Immersed in the politics, society, and finance of London, the Economist naturally saw the colonies as distant and not very interesting; Bagehot could hardly help but condescend. Still, running the Empire was part of the Englishman’s burden, so the Economist kept an eye on colonial developments. Starting in 1864, Bagehot offered his readers concise opinions on all the key developments in British North America’s debates on confederation. Just weeks after the formation of the coalition at Quebec, Bagehot declared that “the latest intelligence from Canada is the most important which has reached us for some years,” though he credited the initiative to a “Mr. Browne.” In the following months his spelling improved. By the end of the year, the Economist had published four very enthusiastic Bagehot articles on the progress made at Charlottetown and Quebec and the constitution that was being proposed. “The object of the American colonists, it is clear from every clause of the resolutions, is to form a nation,” he declared after perusing the Quebec resolutions in November 1864.4
In the months when he was taking occasional note of the confederation conferences, Bagehot was also busy writing The English Constitution, the book which, along with the Economist, preserved his fame. Published in book form in the year of confederation, The English Constitution was remarkably vivid for a text in political theory. In The English Constitution was born the aphorism that to scrutinize the working of monarchy too closely is to “let in daylight upon magic.” In Queen Victoria’s heyday, it cheerfully characterized the Queen and her son the Prince of Wales as “a retired widow and an unemployed youth.”5 Elsewhere Bagehot deflated a not-quite-first-rank English politician with the throwaway line, “If he were a horse, no one would buy him.” Throughout, The English Constitution was remarkable for its clear-eyed, unsentimental look at how power and leadership were exercised in a constitutional monarchy.
The English Constitution was also remarkable for its class prejudice. Racial minorities and women were largely beneath Bagehot’s gaze, but he was deeply alarmed by the prospect that Britain might grant voting rights to men of classes lower than his own. Bagehot thought himself principled in his insistence that the elected representatives of the people of Britain must continue to be chosen by “the ten thousand.” “The masses of England are not fit for an elective government,” he wrote in The English Constitution, and it was simply self-defeating to give votes to people incompetent to choose their representatives intelligently. “The working classes contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion and therefore the fact of their want of influence in parliament does not impair the coincidence of parliament with public opinion,” said The English Constitution.6
Despite his deep hostility to votes for working people, Bagehot faintly regretted the impossibility of universal manhood suffrage in Britain. By keeping its population uneducated and in servitude, he wrote, Britain had left them too ignorant to vote. But he conceded that a literate population, one with widespread prosperity and relative social equality, could enjoy universal suffrage without disaster. This thought inspired the only reference to British North America in The English Constitution: “Where there is not honest poverty, where education is diffused, and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass of the people to elect a fair government. The idea is roughly realized in the North American colonies of England.” For a moment, Bagehot had grasped that British North America had both representative government on the British model and voting rights far broader than those existing in Britain itself.7
Bagehot was too much an Englishman of “the ten thousand” to pursue this thought. It was impossible, really, to consider whether the English constitution might be working better in a colony than at home. Phrases from The English Constitution appeared in Bagehot’s articles on confederation, but Canadian processes did not influence The English Constitution. To tease out how Bagehot’s analysis of power and leadership might apply in a society of (by English standards) social equality, general education, and widespread participation in civil society – in British North America, that is – we have to read Canadian evidence into the Bagehot description.
