by Conrad Black
In addition to all his other attainments, Salisbury was head of Britain’s greatest family, the Cecils, who were elevated by Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century to a position they had never yielded through four dynasties (Tudor, Stuart, Orange, and Hanover) and the Cromwell interregnum. He replied to this bumptious and transitory official with the suavity of his standing and the eminence of his position that the Monroe Doctrine was scarcely relevant, as the border in question had antedated that event and Her Imperial Britannic Majesty’s government had no need of American arbitration. It was magnificent, but Britain could not win this argument. It was facing a challenge from Germany, which, as Salisbury’s late chief had predicted twenty-four years before, upended the balance of power in Europe and could move the fulcrum for control of that balance from the hands of Britain to those of America. Olney would not have understood any of this, and probably neither would the president he served, the very scrupulous quasi-pacifist Grover Cleveland, former mayor of Buffalo, New York. But Salisbury judged it appropriate to de-escalate this exchange. After Cleveland released the correspondence and told Congress that the United States would regard any attempt to alter the Venezuela–British Guiana border by force as an act of war, Salisbury handed the overheated question to Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain, who sought a triple alliance between Great Britain, the United States, and Germany, declared that war between Britain and America “would be an absurdity as well as a crime. The two nations are more closely allied in interest than any other nations on the face of the earth.”7 It all settled down, went to international arbitration by an agreement of 1897, and that process eventually approved the British position of 1840 but not of 1887, and everyone was satisfied.
What was noteworthy was the propensity of the Americans to rise to instantaneous bellicosity without an apparent thought to where it might lead. Again, the young Theodore Roosevelt, the thirty-seven-year-old president of the New York City Police board of commissioners, wrote, “Let the fight come if it must. I don’t care whether our seacoast cities are bombarded or not. We would take Canada.… It seems to me that if England were wise, she would fight now. We couldn’t get at Canada until May, and meanwhile, she could play havoc with our coast cities and shipping. Personally, I rather hope that the fight will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war.”8 Of course, this was objectively nonsense. The British could defend Canada quite well unless the Americans remobilized a force at least half the size of the Union Army. The British could reduce every American Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coast city to rubble for as long as they pleased. The British chose to wind it down because they did not want their relations with the United States compromised over such a tertiary issue. But it showed that a man who would soon be a very effective architect of America’s assumption of a front-rank place among the world powers was still a blustering schoolyard bully. In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World reported that in Canada “five or six million dollars judiciously expended … would secure the return to Parliament of a majority pledged to the annexation of Canada to the United States,”9 because “Canadians have always been looking over their neighbour’s fence … they have been small-town people giving themselves big city airs.”10 The vagaries of the American personality had always, then and for nearly a century to come, to be taken very seriously by Canadian leaders.
2. The Great Development of the West, 1897–1899
Laurier, who had founded his career as a national figure on his affectation of unimpoverishable optimism, ushered in good times. The western farmers had developed earlier-maturing wheat to surmount or avoid frost and had improved yields and could generally afford better implements. The industrialization of Western Europe and the eastern United States had raised the demand for wheat, and the American farmlands, after thirty years of massive immigration, were filling up, raising interest in the potential of Canada. The senior vice president of Canadian Pacific, Thomas G. Shaughnessy, wrote to Laurier, as he had to Tupper, proposing a railway from Lethbridge through the Crowsnest Pass to Nelson, British Columbia, to keep in Canada the transport business of the gold, copper, and coal mines that were being developed in Western Canada.* The new spurt in business activity and increasing immigration drove railway promoters William Mackenzie and Donald Mann to propose a new railway in Central Canada and spurred the Grand Trunk Railway to bid for another transcontinental route north of the CPR. Van Horne and Shaughnessy warned Laurier of the dangers of overbuilding, but the temptations to encourage such construction were almost irresistible.
Early in 1897, Sifton arrived from Manitoba to take up his position as minister of the interior with an open mandate to increase assimilable immigration. Canada had 5.4 million people, more than Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, Scotland, Ireland, Argentina, or South Africa, but it was only one-thirteenth the population of the United States. Since 1867, Canada’s population had increased from 3.3 million while that of the United States had increased from 40 million to 75 million. Sifton found his department tired and unfocused and vowed to change it. It was time to reinvigorate the pace of Canada’s growth and development. Clifford Sifton, a man whose natural ferocity was heightened by advancing premature deafness (he was only thirty-six), had arrived in Ottawa as an MP and minister of the interior in late November 1896 having signed off on the Manitoba schools settlement. He had a practically unlimited mandate from Laurier to develop the West and take real possession of the vast centre of the country from Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains that La Vérendrye had originally explored 160 years before. The CPR and lesser railways had been granted twenty-four million acres but had only taken up two million, in order not to pay taxes on the rest. Sifton decreed that the railways had to choose what they wanted and take possession and pay taxes on it and yield the rest. Thus cleared of the railway grants, the unclaimed land was made available in 160-acre homesteads, free, to settlers who undertook to develop and occupy them. All accumulated regulations were cleared away, and Sifton ordered his officials to do everything possible to make it easier for sincere applicants to take up the land. He began an advertising campaign in thousands of American newspapers and in Britain and continental Europe, opened offices all over Europe and some in the United States, set up fairs and exhibitions abroad, hired publicists in those countries, and exploited the newspapermen’s notorious weakness for free travel by bringing publicists to Canada and showing them the “amber waves of grain … [upon] the fruited plain,” to quote a celebrated American anthem, to inspire the penurious, downtrodden masses of Europe with a vision of land, food, freedom, abundance, and opportunity.
