Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 731
Of necessity the government of the North-West had to be reorganized. There followed the creation of the sister provinces Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905 and the expansion of the boundaries of Manitoba. Since Rupert’s Land was thus doomed, Extension of Boundaries Act, 1912 Ontario and Quebec took off the rest of it, the provinces thus reaching to the now familiar line of 60 degrees north and the Hudson Bay and Strait. Beyond that the Yukon had already Yukon Territory Act, 1898 been organized as a Territory with a Controller and an elected Council of three members, and the rest of the North, known and unknown, frozen or thawed, divided up as Mackenzie, Keewatin, and Franklin Districts under direct Dominion control. 1920 The North-West Mounted Police became everywhere the symbol of law and order.
Under such circumstances the general elections of 1904 and 1908 passed as in a dream. The government had become a legend; a sort of mythology grew round them as if they created the good times, with the Minister of Agriculture as God of the Harvest and the Minister of the Fisheries as the Neptune of canned salmon. A hush fell upon the electorate as if the Ministry had been protected by a sort of highway sign, “Men at work; do not disturb.” It will be recalled that when the party finally met disaster in 1911 they went down under the pathetic slogan, “Let Laurier finish his work.”
But there was one phase of immigration into Canada in this halcyon period which occasioned difficulty and violent opposition. This was the oriental migration to British Columbia. The United States had long since realized the danger to American civilization of an influx of the Asiatic races to the Pacific coast. Asia could, and would, have flooded Pacific America, turning against Western Civilization its own invention of easy transport, and its own industrial demand for cheap labour. Welcomed at first as the coolies of the gold diggings, the Chinese soon became a menace to California. Bret Harte’s mournful poem concerning Ah Sin, The Heathen Chinee, gives the views of Truthful James on “Chinese cheap labour” and represents a mosaic fragment of world history. The American exclusion law dates from 1882.
But British America was more slow in recognizing the Asiatic L. Neame, “The Asiatic Danger in the Colonies,” 1907 peril. In early days in Victoria, with labour scarce and dear and Chinamen cheap and handy, their coming met no opposition. Even when railway building began, the Chinese coolie labour was more than welcome. Indeed its import was encouraged. It accorded with the traditional doctrines of liberty, of the open-door, the traditional British privilege of refuge for exiles of all complexion and colour. People who had only seen Hindus as curiosities at Oxford or on the cricket field, and Chinese in the form of Li Hung Chang accepting an honorary degree, and who 1896 were in no danger of an invasion of the hop fields of Kent or the farms of Sussex by Chinese cheap labour, felt themselves singularly wide-minded as compared with the narrow selfishness of the Colonials. The British Columbian apparently did not realize that the Chinaman was his brother. Fuel was added to this flame by the unhappy episode of the import of Chinese coolie labour, under indentures, into the compounds of the South African mines. British Columbian opinion, thoroughly aroused Reports, Department of Justice, Ottawa, 1900-1905 against the Asiatic peril, expressed itself in a series of Exclusion Acts. The Dominion Government set its face towards England and used its power of disallowance. The quarrel went on for four or five years, until general opinion in Canada began to realize the danger, so obvious now, of unrestricted immigration. A statute of 1886 had undertaken to check Chinese immigration by an admission tax of $50 which was raised to $500 in the year 1904 — a plan intended to combine a perfect liberty of entry with a perfect impossibility of entering. The Act only half succeeded. Capital could still sink $500 in a cheap Chinaman and take it out of him later. Moreover the United States complained that Canadian entry served as their back door. Canada got the $500 and the United States got the Chinaman. Later on an Act of 1923 forbade all immigration of the Chinese coolie class.
The case of Japan was different. Japan was now an armed nation. Britain had concluded a sort of general alliance, or at least entente, with Japan. It was felt that nothing must be done to hurt the pride of Japan. Chinese pride didn’t matter. The suppression of the national movement — China for the Chinese — had seen to that. The nature and the justice of the Chinese movement was lost to most British and American people by its funny name of the “Boxers.” The Chinese term corresponds in reality to such heroic terms as the “mailed fist.” Nothing makes sadder reading to the idealist than the disregard of Asiatic rights by Europeans in the past, except the present disregard of European rights by the Asiatics.
