by John Buchan
Minto’s action was much criticized, but it is impossible to doubt that he was right — both in signing the order-in-council and in making his protest. The “stiffness” which Sir Wilfrid attributed to him was in this case clear-sightedness and courage. He stated the case to Mr. Chamberlain with complete fairness. Hutton was undoubtedly difficult; he might strive to be decorous, but cumulatively by endless little indiscretions he exceeded decorum. His fortitude in re was not combined with suavity in modo; he was a gadfly whose business it was to sting lethargy into action, and there were naturally protests from those who smarted under the sting. He was not the best man to work with the Government of a jealous young democracy. But the fact remained that the policy he represented was vital to Canada as a nation, that it was not questioned by Ministers that he had substantially kept inside the constitutional limits of his office, that he had done and was doing much valuable work, and that he fell a victim less to his defects than to his merits. He had suffered an unwarrantable interference in matters which were strictly within his province, and that interference had been due to the inclination to “graft” and patronage engrained in Canadian political life. Unless this root of evil was extirpated there could be no health in the Militia, and with Hutton’s failure vanished the hope of a national militia army.
It was for this reason that Minto was compelled to take a stand in opposition to his Ministers. Hutton was sacrificed to their pettiness — not so much Sir Wilfrid’s, for he admitted that he could have worked with him, but that of lesser folk; and in the interests of his party the Prime Minister not very willingly and rather shamefacedly took up the quarrel. In these lesser people two other motives were no doubt at work. It was the dark season of the South African War, and the repute of imperial officers was a little tarnished, and the ardour of the more recent converts to imperialism notably abated. “I ask myself,” Dr. Borden had told Hutton after Colenso, “in face of the reverses which the British army has received, if it is worth the while of Canada to remain part of the Empire.” Also, Hutton was too popular. He had behind him a large following of which he was sometimes injudicious enough to remind Ministers — an unpalatable thought to those who had come to believe that they were the sole rightful interpreters of the people’s will.
During his term of office Minto had to face a second dispute over the personality of the Militia commander, but happily one which raised a less difficult question. A temporary successor to Hutton was appointed, and Mr. Brodrick, when he became Secretary for War, exerted himself to find a man who would be at once acceptable to the Canadian Government and would carry out the reforms in the Militia, as to which he and Minto were in complete accord. After many failures he persuaded Lord Dundonald to accept the post. Lord Dundonald at the time was a conspicuous figure in the public eye. He had done good work with the cavalry in South Africa, and had led the first troops that relieved Ladysmith; he was a keen professional soldier; he belonged to an ancient and famous Scottish house, which was in itself a recommendation to a country so largely peopled from Scotland. But he had certain personal characteristics which made friction inevitable. His candour had little geniality; he was extremely sensitive, like many shy men, and had developed a protective armour of stiffness and reserve, which was not far removed from egotism. A touch of the theatrical in his conduct was a further danger; he was very willing to appear to the world as riding the storm and holding the gate. At first he was not unsuccessful. Much excellent work was done in Militia reorganization in the light of South African lessons, and the Militia budget was substantially increased. But rifts soon opened between him and the Government. His pleas for larger estimates and for extensive fortifications on the United States border were rejected, and in the discussions on the revision of the Militia Act he was profoundly irritated by the ignoring of his views on certain clauses. A multitude of petty differences of opinion with Sir Frederick Borden exacerbated his temper, and he gradually slipped in his public utterances into a tone of sharp criticism of the Government of which he was the servant.
The crisis came in the summer of 1904. A new regiment, the 13th Scottish Dragoons, was being raised in the Eastern Townships, the constituency of a member of the Cabinet, Mr. Sydney Fisher, who was temporarily acting as Minister of Militia. Among the names of officers submitted to the Governor-General for approval, one, that of a prominent Tory politician, was scratched out by Mr. Fisher on his own responsibility. Minto signed the list, and returned it to Dundonald, who made no comment. But on 4th July the latter at Montreal made a public speech in which he violently attacked the Government for introducing party politics into the Militia administration. Such action was a grave breach of discipline, and Minto saw at once that it made Dundonald’s position impossible, and frankly told him so. The General commanding the Militia had been sedulously cultivating the Opposition and the Opposition press, and he was not displeased to find himself in the role of a popular saviour defying the machinations of the politicians. Mr. Fisher’s action had been no doubt irregular, but Dundonald’s correct views on the evils of political wire-pulling could not atone for a flagrant breach of discipline and an utter disregard of the constitutional position of his command. In a private memorandum Minto wrote: “I entirely agree with my Government as to the immediate necessity of Dundonald’s dismissal. As to their support of Fisher I entirely disagree with them; but surely the question as to whether public departments are to be run on political lines is not one to be settled by the Governor-General, but by the Dominion Parliament and the people of Canada. . . . I don’t care a damn what any one says, and have not a shadow of doubt this is right.”
