Delphi complete works of.., p.405
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 405
That’s the way we run the Empire. Now send us along that International Committee, and we’ll invite them to a cricket match, and let them see all Australia beat half England, have a gin fizz with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and go home.
Britain and Canada
Old Phases and New
MANY OF US are wishing now that we had learned more while we were still at school about the British Empire and how it is made up and how it works. Our recollection of the old school geography doesn’t help us much. We recall a picture of the solar system in full swing, with a huge earth sweeping around an insignificant sun, and after that the names of the counties of Ontario and the capes of North America. But indeed the whole vast system which we call the British Empire presents in its structure such a mass of oddities and inconsistencies that not even the lawyers can understand it. Is it one solid unit, or just a collection of units, “freely associating” while they care to, and off somewhere else when they are ready to? There is supposed to be at the centre of it a body called the Privy Council, or more properly the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, to decide all cases that arise in regard to the laws and constitutions of the Empire. This is a very pleasant thing for the lawyers, as they have to take long trips at some one else’s expense (lawyers never travel on their own) from various parts of the Empire to see what the Privy Council thinks of some contested case. As a matter of fact, the Privy Council, made of wise, experienced men, far too wise to think on their own account, merely whisper to the visiting lawyers, “What do they think about the matter over in your country?” and they say, “Well, that’s what we think, too....” As a matter of fact, some parts of the Empire, namely Eire (don’t call it Ireland) and South Africa, no longer consent to appeal to the Privy Council — which is a pity as they lose a lot of good will and friendly intercourse.
But, in reality, the British Empire doesn’t hang together by any set of hard and fast statutes, such as the Statute of Westminster (1931) that everybody talks about and nobody understands. This statute was passed by the British parliament and declares, practically in the same breath, that the Empire is permanent and that it can be dissolved at will. Nor need the Americans laugh at this, since it is practically what their Constitution said from 1789 till 1865 about the relation of the States to the Federal Government. It took a whole Civil War to find out what it did mean.
We’ve learned, with the help of this American experience, a better system of dealing with our imperial constitution. We don’t ask what it means; we just take it as a sort of “gentlemen’s agreement.” There are certain things which it is “the thing” to do, and others that you simply “don’t do” because it’s not “the thing” to do them. It’s like the game of cricket — which many of you have now seen as played in England. When we play it in my home town of Orillia, or yours of Sussex, New Brunswick, or Red Deer, Alberta, there’re lots of fighting and disputes in it, almost as good as American baseball, with argument and tumult around the umpire, so that you can’t see which one he is till they carry him off the field. But in England cricket is cricket; you mustn’t dispute or argue. It’s not “the thing.” If you’re fielding at square leg (ask the nearest Englishman where that is) and you get a paste with the ball in the pit of the stomach, you mustn’t complain; you must just say, “Sorry, old man.” That’s addressed to the bowler. Ask the Englishman why you say you’re sorry for his sake; it wasn’t his stomach.
What I am really trying to say is that all government rests, not on codes and laws (those are for criminals), but on decency, kindly feeling and a proper idea of the merits and rights and the good sides of others. This is especially true of our British Empire. We couldn’t live a day without it. You should carry the idea up to the verge of truth, and for the sake of good fellowship, even a little beyond. I’ve had the good luck to see a great many parts of the British Empire and I make it a rule to praise it all. If a man says he comes from Jamaica, I say, “Ah, now there’s an island! ... if you like...” So it is; it’s an island. And if a man tells me he’s from Western Australia, I say, “My! my! What country, especially up inland past Calgourlie! How fertile! I’ve seen a cabbage growing there in the open without support....” And for Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, “Ah, now there’s a climate for you! Never cold; that is, never severely cold; never far below zero — in summer....”
Nor do I say this to try to be funny. I mean it in earnest. And when you’ve done with your fellow Britisher, use it on an American and tell him that Nevada is your idea of a summer resort.
