by Conrad Black
* * *
While this issue heated up, the Irish famine caused the Peel government to revoke the Corn Laws that restricted the import of foodstuffs. The rural Tories professed not to believe that that law, which benefited British farmers, had anything to do with conditions in Ireland, and Lord Henry Bentinck led a revolt of the agrarian faction of the governing party, but the real engineer of the split in the party was Benjamin Disraeli, embittered at what he considered the role of anti-Semitism and both patrician snobbery and bourgeois bigotry in his exclusion from Sir Robert Peel’s government. Disraeli (who was a baptized Anglican but an ethnic Jew) cracked the party wide open and began the task of reconstructing it on progressive lines, which he pursued with conspicuous ultimate success over thirty-three years as leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons or overall, including three partial terms as chancellor of the exchequer and two stints, totalling seven years, as a very capable, as well as legendarily witty, prime minister. The fall of the Peel government brought in Lord John Russell, who had succeeded Melbourne as Liberal leader, with Palmerston back in the Foreign Office, and, as colonial secretary, Earl Grey, son of the prime minister who had passed the First Reform Act and Catholic Emancipation and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Grey had studied the Canadian problem and knew that the repeal of the Corn Laws was the end of the official rationale of the colonies as suppliers of raw materials for Britain and a market for British manufactures. He substituted a new basis of the relationship: shared interest and the political advantages of Imperial solidarity but with the blessings of liberty for all kindred (that is, Caucasian) people in the Empire. Grey said, “The nation has incurred a responsibility of the highest kind which it is not at liberty to throw off,” by which he meant, in the Canadian context, that Britain should hang on to all it could in North America by steering between the local “rebels” and the aggressively watchful Americans.50 “To English Tories, the outer Empire meant dominance and a chance of jobs for younger sons, to English Whigs and radicals it meant trade and if trade could be done with other countries to better advantage, the Empire became a nuisance.… Colonists having repudiated the Tory political view of Empire and the metropolis having repudiated the traditional mercantile conception, it was not surprising that the home government was willing to concede both fiscal and political autonomy.”51
Out of the personal tragedy of Metcalfe, the agitation of Baldwin, Lafontaine, and Hincks, the tectonic shifts in Britain and Ireland and the tensions over Oregon and Mexico, the innate genius of the British, Canadian, and American political systems suddenly asserted themselves. Like a kaleidoscope where everything suddenly comes into focus, all the variables aligned swiftly: Palmerston was happy to accept the arrangement that Peel’s foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, sent to Polk just as the Peel government left office in June 1846, and under Palmerston’s instructions, the British minister completed an Oregon agreement with Polk, which the president had the U.S. Senate ratify. This cleared away the danger of a two-front war and Polk then focused on Mexico, which blundered into a war in which the Americans over the next eighteen months almost effortlessly relieved Mexico of nearly 1.2 million square miles which provided the future states of Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.
As this was happening along the Mexican border, Grey persuaded Russell and Palmerston that there was no practical alternative to setting up the advanced British North American colonies (including Nova Scotia, where Joseph Howe was leading the agitation for responsible government, against the governor, Viscount Falkland, whom Howe threatened to horsewhip), along semi-autonomous, democratic, and cooperative lines. The twenty-seven-year-old monarch Queen Victoria had already come to this conclusion and had proposed to Stanley the appointment of Lord Elgin (1811–1863), a very successful and enlightened governor of Jamaica in the wake of disturbances there, as Metcalfe’s successor, as there was no need for Cathcart after the resolution of the Oregon issue with the United States. She reiterated the suggestion to Grey, who spontaneously concurred, and Elgin arrived with instructions to scrap the tightrope and deliver what Durham had recommended and Bagot had promised. Victoria was probably influenced in her views by her intelligently liberal husband Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Elgin in his by the fact of being Durham’s son-in-law. The Liberal hour had struck in Britain and the dawn of Reform in Canada was at hand.
* * *
British embrace of free trade and the decline of Imperial preference started a tug of war between economic orientation to the United States and the rest of the world, especially, at the outset, Britain and the Empire. One of the preliminary ingredients of responsible government was a Canadian-originated tariff policy, and protection asserted itself quickly, but the first consequence was economic recession, and the population of Montreal declined in the late 1840s from 65,000 to 58,000.52
Lord Elgin arrived in Montreal on January 29, 1847. Expectations were high for an end to the constitutional impasse. William Draper’s government had reached, in Leacock’s words, “its last stage of decrepitude.” 53 “Sweet William,” the “artful dodger,” couldn’t keep the balls in the air any longer and retired and went to the Court of Queen’s Bench (and remained a jurist for the rest of his life, as chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas from 1856 to 1869, and of the Court of Appeal from 1869 to his death, aged seventy-six, in 1877). Draper was a talented and generally admirable transitional figure from the abusive parochialism of the Family Compact to the responsible government enacted by those who would bring Canada to nationhood. Henry Sherwood became the attorney general (premier in fact) in a joint government with the timeless Dominick Daley, but only to play out the string of the outgoing Assembly: a caretaker operation in which Denis-Benjamin Papineau was the only French Canadian, the ambiguous bearer of a famous name. The new regime survived by only two votes a bruising confidence battle on its opening address led by Baldwin and LaFontaine. The session did incorporate enterprises for the “magnetic telegraph,” as its predecessors had for railways (which will be summarized in Chapter 4), and emergency relief for the victims of the Irish famine who were arriving, in pitiable and desperate condition, in Canada. Baldwin was the co-founder of the Emigration Association of Toronto, which gave great assistance to these destitute people, who would yet make a great contribution to the new country on whose abundant shores they had fetched up.