He was strongly pressed to refuse to sign the order-incouncil for Dundonald’s dismissal, and much criticized when he signed it. But he had no doubts as to his course. Dundonald’s case was wholly different from Hutton’s; the latter had laboured earnestly to carry Ministers with him and had never been willingly guilty of insubordination; the former had chosen the path of flat defiance. Dundonald’s attitude was revealed by his conduct when the order was passed. He wanted Minto to delay it that he might have a chance of starting a political campaign, and was surprised when Minto told him that he would never be a party to such a course. At the same time Minto wished to use the occasion as a warning against political jobbery in the Militia, and pressed Sir Wilfrid to ask also for Mr. Fisher’s resignation — a course which the Prime Minister declined to take. Minto signed the order, and contented himself with repeating his views on political interference in a private memorandum to Council, and in endeavouring unsuccessfully to get from Ministers some recognition of the good work accomplished by Dundonald in spite of his indiscretions. A hot controversy followed the incident, for the Opposition were on the General’s side, and Dundonald, like his famous ancestor, was not without some of the gifts of the demagogue. Moreover, he was a Scot, and Canadian Scots were prompt to resent Sir Wilfrid’s description of him as a “foreigner,” at once modified to “stranger” — the consequence, perhaps, of the Prime Minister’s habit of thinking in French. The mass meetings held in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal were nearly as critical of the Governor-General as of the Government. Minto’s action was a proof of his full understanding of his constitutional duties, and his appreciation of those small differences in the facts which may involve a momentous divergence in principle; the policy which he had vigorously resisted in the case of Hutton he accepted promptly in the case of Dundonald.*
* Footnote: His action has been curiously misunderstood by certain Canadian writers. Professor Skelton in his Life of Sir Wilfrid Laurier says that “he endeavoured to induce Sir Wilfrid to abandon or postpone the dismissal” (II., page 201), and Mr. J. W. Dafoe in his brilliant little sketch of Laurier says that “he resisted signing the order-in-council until it was made clear to him that the alternative would be a general election in which the issue would be his refusal” (page 80). The writers seem to be confusing the Hutton and Dundonald affairs, for I can find no evidence from the correspondence and
notes of conversations of any delay in the latter case. Minto accepted at once the view of the Cabinet on the necessity of Dundonald’s dismissal.
In a conversation with Laurier in June 1904, Minto secured from the Prime Minister a remarkable condemnation of political influence in spheres which should be free from politics. It was, said Sir Wilfrid, the great evil of democracies, and he deplored the case of Quebec, “which was full of small political organizations who entirely controlled numerous public appointments.” His view seems to have been that the whole business was indefensible, but that while life was lived in faece Romuli and not in the Platonic state, the evil must be accepted and the abuses of one party balanced by the abuses of the other. It was the view of a practical party leader, not very heroic, perhaps, but with a certain crude justification. So long as the people accepted the system, the system would continue. Canada suffered from the misfortunes incident to all young countries, where the ablest and strongest men are content, as a rule, with private life, and are too busy in developing the land’s resources to have time to take a share in the land’s government. Such a situation leaves a free field for the wire-puller. Moreover, in Canada parties had come to have a hereditary and sentimental sanction, so that the people were sharply brigaded between them without much regard to doctrine. A man was born a “Grit” or a Conservative, traditions and environment determined his political allegiance, and party loyalty had come to be reckoned a moral virtue. In Lord Bryce’s words:* “Party seems to exist for its own sake. In Canada ideas are not needed to make parties, for these can live by heredity, and, like the Guelfs and Ghibellines of mediaeval Italy, by memories of past combats.” In such conditions the statesmen who tried to exclude party influence and “graft” from any domain of public life had the hopeless task of Sisyphus.
* Quoted in Dafoe’s Laurier, page 176.
But this maleficent growth was bound to strangle at birth any true system of national defence. There was another and a not less grave obstacle to be faced by the military reformer. The Canadian people could not be apprehensive of danger except from the direction of the south. The Venezuela crisis and the vapourings of American politicians alarmed the country from Halifax to Vancouver, and on the basis of this alarm Hutton began his reforms. But the fear soon passed, and the enthusiasm at the start of the South African War was not less short-lived. Canada, desperately busy in developing her rich heritage, lost interest in schemes for her defence, for the imagination of most people has but a short range, and dangers which are not visible to the eye are soon dismissed as academic.
Before the end of Minto’s term of office certain vital changes were made in the Militia Department. In 1904 the Militia Act was revised, and the Government were permitted to appoint to the command of the force, if they so desired, a Canadian Militia officer. A Militia Council was also created, on the lines of the new Army Council in Britain, with the Minister as president, and with as its first member a Chief of Staff, who was destined to take the place of the old G.O.C. Moreover, the doubt as to the powers of the Imperial authorities to call out the Militia for service abroad was settled by an explicit statement that the force in time of war could only be called out by the Dominion Government, and that its service, whether within or without Canada, was restricted to the defence of Canada. In the following year the fortified harbours of Halifax and Esquimalt, hitherto maintained and garrisoned by Britain, were taken over by Canada, and the numbers of the permanent Militia were consequently increased. The result was that the defence of the country and the control of the armed forces of the Dominion were wholly vested in the Canadian Government.