For Japan was found a method of ‘saving face’ in the immigration difficulty by what was called a “gentleman’s agreement.” It was known, from the opening chorus of The Mikado, that there were then “gentlemen of Japan.” One of them was found to make an agreement of good faith whereby Canada would not 1908 exclude Japanese labourers from immigration and that Japan would see that not too many immigrated. On the Canadian side a prominent part in the settlement was played by Mr. William Lyon Mackenzie King, then rising to eminence as Deputy Minister, and presently (1909) as Minister of Labour. It was one of the first of the many triumphs in finding the common ground of common sense which were to result later on in securing for Mr. King, as has been wittily said, “employment from time to time at Ottawa.”
ADAM SHERRIFF SCOTT, A.R.C.A., MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941
“The North-West Mounted Police became everywhere the symbol of law and order” — page 208
Hindu immigration to British Columbia was ingeniously side-tracked by the “continuous voyage” rule, as smart a piece of legislation as any that ever disfranchised negroes in the South. The Hindus were free to come, but only on a ‘through’ ship; and there were no through ships. Just before the war of 1914 somebody, or some government, supplied the money to fetch a direct ship with brown samples to Vancouver. The fat was in the fire but at that moment the war pot boiled over.
It was a new feature of the settlement of the North-West in the twentieth century, that it did not bring with it merely the population of the land and of stores and the workshops — the so-called “working people.” It brought with them people to whom that title is commonly denied and whose activities are presumably midway between work and leisure, the lawyers, the doctors, the clergy — all the round of the learned professions, and with them the whole apparatus of education and culture. Alberta and Saskatchewan began where older civilization ends — with Authors’ Associations, Browning Societies and lectures on palæontology. The things in which older communities run to seed were the new seeds from which they drew life. The University of Saskatchewan rose, literally, on the empty prairie, on the high ground that overlooks the sweeping slopes of the Saskatchewan Valley. At the same time the University of Alberta emerged from Fort Edmonton as complete as Minerva from the head of Jove. It is a hidden secret, known only inside colleges, but unsuspected even by college trustees, that the most distinguished university in all the world can be made overnight by gathering to it the most distinguished scholars of all the world. The North-West guessed a part of this secret, and imported along with its harvest machinery, a working plant of scholarship that brought McGill and Toronto, Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne to the plains of the West. The vivifying example stimulated a new cultural activity in the older provinces of the West, themselves still young. Manitoba equipped itself anew. British Columbia shook off the leading-strings of McGill, and gave to its University a magnificent endowment of land beside the ocean that ought to guarantee its finances and its inspiration.
Nor should this expanding current of intellectual life be traced only in Western Canada. It was a part of a new life animating the whole country. The earliest era of war and wandering and danger gave way in Canada to the era of pioneer settlement, the fort to the farm. This was now giving place to the industrial age of all-round industry. The tone of the people altered with it. All R. Jebb, “Studies in Colonial Nationalism,” 1905 observers of the period noted what began to be called the new Nationalism of Canada, and local patriotism and pride rang the changes on the idea that Canada was a nation. This was in part a political idea but in part also social, intellectual and literary.
