G86 The Quebec Act and its effects [1763-76

Nothing was said of religion; liberty of conscience had been guaranteed by the Peace. All this constituted the usual colonial regime, conferred by the same proclamation on the Floridas and Grenada, yet calculated to break up the old political and social framework of Canada, and so to render it homogeneous with the other societies across the Atlantic.

Within a few years the situation in America, which had suggested the policy of Anglicising the new conquest, wore a different aspect. Ominous signs were on the horizon. Few Englishmen had settled in the province of Quebec; and the threatened changes deeply troubled the French. Dispatches from the Governor told of " disorders and divisions," of greedy and oppressive officials, of arrogant immigrants, of the uncertainty and maladministration of the law, of the possibilities of racial strife, and of the failure of the Government to win the confidence of the influential classes, the nobility, and the clergy. The movement of events in the old Colonies, making it necessary to ensure the loyalty of the French, quickened the appeal of justice. In 1771, Lord North, who had been conducting a long enquiry into the conditions of Canada, produced his Quebec Act. Its object was to satisfy the desires of the new subjects by guaranteeing to them their traditional customs and institutions, and, at the same time, to rebuff the ambitions of the Americans, by enlarging the province of Quebec, through the addition of the country between the Ohio and the Mississippi, to its former dimensions. The measure marks a very important stage in the growth of Canada. Its first end was achieved — the nationality of the conquered people was secured from attack, and the province received the character which it was to retain. From this time onward the jealous but natural care of the French for the maintenance of their distinctive inheritance has given rise to many of the peculiar problems, both economic and political, which have marked the changing phases of Canadian history.

A clamour of disapproval was raised by the older Colonies and by the English settlers in Quebec. Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York saw their Hinterland taken from them ; the English settlers encountered the disappointment of expectations reasonable and unreasonable. By the recognition of the Roman Catholic faith and the retention of the French civil law the new Constitution discouraged British immigration; while by vesting a power absolute, save for the right of taxation, in a Governor and a Council without an assembly, and by omitting the Habeas Corpus Act and trial by jury in civil cases, it deprived the English of those rights of self-government and that security of person and property to which they felt by birth entitled. But worse than their irritation were the difficulties resulting from the outbreak of the American War, which rendered the initiation of a new political system far from easy. The unsuccessful appeal of Congress to the French to rebel was followed, in 1776-6, by a dangerous invasion of Canada,

1775-83] Results of the American Revolution 687

frustrated, after the capture of Montreal, by the conspicuous daring and resource of Governor Carleton. To meet their difficulties, both Carleton and Haldimand (his successor) were driven to arbitrary actions, which provoked a well-founded, if sometimes perverse, opposition. Fortunately, suspicion of the Americans and the influence of the nobility and clergy kept the French peasantry loyal, even when their mother-country joined in the struggle. This is some evidence, perhaps, that they had no longer serious grievances or apprehensions. Conquest had but little disturbed their life. They had been found an uneducated, unprogressive, contented people, and so they had been left. Nothing was done for them, or for any other class; but none saw itself threatened with the loss of ancient rights or the imposition of new burdens. Hence the material gains of peace after endless wars, of reviving agriculture, of trade increasing with the removal of monopoly, were balanced against the sentimental loss, and helped to secure an unenthusiastic acquiescence in British rule.

But the American Revolution, in its influence on Canadian history, was to prove far more than a searching trial of British policy towards the French. It induced a migration from the United States with which English colonisation on the St Lawrence, and any colonisation in the interior of the country, virtually commenced, and which made Canada the home of two nations. The cessions of the Peace (1783) ended the colony's long connexion with the favoured Ohio valley, established to the south of it a foreign State, and thus, owing to the stern limitations which nature imposed on the north, dictated as the only possible direction of expansion a straight march westwards. A narrow belt of fertile land, encumbered with dense forests, and ending sharply to the north of Lake Superior in an apparently uninhabitable wilderness, was all that, after 1783, seemed left of America for British settlement. Moreover, the illiberal colonial policy, now, for a time, adopted by the mother-country, in part as a result of the war, found in Canada its principal victim, and must share the responsibility for that unceasing political restlessness which characterised the life and threatened the progress of the country for nearly half a century.

