada, Vol. VI., p et seq.
The following extract from a letter written by Sir Charles Bagot to Lord Stanley under date of November 25th, 1842, is of interest in this connection:— “With regard to Mr. LaFontaine, I have always understood that he was arrested upon mere suspicion. He protested strongly at the time, and subsequently, against the unjustifiableness of the proceeding, and demanded, but in vain, to see the warrant or affidavit on which he was arrested. The public offices furnish no record of the transaction, but Mr. Daly has supplied me with a copy of a letter which Mr. LaFontaine addressed to him from New York, and which was shown by him to Lord Durham. This document bears satisfactory evidence of his readiness to court inquiry.” (Archives of Canada. MS. Letters of Sir C. Bagot.)
CHAPTER III
THE UNION OF THE CANADAS
THE COLLAPSE OF the rebellion of 1837 opens a new era, not merely in the history of Canada itself, but in the history of colonial government. The revolt, unsuccessful though it was, had brought into clear light the fact that the previous system of colonial management could not permanently endure, that its continuance must inevitably mean discontent and discord which could only terminate in forcible separation. The lesson that the mother country had failed to learn from the loss of its Atlantic colonies in 1776 had now been repeated. This time, fortunately for the mother country and the colonies, there were statesmen ready to give heed to the lessons of the past. The years of reconstruction that ensued may be considered to constitute the truly critical period of our colonial history. The position was indeed a difficult one. England found itself in possession of a colony still bleeding from the strife of civil war, and torn with racial and religious antagonism. The majority of its inhabitants cherished, indeed, a conscientious loyalty to the British connection, but smarted from a sense of unredressed wrongs and long-continued misgovernment, while those who had been forced into submission at the point of the bayonet, harboured an embittered hatred against their conquerors. That a means was found to establish, in such a situation, a form of government fitted to restore peace, prosperity and loyalty, ranks among the finest triumphs of British administrative skill; and it stands as the great political achievement of the colonial statesmen whose work forms the subject of the present volume, that they both planned the adoption and sustained the execution of the sole policy that could preserve to an illustrious future the colonial system of Great Britain. Responsible government was the chief, indeed the only, demand of Robert Baldwin and his associates; it had been a leading demand of the Radicals in Upper Canada who had been drawn into revolt, and it had been one of the demands of the French-Canadian party of discontent. The history of British administration, like the structure of British government, is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Nor is there any inconsistency more striking than this: that the imperial government, after strenuously denying the possibility of colonial self-government and suppressing the rebellion of its subjects who had taken up arms largely to obtain it, proceeded to grant to the conquered colony the privilege which peaceful agitation had constantly failed to obtain.
The British government, stirred from the lethargy and ignorance which had so long characterized its colonial administration, was now anxious to redeem the past. “The Downing Street conscience,” as a Canadian historian has called it, was quickened into a belated activity. With a view to ascertaining the grievances of the Canadians and enabling the government of Lord Melbourne to adopt remedial measures, a special high commissioner and governor-general was sent out to British North America in the person of Lord Durham. John George Lambton, created Baron Durham in 1828, and Earl of Durham in 1832, is one of the notable characters of Canadian history, and one whose name will ever be associated with the grant of responsible government to Canada. The scion of a Whig family whose members had represented the city of Durham in the House of Commons continuously from 1727 until 1797, Durham came honestly by Liberal principles, which his ardent temperament and domineering intellect carried to the verge of radicalism. He had already enjoyed a career of distinction, had served in the army, sat in the House of Commons and had held the post of Lord Privy Seal in the ministry of Earl Grey (1830). Over Lord Grey, whose eldest daughter he had married, Durham possessed an unusual ascendency, “une funeste influence” the aged Talleyrand had called it. Prominent as one of the leading supporters of the British Reform Bill and identified in ideas, if not in practice, with the Liberal creed of equal rights, Lord Durham appeared preëminently suited to typify to the people of Canada the earnest desire of the mother country to redress their wrongs. From the moment of his arrival at Quebec (May 29th, 1838), he threw himself with characteristic energy into the task before him. The powers conferred upon him as high commissioner, Lord Durham interpreted with the utmost latitude. He regarded himself in the light of a benevolent dictator, and supported the extraordinary powers which he thus assumed with an ostentatious magnificence. He reconstructed Sir John Colborne’s council in Lower Canada, issued an amnesty to the generality of political prisoners still in confinement and to the participants in the late rebellion, and, on his own authority, banished to Bermuda certain leaders in the insurrection. He set up at the same time special commissions to enquire into education, immigration, municipal government and Crown lands; paid a brief visit to Upper Canada, where he was received with enthusiasm, and in his short stay of five months gathered together the voluminous materials which formed the basis of the celebrated report. Meanwhile, however, the governor-general’s enemies in England were working busily against him. The illegal powers which he had seen fit to assume were made the basis of an unsparing attack. Durham’s actions were denounced in the House of Lords and but feebly defended by the government. The ordinance by which he had granted political amnesty was disallowed by the Crown. On the news of this, Durham, conscious of the real utility of his work in Canada, and stung to the quick at the pettifogging legality of the government, issued (October 9th, 1838) an ill-considered proclamation, in which he recited the aims of his mission and declared that “if the peace of Lower Canada is to be again menaced, it is necessary that its government should be able to reckon on a more cordial and vigorous support at home than has been accorded to me.” This was too much. The high commissioner had become, in the words of the London Times, a “High Seditioner,” and the government reluctantly ordered Lord Durham’s recall. For this, however, the governor-general had not waited. He had already reëmbarked for England, and completed during the voyage the preparation of his report.
