LITMIR.BIZ

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      But Providence would need to have broad shoulders if generals, kings and statesmen are to place all their doings there.

      By 1837 Canada was no longer a giant in its cradle. Colonial boyhood had arrived; a most obstreperous and well-nigh unmanageable youth, with many of the usual mistakes of alternate harshness and indulgence from the parent. For it was not all wisdom that came from Downing Street, either in despatches or in the gubernatorial flesh. It is easy now to see that much emanating therefrom came from those whose vision was confined to the limits of a small island.

      The great lubberly youth was given to measuring himself from time to time; for Canadian epochs are much like the marks made by ambitious children on the door jamb, marks to show increase in height and a nearer approach to the stature of the parent.

      Canadians’ privileges, like children’s, existed only during the good pleasure of those who governed them. Some meant well and did foolishly; others were “somewhat whimsical, fond of military pomp, accustomed to address deputations, parliamentary or others, as if they had been so many recruits liable to the quickening influence of the cat-o’-nine-tails.” One peer in the House of Lords, during a debate on the vexed Canadian question, demurred at the members of Colonial Assemblies being treated like froward children, forever tied to the Executive leading-strings. Canada was, in fact, bound to the Mother Country by bonds of red tape and nothing else. “Who made you?” catechized Great Britain. In the words of Mr. Henry Labouchere’s precocious young catechumen: “Let bygones be bygones; I intend to make myself,” replied the colony.

      The problem of assimilation created by the influx of all nations, and the fact of two divisions, a conquering and a conquered, with languages, customs and creeds as diverse as the peoples, made up an enigma the solution of which still occupies French and English wits alike.

      The English and the French temperaments, each the antipodes of the other, called for mutual patience and forbearance. But historic truth compels many admissions: first, that British rule with British freedom left out made a dark period from the Conquest to the Rebellion; second, that the national, religious and intellectual ideas of the French-Canadians, their whole mental attitude, were dominated by the Quebec Act; and the motto given them by Etienne Parent, “Nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois,” had become a kind of fetich. They looked upon themselves as the agents of their mother country and the Church in the New World; and they argued did they give up these laws, institutions and language, and become Anglicized, their nationality would be forever lost.

      The toast among officers en route to the Conquest had been, “British colours on every fort, port and garrison in America.” For many years after the British flag had first waved on the citadel the habitant on the plain lifted his eyes to where he had seen the lilies of France, and with heavy heart said to himself that which has become an historic saying, “Still we shall see the old folks back again”—words as pathetic in their hope as the Highlanders’ despairing “We return no more, no more.”

      It is doubtful if at this period the old folks bothered themselves much about their late colony. Like their own proverb, “In love there is always one who kisses and one who holds the cheek,” French Canada was expending a good deal of sentiment upon people who had forgotten that tucked away in a remote corner of the new world was “a relic preserved in ice,” a relic of France before the Revolution, its capital the farthermost point of manner and civilization, a town with an Indian sounding name, which yet bore upon its front the impress of nobility. For Quebec is and should be the central point of interest for all Canadians; the history of the old rock city for many a day was in effect the history of Canada. History speaks from every stone in its ruined walls—walls that have sustained five sieges.

      The Revolution did not create the same excited interest in Canada that might have been looked for, yet there were those who “wept bitterly” when they heard of the execution of the King. The patois, ignorance, superstition, devotion of its inhabitants, were identical with a time prior to the Revolution; and with them were the same social ideas and the same piety.

      But the power divided in France among king, nobles, and priest, in Canada was confined to priest alone; and when the dream of a republic was dreamt it was the priest and not the British soldier who made the awakening. The British soldier and those who sent him seem to have been not a whit better informed about the colony gained than France was about the colony lost. Some London journalists were not sure whether Canada formed part of the Cape of Good Hope or of the Argentine Republic. For a long time the English Government annually sent a flagpole for the citadel, probably grown in a Canadian forest. Nor did time improve their knowledge, for as late as the Trent affair one statesman in the House of Commons informed his more ignorant brethren that Canada was separated from the United States by the Straits of Panama.

      The acts of Regicide France inspired horror in Canada, yet were not without their fruits. Despite his title of the “Corsican ogre” and their horror of revolution, the submission of all Europe to Napoleon did not make the French of Canadian birth more submissive. Nor did the nation of shop-keepers, whom he despised and who were to cut his ambition and send him to his island prison, become more plausible, courteous or conciliatory, through their sense of victory. Many a thing, had the positions been reversed, which would have been passed unnoticed by a phlegmatic Briton, was to the Gallican a national insult.

      And LeMoine, that past grand master of the Franco-Anglo-Canadian complexion, says all too truthfully that conciliation was not a vice-regal virtue; and one of the singers of the day, a Briton of the Britons, confirms the opinion:

      “So triumph to the Tories and woe to the Whigs,

       And to all other foes of the nation;

       Let us be through thick and thin caring nothing for the prigs

       Who prate about conciliation.”

      But, under its fossil simplicity, Quebec, the “relic preserved in ice,” untrue to its formation, burned with a fearsome heat and glow in the years ’37-’38, and those prior to them. The thoughtless words of such birds of passage as commandants and governors were not calculated to put out the fire. The very origin of the name Jean Baptiste, applied generically, arose from a Jean Baptiste answering to every second name or so of a roll called in 1812, when he turned out in force to defend the British flag. Getting tired of the monotony of them, said the officer in his cheerful English way: “D—— them, they are all Jean Baptistes.” And so the name stuck. General Murray, outraged at any gold and scarlet apart from his own soldiers, lost all patience at the sight of French officers in the streets of Quebec. “One cannot tell the conquering from the conquered when one sees these—— Frenchmen walking about with their uniforms and their swords.”1

      But the French-Canadians did not struggle against individuals except as they represented a system considered vicious. With the British Constitution Jean Baptiste was a veritable Oliver Twist. He was not satisfied with the morsels doled out, but ever asked for more.

      True, there were many—at any rate, some—of the higher class French whose horizon was not bounded by petty feelings regarding race and religion. These men accepted British rule as one of the fortunes of war and enjoyed its benefits. An old seigneur, when dying, counselled his grandson, “Serve your English sovereign with as much zeal and devotion and loyalty as I have served the French monarch, and receive my last blessing.” And that king in whose reign insurrection was on the eve of breaking—irreverently called “Hooked-Nose Old Glorious Billy”—strangely enough had great sympathy with French-Canadian feeling, a sympathy which did much to hearten the minority who counselled abiding by the fortunes of war. But “Old Glorious” was also called the “People’s Friend,” and the Quebecers had lively and pleasant memories of him.

      In the nine years preceding the fateful one of ’37 there had been eight colonial ministers, the policy of each differing from that of his predecessor, and all of them with at best but an elementary knowledge of colonial affairs and the complexities arising from dual language, despite the object-lesson daily under their eyes in the Channel Islands. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Each Colonial Secretary had that little, and it proved the proverbial pistol which no one knew

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