Part 15

It was an era of missionary zeal in the Roman Catholic church, and Canada became the favourite mission. The Society of Jesus was only one of several orders--Franciscans (Recollets), Sulpicians, Ursulines, &c.--who worked in New France. The Jesuits have attracted chief attention, not merely on account of their superior zeal and numbers, but also because of the tragic fate of some of their missionaries in Canada. In the voluminous _Relations_ of their doings the story has been preserved. Among the Huron Indians, whose settlements bordered on the lake of that name, they secured a great influence. But there was relentless war between the Hurons and the Iroquois occupying the southern shore of Lake Ontario, and when in 1649 the Iroquois ruined and almost completely destroyed the Hurons, the Jesuit missionaries also fell victims to the conquerors' rage. Missionaries to the Iroquois themselves met with a similar fate and the missions failed. Commercial life also languished. The company planned by Richelieu was not a success. It did little to colonize New France, and in 1660, after more than thirty years of its monopoly, there were not more than 2000 French in the whole country. In 1663 the charter of the company was revoked. No longer was a trading company to discharge the duties of a sovereign. New France now became a royal province, with governor, intendant, &c., on the model of the provinces of France.

In 1664 a new "Company of the West Indies" (_Compagnie des Indes Occidentales_) was organized to control French trade and colonization not only in Canada but also in West Africa, South America and the West Indies. At first it promised well. In 1665 some 2000 emigrants were sent to Canada; the European population was soon doubled, and Louis XIV. began to take a personal interest in the colony. But once more, in contrast with English experience, the great trading company proved a failure in French hands as a colonizing agent, and in 1674 its charter was summarily revoked by Louis XIV. Henceforth in name, if not in fact, monopoly is ended in Canada.

By this time French explorers were pressing forward to unravel the mystery of the interior. By 1659 two Frenchmen, Radisson and Groseillers, had penetrated beyond the great lakes to the prairies of the far West; they were probably the first Europeans to see the Mississippi. By 1666 a French mission was established on the shores of Lake Superior, and in 1673 Joliet and Marquette, explorers from Canada, reached and for some distance descended the Mississippi. Five years later Cavelier de la Salle was making his toilsome way westward from Quebec to discover the true character of the great river and to perform the feat, perilous in view of the probable hostility of the natives, of descending it to the sea. In 1682 he accomplished his task, took possession of the valley of the Mississippi in the name of Louis XIV. and called it Louisiana. Thus from Canada as her basis was France reaching out to grasp a continent.

There was a keen rivalry between church and state for dominance in this new empire. In 1659 arrived at Quebec a young prelate of noble birth, Francois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, who had come to rule the church in Canada. An ascetic, who practised the whole cycle of medieval austerities, he was determined that Canada should be ruled by the church, and he desired for New France a Puritanism as strict as that of New England. His especial zeal was directed towards the welfare of the Indians. These people showed, to their own ruin, a reckless liking for the brandy of the white man. Laval insisted that the traders should not supply brandy to the natives. He declared excommunicate any one who did so and for a time he triumphed. More than once he drove from Canada governors who tried to thwart him. In 1663 he was actually invited to choose a governor after his own mind and did so, but with no cessation of the old disputes. In 1672 Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac (q.v.), was named governor of New France, and in him the church found her match. Yet not at once; for, after a bitter struggle, he was recalled in 1682. But Canada needed him. He knew how to control the ferocious Iroquois, who had cut off France from access to Lake Ontario; to check them he had built a fort where now stands the city of Kingston. With Frontenac gone, these savages almost strangled the colony. On a stormy August night in 1689 1500 Iroquois burst in on the village of Lachine near Montreal, butchered 200 of its people, and carried off more than 100 to be tortured to death at their leisure. Then the strong man Frontenac was recalled to face the crisis.

Struggles with England.

It was a critical era. James II. had fallen in England, and William III. was organizing Europe against French aggression. France's plan for a great empire in America was now taking shape and there, as in Europe, a deadly struggle with England was inevitable. Frontenac planned attacks upon New England and encouraged a ruthless border warfare that involved many horrors. Him, in return, the English attacked. Sir William Phips sailed from Boston in 1690, conquered Acadia, now Nova Scotia, and then hazarded the greater task of leading a fleet up the St Lawrence against Quebec. On the 16th of October 1690 thirty-four English ships, some of them only fishing craft, appeared in its basin and demanded the surrender of the town. When Frontenac answered defiantly, Phips attacked the place; but he was repulsed and in the end sailed away unsuccessful.

