by Jan Morris
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Canada was still a colony of the British Empire. The greatest and oldest of the self-governing overseas territories, far bigger than the whole of Europe, it still possessed no absolute sovereignty of its own. Its laws, signed in the name of the Queen, could theoretically be overridden by the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. Its foreign policies were decreed by London, and it was represented abroad by British Ambassadors—the only Canadian overseas agent lived in London and was accredited to the Colonial Office. When Canada concluded a trade agreement with a foreign Power the British Government appended its signature, too, like a trustee with a juvenile ward. The Governor-General in Ottawa, Lord Aberdeen, behaved partly as the president of an autonomous confederation, Canada, but partly as the representative of the imperial Power, reporting back to the Colonial Office in London—a kind of super-Ambassador, empowered to intervene even in the internal affairs of Canada. Canada’s very title recognized this ambiguous status. When the Confederation was formed in 1867 its chief architect, John Macdonald, proposed to call it the Canadian Kingdom, but the British Government of the day had insisted on a less absolute definition: the Dominion of Canada.
To Canada, as everywhere, the British had transferred such of their institutions as seemed suitable. No two countries could be much more different than England and Canada, but it was an English Constitution that governed the Confederation. Its Governor-General played the part of the monarch, advised by a Prime Minister and his Cabinet. Its Senate was non-elective, like the House of Lords, and real power lay, as it did at Westminster, in the House of Commons. There was no hereditary aristocracy, but Canadian statesmen still received honours from London, and knights abounded in these forest glades. The imperial forces maintained their bases at Halifax and Esquimalt, ships of the Royal Navy regularly sailed up the St Lawrence as far as Montreal, and from end to end of Canada memorials stood in witness to the imperial tradition: the enormous cenotaph in Halifax commemorating the two Nova Scotian officers killed in the Crimean War; or the memorial at Ottawa to Wm. B. Osgood and John Rodgers, of the Guards Company of Sharpshooters, killed in action at Cutknife Hill in 1885; or the monument at Fort Walsh, far in the west, which honoured those men of the Mounted Police who, ‘by defeating hunting bands of Blackfoot, Crees, Assiniboines, Salteaux and Sioux, imposed the Queen’s law upon a fretful realm’.
The Queen’s law! This is how a police proclamation read, in the Canada of the 1890s:
CANADA
VICTORIA, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith, etc etc.
TO ALL WHOM these presents shall come, or whom the same may in any wise concern,—GREETING.
A PROCLAMATION
WHEREAS, on the 29 th day of October, one thousand, eight hundred and ninety-five, Colin Campbell Colebrook, a Sergeant of the North West Mounted Police, was murdered about eight miles west of Kinistino by an Indian known as ‘Jean-Baptiste’, or ‘Almighty-Voice’, who escaped from the police guard room at Duck Lake; AND WHEREAS it is highly important for the peace and safety of Our subjects that such a crime should not remain unpunished;
NOW KNOW YE that a reward of FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS will be paid to any person or persons who will give such information as will lead to the apprehension and conviction of the said party.
WITNESS, Our Right Trusty and Right Well-beloved Cousin and Councillor the Right Honourable Sir John Campbell Hamilton-Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen; Viscount Formartine, Baron Haddo, Methlic, Tarnes and Kellie, in the Peerage of Scotland; Viscount Gordon of Aberdeen, County of Aberdeen, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom; Baronet of Nova Scotia, Knight Grand Cross of Our Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, Etc, Governor General of Canada, At Our Government House, in Our City of Ottawa, this Twentieth Day of April, in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety-six and in the Fifty-Ninth year of Our Reign.
Threatened with such solemnity, Soapy Smith himself might momentarily have blenched, before relieving Our Right Trusty Cousin of his Grand Cross.
