by Conrad Black
That night, Tarte, unwell, and a dangerous source of unpredictable political coaching for Bourassa, left to take up his post as Canadian high commissioner to the Paris International Exposition (chiefly remembered for the Eiffel Tower), but really for Laurier to get him out of the way and to enable him to try to restore Tarte’s fragile health. By now, British arms were making greater progress, which continued as forces, under more purposeful command, poured into South Africa and overwhelmed the Boer capacity for direct resistance. On June 7, 1900, Laurier moved a resolution of congratulations to Her Imperial Britannic Majesty on the recapture by her armies of the Boer capital at Pretoria. Tupper spoke strongly in support, but Bourassa could not resist even this ill-chosen window of opportunity: “I admire the might of England, I admire many of the deeds that England has done throughout the world, but this war will not add an ounce to the glory of the English flag.” Bourassa was drowned out in cries of “shame,” followed by a bellowed, scarcely sonorous rendition of “God Save the Queen.” Of course, Bourassa was correct that it was nothing to celebrate to subdue such a stubborn people, but it was a step forward for civilization, the enemies of slavery in particular, and the spirit of the moment was one of relief at the victory of a great and kindred power. Having done Laurier the favour of showing English Canadians what the prime minister had to contend with in French-Canadian nationalism, Bourassa had now discountenanced his fellow Québécois with a motion that was nasty, provoking, and insolent; and he had given Laurier the opportunity to rise again, as he seemed almost effortlessly to do, to the task of providing the voice of reason for the balanced continuity of Canadian national progress and understanding. Apart from anything else, Canada, contrary to Bourassa’s woolly and premature aspirations, was in no position to part company altogether from Britain, and especially not in the hour of her victory, given continuing, if declining, vulnerability to the United States, which was about to be governed by the most belligerent president in its history, Theodore Roosevelt, with the sole possible exception of Andrew Jackson.
The South African War was now passing into the guerrilla phase, where scores of thousands of civilians were rounded up into detention camps in which conditions could and should have been better and over twenty thousand women and children perished from illness and malnutrition. Ultimately, over four hundred thousand British and Empire soldiers were required to burn the crops of the Boers and starve them into surrender. It was not an image-building initiative by the country that celebrated itself in Elgar’s stirring “Land of Hope and Glory” as the “Mother of the Free.” Chamberlain asked Laurier via Minto if Canada wished to be invited to the peace conference and if it wished to attend a colonial council, of the kind Chamberlain had been championing since the jubilee year of 1897. Laurier distantly replied that Canada did not ask for an invitation to the peace conference but would attend if asked, and that if the purpose of a colonial council was to discuss Imperial defence, he thought it premature. A total of seventy-three hundred Canadians had participated on the British side in the South African War (89 were killed, 135 died of disease, and 252 were wounded).
On June 19, 1900, Laurier sacked Thomas McInnes, the lieutenant-governor of British Columbia, whom he had appointed from the Senate, for apparently ignoring the results of the recent election in that province. It was a useful and somewhat dramatic precedent, reinforcing responsible government, which had supposedly reigned in Canada for over fifty years. After a summer of holidays and preparation, Laurier dissolved the House of Commons on October 9 for an election on November 7. Sifton returned from Vienna after unsuccessful attempts by specialists to cure his deafness, but took to the hustings with his usual energy and vehemence undimmed by his conspicuous ear trumpet. Tarte was also back; he had not liked the Parisians, nor they him, and he had made a number of rather provocative speeches complaining about a wide range of French national traits, British government policies, and assorted Canadian shortcomings. His most noteworthy hour in Paris was when the president of the republic, Émile Loubet, was about to enter the Canadian pavilion at the Paris Exposition by the side door, having been in the neighbouring Australian pavilion. Tarte had the door closed and let it be known that he was not “in the habit of receiving by my kitchen door.” He was noisily resentful of not being treated by the French or the British, and certainly not anyone else, as the representative of a self-governing country.