Each side had now begun to see that the vital point was control of the interior, which time was to prove the most extensive fertile area in the world. La Salle's expedition had aroused the French to the importance of the Mississippi, and they soon had a bold plan to occupy it, to close in from the rear on the English on the Atlantic coast, seize their colonies and even deport the colonists. The plan was audacious, for the English in America outnumbered the French by twenty to one. But their colonies were democracies, disunited because each was pursuing its own special interests, while the French were united under despotic leadership. Frontenac attacked the Iroquois mercilessly in 1696 and forced these proud savages to sue for peace. But in the next year was made the treaty of Ryswick, which brought a pause in the conflict, and in 1698 Frontenac died.

After Frontenac the Iroquois, though still hostile to France, are formidable no more, and the struggle for the continent is frankly between the English and the French. The peace of Ryswick proved but a truce, and when in 1701, on the death of the exiled James II., Louis XIV. flouted the claims of William III. to the throne of England by proclaiming as king James's son, renewed war was inevitable. In Europe it saw the brilliant victories of Marlborough; in America it was less decisive, but France lost heavily. Though the English, led by Sir Hovenden Walker, made in 1711 an effort to take Quebec which proved abortive, they seized Nova Scotia; and when the treaty of Utrecht was made in 1713, France admitted defeat in America by yielding to Britain her claims to Hudson Bay, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. But she still held the shores of the St Lawrence, and she retained, too, the island of Cape Breton to command its mouth. There she built speedily the fortress of Louisbourg, and prepared once more to challenge British supremacy in America. With a sound instinct that looked to future greatness, France still aimed, more and more, at the control of the interior of the Continent. The danger from the Iroquois on Lake Ontario had long cut her off from the most direct access to the West, and from the occupation of the Ohio valley leading to the Mississippi, but now free from this savage scourge she could go where she would. In 1701 she founded Detroit, commanding the route from Lake Erie to Lake Huron. Her missionaries and leaders were already at Sault Ste Marie commanding the approach to Lake Superior, and at Michilimackinac commanding that to Lake Michigan. They had also penetrated to what is now the Canadian West, and it was a French Canadian, La Verendrye, who, by the route leading past the point where now stands the city of Winnipeg, pressed on into the far West until in 1743, first recorded of white men, he came in sight of the Rocky Mountains. In the south of the continent France also crowned La Salle's work by founding early in the 18th century New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. It was a far cry from New Orleans to Quebec. If France could link them by a chain of settlements and shut in the English to their narrow strip of Atlantic seaboard there was good promise that North America would be hers.

The project was far-reaching, but France could do little to make it effective. Louis XV. allowed her navy to decline and her people showed little inclination for emigration to the colonies. In 1744, when the war of the Austrian Succession broke out, the New England colonies planned and in 1745 effected the capture of Louisbourg, the stronghold of France in Cape Breton Island, which menaced their commerce. But to their disgust, when the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was made in 1748, this conquest was handed back to France. She continued her work of building a line of forts on the great lakes--on the river Niagara, on the Ohio, on the Mississippi; and the English colonies, with the enemy thus in their rear, grew ever more restive. In 1753 Virginia warned the French on the Ohio that they were encroaching on British territory. The next year, in circumstances curiously like those which were repeated when the French expedition under Marchand menaced Britain in Egypt by seeking to establish a post on the Upper Nile, George Washington, a young Virginian officer, was sent to drive the French from their Fort Duquesne on the Ohio river, where now stands Pittsburgh. The result was sharp fighting between English and French in a time of nominal peace. In 1755 the British took the stern step of deporting the Acadian French from Nova Scotia. Though this province had been ceded to Great Britain in 1713 many of the Acadians had refused to accept British sovereignty. In 1749 the British founded Halifax, began to colonize Nova Scotia, and, with war imminent, deemed it prudent to disperse the Acadians, chiefly along the Atlantic seaboard (see NOVA SCOTIA: _History_). In 1756 the Seven Years' War definitely began. France had no resources to cope with those of Britain in America, and the British command of the sea proved decisive. On the 13th of September 1759 Wolfe won his great victory before Quebec, which involved the fall of that place, and a year later at Montreal the French army in Canada surrendered. By the peace of Paris, 1763, the whole of New France was finally ceded to Great Britain.

English possesion.

With only about 60,000 French in Canada at the time of the conquest it might have seemed as if this population would soon be absorbed by the incoming British. Some thought that, under a Protestant sovereign, the Canadian Catholics would be rapidly converted to Protestantism. But the French type proved stubbornly persistent and to this day dominates the older Canada. The first English settlers in the conquered country were chiefly petty traders, not of a character to lead in social or public affairs. The result was that the government of the time co-operated rather with the leaders among the French.