There was little suspense of the result when Governor General Elgin dissolved the Assembly for new elections on December 6, 1847, and on January 24 Baldwin and LaFontaine and the returning Hincks swept the Canadas, Baldwin’s Liberals taking twenty-six of the forty-two constituencies in West Canada, while LaFontaine carried thirty-six of the forty-two in East Canada. Baldwin would sit for Toronto and LaFontaine for Montreal, and the former districts of both returned partisans who better spoke the language of the voters, but their terms as representatives of the others’ provinces and ethnic and cultural groups remain a distinguished link in the political progress of Canada. On election night, Baldwin said, “We shall have no more representatives of the sovereign making the doctrine of the Charleses and Jameses the standard by which to govern British subjects in the nineteenth century.… [They] will be distinguished by adherence to the constitutional principles acknowledged by all parties in England, which will relieve Her Majesty’s representative from the invidious position of head of a party and will render him … a living spirit and the connecting link which binds this great colony to the parent state in affectionate and prosperous union.”54 Thus began what became known, not undeservedly, as the Great Ministry.
The Assembly met on February 28, and Baldwin’s motion to put Augustin-Norbert Morin in as Speaker in place of Sir Allan MacNab passed 56–19. (Papineau’s chief collaborator in the Ninety-Two Resolutions thus replaced the chief of the militia that routed the Upper Canada rebels.) Apart from the co-leaders and Francis Hincks, the new ministry included René-Édouard Caron, Thomas Aylwi
n, Étienne-Paschal Taché, and William Hume Blake. A program of comprehensive electoral, judicial, and university reform, public works, an interprovincial railroad from Quebec to Halifax, and the takeover of the postal service from the Imperial government were all announced. Elgin also announced on behalf of the Imperial government that the non-acceptance of French as an official language of the Legislature was repealed – news he imparted in very comprehensible French – and that, subject to the legislators’ approval, the Queen proposed to pardon all those still serving any form of penalty in respect of the upheavals of 1837 and 1838. Louis-Joseph Papineau had already received a non-prosecution decree from Metcalfe on LaFontaine’s request, and had been elected in 1847 as member for Saint-Maurice. His return was not a success: he raged against the prorogation while those elevated to the ministries had to go through a further election, and when the session reconvened in 1849, he unwisely and ungratefully attacked LaFontaine for a “constitution of the country” that was “false, tyrannical, and calculated to demoralize the people, conceived by statesmen of a narrow and malevolent genius” who would lead French Canada to “results that are ruinous and disastrous.” LaFontaine, to whom Papineau owed his right of return and election and the French Canadians owed their full emergence from inferior political status to full partnership in a voluntary union, and who had declined office from Metcalfe and Draper, eviscerated his former chief: “Behold now this man obeying his ancient instinct of pouring forth insult and outrage, and daring … to accuse me and my colleagues of venality, of a sordid love of office, and of servility to those in power … [were it not for whom, Papineau] would be in Paris, fraternizing, I suppose with the red republicans, the white republicans, or the black republicans and approving, one after the other, the fluctuating constitutions of France.”55
In fact, for the French Canadians, all had changed utterly. Their isolation was, at least conceptually, over, and they were invited to participate in full equality with English Canadians in an entity that enjoyed the freedom of British citizens, the protection of the British Empire, and the rising prosperity of the New World, in a harmony with the great American republic that British statesmen had suavely negotiated at the expense of the distant Mexicans (who had no more possibility of holding what they had just lost to the United States than Canada would have of retaining its independence if the British withdrew their protection of it). LaFontaine had referred to Papineau’s love of republicanism and revolutionary posturing. Papineau was intoxicated by the lengthy and ever-changing political menu of France, while most Canadians and most others preferred, at least for themselves, if not as spectators, the political continuity with gradual reform of Great Britain.