But just now we’re to talk only of Britain and Canada and to illustrate various imperial phases through them. You may notice at once the difficulty, as all throughout the Empire, of finding suitable names. Britain. Where’s that? When I was young, there was no such place outside of a poetry book. We always used to say “England” — to mean in a general sense — well, whatever “Britain” means now. A poet of the Crimean War days could write, “One more gone for England’s sake, where so many go,” though perhaps the man fallen in the snow was a Scotchman; and a learned professor could write a whole book called The Expansion of England, as if Ireland and Scotland hadn’t swelled up, too.
Presently the other parts of — well, of what they are all parts of — got touchy about it. They wouldn’t be called “England” any more. The Channel Islands were especially bitter. They considered that they had conquered England under their own Duke in 1066 and that England was therefore an annex of the Channel Islands. Believe it or not, this fiction was actually kept up till 1914; the British parliament didn’t legislate for the Islands and had no power there except through the King — but not as King — as ex-Duke of Normandy. This fairyland fell under the shadow of the Great War Income Tax.
But what name could be used? “Great Britain” leaves out Ireland. “British Isles” won’t fit in ordinary sentences. The “United Kingdom” is a law term. So now we say “Britain”; when we get settled to it, we shall talk of taking a trip to “Britain,” which in my youth would have sounded like going to “Caledonia” or running over to “Erin.”
The name “Canada” used to be just as bad but is now pretty well straightened out. Nobody knows where it came from. When Jacques Cartier came up the St. Lawrence in 1535 on his way to McGill University (then called Hochelaga), he came to the great river that we call Saguenay — in fact, the Indians told him that up this and beyond it, farther west, was the Kingdom of Saguenay, full of gold and diamonds; they were right in a way. Savage legend always has a background. They meant the Hollinger mine, and God’s Lake and Flin-Flon, the legend of gold and silver beyond the divide, which later turned out to be true. But they told Cartier, also, that if he went on up the river he would come to “Canada,” and when he got to where Quebec is they said, “This is Canada and beyond it is Hochelaga” (corner of McGill College Avenue and Burnside).... What did the name mean? We don’t know. Some said it was Algonquin Kanata — the narrows; some said it was Algonquin Kanada — a collection of wigwams. Later some one made a joke, “It’s Spanish Aca-Nada” — meaning “nothing there.” That joke got into the schoolbooks of my youth as dead earnest (the education department in Ontario was Scotch) and stayed there. So we don’t know. The French called the country New France — a name that was, so to speak, spilt on the American coast (1524) by Verrazano (he never landed north of New Hampshire), and then picked up again by Champlain. It was the official name of the country till the Conquest, but by about the year 1700 people commonly used “Canada” and even put it in official correspondence.
After the cession of 1763, the British government adopted the name “Quebec” for its new possession, the reason being that General Amherst and General Murray both declared that they couldn’t find out just how much territory the French meant by Canada. So Quebec it was, on a small scale, till 1774, and then it was the huge Quebec of the Quebec Act of that year, which reached from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, and took in Chicago, what there was of it to take — mudflats, reeds and an Indian Portage — and perhaps a Rotary Club.
The schoolbooks may have led you to think that France and England fought for the possession of Canada (1754-1763). They didn’t. They weren’t thinking of it. They were fighting, so to speak, for the United States, for the marvellous Ohio territory just being revealed in all its park-land fertility. After the war the English didn’t want Canada particularly, to which fact we owe a great deal of the freedom of our present institutions and especially the privileges of church and speech and nationality extended to French Canada, which alone made possible our Confederation.
A lot of the silly nonsense talked about Canada as a land of desolation began right then and has kept up till today. Voltaire’s sneer about “the snow” passed down in history, and people forgot the last, wistful phrase of the departing Governor Vaudreuil, “A vast and beautiful country....”