Laurier had an unbeatable formula and had earned the respect of the whole country. Good times were rolling, and Laurier had given Imperial Preference to the Imperialists and rebuffed Chamberlain for the nationalists, French and other. He had threaded the needle on South Africa, with enough solidarity and enough independence, with Canadians free to choose for themselves and no one coerced to anything. Even the pope had endorsed his schools efforts, and he had not gone to war against the Protestant majority. He had held his ground against the Americans and gained considerable recognition and prestige, for himself and for Canada, from the British, Americans, the papacy, and the French (even if Tarte did not share in the esteem of the French). On November 7, the government was re-elected safely enough, with 139 Liberal MPs to 75 Conservative, compared with 132 and 81 four years before, and the spread in the popular vote also widened slightly, from 52 per cent to 47.4 in 1896, to 52.5 per cent to 46.9 in 1900. Sir Charles Tupper was defeated in his own constituency, and the “Ram of Cumberland,” as he was known in his lusty younger days, was retired at last after a distinguished public career of forty-five years. The first head of the Canadian Medical Association, and a Father of Confederation, he tried to run an ultra-Imperial campaign, but Laurier crowded him onto the political shoulder. Tupper returned to London and lived happily in retirement for another fifteen years, dying at ninety-four on October 30, 1915. Borden and Laurier eulogized him in Parliament on February 7, 1916, Borden, a classicist, closing with the famous charge “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice” (“If you wish a monument, look about you”). After so long and distinguished a career, Tupper deserved no less.20
Queen Victoria died on January 22, 1901, after a reign of sixty-three years and seven months. After a suitably mighty funeral attended by her offspring the king-emperors of Britain and India, Germany and Russia, the entire post-Waterloo era of three generations was laid in the grave with her. The stylish and flamboyant Edward VII, sixty-one, and his ever-youthful (despite her husband’s countless infidelities) consort, Alexandra, ascended the thrones. The death of the venerable grandmother of Europe could only exacerbate the rivalry between Britain and Germany; already, the insouciant Kaiser Wilhelm had allowed Bismarck’s League of the Three Emperors, between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, to lapse, casting aside the late chancellor’s device for separating an avenging France from alliance with Russia. Wilhelm had openly favoured and helped supply the Boers, and was always chippily criticizing his British relatives, overawed though he was in the presence of Victoria and even Edward. Such was the power of Germany that Great Britain was, at the very end of the long Salisbury era (Salisbury retired in 1902 after fourteen years as prime minister, having served Disraeli as foreign minister before that), drawing close to France and Russia to preserve the balance of power. The British and their Empire were preparing to depart splendid isolation and concede that they could no longer hold the fulcrum between contending continental blocs and had to throw themselves into the balance. This was what Disraeli had warned of after the unification of Germany in 1871, and was the reason that Richelieu and Napoleon and even Metternich had gone to such lengths to keep Germany divided. It was also the reason that underlay Chamberlain’s perfervid promotion of a unitary Empire (as well as an alliance with Germany and the United States, the three greatest powers). The Gladstonian era of questioning the utility of the Empire now seemed as distant as the Middle Ages, though Gladstone had retired from his fourth term as prime minister only seven years before Victoria died (“Not that bore again,” Victoria had said when told that she had to send for him as he formed his last g
overnment at the age of eighty-three). Ominous though these events were for the world, they were useful for Canada, as it was now more highly prized by Britain and therefore more certain of British, and even French, support than ever; and as there was no power left in Europe capable of tilting the balance between the arrayed nations of the old continent, this sceptre was passing, unsought, to the United States, which would soon have to construe its national interest in more sober terms than promenading as the suzerain of the Americas and occasionally perplexing its neighbours. The world, and Canada’s place in it, were becoming unaccountably complicated.