After peace was concluded in 1763, Canada was governed under the authority of a royal proclamation, but sooner or later a constitution specially adapted to the needs of the country was inevitable. In 1774 this was provided by the Quebec Act passed by the Imperial parliament. Under this act the western territory which France had claimed, extending as far as the Mississippi and south to the Ohio, was included with Canada in what was called the Province of Quebec. This vast territory was to be governed despotically from Quebec; the Roman Catholic church was given its old privileges in Canada; and the French civil law was established permanently side by side with the English criminal law. The act linked the land-owning class in Canada and the church by ties of self-interest to the British cause. The _habitant_, placed again under their authority, had less reason to be content.

In 1775 began the American Revolution. Its leaders tried to make the revolt continental, and invaded Canada, hoping that the French would join them. They took Montreal and besieged Quebec during the winter of 1775-1776; but the prudent leadership of Sir Guy Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, saved Quebec and in 1776 the revolutionary army withdrew unsuccessful from Canada. Since that time any prospect of Canada's union to the United States has been very remote.

But the American Revolution profoundly influenced the life of Canada. The country became the refuge of thousands of American loyalists who would not desert Great Britain. To Nova Scotia, to what are now New Brunswick (q.v.) and Ontario (q.v.) they fled in numbers not easily estimated, but probably reaching about 40,000. Until this time the present New Brunswick and Ontario had contained few European settlers; now they developed, largely under the influence of the loyalists of the Revolution. This meant that the American type of colonial life would be reproduced in Canada; but it meant also bitter hostility on the part of these colonists to the United States, which refused in any way to compensate the loyalists for their confiscated property. Great Britain did something; the loyalists received liberal grants of land and cash compensation amounting to nearly L4,000,000.

A prevailingly French type of government was now no longer adequate in Canada, and in 1791 was passed by the British parliament the Constitutional Act, separating Canada at the Ottawa river into two parts, each with its own government; Lower Canada, chiefly French, retaining the old system of laws, with representative institutions now added, and Upper Canada, on the purely British model. (For the history of Lower and Upper Canada, now Quebec and Ontario, the separate articles must be consulted.) Each province had special problems; the French in Lower Canada aimed at securing political power for their own race, while in Upper Canada there was no race problem, and the great struggle was for independence of official control and in all essential matters for government by the people. It may be doubted whether at this time it would have been safe to give these small communities complete self-government. But this a clamorous radical element demanded insistently, and the issue was the chief one in Canada for half a century.

But before this issue matured war broke out between Great Britain and the United States in 1812 from causes due chiefly to Napoleon's continental policy. The war seemed to furnish a renewed opportunity to annex Canada to the American Union, and Canada became the chief theatre of conflict. The struggle was most vigorous on the Niagara frontier. But in the end the American invasion failed and the treaty made at Ghent in 1814 left the previous status unaltered.

Lord Durham.

In 1837 a few French Canadians in Lower Canada, led by Louis Joseph Papineau (q.v.), took up arms with the wild idea of establishing a French republic on the St Lawrence. In the same year William Lyon Mackenzie (q.v.) led a similar armed revolt in Upper Canada against the domination of the ruling officialdom called, with little reason, the "Family Compact." Happening, as these revolts did, just at the time of Queen Victoria's accession, they attracted wide attention, and in 1838 the earl of Durham (q.v.) was sent to govern Canada and report on the affairs of British North America. Clothed as he was with large powers, he undertook in the interests of leniency and reconciliation to banish, without trial, some leaders of the rebellion in Lower Canada. For this reason he was censured at home and he promptly resigned, after spending only five months in the country. But his _Report_, published in the following year, is a masterly survey of the situation and included recommendations that profoundly influenced the later history of Canada. He recommended the union of the two Canadian provinces at once, the ultimate union of all British North America and the granting to this large state of full self-government. The French element he thought a menace to Canada's future, and partly for this reason he desired all the provinces to unite so that the British element should be dominant.

To carry out Lord Durham's policy the British government passed in 1840 an Act of Union joining Upper and Lower Canada, and sent out as governor Charles Poulett Thompson, who was made Baron Sydenham and Toronto In the single parliament each province was equally represented. By this time there was more than a million people in Canada, and the country was becoming important. Lord Sydenham died in 1841 before his work was completed, and he left Canada still in a troubled condition. The French were suspicious of the Union, aimed avowedly at checking their influence, and the complete self-government for which the "Reformers" in English-speaking Canada had clamoured was not yet conceded by the colonial office. But rapidly it became obvious that the provinces united had become too important to be held in leading strings. The issue was finally settled in 1849 when the earl of Elgin was governor and the Canadian legislature, sitting at Montreal, passed by a large majority the Rebellion Losses Bill, compensating citizens, some of them French, in Lower Canada, for losses incurred at the hands of the loyal party during the rebellion a decade earlier. The cry was easily raised by the Conservative minority that this was to vote reward for rebellion. They appealed to London for intervention. The mob in Montreal burned the parliament buildings and stoned Lord Elgin himself because he gave the royal assent to the bill. He did so in the face of this fierce opposition, on the ground that, in Canadian domestic affairs, the Canadian parliament must be supreme.