None of it was a mirage. It was a brilliant and visionary campaign that made Sifton, within a couple of years, one of the great builders of Canada, with Jean Talon, John Graves Simcoe, Francis Hincks, George Stephen, and a select few others. The Allan line ships (which Shaughnessy was about to buy for Canadian Pacific) and the CPR and Grand Trunk were lumbered by Sifton with the task of providing practically free passage for settlers to the West. (Shaughnessy simultaneously commissioned the largest and fastest passenger liners on the Pacific, an honour Canadian Pacific would hold through the Second World War.) As Laurier biographer Joseph Schull wrote, “Wherever a restless man looked up Sifton intended him to see the great sheaf of wheat and the beckoning gateway to the golden west.… This ruthless close-mouthed man was asking for all but absolute control over four hundred million acres of land. He was asking for the power and the money to exploit them and he was going to take what he could get in the way of humankind. One looked at those unyielding agate eyes, burning resentfully as deafness closed round him, and wondered for the future. But Sifton got what he wanted.”11
By 1903, the Laurier-Sifton immigration policy would be bearing fruit and Canada was again beginning to track toward the less lopsided one-to-ten population ratio with the United States. Immigration totals to Canada had bumped along at 15,000 to 20,000 per year apart from the ballo
on of the Irish famine, when they peaked at about 80,000 in 1847. There were (rounding to the nearest thousand), 17,000 in 1896; 24,000 in 1897; 32,000 in 1898; 45,000 in 1899; 43,000 in 1900; 56,000 in 1901; 89,000 in 1902; 139,000 in 1903; lateral movement until 212,000 in 1906; 272,000 in 1907; a 40 per cent dip through 1908 and 1909; and then a rebound to 287,000 in 1910; 332,000 in 1911; 376,000 in 1912; and a staggering 401,000 in 1913. The population of the United States almost tripled between the Civil War and the First World War, from 33 million to about 95 million, but in that period annual immigration increased from 319,000 in 1866 (the highest annual figure before that had been 428,000 in 1854, the only time American immigration surpassed 400,000 prior to 1872) to 1,218,000 in 1914. This was the second highest total in all of American history to the present, surpassed only in 1907 with 1,285,000. Annual immigration to the United States was greater than 1,000,000 six times in the ten years from 1905 and 1914, and never exceeded 400,000 after that (apart from uncertain but high numbers of tolerated illegal immigrants from Mexico in the last third of the twentieth century). These peak million-plus immigration years represented annual increments of 1.1 to 1.3 per cent of the overall population. Once Laurier’s program was fully cranked up by Sifton, between 1903 and 1913, immigration was at the rate of between 2.5 per cent and the 5.5 per cent of 1913.12
From 1901 to 1911, the population of Canada rose, according to the decennial census, from 5.37 million to 7.21 million, an increase of 34 per cent. This was a growth percentage the United States had at times approximately equalled, and in four decades (the 1790s, 1800s, 1840s, and 1850s) very narrowly exceeded, but after the mid-nineteenth century only approached again once, in the 1880s (with 30.1 per cent). Between 1820 and 1900, the grievous total of 1,051,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders emigrated to the United States, a total of immigrants to that country exceeded only by newcomers from Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, and Austria-Hungary, and about equal to immigrants from Italy. In the Laurier decade of 1900 to 1910, this number of Canadian emigrants to the United States contracted to 179,000 (and both these totals would have been partially countered by immigration into Canada from the United States), while Italy and Russia surged ahead of Canada in overall numbers, and in that decade Sweden, Norway, and Greece also exceeded Canada as a net source of immigrants to the United States. Sifton set up the North Atlantic Trading Company in Hamburg to transport “the stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat,” and between 1897 and 1912 Canada received 784,000 people from the United States, perhaps half of them returning Canadians, 961,000 from Great Britain, and 594,000 from continental Europe.
The Laurier-Sifton immigration and western settlement policy was a grandiose design, on the scale, in ambition, imagination, and determined execution, of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was very productive immigration, and all economic indices, agricultural and industrial, reflected, and in some ways amplified, the population growth. Most of the immigrants assumed they were coming to an English-speaking continent and assimilated to the English-language communities, but the French Canadians essentially held their share of the total population with their formidable birthrate, spurred on by the moral and material incentives of church and state in Quebec.