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The imperial hegemony was tactfully exerted. Nobody in London wanted to bully the Canadians, still less goad them into republicanism. In practice the Governor-General seldom intervened, obligingly assenting sometimes to legislation frankly directed against British trade, and the imperial Government politely consulted the Canadians, before signing foreign treaties that might affect them. Canada had been Britain’s first experiment in colonial emancipation—the forerunner, it was hoped, of noble things to come, as the other white colonies of the Empire advanced to proper nationhood. It was the famous report brought home from Canada by Lord Durham, in 1839, that had led in the end to the establishment of cabinet Government, on the Westminster pattern, in the white colonies of the Empire. Since then, so the British liked to think, Canada had stood as proof that looser imperial ties would dissuade the colonies from seceding like the Americans—that they would not gallivant away with independence, but would actually cling closer to the Mother Country, like ever-grateful daughters about a never-ageing Mama.
The real relationship between London and Ottawa could not easily be defined. One could not look it up in a reference book. It was a modus vivendi, based upon ambivalences, sympathies and the realities of power, and very difficult for foreigners to master. The imperial links were maintained in twilight, sometimes relaxed, sometimes stiffened, so subtle that few people really knew just how independent Canada was, and while Englishmen generally supposed it to be virtually a sovereign State, Americans and continentals generally regarded it simply as a colonial outpost, behaving as Britain told it to.1
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Canada had become a nation, of a sort, just thirty years before, when the Confederation was formed. It was geographically united, in a way, when the Hudson’s Bay Company gave up its rights of sovereignty, in 1870, and handed over the half-explored regions of the west and north. The Dominion now comprised six Provinces, each with its elected Assembly, plus the inconceivable wildernesses of conifer, tundra and ice which faded away into the unknown Arctic. In the north-west Alaska was American. In the north-east Newfoundland and its dependency Labrador staunchly maintained their own autonomy:
Hurrah for our own native Isle, Newfoundland,
Not a stranger shall hold one inch of its strand.
Her face turns to Britain, her back to the Gulf–
Come near at your peril, Canadian wolf!
For the rest, Canada looked a logical sort of slab on the map: self-contained, huge, very solid.
In reality it was a flabby State, tenuously strung together, and racked by inner tensions. Canada was only inhabited in patches along the American frontier: thick clusters in the east and west, scattered clusters in the middle, almost nobody at all in the north. Between one settlement and the next there extended a wasteland, sometimes of forest, sometimes of empty prairie—mile upon mile of dark green and brown, totally uninhabited, deep in snow for half the year, and relieved only by gloomy fly-infested lakes. No Canadian town was far from the wilderness, and up every Canadian road, just beyond every horizon, lay the frozen immensities of the north. In the interior the winters were terrible and the summers stifling: Everywhere the gigantic emptiness of the place made its presence felt—so big that forty Mother Countries could be squeezed into its mass, and the most grandiloquently imperial mind could hardly imagine the One Race peopling all its corners.
Queen Victoria had herself chosen the site of the Dominion capital, so tradition said, by closing her eyes and stabbing a map with a hatpin. She hit Ottawa, then an obscure lumber-town called Bytown, and there all the paraphernalia of federal Government had been erected, on a glorious site above the Ottawa River—a parliamentary pile that anyone would be proud of, and a castle of a railway station almost next door. The one would be perfectly useless without the other, for some of the federal parliamentarians had to travel 2,000 miles to attend a debate, and so devastating were the problems of distance in this
sprawling State that there were times when Canada actually seemed to exist for its railways. Railway politics repeatedly dominated national affairs, swirling around interminable disputes of finance, landownership, strategy and competition. Whole towns, whole Provinces even, depended upon the railways for their survival, and the entire flavour of Canadian life was tempered by the railway ethos—from the hick towns of the prairies, setting their clocks by the swoosh of the morning train through the depot, to the greatest cities of the settled east, whose biggest buildings were generally railway hotels. The railways played a vital part in every Canadian life, and everyone knew the different railway companies by reputation or at least by nickname—the Dust and Rust (Dominion Atlantic Railway), the Get There Perhaps (Grand Trunk Pacific) or the Never Starts On Time (Niagara, St Catharines and Toronto).