The union of the two provinces did not work well. Each was jealous of the other and deadlocks frequently occurred. Commercially, after 1849, Canada was prosperous. In 1854 Lord Elgin negotiated a reciprocity treaty with the United States which gave Canadian natural products free entrance to the American market. The outbreak of the Civil War in the United States in 1861 increased the demand for such products, and Canada enjoyed an extensive trade with her neighbour. But, owing largely to the unfriendly attitude of Great Britain to the northern side during the war, the United States cancelled the treaty, when its first term of ten years ended in 1865, and it has never been renewed.

Under the party system in Canada cabinets changed as often as, until recently, they did in France, and the union of the two provinces did not give political stability. The French and English were sufficiently equal in strength to make the task of government well nigh impossible. In 1864 came the opportunity for change, when New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island were considering a federal union. Canada suggested a wider plan to include herself and, in October 1864, a conference was held at Quebec. The conference outlined a plan of federation which subsequently, with slight modifications, passed the imperial parliament as "The British North America Act," and on the 1st of July 1867, the Dominion of Canada came into existence. It was born during the era of the American Civil War, and was planned to correct defects which time had revealed in the American federation. The provinces in Canada were conceded less power than have the states in the American union; the federal government retaining the residuum of power not conceded. (G. M. W.)

Canada since federation.

When federation was accomplished in 1867 the Dominion of Canada comprised only the four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Lord Monck was appointed the first governor-general, and at his request the Hon. John Alexander Macdonald undertook the formation of an administration. A coalition cabinet was formed, including the foremost Liberals and Conservatives drawn from the different provinces. Under a proclamation issued from Windsor Castle by Queen Victoria on the 22nd of May the new constitution came into effect on the 1st of July. This birthday of the Dominion has been fixed by statute as a public holiday, and is annually observed under the name of "Dominion Day." Seventy-two senators--half Conservatives and half Liberals--were appointed, and lieutenant-governors were named for the four provinces. The prime minister was created a K.C.B., and minor honours were conferred on other ministers in recognition of their services in bringing about the union.

Nova Scotia question.

The first general election for the Dominion House of Commons was held during the month of August, and except in the province of Nova Scotia was favourable to the administration, which entered upon its parliamentary work with a majority of thirty-two. The first session of parliament was opened on the 8th of November, but adjourned on the 21st of December till the 12th of March 1868, chiefly on account of the fact that members of the Dominion parliament were allowed, in Ontario and Quebec, to hold seats in the local legislatures, so that it was difficult for the different bodies to be in session simultaneously. It was not till 1873 that an act was passed making members of the local legislatures ineligible for seats in the House of Commons. Immediately after the completion of federation a serious agitation for repeal of the union arose in Nova Scotia, which had been brought into the federal system by a vote of the existing legislature, without any direct preliminary appeal to the people. Headed by Joseph Howe (q.v.), the advocates of repeal swept the province at the Dominion election. Out of 19 members then elected 18 were pledged to repeal, Dr Tupper, the minister responsible for carrying the Act of Union, alone among the supporters of federation securing a seat. The local assembly, in which 36 out of 38 members were committed to repeal, passed an address to Her Majesty praying her not to "reduce this free, happy and hitherto self-governed province to the degraded condition of a servile dependency of Canada," and sent Howe with a delegation to London to lay the petition at the foot of the throne. Howe enlisted the support of John Bright and other members of parliament, but the imperial government was firm, and the duke of Buckingham, as colonial secretary, soon informed the governor-general in a despatch that consent could not be given for the withdrawal of Nova Scotia from the Dominion. Meanwhile Howe, convinced of the impossibility of effecting separation, and fearing disloyal tendencies which had manifested themselves in some of its advocates, entered into negotiations with Dr Tupper in London, and later with the Dominion government, for better financial terms than those originally arranged for Nova Scotia in the federal system. The estimated amount of provincial debt assumed by the general government was increased by $1,186,756, and a special annual subsidy of $82,698 was granted for a period of ten years. These terms having been agreed to, Howe, as a pledge of his approval and support, accepted a seat as secretary of state in the Dominion cabinet. By taking this course he sacrificed much of his remarkable popularity in his native province, but confirmed the work of consolidating the Dominion. It was many years before the bitterness of feeling aroused by the repeal agitation entirely subsided in Nova Scotia.