# The New England Magazine/Volume 4/Number 5/A Brief for Continental Unity

A BRIEF FOR CONTINENTAL UNITY.
A Confederation of the Sentimental Objections to Annexation.
By Walter Blackburn Harte
THERE is an idea prevalent in the United States that the sentiment of the people of Canada is so essentially English, that no commercial advantages would induce them to sever the British connection and become citizens of a Continental Republic. Even some of the most advanced political economists of Canada, in their advocacy of free trade with the United States, are particular to emphasize their belief that commercial union would not imply political union—because they are afraid of being accused of disloyalty to the throne of Great Britain. It is not my intention to enter here into the consideration of the mutual commercial advantages to be derived from a unification of the two countries. But I ​think it is clear that no two countries in such close natural juxtaposition, interlocked by lakes, railroads, and canals, could become commercially a unit, and still remain politically separate and dis tinct. The fact is there is a good deal of jugglery with the terms "commercial" and "political." Lincoln's definition of politics is the truest I have ever read. He said: "Politics is the commercial idea carried into the affairs of the nation. Politics and commerce are indissolubly linked together, though often divorced by politicians who make a commerce of politics. A country cannot present a commercial attitude to the world different from its political attitude.
If the tariff wall was removed from across the continent, and internal free trade adopted, it is not supposable that in the consideration, or adoption, of commercial treaties with foreign nations either Canada or the United States could long act independently of the other. As a commercial unit they would be compelled to be a political unit. There is not very much doubt in the minds of many sane men in Canada, that once the Dominion has succeeded in throwing off the sentimental tie to Great Britain, annexation must quickly follow on the heels of independence and free trade with the United States. One thing is incontrovertible: if the United States declared itself in favor of free trade to-morrow, and threw its markets open to the world, as Great Britain has done, unless the people of Canada were desirous of committing commercial suicide, they would at once seek admission to the Union. Canada can hold her own fairly well, with an enormous national debt, as long as the Congress of the United States continues a policy of protection; but Canada could not manage at all with a great free trade nation of sixty-five millions on her southern border, Free trade would bring the Canadians to their knees, while such measures as the McKinley Bill only serve to arouse a bitter spirit of retaliation and dislike. For Canadians are apt to believe such legislation is intended as a blow at their trade; and are not aware of its true motive; viz., the squeezing of the purse of the American consumer for the enrichment of a clique of millionnaire monopolists. It is well to remember, in considering the future of Canada, that Bismarck secured German unity by welding all the states into a commercial whole, which he easily converted into a solid empire.
I would not for a moment disparage the potentiality of national sentiment in international questions. This article is intended simply as a criticism of the "straw loyalists" who are paraded by the party papers in Canada as the true representatives of Canadian sentiment. As a Canadian journalist, I have visited every province of the Dominion, and gauged the public feeling in each, and I may safely say that the Canadians as a people laugh to scorn any idea of closer political relations with England. The whole trend of public opinion is in the opposite direction. The most popular and influential leaders in Canada are already openly looking forward to a severance of the tic with Great Britain. The Conservative Government only retains power by a curious compound of loyalty and nationalism, which, reduced to plain English, means: Canada for the Canadians. Sir John Macdonald, in the discussion over the national policy, was warned by the Imperial Conservatives that a protective policy for Canada would injure the British connection; and his emphatic response was, "So much the worse for the British connection." Those friends of unrestricted reciprocity who are dubbed "traitors" by the government organs retort by reminding them of Sir John's famous and popular reply to the Imperial croakers.