4. Imperial Relations, 1901–1903
In March 1901, Bourassa, as Laurier had confidently foreseen, went completely overboard with his parochial histrionics and moved a parliamentary resolution asking Britain to conclude an honourable peace that would recognize the independence of the Boers. Britain had poured four-fifths as great a force into South Africa as that which constituted the Grand Armies of Napoleon and Grant and Sherman, and had not done so to re-establish the status quo. In fact, it was a generous peace when it came, and created, in 1910, the Union of South Africa, with full and equal rights for the Boers, and though slavery was ended, white supremacy continued for almost all of the new century. As Laurier’s biographer Joseph Schull writes, Bourassa’s “speech was merely another exercise in irritation and the speaker’s accumulating rancours carried him on to the verge of imbecility.”21 He averred that the South African War had shortened the late queen’s life (to eighty-two years) and he would not be “an accomplice of murderers of the queen.” Like his grandfather, though without the violent afterpiece, he had gone too far, and Laurier dispensed with him in the brief but deflating reflection that it was extraordinary that someone who would not approve offering any assistance to Britain was so generous with his advice to that country.22
Robert Laird Borden, a Halifax lawyer and MP, was formally elected leader of the federal Conservatives. He was a less volcanic and energetic figure than Tupper, and seemed a rather pallid alternative to the elegant, refined, worldly, and bilingually mellifluous prime minister now in his fifteenth year as Liberal leader, though only just turning sixty. Laurier greeted the Duke and Duchess of York (the future King George V, son of Edward VII, and Queen Mary) at Quebec in September 1901, as the Alaska boundary dispute flared up again. The Americans would not accept Laurier’s approach to a Canadian-American agreement that might make ocean access in the southern “panhandle” of Alaska available to British Columbia and the Yukon. Sensing the British urge to conciliate America, as European conditions became steadily more tense and difficult, the Americans summoned a conference in Washington and invited the British and Canadians to send a joint delegation. It was as if nothing had changed in Canada’s status and America’s attitude to Canada since Macdonald’s heroics at the Washington Conference on trade in 1871.
Laurier conducted Their Royal Highnesses across the country on the Empire’s greatest railroad in September, and the tour stopped respectfully on September 19 to observe the death by assassination of President William McKinley while he attended an exposition in Buffalo, New York, just a few miles from the Canadian border. With the accession of the forty-two-year-old vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, former rancher, New York City Police commissioner, Rough Rider colonel of volunteers in Cuba in the Spanish-American War, learned historian, former assistant secretary of the navy and governor of New York, it seemed that America had its own Kaiser Wilhelm. They were almost exact contemporaries, and full of energy and bravado, but fortunately Roosevelt proved a serious and intelligent, if very nationalistic president, and a man of integrity, courage, and even judgment, though he continued to be impulsive. None of these compliments could be applied to the German kaiser, except his energy, and occasionally his flare. Laurier accompanied the royals back from Vancouver and saw them off, a very pleasant and successful cameo appearance and another gesture of Britain’s swiftly appreciating judgment of Canada’s increasing utility in the strategic chess game unfolding in the chancelleries of Europe and ramifying over the whole world.
Bourassa returned from a tour of Europe and began what would be his practice over the next forty-five years of addressing large crowds in public places with very carefully prepared texts that would be lapidary reflections on history and national and international affairs, think pieces for the edification of the French-Canadian race. It was a rather portentous role to be taken up by a thirty-three-year-old, even a grandson of Papineau and former protégé of Laurier. Bourassa’s address on October 20, 1901, at the Théâtre National in Montreal praised the British as creators of liberty, dissented from Imperial union because British and Canadian interests were at odds, warned against pan-Americanism, and evinced little solidarity with the Americans. Bourassa felt English and French Canadians had too many differences in goals and outlook to concert usefully in one country, and warned that the British were not the champions of liberty of olden times but were now Chamberlains and Rhodeses and were grasping hegemons. He evinced no love of the French and didn’t much emphasize his incandescent Catholicism, and so his magisterial speech, which was certainly erudite, recondite, and pedantically formulated, criticized everyone and everything but was neither nihilistic nor at all enlightening about the way forward. No one really knew what to make of it, except that Bourassa was likely to be around with a following to dispose for a long time.23