The key to The English Constitution was Bagehot’s dictum that all constitutions have “dignified” and “efficient” parts. “Dignified” parts could command respect and wield influence – as the monarch did, and the great aristocrats of Britain often did – but real power to govern lay with the “efficient” parts. The analyst’s challenge, said Bagehot, was always to discern which was which. In The English Constitution, Bagehot used this device to cut through the blather about the British government. He dismissed lofty notions of Britain’s “balanced” constitution of monarchy, Lords, and Commons. “A republic has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a monarchy,” Bagehot declared; Britain had become a state where the people’s representatives were supreme. In phrases he might have borrowed from George Brown’s analysis of the Canadian Senate, Bagehot argued that, in a parliamentary government with two chambers, only the more representative one could have real power. Accordingly, the House of Lords had become “a subordinate assembly,” dignified but without significant political power, and sure to be defeated in any serious confrontation with the Commons. Bagehot saw at once it would be the same with the Canadian Senate proposed in the Quebec resolutions, and he approved.8
That left only the House of Commons, but Bagehot was just as hard on the Commons. The Commons, he said, was “a big meeting,” and everyone knows nothing ever gets done in a big meeting. Practical leadership lay with the cabinet, which put structure into the Commons’s discussions and, even more, with the prime minister who dominated the cabinet. The rise of cabinet government had brought about what Bagehot called “the close union, the near complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers” in the English constitution. Britain was “a disguised republic” whose “president” was the prime minister, said Bagehot. Under the constitution proposed by the Quebec conference, he saw, Canada would be the same.9
The British constitution, however, provided a control upon the prime minister and his cabinet. An elected president, like the American one, held office for a fixed term of office. Whether or not he proved right for the job, those who made him president had no power over him between elections. A prime minister, however, was a president whose electoral college was the House of Commons, and the Commons was always ready and able to throw out a prime minister at a moment’s notice. In Bagehot’s view, the power to make and destroy governments, not the power to make laws, was the root of the Commons’s power. In The English Constitution, he imagined a prime minister dismissing the often-heard suggestion that the Commons had not been accomplishing much lately. It had kept him in office, the prime minister might say, and keeping or dismissing him was its only really important job. Without the power to sustain or to dismiss the prime minister and cabinet, said Bagehot, the House would become merely a debating society. It would join the dignified parts of the constitution, while power migrated elsewhere.
Prime-ministerial leadership was the crucial subject of The English Constitution. Bagehot had learned about leadership by close observation of British politics, and he illustrated his book with lively references to many British statesmen, now mostly forgotten. Neither his book nor his editorials on confederation mentioned John A. Macdonald.* But if he could have put aside his essential Englishness, Walter Bagehot might have found in Macdonald the perfect illustration for his case about leadership. What Bagehot set out in a book-length argument about parliamentary leadership, John A. Macdonald had always known in his fingertips.
For Donald Creighton, John A. Macdonald was confederation, Creighton left behind the widely held impression that confederation was made by Macdonald; that Cartier, Brown, various docile Maritimers, some bankers and railway magnates, and the Colonial Office all followed the lead of his visionary statesmanship. In fact, Macdonald was at first a minor figure in the making of confederation, even though he was joint leader of the government of the Province of Canada. In the spring of
1864, he opposed George Brown’s federalism initiatives, standing among a handful of doubters, virtually all the rest of whom became anti-confederates. It was George-Étienne Cartier’s sudden willingness to deal with Brown which brought in Macdonald. In June 1864, the parties led by Cartier and Brown were the essential elements in the confederation coalition. Macdonald, leading only a handful of Upper Canadian politicians, had to follow Cartier or be dropped from power. Walter Bagehot, watching from faraway London, had it essentially right when he wrote of the new Canadian coalition as the Cartier–Brown ministry.
Once Macdonald came in, however, he came in strongly. He had spent a decade learning how to cobble together majorities in the fractious Canadian legislature, where he personally rarely had more than a handful of loyal followers. Whatever his coolness to federalism as a political philosophy, he quickly saw that the complicated regional, ethnic, and ideological coalitions of a confederated Canada would give wonderful scope for the skills he had been honing. He could dominate the politics of a confederated Canada as he would never dominate a union of Brown’s Ontario and Cartier’s Quebec. First, however, he began to dominate the conferences.
