The Winning of Popular Government Part 5

A Nation spoke to a Nation, A Throne sent word to a Throne: 'Daughter am I in my mother's house, But mistress in my own!

The doors are mine to open, As the doors are mine to close, And I abide by my mother's house,'

Said our Lady of the Snows.

_Quis separabit_? The confident prophecies of 'cutting the painter'

have all come to naught. In the supreme test of the Great War, Canada never for a moment faltered. She gave her blood and treasure freely in support of the Empire and the Right. No severer trial of those bonds that knit British peoples together can be imagined. To look back upon the time when British soldiers had to be sent to suppress a Canadian insurrection from a time when French Canadians and English Canadians are fighting side by side three thousand miles from their homes for the maintenance of the Empire is to envisage the most startling of historical paradoxes. That old, bad time seems as unsubstantial as a dream; this seems the only reality; and yet the two periods are separated only by the span of a not very long human life. {163} The truth is that in those days there were no Canadians. There were French on the banks of the St Lawrence, but their political horizon was bounded by the parish limits. Their most renowned leader had no vision but of an independent French republic, or of one more state in the Union. The people of the western province consisted of diverse elements. The solid kernel was of United Empire Loyalist stock, which gave the province its distinctive character. The Scottish, Irish, English immigration could not be reckoned among the genuine sons of the soil. They built their log-huts in the wildwood clearings, but their hearts were in the sheiling, the cabin, the cottage they had left beyond the sea. Their allegiance was divided, a fact of which the perpetuation of the various national societies is indubitable evidence.

They were the pioneers; they made the wilderness a garden; and their children entered into a large inheritance. More inharmonious still was the immigration from south of the border, of persons brought up on the Declaration of Independence and Fourth of July oratory. Colonel Cruikshanks's researches have proved how numerous they were and how disaffected. Mrs Moodie found {164} them and the Americanized natives just as disagreeable in Ontario as Mrs Trollope did in Cincinnati, and for the same reasons. Except the Loyalists, all these elements were divided in their political affections and ideals. Their leaders saw only two possibilities. British connection was the sheet-anchor of the old colonial Tories; but their vision of the country's future was an aristocracy, a landed gentry, a decorous union of church and state--in short, a colonial replica of old Tory England. On the other hand, the Radical leaders, French and English alike, saw before them only an independent republic, or fusion with the United States. How limited was the vision of both time has made blindingly clear. The instinct of the nascent nation decided for the golden mean, and chose the middle path. Canada has stood firm by the Empire--how firm let the blood-soaked trenches of Flanders attest--and yet she had stood just as firmly by the creed of democracy and her determination to control her own affairs.

One son of the soil had a vision wider than that of his contemporaries.

Years before the rebellion the editor of a Halifax newspaper saw the scattered, jarring British colonies {165} united under the old flag, and bound together by fellows.h.i.+p within the Empire. He saw iron roads spanning the continent and the white sails of Canadian commerce dotting the Pacific. Canadians of this day see what Howe foresaw--the eye among the blind. Let it be repeated. In those old days there were no Canadians of Canada. Confederation had to be achieved, a new generation had to be born and grow to manhood, before a national sentiment was possible. These new Canadians saw little or nothing of provinces with outworn feuds and divisions. They saw only the Dominion of Canada. Their imagination was stirred by the ideal of half a continent staked out for a second great experiment in democracy, of a vast domain to be filled and subdued and raised to power by a new nation. In spite of many faults and failures and disappointments, Canadians have been true to that ideal. The Canada of to-day is something far grander than the Mackenzies and Papineaus ever dreamed of; she has disappointed the fears and exceeded the hopes of the Durhams and the Elgins; and she stands on the threshold, as Canadians firmly trust, of a more ill.u.s.trious future.

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The following are a few of the works which should be consulted:

Lord Durham, _Report on the Affairs of British North America_ (1839).

Sir Francis Hincks, _Reminiscences_ (1884).

Dent, _The Last Forty Years_ (1881).

Reid, _Life and Letters of the First Earl of Durham_ (1906).

Shortt, _Lord Sydenham_ (1908).

Wrong, _The Earl of Elgin_ (1906).

Bourinot, _Lord Elgin_ (1905).

Walrond, _Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin_ (1872).

Leac.o.c.k, _Baldwin, LaFontaine, Hincks_ (1907).

Pope, _Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald_ (1894).

_Canada and its Provinces_, vol. v (1913), the chapters by W. L. Grant, J. L. Morison, Edward Kylie, Duncan M'Arthur, and Adam Shortt.

Consult also, for individual biographies of the various persons mentioned in the narrative, Taylor, _Portraits of British Americans_ (1865); Dent, _The Canadian Portrait Gallery_ (1880); and _The Dictionary of National Biography_ (1903).