Dr. George Bryce, Short History of the Canadian People, Ch. xi. Section iii.
Justin McCarthy, History of Our Own Times, Vol. I. Ch. iii.
Greville Memoirs, Ch. xvi.
F. Bradshaw, Self-government in Canada (London, 1902), .
R. Christie, History of the Late Province of Lower Canada, Vol. V., Ch. xliii.
Among all the state papers on British colonial administration, the report of Lord Durham, both in point of form and of substance, stands easily first. It is needless here to discuss how much of its preparation was owed to the ability of the governor-general’s secretaries; it is certain that a part of it at any rate was the personal work of Lord Durham himself. In its bearing upon the topic which is the main subject of the present volume, it stands as a Magna Charta of colonial liberty. The report contains a masterly analysis of the origin and progress of those grievances which had driven the provinces to revolt, together with a survey of the existing situation with recommendations for its amelioration. The distracted condition of the Canadian provinces was attributed by Lord Durham to two causes. The first of these was the intense racial animosity existing between the English and the French, an animosity still further inflamed by the arrogant pretensions of the English minority in Lower Canada, which the report pitilessly exposed. The second cause of disturbance was found in the absence of that system of responsible government which could alone confer upon the people of Canada the political liberty to which they were entitled. As a remedy Durham proposed the reunion of the two Canadas into a single province, with a legislature representative of both the races. Such a union he anticipated would necessarily mean, sooner or later, the dominance of British interests and British nationality.
“I have little doubt,” wrote Lord Durham, “that the French when once placed, by the legitimate course of events and the working of natural causes, in a minority, would abandon their vain hope of nationality . . . . I certainly shall not like to subject the French-Canadians to the rule of the identical English minority with whom they have so long been contending; but from a majority emanating from so much more extended a source, I do not think that they would have any oppression or injustice to fear.” Had Lord Durham’s report rested for its reputation upon his view of the probable future of French Canada it would never have achieved its historic distinction. Indeed Durham’s political foresight failed him in that he did not see, as LaFontaine, Morin and the leaders of the moderate party presently demonstrated, that the system of government which he went on to recommend for the united provinces would prove the very means of sustaining the nationality and influence of the French-Canadians. It is in its recommendation of a change in the system of government that the chief merit of the report is to be found. “Without a change in our system of government the discontent which now prevails will spread and advance . . . . It is difficult to understand how any English statesman could have imagined that representative and irresponsible government could be successfully combined . . . . It needs no change in the principles of government, no invention of a new constitutional theory, to supply the remedy which would, in my opinion, completely remove the existing political disorders. It needs but to follow out consistently the principles of the British constitution, and introduce into the government of these great colonies those wise provisions by which alone the working of the representative system can in any country be rendered harmonious and efficient . . . . The responsibility to the united legislature of all officers of the government, except the governor and his secretary, should be secured by every means known to the British constitution.”
Report of the Earl of Durham, (Methuen & Co., new edition, 1902,) p, 228.
The administration of Lord Durham and the policy which he was about to recommend to the imperial government, commanded among the Reformers of Upper Canada a cordial support. Hincks established at Toronto, July 3rd, 1838, a weekly paper called the Examiner, (there was as yet no daily published in the little town) which bore as its motto the words, “Responsible Government.” On the first page of it Hincks printed each week for some months “three extracts which were intended to explain the principles it was intended to advocate.” The first of these was the well-worn saying of Lieutenant-governor Simcoe, that the constitution of the colony was nothing less than “the very image and transcript of that of Great Britain.” In a leading article of the first number of the Examiner, Hincks wrote in support of Lord Durham: “We trust his advice will be followed by all parties in this province, and we would urge those Reformers, who, guiltless of any violation of the laws, have been wantonly oppressed and insulted for the last six months, to forget their injuries, and repose confidence in the illustrious individual to whom the government of these provinces has been entrusted.”
Reminiscences, .
Meantime the imperial government had decided to act upon the advice presented in Lord Durham’s report and to effect a union of the Canadas. A bill to that effect was brought into parliament, but on reconsideration was withdrawn, in order that still further information might be obtained about the state of opinion in the colony, and in order that, as far as might be, the terms of the union should be proposed by the colonists themselves. To effect this purpose a new governor-general was dispatched to the Canadian provinces, in the person of Mr. Charles Poulett Thomson. Thomson came of a mercantile family, had been in the Russian trade at St. Petersburg, had sat in the Commons, had served as vice-president of the Board of Trade in the ministry of Lord Grey, and had no little reputation as a Liberal economist and tariff expert. His business career enabled him at his coming to make a pleasing show of democratic equality with the colonial community. “Bred a British merchant myself,” he told the Committee of Trade at Quebec, “the good opinion of those who follow the same honourable career is to me naturally and justly dear.” The “British merchant” was, however, very shortly removed to a higher plane by his elevation to the peerage as Baron Sydenham and Toronto. At Quebec the governor-general took over the administration of Lower Canada from the hands of Sir John Colborne. Thence he went to Montreal, where he arrived on October 22nd, 1839, and proceeded to lay the imperial plan of union before the special council, a body of nominated members appointed by Colborne, the representative institutions of the colony being still in suspense. This plan, as conceived in outline by the imperial government, involved the establishment of a legislature in which the two provinces should be equally represented, the creation of a permanent civil list, and the assumption by the united provinces of the debt already incurred in public works in Upper Canada.