Macdonald signed the guest book at Charlottetown as “cabinet maker.” It was a fair self-assessment. Bagehot could have recognized in the Macdonald of the 1860s all the skills of a superb parliamentary manager. From long experience – he had first been elected in 1844, at the age of twenty-nine – Macdonald knew both the business of campaigning and the machinery of public administration. As a lawyer and attorney-general, he knew the legalities, precedents, and principles of legislative and constitutional drafting. But parliamentary leadership – putting together majorities – was personal, and personal skills were where Macdonald shone.
When David Thompson, an unrepentant old Clear Grit farmer-politician, returned to the Commons from a long illness in the 1880s, he got brief, distracted greetings from his party leaders, Edward Blake, a fastidious Toronto barrister, and Richard Cartwright, a dour and rigid Kingston financier. “Davey, old man,” cried John A. Macdonald a moment later, “I’m glad to see you back.” Thompson had never in his life voted with Macdonald, but he admitted it went increasingly against the grain that his enemy was better company than his friends.10
Dozens of similar stories testify to Macdonald’s persuasive charm. One perceptive Macdonald historian, Keith Johnson, has suggested there was a dark, cold, private soul beneath Macdonald’s affable surface.11 But if his humour and sociability were mostly on the surface, they sufficed. Joseph Rymal, another Grit rival, marvelled over Macdonald’s ability to cajole his supporters in the House. “Good or bad, able or unable, weak or strong, he wraps them around his finger as you would a thread. I have seen some of them … denounce the measures of government and say ‘Well, I can’t go that!’ and still I have known these gentlemen long enough to believe that they would go it, and after there was a caucus they did go it every time.”12
A colleague put it more admiringly. “Often when council was perplexed and you had made things smooth and plain, I have thought, ‘There are wheels in that man that have never been moved yet,’ ” said Archibald McLelan, the one-time anti-confederate from Nova Scotia who sat in Macdonald’s cabinets for years.13 For his part, Macdonald once joked that his ideal cabinet would be “all highly respectable parties whom I could send to the penitentiary if I wished.” * Lacking that power, he used his persuasive powers instead.14
Macdonald was good on the floor of the House, too. He was not notably an orator. George Brown, who took pride in his own oratorical powers, dismissed Macdonald’s prepared address in the confederation debates as “a very poor speech for such an occasion.” 15 Macdonald did better later in the debate, and in a crisis he could speak strongly. With his government on the line in 1873, he rallied wavering members with a passionate five-hour argument, fuelled by gin delivered in water glasses from three different supporters, each unaware of what the others were doing. But his great strength was the casually wielded authority, which, Bagehot argued, parliaments preferred over oratory. During the confederation debates, an opposition member tried to score a point by tying Macdonald to some procedure in a long-ago debate over a temperance bill. “I don’t remember,” confessed Macdonald. “I don’t generally go for temperance bills,” and in the laughter that followed, the House acknowledged his authority to ignore the challenge.16
It was not all laughter, however. “The great leaders of parliament … all have a certain firmness,” Bagehot thought, and Macdonald, with a majority at his back, used it without compunction, whether in the double shuffle of 1858 or in ruthlessly closing down the confederation debate when the New Brunswick election disaster seemed likely to give the Canadian anti-confederates an opening.17
It was the same with smaller matters. Joseph Rymal had been a popular and respected member of Parliament for decades when Macdonald gerrymandered his seat out of existence in 1885. “Mr Speaker, I am not made of such material that I can beg for justice,” declared Rymal. “I can ask you in a plain and manly way to do what is right, but I cannot fawn and be a sycophant.” Macdonald was unmoved, and his majority voted Rymal’s seat into oblivion.18
For the photography session that recorded the delegates at Charlottetown, Macdonald crouched casually at the centre of a long line of standing delegates, so the eye was drawn to him automatically. Robert Harris gave him the same central status in the Quebec painting. But despite his important role in both conferences, Macdonald was one delegate among many, and not always in the majority. He had never fought for federalism and did not conceal his conviction that “absolute power … must reside somewhere” (the phrase is Bagehot’s and appears in The English Constitution and several times in the Economist’s articles on confederation, but the opinion was also Macdonald’s). That view was problematical, given the necessity of a federal union. Cartier, Langevin, and the Maritimers had frequently to rein in their colleague’s acknowledged preference for legislative union.