The greatest force of all was the Canadian Pacific, which had literally summoned the Dominion into being. It was built chiefly by private enterprise, much of the capital coming from London, but with Government subsidies and a land grant of 50 million acres of good land. The last spike was driven at 1885, at Eagle Pass in the Rocky Mountains, connecting for the first time the Atlantic and the Pacific shores of Canada, and at once the C.P.R. became an imperial Power itself. It saw itself, as the British saw it, as a link in an all-British route to the orient, and presently it launched its own steamships on both oceans, to convey goods and passengers under one house flag all the way from London, via Vancouver, to Hong Kong or Sydney. At home it was even more powerful. It enjoyed a monopoly of the transcontinental traffic, it was a vast landowner, its tycoons were among the great men of Canada. All along the line its works stood as a reminder of its influence: the great company offices and hotels, like inner keeps of the cities; the stations, built to a standard pattern from coast to coast, except when they burst into the monumental flourish of termini; above all, the trains themselves, hauled by their majestic wood-burners—immensely long trains by the standards of the day, snaking and plodding their way across those merciless landscapes, sometimes negotiating loops so sudden that engine and caboose passed each other in opposite directions, with coaches heated direct from the engine, so the brochures boasted, and electric light in every compartment—the most confident things in Canada, and almost the only earnest that this was really a nation at all.
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The first Europeans in Canada were the French, but the British considered themselves justifiably masters of the country. They had won it by right of conquest, when Wolfe had defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham above Quebec, nearly 140 years before. By 1897 the British outnumbered the French by nearly two to one, and of the seven Provinces only Quebec, the original Nouvelle France, was French in language and custom. The strength of the British in Canada was above all their Britishness. At this moment of their history patriotism and imperialism were synonymous, and like true-born Britons everywhere, British Canadians were caught up in the enthusiasms of the day—proud to belong to so great a brotherhood of nations, at such a climax of its career. Canada sometimes had differences with England, and sometimes resented those last colonial leading-strings, but in the summer of 1897 grievances were momentarily forgotten. Who would not wish to be British, at such a time? The Canadian flag was still the Union Jack, the national anthem was God Save the Queen, and the presence of a large French minority only made the British more British still: even the Irish of Canada were mostly Protestant Scots-Irish, as staunch and loyal as anyone. It was the proud boast of the grandest Anglo-Canadian mansions that not a stick of furniture in the house, not a knife, not a single painting of Highland cattle in a gloomy brownish glen, was home-produced—all came, as they liked to say, from the Old Country.
In many a Canadian settlement British ways had been maintained uncannily down the years, sometimes heightened rather than weakened by pride and remoteness. The city of Victoria, in Vancouver Island on the Pacific, was so unremittingly English that it was already something of a joke, and was generally supposed to be inhabited exclusively by retired Anglo-Indians, eating tea-time crumpets or playing creaky cricket in the thriving British Columbia League.1 At Regina (ingeniously named by Queen Victoria’s daughter Louise, in a country already chock-a-block with matronymics) the North West Mounted Police had established its depot with a fanfare of British military tradition—red coats, plumed white helmets, swagger sticks and braided jackets, as rigidly paternal as any ancient regiment of the line, and as stoutly devoted to the code of the officer and gentleman. The Mounties’ crested mess china was made for them by T. G. and F. Booth in England, and everywhere in the West they stamped an imperial hall-mark of their own—there they go in every old photograph, among the feathered and blanketed Indians and the high-wheeled buggies of the pioneers, always a couple of spanking troopers, in pill-box caps and pipe-clayed accoutrements, as though they have arrived direct from Aldershot.1 Scotsmen thronged Canada. The Governor-General numbered among his A.D.C.s two members of the Royal Scottish Company of Archers, and in 1895 a book called Men of Canada, Or, Success by Example, numbered among its worthies Messrs MacCabe, MacCarthy, MacCraken, MacDonald, Macfarlane, MacKeen, Mackendrick, Mackenzie, Mackey, Maclean, Macleod, Mac-Millan, Macpherson, MacTavish, and even the Reverend D. H. Macvicar. In the lakeshore country of Ontario the people who called themselves The Scotch lived in an intensely concentrated enclave of Highland values—honest, austere and bony people, Nonconformist almost to a family, who lived in villages like Campbellton, Iona and Fingal, and went in for Caledonian Games.2