Richard Cartwright, who had so enthusiastically called for free trade with the United States, was sent by Laurier to London to talk matters over with Joseph Chamberlain, now colonial secretary, whose latest preferred cause was Imperial free trade. This rival commercial union got Cartwright’s attention, and he returned no less convinced a tariff-cutter but less precisely focused than he had been. Israël Tarte won respect as an ambitious, and not just patronage-obsessed, minister of public works. He worked closely with Sifton and with Andrew Blair at Railways and Canals to build the terminals and grain-handling and other port facilities to feed and service the settlers and the growing economy. He wrote Laurier that he would “assure the solid friendship of the Grand Trunk and the Canadian Pacific at the same time. With these two great railway companies behind us we could stand up to the fury of the clergy.”13 William Mulock was an imaginative head of the post office and pushed for faster deliveries in-country and overseas. Sydney Fisher at Agriculture and Sir Louis Davies at Fisheries also toiled fruitfully to get the products of their spheres out to the world as cheaply and profitably as possible. It was an energetic and dynamic ministry and illustrated how run down the Conservatives had been, renewed only by John Thompson and kept going only by the overarching national strategy, tactical genius, and immense prestige of Macdonald, who could always rip the patriotic flag out of the hands of any opponent, but had spent himself building and defending Canada and its national railway.
As minister of finance, William Fielding reinforced the dynamic tenor and appearance of the government with his first budget, on April 22, 1897, the most important such occasion since Samuel Tilley had unveiled his chief’s National Policy nineteen years before. He introduced a regime of selective tariffs, promising reciprocity to those who offered it themselves and starting out with Chamberlain’s idea of Imperial solidarity, which bulletproofed the government against Tupper’s Tory opposition. Fielding explained that the tariff was for revenue and not protection, but in fact it provided as much protection as the previous government had done. Fielding put Britain on the spot: Chamberlain, to take up Fielding’s proposal, would have to sever Britain’s preferential trade relations with her great German rival and some other European countries. That was for Salisbury’s government to sort out.
The meetings of the joint high commission with the United States were delayed because of the Spanish-American War, in which Spain had resisted an ultimatum from the Americans to end its oppressions in Cuba and declared war on the United States, and had been pulverized on land and sea within a few weeks, losing Puerto Rico and the Philippines as well as Cuba. This was the last of the Boys’ Own Annual fun wars in which the United States had excelled. Henceforth, it would be waging war with deadly and determined enemies. Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau had died and was replaced as head of the Canadian side at the joint commission by Laurier himself. The opening session was at Quebec on August 23, 1898. The other Canadians were Cartwright, Davies, and a Liberal MP who owned a lumber business, John Charlton. There was only one British representative, the emollient Lord Herschell. The Canadian secretaries were Macdonald’s old assistant, Joseph Pope, and the bright young man of Quebec public life, Henri Bourassa.
It was another feather in Laurier’s cap that it was an almost entirely Canadian delegation and that the meetings moved between Quebec and Washington. Of such details is sovereignty gathered, when it has to be negotiated gradually and without alienating the power from which it is obtained. There was good progress on fisheries and all tariffs, but the Alaska boundary was stickier, and this had attained heightened importance because of the discovery of rich quantities of gold in the Yukon, with the usual inrush of prospectors, panhandlers, adventurers, and hucksters, and the demand for a railway to the goldfields. (This discovery made Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1867 seem especially opportune.) The redoubtable Sifton had led an exploratory trip there in the autumn of 1897. After a month’s holiday, the joint commission resumed its sessions in Washington in December 1898, and proceeded into the New Year in a much more congenial atmosphere than had obtained when the Canuck-baiting man of Maine, James Blaine, had been in the chair. McKinley’s first secretary of state had been Senator John Sherman, brother of the general, and, after a year, William Day, who had been assistant secretary of state under Sherman and who then moved on to the Supreme Court. Day was about to be replaced by the urbane and very capable former minister to Great Britain and Spain, and one-time secretary to Abraham Lincoln, John Milton Hay.
The economy was reviving in Canada as elsewhere, very conveniently, and it was accompanied and propelled by the gold strike in the Yukon and a fever of railway building. A new era of expansion was beginning, and Laurier had no less ardent a concept of what Canada could become than had Macdonald. Canada had established i
tself as a country with extensive powers of autonomy, and had run the gauntlet successfully between American aggression and British hauteur and indifference, but the challenge remained of earning the esteem of those powers and of maintaining a raison d’être for an independent nationality opposite the immense United States contiguity. Illustrative of residual American skepticism was the opinion of the young Theodore Roosevelt written in the latter years of the Macdonald era:
Not only the Columbia but also the Red River of the North – and the Saskatchewan and Frazer [sic] as well – should lie wholly within our limit, less for our own sake than for the sake of the men who dwell along their banks. Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba would, as States of the American Union, hold positions incomparably more important, grander, and more dignified than they can ever hope to reach either as independent communities or as provincial dependencies of a foreign power. As long as the Canadian remains a colonist, he remains in a position which is distinctly inferior to that of his cousins, both in England and in the United States. The Englishman at bottom looks down on the Canadian, as he does on anyone who admits his inferiority, and quite properly, too. The American on the other hand, with equal propriety, regards the Canadian with the good-natured condescension always felt by the freeman for the land that is not free.14