Laurier had a very challenging and prolonged showdown with Chamberlain in London in the spring and summer of 1902. He went initially for Edward VII’s coronation, but it had to be deferred for six weeks because the king had to have his appendix removed on the original coronation day. Chamberlain gathered the constituent Empire leaders and pressured them as aggressively as he could on the virtues of Imperial intimacy in foreign and defence policy. He was still not prepared to countenance interrupting trade relations with Germany for the benefit of kith and kin, though it was the inexorable rise of Germany that drove Chamberlain and his colleagues to such paroxysms of Imperial affection. And in Canada the game of loyalist hosannas in English Canada tempered by cautious prevarication in Quebec reached new depths of opportunism and evasion. For once, Bourassa captured it: “The only point in real dispute between both parties is which will eat the biggest piece of the jingo pie. All this, of course, does not prevent them from selling Canada wholesale to American railway magnates.”24 Laurier was a human barometer, moving ahead of opinion or reacting deftly to it, shifting weight from one foot to the other. But whatever the criticisms from Bourassa and Tarte on one side and the Conservatives and ultra-loyal English on the other, and some French “vendus” (“sellouts”) as Bourassa called Laurier unjustly, Laurier kept a plausible version of the emergent Canadian national interest alive. He declared before he departed Canada in May 1902 for London that he was always open on trade matters but saw no reason for an adjustment of political or defence relationships, and told Parliament that he flatly refused to join the transatlantic movement to bring Canada “into the vortex of militarism which is now the curse and the blight of Europe.”25
Chamberlain had a much-refined argument from that of the jubilee of 1897, sustained as it had been by the august and tranquil glories of Victoria and her time. Now the kaiser was churning out battleships, sabre-rattling in Europe and Africa, and the new American kaiser was furiously building ships and an isthmian canal in Panama to facilitate movement of the expanded American fleet between the Atlantic and Pacific. Even the pacifistic Cleveland had been pugilistically assertive in the absurd sideshow of the Venezuela-Guiana border, and Canada in particular should beware of where the Americans might cast their covetous, greedy eyes next. They had all seen in South Africa – where gold, diamonds, and the rights of overseas Britons were at stake – how the whole world had cheered on the gross, brutal, Afrikaner Trekboer peasants, who had trudged by foot and in ox cart five hundred miles more than sixty years before to escape a regime whose offence had been that it had abolished slavery.
/> Chamberlain’s pursuit of an Imperial Council with powers to tax and regulate the whole Empire received no support, and would not have had any in the United Kingdom itself if there had been any notion of it not being simply a method for the British to pick the pockets of the related jurisdictions. Nor was any country present any more prepared than was Great Britain itself to barricade itself into an Imperial protectionist fortress. These overseas units and outposts of the Empire were largely resources-based economies and had to have access to the great industrial importers of raw materials, especially the United States, Japan, and parts of Western Europe apart from Britain. Chamberlain was selling moonshine, and only the fervour with which he was able to torque himself up to a cause, and the urgency of the German challenge, prevented him from seeing it himself. (He broke both major parties in half in his career and was about to split the Conservatives, who passed to the leadership of Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur James Balfour, in 1902.)
In any case, he had no takers. Defence was the real kernel of the discussion. Britain was assuring the security of its Empire, and had rallied most of the time when necessary, though there would never have been the American threat to Canada from 1812 to 1815 if Britain had not grossly overplayed its hand and committed acts of war against the Americans on the high seas. Australia continued to make a contribution to the Royal Navy, and others pledged modest sums, but none of them was under any direct threat. Canada’s condition was different because of its immense and unpredictable American neighbour. Laurier said that Canada would remain loyal in the event of a great and common emergency, would soon set up her own modest navy for the defence of both coasts, and would not otherwise pre-pledge anything or anyone to a central Imperial force. Chamberlain and Laurier exchanged expressions of surprise at each other’s position. Chamberlain was outraged, though he could scarcely have feigned surprise, and called Laurier privately “the dancing master” and expressed a preference for “a cad who knows his own mind.”26 As always, British statesmen had almost no grasp of the distinctiveness and wariness of the French Canadian, and certainly Chamberlain, and even Minto, who should have known better, little realized the forces Laurier had always to master in Quebec. Laurier sagely declined a peerage and departed and made the now customary calls in Paris and Rome, where he was much more graciously received than by His Majesty’s government, but he was unwell and tried, without success, to rest in Switzerland and the Channel Islands, and to get a proper medical diagnosis. Rumours abounded, and he returned to Canada in October 1902 amid great perplexity over his health.