It has not been possible in this survey to do more than glance at the development of art and letters in Canada. Nor was there, “Canada and Its Provinces,” Vol. 12, 1914 till the later nineteenth century, much more than what a glance might cover. Learning in the new world took its light from the old. A country with neither press nor public can do little else. Laval University and the classical colleges of French Canada accepted for education the old French models, undisturbed since Louis Quatorze. The British colleges reproduced the classics of Oxford, the mathematics of Cambridge and the surgery and philosophy of Edinburgh. Polite culture imitated Britain. A false quantity in a Latin quotation in the Parliament at Toronto would have called forth the same laugh as at Westminster — or an unconvincing imitation of it. Educated people of those days disclaimed all knowledge of such things as chemistry, as people openly disclaim sin. As with learning so with letters. There was but little that was not merely imitative, a lamp with old oil that burned dim in a wilderness. From the time of the humorist 1606 Lescarbot, of Port Royal, letters in Canada consisted mostly of things written about Canada such as Lescarbot’s own history and that of Charlevoix. Till far on in the nineteenth century the whole output of literature in Canada, French or English, had not amounted to much. One may recall the scholarly Histoire du Canada of François-Xavier Garneau, published in 1848, the work of twenty-five years of research, and, in English, Robert Christie’s History of Canada 1791-1821 and later the ten volumes of Kingsford the mathematician, which have become of peculiar value owing to their undiscriminating comprehensiveness. In the highest rank, vivid with the illumination of genius, and with the merit that crowns an unremitting toil defiant of a failing body, are the pages of Francis Parkman. But Parkman was an American and his theme continental. Goldwin Smith’s polished work was that of Oxford in Canada. In fiction and poetry few voices from Stephen Leacock, “Humour, Its Theory and Technique,” 1930 Canada reached home. John Galt of the ‘Lone Shieling’ and Tom Moore of the faintly tolling “evening chime,” took a song home with them. Louis Fréchette reached the ear of France, but that was much later. A conspicuous exception is that of Judge Haliburton of Nova Scotia, reaching England as Sam Slick. He has been falsely accused as the father of the illegitimate child called American humour. But accurate history acquits him.
Nor is it possible to say that there was in the nineteenth century a Canadian literature, meaning literature written in Canada in a Canadian way which others may admire but did not originate. Most people would agree that there is still none. Canadian art there is, but not Canadian literature. The topic is delicate, with so easy an affront in it that it will stand a moment’s elaborating. American literature (that of the United States) was similarly slow in coming. Sydney Smith, the famous cleric and wit of a hundred or more years ago, once asked, “Who reads an American book?” He had hardly said it when all England found itself reading Washington Irving’s Sketch Book of 1819, absorbed in Hawthorne’s gloomy fancies, weeping over Longfellow’s Evangeline, and crawling breathless on all-fours through the forest with Fenimore Cooper, fearful of snapping a dry twig. Yet this was still not American literature; it was still part of the common stock, no better in its origin than Shakespeare or Milton.
It is exactly at that point that our literature in Canada still stands. There is not as yet a Canadian literature in the sense indicated. Nor is there similarly a Canadian humour, nor any particularly Canadian way of being funny. Nor is there, apart from varying accents, any Canadian language. We use English for writing, American for conversation and slang and profanity, and Scottish models for moral philosophy and solemnity. Maria Chapdelaine may well be rated as one of the world’s books. But it is only Canadian in the sense that it was written about Canada, seen better by a transient outsider than by ourselves. In the United States such writers as Mark Twain and O. Henry presently brought forth an American way of writing, greatly admired by great writers in England, who could not have written a line of it. Whether that will happen in Canada is doubtful. The times are against it. In all the Britains and in the United States, speech, thought and language now amalgamate, not diverge.
What is true of letters has not been true of art. All through the nineteenth century there were excellent painters in Canada, but little to distinguish their work from that of the overseas schools in which the most fortunate of them were trained. The topic changes but not the hand. The St. Lawrence looked like the Rhine and a waterfall was a waterfall. Then came a time when some one — was it Maurice Cullen first, or was it many people together? — discovered Canadian scenery and what to do with ob. 1934 it — the breaking snow and the black water of opening spring, the intensity of dry cold, and with that a whole wealth of coloured sands and changing woods and the broken foam of rapids. The Latin inscription to Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s Cathedral invites anyone who seeks for his monument to look about him. The readers of this book, curious over Canadian art of the day, may do the same.
