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130 That Hugh John should have gone to university at the age of fifteen was not in the least unusual. Some undergraduates then were a year younger. No high schools existed until the 1870s, and bright students were prepared for university entrance exams in special schools. See A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951.
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†131 As must have galled Macdonald, Brown at this time made himself wealthy for life by selling his farm and lands in southwestern Ontario for a handsome $275, 000.
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132 Macdonald had received his first honorary degree in 1863 from Queen’s University; it was also the first honorary degree awarded by Queen’s, which he had helped to found.
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133 Before his speech, Macdonald had already rejected a suggestion by Brown that he should move a series of resolutions on the scheme.
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†134 This purely tactical use by Macdonald of the term “treaty” was later seized on by advocates of the “Compact Theory” of Confederation. They held that it was a compact or treaty negotiated between the provinces, with the federal government set up by them to perform certain functions. But the provinces, as colonies, had no power to negotiate anything. Further, Ontario and Quebec didn’t exist before Confederation and had no one to negotiate on their behalf. A supposed compact or treaty that no one signed, and whose two largest participants (representing four-fifths of the population) didn’t exist, is difficult to take seriously.
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†135 Although democracy, as a grand theory, had few supporters in Canada, the country’s political system was quite respectably democratic in practice. While the franchise was limited to property-owning males, as in Britain, there were many more of them here than there, and the vote was extended to Roman Catholics and Jews much earlier here. Walter Bage hot, the great British political analyst, wrote in The English Constitution (published in 1867) that while “the masses in England are not fit for elective government,” because too little educated, “the idea is roughly realized in the North American colonies.”
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†136 O’Halloran’s speech is quoted in that excellent source book Canada’s Founding Debates, edited by Janet Ajzenstat. One chapter, “Direct Democracy: Pro and Con,” contains an extended analysis of both sides of the argument. O’Halloran himself suffered one serious handicap as an advocate of democracy: he had been educated at the University of Vermont and had served in the U.S. Army, all of which put him under severe suspicion.
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*137 Macdonald used the phrase “peace, welfare and good government” rather than the now familiar “peace, order and good government.” See Chapter 22 for a fuller explanation of this iconic phrase.
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†138 Macdonald—predictably—could switch his arguments against democracy to suit his political convenience. In one letter he denounced constituency nominating conventions as “immoral and democratic,” but then went on to advise his preferred candidate that “if a respectable and influential body of delegates is likely to be called together, you must exert every energy to have your friends chosen.”
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*139 As noted earlier, Dunkin predicted that the constant cry of the provinces would be “Give, give, give.” On defence, he commented with equal acuity, “The best thing Canada can do is to keep quiet and give no cause for war.” Dunkin joined Macdonald’s cabinet in 1869.
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†140 Howe himself on one occasion argued that “deadly weapons, so common in the streets of Montreal, are rarely carried in Nova Scotia, except in pursuit of game.”
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*141 Over time, as may be only a coincidence, there has been a displacement of one nationally unifying virtue by the other. In the nineteenth century, there was little tolerance in Canada—hence the sectarianism and open religious hatreds. Today, there is little loyalty to institutions, from marriage to employers.
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*142 Brown very generously contributed five hundred dollars to the by-election fund and wrote, “[I] will not be behind if further aid is required.”
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*143 The militia’s adjutant general, Colonel Patrick MacDougall, later wrote that the Fenians had functioned as “invaluable, though involuntary, benefactors of Canada” by giving its people “a proud consciousness of strength.”
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†144 The Fenian who had actually proposed the raid was accused of being a Canadian agent and expelled from the movement.
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†145 Anti-Confederates argued that a referendum should be held before any final commitment to Confederation was made, but Tupper retorted that the same legislature had approved negotiations to create a Maritime Union—with no provision for a referendum.
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†146 New Brunswick’s Governor Gordon, as so often, summed up the electoral chicanery perfectly: “Confederation has hardly any friends here, but it will be carried by large majorities nonetheless.”
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*147 This first version of the BNA Act contained only twenty-two clauses and, unlike the Quebec Resolutions and the final act, did not specify the powers of the central government, relying instead on its general enabling power to make laws for “the peace, order and good government.”
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*148 This crashing fall from grace is reported in the biography by Elisabeth Batt, Monck: Governor General, 1861–1868. She hedges her bets by saying that although this story is told by Monck’s descendants, it should be remembered that “the Irish were ever loath to spoil a good story for lack of a ha-porth’ of exaggeration.”
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*149 An apt description of what Macdonald was doing would be “ragging the puck,” except that hockey was then so new that the phrase had yet to be minted.
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†150 In fact, the Globe got hold of a summary of the BNA Bill and published it in late February 1867, fiercely attacking the shifts in jurisdiction to favour Ottawa and the increase in subsidies to the Maritimes. By that time, though, it was all too little, too late.
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*151 One of the particular attractions of the Westminster Palace Hotel was that it had been equipped with that new technological marvel, an elevator.
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*152 Hewitt Bernard did keep some scanty minutes.
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*153 Macdonald was wearing so many garments in bed simply because British buildings in those days were heated only by open fires, windows were single paned and doors gaped.
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*154 The British authorities insisted on adding a provision authorizing the cabinet to appoint extra senators under exceptional circumstances. This power was first used by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1990 to secure passage of the Goods and Services’ Tax Bill through a Liberal-dominated Senate.
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*155 Feo Monck, in her diary about the 1864 Quebec Conference, recalled Macdonald telling her teasingly that the new nation might be called “Canadin” and, as might well have actually happened, that “in some speeches he had said that, to please the Nova Scotians, it should be called ‘Acadia.’” She concluded, “John A. is very agreeable.”