Minto, as was to be expected, took an eager interest in the changes, and in many letters to Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Brodrick, Lord Lansdowne, and Mr. Alfred Lyttelton, and in conversations with Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Sir Frederick Borden he pressed his views. He was the first to suggest that Halifax and Esquimalt should be handed over to Canada and their command amalgamated with that of the Militia, for he thought that the increased importance of the post would attract the best type of soldier—”capable,” as he told Mr. Chamberlain, “of looking beyond purely military needs, and of dealing tenderly with political necessities and the many disagreeable surroundings of official life in a new country, and at the same time possessing strength of character enough to wear down abuses by tact and deliberation.” To the Militia Council he was favourable, but he was resolutely opposed to the throwing open of the chief command to Canadian officers. He was most anxious to open up to keen Militia officers a real career, and laboured to devise a system by which a certain number of imperial appointments would be available for them. But he did not believe that the time was ripe to hand over the defence of Canada to a Canadian soldier, and his reasons were threefold. The first and most important was the matter of technical competence. Canada simply did not possess men of the professional knowledge capable of bringing the Militia to the standard of training required by modern military standards. It was no discredit to Canada, but it was a fact which could not be blinked. In the second place, it was unfair to expect a Canadian commander to fight against the traditions of political interference which were ingrained in public life, and which at the same time must disappear if true discipline was to be maintained. Finally, he dreamed of a Canadian force trained on the same lines as other forces in the Empire, and so linked with these forces that in a great war co-operation — should Canada decree it — would be swift and smooth and irresistible. For this there must be a trait d’union, and that for the present could only be found in the link provided by an imperial commanding officer, familiar with imperial staff work. Minto laboured in argument, but the home authorities were apathetic and the Canadian Government resolved. Slowly the vision of a Canadian national army, on a plane with other national armies within the Empire and part of one great system of imperial defence, faded out of the air.
There are many views on the doctrine of Empire, and a dozen types of constitution have been canvassed, from the close mechanism of federation to the loose tie of allied nations. But, whatever the doctrine, the one insistent interest which can never be questioned is that of common defence. Canada relapsed into a provincial system of a small permanent Militia, an imperfectly trained active Militia, and a water-tight staff. She did not even, like Australia, have any custom of universal training. Her statesmen of all parties, however restive they might normally be under imperial demands, had eloquently proclaimed that should Britain and the Empire ever be in danger the country would rise as one man in their defence. They were justified in their faith. When in August 1914 Germany flung down the challenge, Canada did not waver. Her response was instant and universal; she put armies into the field larger than any army of Britain in the old wars, and at Second Ypres, at Vimy, at Passchendaele, at the Drocourt-Queant Line won victories which were vital to the Allied triumph. But everything had to be improvised, and improvisation takes time. It was eight months before the first Canadian division could take its place in the field, and meantime the whole burden of the defence, not of Britain alone but of Canada, fell on the worn ranks of the British regulars. They did not fail in that desperate duty, but most of them died of it.
CHAPTER 7. GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF CANADA, 1898-1904 (continued)
Imperial and Domestic Problems
WHEN in the mid ‘nineties the doctrine of a united Empire, preached by Sir John Seeley and made romantic by Cecil Rhodes, became in Mr. Chamberlain’s hands an explicit policy, it took for its text Disraeli’s famous declaration in 1872: “Self-government, in my opinion, when it was conceded, ought to have been conceded as part of a great policy of imperial consolidation. It ought to have been accompanied by an imperial tariff . . . and by a military code, which should have precisely defined the means and the responsibilities by which the colonies should be defended, and by which, if necessary, this country should call for aid from the colonies themselves. It ought, further, to have been accompanied by the institution of some representative council in the metropolis,
which would have brought the colonies into constant and continuous relations with the home Government.” Each detail of this creed — constitutional, military, economic — was emphasized in turn by the new imperialist school; but naturally the constitutional took precedence, and its first and obvious form was the scheme of imperial federation.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier was in 1897 the hope of the federationists. In his own words, they looked to him to act as the bell-wether. The measure of imperial preference which he had carried in that year as a shrewd stroke in domestic politics seemed to outsiders a step in a bold imperial statesmanship. He told a Liverpool audience in his eloquent way that the time might come when Macaulay’s New Zealander would “stand at the gate of Westminster Palace asking for admission into that historic hall which, having been the cradle of Liberty” — the rest of the sentence was drowned in the plaudits of his hearers. His views beyond doubt at this time leaned to a scheme of federation, and the Conservative Opposition, while in Ontario accusing him of lukewarmness in the cause of Empire, in Quebec tried to win favour by attacking his imperialist proclivities. When in the spring of 1900 he replied to Mr. Bourassa’s criticisms in Parliament, he declared that Canada’s assistance in future wars must be dependent on a new constitutional arrangement. “If you want us to help you,” he told the people of Britain, “you must call us to your councils.” It was natural that Mr. Chamberlain should look on the Canadian Premier as his first lieutenant.