But if letters lay behind, science in the form of applied science has run ahead. The new century soon showed schools of engineering with which Great Britain had nothing to compare. Our country gave its open opportunity. Cambridge could teach hydraulic science; Canada could send the student over a waterfall. In this pre-war era hundreds of British students came to Canadian universities for applied science as humbly as Canadians used to go to Oxford for unapplied Greek and to Cambridge for inapplicable mathematics. More than that; it looked for a moment, when the century opened, as if one great Canadian A. S. Eve, “Lord Rutherford, 1871-1937” College was to become the Mecca of all the world for pure physical science.
It was only natural that the quickening of intellectual life and the new sense of nationality should revive the question of the Empire. Universal peace, like free trade, was a lost dream. Separation looked too dangerous with a German Empire risen on the ashes of empire in France, with Russia ‘at the gates of Herat,’ harboured on the Pacific and reaching out everywhere for the open sea. Hence arose the impetus towards protection by union and strength in the Empire that brought the abortive G. Parkin “Imperial Federation,” 1892 Imperial Federation League (1883-1893). It held its meetings and it sang God Save the Queen on the veldt and on the prairie, in cities as old as Chester and as new as Portage la Prairie. Then it turned out that Federation meant federal taxes. Naval defence cost money. The colonies — they were still called that — claimed that they protected the Empire by opening new lands. With that the League went to pieces, broke up like Canadian ice, blew away like Australian sand, and dwindled like a South African river.
W. J. PHILLIPS, R.C.A., WINNIPEG, MAN., 1941
“The University of Saskatchewan rose . . . on the empty prairie . . .” — page 213
But the under-current still flowed. In place of formal federation came the pageants of demonstration of imperial power and the union of hearts, at the Golden Jubilee of 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee of ten years later. Out of these when the South R. Jebb, “The Imperial Conference,” 1911 African War had come and gone, grew the successive Conferences, Colonial till 1902 and Imperial after 1907. They occasioned an infinity of discussion and led, as far as any conclusion went, exactly nowhere. “If you want our aid,” said Sir Wilfrid Laurier to Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, “call us to your councils.” Mr. Chamberlain answered with equal grandiloquence to the same effect, “Come in, but pay as you enter.” The Car of State stuck right there. Similarly the tariff problem was introduced at every Conference and got wedged, like a piano in a doorway. Canada gave a tariff preference that began in 1898. Mr. Chamberlain said it didn’t prefer. Years later some one said what everybody thought, and called it humbug. The Conference of 1911 saw a complete scheme for an Imperial Federal Council presented by the Prime Minister of New Zealand. It was not really a child of his own. It had been fathered by a round-table group of Empire enthusiasts. This academic foundling he laid on the doorstep of the Conference. It turned out to be a dummy. Mr. Asquith, the Imperial Prime Minister, joined with Sir Wilfrid Laurier in repudiating it. That was the end of imperial reorganization. People on the inside thought things ominous. A divided Empire seemed too weak to fight. But outside of the inside, nobody thought much about it. “We are happy as we are,” said a leading French-Canadian jurist.
During all this period relations with the United States, as contrasted with earlier years, were singularly happy. The Alaska H.L. Keenleyside, “Canada and the United States,” 1929 Boundary Question, which came to new life in the opening of the century, occasioned a brief flurry and led Sir Wilfrid Laurier to declare that Canada has been once more “sacrificed on the altar of British diplomacy.” The reference was to the award made in regard to the boundary by a mixed tribunal, three Americans, two Canadians and one Englishman. In spite of the brilliant argument of Aimé Geoffrion, of Counsel for the Canadian case, the tribunal decided in favour of the United States the question whether the boundary separating the Alaskan Panhandle from British Columbia (the old boundary originally made in 1825 as between Russia and Great Britain) kept strictly back its ten leagues from the sea, even when the sea ran in as an inlet, or whether it cut across the inlets and gave Britain access in and out. Common sense shows at once that the meaning of the old Russian treaty was that Russia kept that part of the coast free from British access. When the false heat generated by argument was replaced by cold reason, Canadians at large knew that the award was just and another myth went the way of the North-West Angle of Nova Scotia. History has its little irony in making the impassable American Panhandle a part of our present protection.