In 1778 some exiles from the old Colonies arrived in Canada, and were stationed round Lake St Peter above Montreal. But Nova Scotia, being nearer, and offering, as it was thought, fewer difficulties and better opportunities to the immigrant, received the great influx of " Loyalists" that followed the conclusion of peace. Some 25,000 people settled on the St John's river, round the Bay of Chaleurs, and in Cape Breton Isle. At the same time, by overland routes, a movement began into the valley of the St Lawrence; and soon a population of 10,000 was established along the line of the river from Montreal to the shores of Lake Erie. To those who left their homes during the struggle the name of United Empire Loyalists was given, and

688 The United Empire Loyalists [1778-91

towards their losses the Imperial Government made a considerable grant; for no satisfaction could be obtained from their exhausted and embittered countrymen. The migration did not cease at once. Till the end of the century there was a dribbling of " late Loyalists " across the border.

Very important in its influence on the history of Canada was the character of the men who thus first bore the standard of British colonisation into the western forests. They were not pioneering spirits who, had they remained in their own States, would have led an advance across the Ohio. Some were disbanded soldiers, but the majority consisted of professional men, clergy of the English Church, officials, and merchants, attached to law and order, and to the practices and institutions of civilized life. Many came destitute, all came poor, prepared indeed to suffer hardships as they had formerly been to make heroic sacrifices, but, save in temper of mind, little fitted to open again the battle for existence in the wilds of an almost unknown country. They brought with them what they prized more than all material comfort, an ardent loyalty to the British connexion and their conservative principles. It must constantly be kept in mind that the English provinces were settled by men who were seeking, not to exploit a new land, but to maintain certain ideas of politics and society. Such an immigration promised to Canada a stable political development, but not rapid economic progress.

The whole question of the government of the Colony had now to be reopened. In 1784 Nova Scotia was divided ; and the part which lay west of the isthmus was formed into the province of New Brunswick, and given a constitution similar to that conferred on the whole in 1758. Quebec provided a far more difficult problem. The legal confusion, which still continued, and the absence of representative institutions, were grievances demanding a remedy; while the relations of the two peoples, who, though occupying different parts of the country, intermingled in its cities, needed some permanent adjustment. To Pitt it seemed that " clashing interests " prevented the amalgamation of both in one State. His policy, therefore, as laid down in the Constitutional Act of 1791, was to separate French from English by dividing the old province of Quebec, at a line following for the most part the course of the river Ottawa, into the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, and so to ensure to the French in Lower Canada the preservation of their nationality. At the same time he conferred on each of the new provinces thus formed a constitution resembling that of Great Britain; and, by the reservation of a certain proportion of the Crown lands, made provision in each for a Protestant Church establishment. Convincing as this course of action seemed, it was really a tremendous experiment; and once more the chief lines of Canadian history diverge from a common point.

1791-1814] English and French in the Colony 689

The succeeding twenty years proved uneventful. Each province had now a Governor, a Legislative Council nominated by the Crown, and an Assembly elected by the people. In Upper Canada the pioneers — increased in numbers to 70,000 by 1806 through the coming of " late Loyalists," Irishmen, and Highlanders —were learning the nature of their new country, clearing land, cutting roads, founding villages, and bringing up children in regions where schools and churches were still non-existent. Of the grim and lonely battle with nature fought in this heroic age the details must be left to the imagination. Here and there the transition to ordered settlement was slowly made ; but politics and social pursuits were necessarity neglected. To the first meeting of the Council and Assembly, summoned at harvest-time, only seven out of the twenty-one members found leisure to come. In the maritime provinces a better-known country, with access to the sea and a variety of occupation, rendered the initial struggles perhaps less severe. In Nova Scotia fishing and agriculture, in New Brunswick lumbering, occupied the principal attention of the inhabitants. Halifax and St John, moreover, were becoming social and commercial centres, not, of course, to be compared with Quebec or Montreal, but more active and important than Kingston and Niagara, the only towns as yet rising amongst the scattered settlements of Upper Canada. As for the French, they had long enjoyed the conditions of an organised society. Save where British and American settlers were making homes in the eastern townships their province was no longer confronted with the problems that lie on the threshold of colonisation. Yet troubles of a different kind disturbed its peace. The end of Pitt's policy, so far as it involved the separation of the two races, was never attained, and seems almost to have been forgotten. Englishmen entered Lower Canada, and by superior energy monopolised its commerce. The French, fearing for their nationality, drew together; and an opposition of interests and feeling began steadily to divide the two peoples.