There was no exact dividing line between a Canadian Briton and a British Briton. Their accents were diverging, it is true, but they carried the same passports and usually honoured the same ideals. Tory especially called to Tory. Papers like the Toronto Mail and Empire were as jingo as the Daily Mail itself, private schools all over Canada assiduously inculcated the English public school code, the University of Toronto subjected its undergraduates to intellectual and moral systems that came direct from Oxford and Cambridge (like many of its dons). In every Canadian town the Anglican Church, often presided over by imported Anglican clergymen, represented the established English order so dear to many colonials, its beauty of form and its certainty of merit. There was a good deal of ornery individualism among English-speaking Canadians, especially in the Maritime Provinces, where the pretensions of Tory-colonials were not widely admired, and a Yankee republicanism was not uncommon: but hundreds of thousands of British Canadians regarded the imperial saga as part of their own national heritage. The excitement of the New Imperialism was almost as intense in Toronto as it was in London. Acquisitions at the Public Library that June included The Navy and The Nation, Glimpses of Life in Bermuda and the Tropics, The Sikhs and the Sikh Wars: news from India was fully reported in the newspapers, and the properly British Canadian would have been affronted indeed, if somebody had suggested that the Royal Navy was not his.
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The British Canadians were loyal to the Crown as a matter of course. The German, Ukrainian and Scandinavian immigrants were loyal as a matter of convenience. The 1½ million French Canadians were often loyal by default. The British were the conquerors, they were still the conquered—they still spoke of the Conquest, meaning the British subjection of Nouvelle France. The peace settlement in 1759 had been, the British thought, generous. The French had been allowed to retain their religion, their language and their laws. When the Confederation was born French was recognized as one of its two official languages, and in the House of Commons Quebec was represented by sixty-five members. In 1897 the Prime Minister himself was a French Canadian, and the happy settlement of old differences was often quoted by sanguine imperialists as evidence of the blessings a benevolent Empire could bestow.
But the French Canadians were a people apart. A few educated families mingled with the British on equal terms, a few social aspirants had been assimilated into the English élite, and Laurier himself, as Prime Minister, was a persuasive exponent of imperial ideas, dizzily fêted in London
that summer (he did not know, he said afterwards, whether the Empire needed a new constitution, but he was sure the visiting Premiers did). Most French Canadians, though, accepted the fact of their British citizenship with an apathy that merged into surliness. They were a dispossessed nation. Their loyalties to France had long been watered down—the French Revolution had passed Canada by, and these habitants were Frenchmen cast in a discarded mould, talking an archaic dialect and governed by pre-Napoleonic laws. They did, for the most part, what their priests told them: they accepted legal authority, whatever its source, and withdrew into the cave of their own ancient culture, where nobody would bother them. Lord Durham had called them a people without a history, meaning that they had no intellectual tradition. They were mostly simple, superstitious peasant people, imprisoned in their own ways, with no education except what the Church allowed them, and little share in the national life. So timidly had they ventured into business and commerce that even in the French Canadian villages of Quebec the store was frequently kept by a Scot.
All through the St Lawrence country those little villages ran, with strips of narrow cultivation down to the river’s edge—the French had not accepted the principle of primogeniture, and the holdings were likely to grow smaller in each successive generation. A steepled church stood on an eminence, with the priest’s house near by, and sometimes there was a manor house in the grand Norman manner, a relic of the French seigniory that had once governed Nouvelle France, but had mostly returned to Old France long before. Life in such a village was in no way British. Scarcely a sign of the imperial authority was to be seen. The architecture was French, the sounds were French, the smells were French and so was the cooking. There were miracle-shrines of Catholic sanctity, hung about with discarded crutches, and fusty French inns with hanging hams, and formidable elderly ladies in shiny bombazine, disapprovingly on stools at parlour windows. It was a hushed, anachronistic country, Arcadian in some ways, stagnant in others, looking always down to the highway of the St Lawrence River—along whose broad waters the Queen’s ships, flying the Red Ensign, passed in an endless stream to Quebec and Montreal.