But I was talking of the name. “Canada” never got on the map till England decided to keep it and use it, after the loyalists came in, to name Upper and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) in 1791, and after that, in 1841, when they united the two together as the Province of Canada. That lasted till 1867 when the name “Canada” was used to cover all British North America — yes, all, because Newfoundland was invited in. But even long after that, forty years after that, people in the Maritimes used the term “Canada” to mean a separate place; within my own recollection — and mind you, I’m not even eighty — I’ve heard Nova Scotia people say they had never been in “Canada.” ... That’s changed now. So, too, with the North West. “Canada” meant another country from their own till after 1869.... And with British Columbia till 1871.... The name triumphs now; it reaches from the forty-ninth parallel to the North Pole, in a long sort of wedge like a slice of orange peel. We own more of the North Pole than any other nation, except the Russians.
Even these casual references to history show something about where we got our relationships with Britain. Pretty thin they were at first. We “owned” the Maritimes (the huge Nova Scotia that reached to what was called Massachusetts) as far back as 1713. But what there was of them was all French. Then as the shadow of a new war fell, things began to happen. The British government deliberately founded Halifax so as to have a real footing in Nova Scotia, founded it mostly with old soldiers, all pipe clay and mitered helmets (see Mr. Jefferys’ picture of the Foundation), but so unhandy on the land they couldn’t even grow cabbages. So for that the government of England sent out a set of distressed Germans and located them at Lunenburg in Nova Scotia. There were always “distressed Germans” in those days, ready to be sent out to America. I forget what they were distressed about; something pretty tough, I hope.
Every mother and every mother country has a favourite child. Now Halifax, all hearty British as compared with the West Indies, all black, and with the American plantations, fractious and bothersome, was the favourite child of the mother country. And so the law officers of the Crown decided (that is, somebody whispered it to them) that the settlers had an inherent British right to an elected assembly. They got it in 1758 and that became, and is, one of the great precedents of the British imperial system....
The dark side of this picture, the reverse of this bright medal, was the forcible moving out, the expulsion of the Acadian French of Nova Scotia, some 6,000 of them, shipped away, some here, some there, with no compensation for their land or their stock. It makes bad reading. The British government tried to plead that the imminence of a new war made these people a danger, as they might fight on the side of France. One hopes they would have. But tears have fallen for nearly a century over the pages of Longfellow’s Evangeline which chronicles their fate.
That much there was of British ... and out in the West the wide sovereignty of the Hudson’s Bay Company, under their Charter of 1670, covered all the watershed of Hudson Bay, and, by extension, all the Pacific coast, over two million square miles.... It was all called Rupert’s Land then (after the wonderful Prince Rupert who founded the Company.) The name lasted officially till 1869. It only survives now in the name of the Province of Rupert’s Land. But the North West — the common name for it — was far more Scottish than English. The Company’s vessels sailed from London around Scotland to the Bay. Most of their men on the ships and at the forts were Scots — islanders at that. The canoemen and servants were French, or French half-breed Métis. The language of the West was French and Indian Cree, with Scottish for the parlour.... The West was empty till 1870. The Roman poet Virgil said that to found the Roman Empire was tanta molis — Latin for “a hell of a business.” But he’d never seen Canada.
Through this maze of history, where did our government come in? Where did we get those privileges, presently rights, that gradually removed us from the control of Great Britain? As usual with British people, much of it was accident, much of it was done by the Turkish system of doing nothing, and much of it, most of it, a result of that inherent “decency” toward other people and toward those who can’t hit back, that is the characteristic of the free government that grew up under British and American democracy. This democracy has not been the result of theory but of instinct and temperament; the fact came first and the theory afterwards. It is always thus; professors of theory merely hold post-mortems.