At Quebec, Macdonald argued adroitly and yielded grudgingly, but what made him indispensable was his organizing. Approval by Prince Edward Island had never been essential to confederation, and by the end of the conference George Coles was undisguisedly hostile, yet Mercy Coles’s diary shows Macdonald working relentlessly on the Coles family – and charming Mercy, if not her father. To all the delegates and hangers-on, he seemed endlessly present, more sociable than Brown, more comfortable than Cartier, more at home than any of the Maritimers, more authoritative than anyone.
It seems to have been the same behind the closed doors of the conference. Macdonald did not control even his own delegation, but his skills as an organizer had free rein. Though he made several of the major formal presentations, these were probably less important than his ability to work the room and identify potential coalitions, to draft compromise texts during the recesses, and come back to coax the resisters. For Macdonald, Quebec meant the exercise of these skills in endless days at the conference table, in late nights of resolution-drafting and early-morning briefings, and even in the midst of the lavish hospitality of the conference. His Sunday-night dinner with the Coles family, at which he entertained Mercy Coles “with any amount of small talk,” was almost certainly aimed at softening her father’s stand on the eve of Oliver Mowat’s crucial resolution on provincial powers, and Mercy noted that, at 9:00 p.m., their guest was off to another political soirée. Although Macdonald vanished into a gin bottle as soon as the confederation tour reached Ottawa, even straitlaced Mercy Coles understood.19
In the thirty months between Quebec and the official proclamation of confederation by Queen Victoria, Macdonald’s letterbooks show him relentlessly keeping in touch even with minor players. He maintained a correspondence with Colonel Gray of Prince Edward Island even when the confederation cause was clearly hopeless there. (One letter concluded, “Pray present my best regards to those of the Prince Edward Island delegation whom you may meet, always excepting Messrs Palmer and Coles,” who by then
were implacably opposed to confederation. He and Gray even discussed the merits of asking Britain to legislate the Island into confederation against its will.) Macdonald did more than write letters. During the second New Brunswick election, when Leonard Tilley sent his plea for “forty or fifty thousand of the needful” to Macdonald, Macdonald arranged the cash transfer quickly and discreetly.20
When confederation had been ratified by the legislatures at Quebec, Fredericton, and Halifax, one more gathering of convention delegates remained to be held. The delegates moved on to London, this time to supervise the rewriting of Quebec’s seventy-two resolutions into the formal language of a bill for the British Houses of Parliament. The Colonial Office had already assigned legal draftsmen, and the colonial delegates were expected merely to consult on matters of detail and nuance.
Politics had intervened, however. As we have seen, delegates from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick headed for London under instruction to try for “better terms,” and by mid-1866, those from Canada also had a wish list. The Quebec resolutions had made education a provincial responsibility, but sectarian schools that had official status at the time of confederation would be able to seek federal protection against provincial moves to limit or abolish them. The Canadian legislature had failed to pass promised legislation to provide Protestant schools of Quebec the official status they sought. At the insistence of Alexander Galt, the Canadian delegation intended to insert the protection (for minority schools in both Quebec and Ontario) directly into the constitution, despite all the assurances that the Quebec terms were a treaty that could not be amended.
Lord Carnarvon, the young English politician who had just become colonial secretary, wanted nothing to do with colonial controversies. He “proposed” that the delegates should confer among themselves and “narrow their points of difference, if any, to the smallest compass, so as to leave as little as possible for my decision and arbitration.” The London conference proceeded, therefore, in two stages. In December 1866, the delegates negotiated among themselves, working steadily through all seventy-two of the Quebec resolutions. Then the bill itself was drafted early in the new year.21
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