Following the debacles of the French Revolution, and the Bourbon Restoration, Louis-Philippe, the egalitarian king, though one of the wealthiest men in France, was installed on behalf of the House of Orléans and ran a constitutional monarchy that favoured the bankers and industrialists and gradually lost the bourgeoisie and was never popular with the working class. The franchise was gradually whittled down to about 1 per cent of the people by 1848, and the opposition, which included large numbers of republicans, socialists, and supporters of other potential monarchs, was clearly an immense challenge to any chance of continuity of the regime. Very large dissident elements arose around competing newspapers and held banquets in their own honour as a way of avoiding the politically restrictive laws against the opposition. The French bourgeoisie noted the First Reform Act in Britain. Opposition grew, and instead of appeasing the moderate elements and gently closing the gate on the rest, Louis-Philippe outlawed these political banquets, eliciting a general revolt (as only the French would mount against a banning of good dinners). Mobs forced the resignation of the prime minister, the historian François Pierre Guizot, and then marched on the Quai d’Orsay (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). By accident, a musket was discharged, volleys followed, and fifty-two people were killed, mayhem followed, and Louis-Philippe fled to London in the footsteps of Charles X (who had died twelve years before). The Second Republic was founded, and the poet Alphonse de Lamartine, an absurd choice to lead such a complicated country, became provisional president. The electorate was multiplied thirty-fold with universal adult male suffrage, to nine million, and the chronic problem of unemployment (about a third of the workforce in Paris) was tackled by the National Workshops, an advanced workfare program. There was the predictable flight of capital and polarization of political opinion, and the Lamartine government was soon forced to impose new land taxes that aggravated the sharpest divisions of French society. A well-known trajectory, to be followed frequently in the future, was followed. The radicals called for international revolution (and Poland, which had been divided between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, was the first to heed the call). By this time, Klemens von Metternich, who had been foreign minister of the Holy Roman Empire since 1809 and chancellor of the Austrian Empire since 1821, was sent packing by angry mobs, even in placid Vienna (to London, of course). Richard Wagner had been among the more energetic demonstrators in Vienna, as Friedrich Engels had been among the more prolific pamphleteers and polemicists in Paris, harbingers of German militarist nationalism and of the Communist movement, which would henceforth lurk in Europe’s future.
Everything in the old and unsettled continental Europe, everything between gradually reforming Britain and glacially immoveable Russia, was coming loose. The working class of Paris, fearing they were losing out again, seized the National Assembly and proclaimed a provisional government, but were chased out by the National Guard as the forces of reaction gained the upper hand. The National Workshops were shut down in June, hundreds of thousands of working-class rioters erected barricades, and General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac was recalled from Algeria to quell the disorder. He did this brusquely and crushed the uprisings with 125,000 troops and special militia. In the election for president of the Second Republic on December 10, 1848, Cavaignac ran as the candidate of the reactionary right, Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin (“I must follow the mob, for I am their leader”) as candidate of the moderate reformers, François-Vincent Raspail as candidate of the far left, and Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, as enigmatic candidate of French greatness and the satisfaction of everyone. Raspail received around 50,000 votes, Ledru-Rollin 370,000, Cavaignac 1,475,000, and the smooth-talking charlatan Bonaparte 5.58 million, and so this was the devolution of all these events that so entranced the returned Papineau.
In the world, the dynamism of America was sapped by the agony of slavery; France was a shambles of riots, revolutionaries, poseurs, and men on horseback; Central Europe was in complete disorder as Prussia gained, Austria slipped, the patchwork of nationalities seethed and agitated, and Russia was little advanced from the Middle Ages. Great Britain led the world in political reform, in the Industrial Revolution, and in its serene, sea-borne strength, and diplomatic cunning and ability to manipulate the permutations of the world’s powers to its own gain. Pax Britannica was entering its most brilliant phase, over the next twenty years, until the resolution of America’s slavery schism and the rise of Bismarckian Germany would present a benign American rivalry, and a mortal German challenge.
In Canada, now sheltering happily in the British orbit, but not so distant from or impervious to the great events of the Western world as it had been, the entire reform program of Baldwin and LaFontaine was passed. This may be taken as Canada’s entirely positive and peaceful contribution to the epochal year of 1848 that convulsed Europe from Paris to Warsaw. Under the Great Ministry of Baldwin and LaFontaine, a protective tariff in response to Peel’s move to free trade, the queen’s amnesty, a well-crafted reorganization of the judiciary, a radical and well-designed reorganization of municipal government, Baldwin’s university initiative, and railway legislation, were all intelligently debated, constructively amended, and adopted. It was a model of self-government such as few other national or quasi-national jurisdictions could claim. Francis Hincks proved a virtual A
lexander Hamilton of Canada. A railway connecting the St. Lawrence at La Prairie to Lake Champlain and the Hudson at Saint-Jean had already been built, as had part of the Grand Trunk Railway from Montreal to Portland, Maine, and parts of the Great Western and Northern Railways. Hincks as inspector general began the Canadian practice (which would crest a century later with C.D. Howe) of government aid to private sector works of national economic interest by promising 6 per cent assistance by the government on half the cost of any railway of more than seventy-five miles in length. Hincks’s effort at freer trade reciprocity with the United States required five years to bear fruit, but was the forerunner of the unsuccessful effort of Sir Wilfrid Laurier sixty years later, and of the Free Trade Agreement successfully pursued by Brian Mulroney eighty years after that.