With us in Canada the sequence of development in our relations with Britain ran like this: The grant of freedom of religion to the Roman Catholic French in Canada (1763) gave it, of necessity, to all Roman Catholics. In England they didn’t have it till the emancipation of 1829. When the Loyalists came in (1784 and on), they had to have representative assemblies by virtue of the Halifax precedent and by what they had left at home. Here began Upper Canada’s first government under Governor Simcoe. We may admit that Simcoe made it as aristocratic as he could; his little parliament at Niagara was all feathers, forms, uniforms, salutes of guns and speeches from the throne — in fact, just like “home.” From him and from his senior Lord Dorchester, we carried down a lot of those queer formalities of government that mean so little to the cynic, so much to the philosopher. But aristocracy wouldn’t work in Upper and Lower Canada (1791-1841). It broke down under the Rebellion of 1837, after which the British government hanged the rebels and adopted their programme. That gave the united province of Canada (1841-67) responsible government with a cabinet of its own, so that it controlled everything except foreign policy, trade and navigation, etc. — all local things. Old-fashioned Tories, like the Duke of Wellington, were reported “thunderstruck” when they heard of giving a colony its own government. But old-fashioned Tories always are thunderstruck. That’s how they live; indignation keeps them warm. Cabinet government for the Province of Canada gave it automatically to the Maritimes.
Cabinet government failed to work in the Province of Canada, because the parties simply couldn’t get a majority that was a majority in each section (Canada East and West) and of each race, and also of the whole.
Hence the plan of a wide union of all British North America. Everybody had talked of this for years as an ideal. But ideals never come true till something else happens. It was the American Civil War, that and the naughty Fenians who grew out of it, that chased all the scattered British North American Colonies into Confederation like chickens into a coop. Great Britain was the mother hen herding them in, with a peck here and a push there — a railway for Nova Scotia, a railway for B.C. — and free leave for them all to divide up the Hudson’s Bay Company’s land.... In they came, and they couldn’t get out.
Confederation in 1867, however, was on a different footing from our present relations. The British soldiers were still here till 1871; the British Navy at Halifax and Esquimalt till 1903. All foreign policy was managed from Downing Street — no Canadian ambassadors or ministers — treaties all made for us, though a Canadian might be invited to “sit in” and see it done, as Sir John A. Macdonald at the Washington Treaty of 1871. We couldn’t even hang our own criminals at first (not till 1878), as the fountain of mercy only flowed from Downing Street through the Governor-General. But now the Minister of Justice runs the fountain from his own tap of tears.
So it was with all of it. Bit by bit the special reservations, treaty powers, etc., all wore away. The Red River Rebellion of 1869 was put down (frightened away) by mingled imperial regulars and Canadian militia. The Rebellion of 1885 was put down with all-Canadian forces, with only an imperial general running up and down to show them how — or how not, I forget which.... A string of Imperial Conferences presently turned the chief colonies into Dominions, and by the Great War of 1914 they were practically as free as Great Britain itself.
But the real thing was that Canada outgrew the idea of its own inferiority to Britain that had vexed its earlier years. No doubt the mingling of population in the great immigration (1900-1913) helped a lot by welding into the structure of the Dominion the temper of American and Scandinavian people — some newcomers, we may admit, didn’t help much and in some spots the thing was overdone but in the main it helped to make a greater Canadian self-reliance. Other things helped also, other aspects of culture. British scholarship and learning; Latin and Greek, the seniority and sneeriority of Oxford, the dead weight of the classical tradition, sat heavy on the chest of Canadian academic aspirations. Ask any of us who spent years and years of study to get a B.A. degree at Toronto or Queens in the early Nineties, only to find that a better B.A. (in the world’s eyes) could be got at Oxford in less time on brandy and soda. They had other degrees, too, I admit. This burden sat until presently it got heaved off by the rise of the great practical science schools in Canada, McGill and others, with all the water power of a continent thundering in their ears, with mines and mountains for geologists to rifle ... schools, beside which the practical science schools of England were nursery games. Soon after 1900, hundreds of British students came over to “get science” in Canada as humbly as Canadian students went to pick up crumbs of Greek under the Oxford table....