Thus, at the beginning of the century, the Colony as a whole had no unity. It lacked not only common nationality and a single government, but also adequate means of communication and the habit of much commercial intercourse between its different parts. As yet there was no recognition of general interests, nor any sense of a common life. The American War of 1812-4 came as a rough but, in some ways, a salutary interruption of this course of development. Its history is elsewhere narrated in this work. It meant more for Canada than the suffering and loss which it inflicted on the Upper province; for it necessitated united action, and awakened the Canadians to their first conception of a national patriotism. , It directed, too, the attention of the mother-country towards her vast possessions across the Atlantic, at the very time when she believed herself suffering from economic evils to be alleviated only by a large emigration. This seemed to promise well for a Colony whose resources were principally agricultural, and whose chief need was men

C. M. H. x. 44

090 Distribution of land [1791-1840

with the patience and energy to become cultivators of the soil. Yet, in the competition that now eusued between Canada and the United States for the stream of labour that began to flow from Europe to the new lands, it became increasingly evident that the majority of immigrants preferred the States. Of those who entered the British provinces at least half passed either immediately, or very soon, to the other side of the border; and there was even an exodus of native inhabitants. The warmer climate of the United States, their rapidly growing prosperity, and their industrial life, were in part the cause of this; but much must also be attributed to the disturbed political and social condition of Canada, and to the manner in which the settlement of the country was being carried out. " Without forethought, preparation, method, or system of any kind" — thus Lord Durham summed up, in 1838, his opinion of the emigration to Canada during the century, contrasting with the inaction of the mother-country and the Colony the greater energy and foresight exhibited by the United States. His criticism of the way in which the land had been distributed was equally severe. For the errors committed the whole responsibility rested with the home Government. Kightly feeling that in an agricultural colony land should be easily obtainable, it adopted at first a system of free grants without attempting sales. Unfortunately its good intentions were defeated by the practices of its officials; and the most reckless profusion resulted. The limitations on the size of free grants were evaded, and the conditions attending them generally violated. In 1838 the provinces were found to have disposed of the greater part of their surveyed lands on a system that had brought almost no profit, and in a manner that had tended to retard most seriously their prospects of progress. In Upper Canada not one-tenth of the grants were even occupied ; in Lower Canada nineteentwentieths remained perfectly wild. Unreclaimed land, consisting of clergy reserves or of blocks in the hands of speculators, everywhere intervened between cultivated parts, and rendered contiguous settlement and the creation of efficient routes of communication impossible. When, after the Act of Union (1840), the matter was transferred to the provincial assemblies, it was perceived that a great opportunity had been lost; for, by that time, the Americans had passed through the eastern forests of the continent on to the western prairie, with which the timbered lands of Canada could not compete.

A few of the immigrants during this period were Americans of strong republican sentiments; but the majority were from Great Britain — weavers from Scotch towns, agriculturists from the Highlands, and many Irish and English whom economic changes had reduced to poverty. Some the Imperial Government had assisted in various ways, Others were sent over by the Poor Law Guardians. Many had been attracted by the energetic policy of the great Land Companies ; and several successful settlements had been carried out under the direction of notable