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†156 At the time, it was widely assumed that the likeliest sibling to be sent to rule Canada as its King was the third son, Prince Arthur. He did in fact make it, although in a lesser role. In 1911, Prince Arthur, by then the Duke of Connaught, was appointed governor general, serving until 1916. He died in 1942, at the age of ninety-one.
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†157 Quite different, though, was the first draft of the British North America Bill as sent from the Colonial Office to the delegates at the Westminster
Palace Hotel. To the fury of the Canadians, this version used the word “colony” throughout, declaring that the provinces were to be “united into one colony.” The offending word was struck out and never used again.
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*158 A problem with the chosen title, “Dominion,” overlooked by the London Conference delegates, was that no ready translation for the term exists in French. The one most often used, “La Puissance,” is hardly satisfactory.
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†159 Carnarvon reached this judgment despite Monck’s counter-argument that “Kingdom” would meet “the natural yearning of a growing people to emerge…from the provincial phase of existence.”
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†160 Tilley’s authorship was confirmed by his son, also called Leonard, in a letter he wrote on June 28, 1917, on the eve of Confederation’s half-century, to the High Court registrar in Toronto. He recounted that his father had told him how he came upon the phrase in his daily Bible reading, and, “When he went back to the sitting of the convention that morning,” he had suggested the title, “which was agreed to.”
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*161 Waite included this sentence in his 1953 doctoral thesis, “Ideas and Politics in British North America, 1864–66.”
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*162 Not until January 23, 1867, does the familiar “Peace, Order and good Government” triad appear in a draft. This version reappears in the later drafts of January 30 and February 2 and then in the actual BNA Act.
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†163 One of the very few substantial references during the entire Confederation process to the phrase “Peace, Order and good Government” was made not by any Father of Confederation but by its godfather, Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon. In his speech in the Lords introducing the British North America Bill, he said that the powers of the federal government “extend to all laws made for the ‘peace, order and good government’ of Confederation”—a term he described as having “an ample measure of legislative authority.”
The author has been able to find only one early use of “peace and order” in its contemporary descriptive sense. The anti-Confederate Howe once described the Maritimes as “accustomed to peace and order,” in contrast to the belligerent, boastful Canadians. And he made this remark back in 1849.
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*164 The phrase’s origin is most probably in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government of that same year of 1689, where Locke described government’s purpose as “the Peace, Security and publick good of the people.”
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†165 The form used in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the earliest appearance of the phrase in Canada, was “Public Peace, Welfare, and good Government.”
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*166 To appreciate why Morton’s insight should have had such a consciousness-raising effect, it should be remembered that right afterwards—in 1965—George Grant published his seminal Lament for a Nation, which itself had so powerful an effect among Canadian nationalists.
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†167 Much of the material for this section was provided by the research staff of the Library of Parliament. A number of the facts are drawn from a groundbreaking article by the historian Stephen Eggleston in the Journal of Canadian Studies.
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*168 Lady Macdonald’s diary covers the years 1867 to 1869 with some regularity, but later entries are few and far between. Her diary is the only known one kept by a Canadian prime ministerial spouse.
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*169 Marriage contracts of this kind were quite common—most particularly when the woman was bringing property into the union and would immediately lose control over it to her husband—until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1887.
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*170 Her ancestry, through her mother, was Scottish.
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*171 The details about Macdonald’s self-designation as “Honourable” and of the other distinguished marriages at St. George’s Church were uncovered by the journalist Arthur Milnes on a research trip to London.
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†172 Disraeli once paid his wife, Mary, the highest-possible matrimonial compliment by telling her she was “more a mistress than a wife.” At the end of a long day in the Commons, Disraeli returned home to find Mary had stayed up waiting for him with a bottle of cooled champagne and a pork pie from Fortnum and Mason.
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*173 Earlier, Carnarvon, for the same purpose of limiting debate, had called the bill “in the nature of a treaty.”The Daily News commented tartly that it was, in fact, “merely an inter-colonial project.”
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*174 British MPs were famously uninterested in colonial affairs. On one occasion a debate was held in the Commons to determine why this should be so: few attended, and the debate ended inconclusively.
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*175 That Agnes’s mother and brother lived with her at the start of her marriage prompted historian Keith Johnson to write one of the niftiest footnotes in Canadian historiography—“Macdonald had in-laws the way other people had mice.”
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*176 When the diary was published in 1873, Feo Monck’s “beastly” was toned down to “horrid.”
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*177 This was by no means a failing only of Ottawa. Anna Jameson, in her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada of 1838, noted, “A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated…. The idea of useful or ornamental is seldom associated here even with the most magnificent timber trees.”
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†178 Smith was in fact anticipating things. In 1867, the entire new dominion civil service numbered just 2, 660. As for the “professional politicians,” only a few dozen actually lived in Ottawa. Most members of Parliament got by in boarding houses during the three months or so that Parliament met each year. Not until after the Second World War did Ottawa become a politics-obsessed, one-industry town.
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*179 Kenny’s career continued in anonymity, but of a most agreeable kind. After resigning from the cabinet in 1870, he was appointed a senator and later gained a knighthood.
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*180 The super winner of the Confederation senatorial lottery had to have been New Brunswick’s David Wark. Called to the Upper House in October 1867, Wark remained a senator for forty years, leaving the chamber only by death in 1905, at the age of 101.
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*181 The celebrations staged by Canadians were outclassed, inevitably, by the great Exposition Universelle held in Paris in that same year of 1867. It attracted ten million visitors. Several Canadian companies even won prizes for their goods; the prize that mattered, though, was the victory by a crew from Saint John, NB, at the World Rowing Championships held on the Seine.
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