Canadians are essentially democratic in their ideas. The English, Scotch, and Irish emigrants who have built up Canada were not recruited from the aristocratic classes, and they came here disgusted with the social gulfs and poverty of Europe, with the determination to establish homes in the New World, where aristocratic and monarchical institutions would not grind them into the Slough of Despond forever. There is nothing in common between the descendants of these people and the newly arrived Britisher, except, of course, an Anglo-Saxon speech, ​and the fundamentals of the civil law, In fact, the Englishman just fresh from the old country is regarded in Canada as a foreigner, and experiences the curious sensation of being practically an alien in a land over which floats the Union Jack. He is more apt to feel at home in the United States, because all peoples newly independent have a tendency to insist upon the fact in an offensive way, while a nation secure in its greatness, resting upon a stable foundation of an historic past of its own, laughs at such insistence on its progress as a provincialism; it is beyond either criticism of self-assertion. This is the trouble with colonists: they antagonize one's sympathies by pointing out their achievements, instead of taking it for granted that you are acquainted with them. The national spirit is intermittent, and, therefore, occasionally ludicrous. The only really deep-rooted anti-American feeling in the country is the peculiar monopoly of those eccentric "patriots" who fought against their kith and kin in the Revolutionary War, and who, through the fortunes of war, were compelled to emigrate into what was then the wilderness of Nova Scotia.
There is much nonsense written about the Canadian distinctive national type (I am not now alluding to the French Canadians) as different from the American. As a matter of fact, only a person gifted with microscopic powers of observation can discover any essential differences between Canadians, in the English-speaking progressive provinces, and Americans that is, dissimilarities which are not equally marked between the inhabitants of different sections of any country. There is not, for instance, the striking contrast that exists between the people of Massachusetts and Virginia. It is worthy of remark also, that there is more in common between an average Canadian from the East or West, and an average American hailing from the same quarter, than there is between a Londoner and a genuine Yorkshireman or Cornishman, as the former do speak the same tongue, and the latter do not. A genuine Yorkshire farmer in London is to all intents and purposes a foreigner, and needs an interpreter in order to supply himself with the necessities of life—except, of course, beer, if that is a necessity; there is a universal language for the topers of all nationalities.
The Canadian when he crosses the border in search of a broader horizon and a competence has very little to unlearn. Once he has passed through the trying ordeal of unstrapping his trunks for the inspection of the Custom officers, and has recovered his equanimity as he rattles along into the heart of Uncle Sam's country, he is no longer in a foreign land. And the Canadians, English, and French, are flocking into the States at all points by thousands every year; as Professor Goldwin Smith aptly says in his recently published book, "Canada and the Canadian Question," If the Americans are not annexing Canada they are annexing the Canadians"; and who ever hears of a Canadian returning to his own country to settle after he has spent a few years in the States? On the contrary, one hears every day of the hearty welcome accorded to Canadians in all occupations, and of successes achieved by their per severance, patience, and wholesome love of hard work.
The Anti-American sentiment has absolutely no existence among the masses. There is, indeed, a tendency to regard the States as a veritable El Dorado, where dollars are picked up in the streets. Nearly every family in Canada has a son, and sometimes half a dozen sons, or nephews, or nieces, living and working in American cities; and un commercial unions in the way of matrimonial alliances between Americans and Canadian belles are of daily occurrence. New England, in particular, is crowded with Canadians. The writers who say that Canadians despise American institutions, and express contempt for American social life should study the really remarkable equanimity with which thousands of Canadian girls support their miserable existence with a family of little Yankees growing up at their knees. The continent of North America is the country of the Canadian of this generation, not a section of it. In his ideas, religion, aptitudes and training, business and social relations, he is practically as American as ​any man born beneath the Stars and Stripes. He is much more in sympathy with the traditions of this continent than the average New Yorker, who is so often the antithesis of everything truly American, New York, not Montreal or Toronto,—is the least American city to be found between Hudson's Bay and the Gulf of Mexico,
It is ridiculous to imagine that the Anglo-Saxon race can build up and maintain two separate and aggressive nations on this continent. Such a proposition is an elaborate cobweb, not capable of sustaining any important commercial friction. The French Canadian dream of establishing a great French papal state on the St. Lawrence and in New England, with Boston as its capital, is quite as tenable. The English speaking Canadians and the Americans have a past that almost equally belongs to both, and to-day their sympathies and ideals are identical. If the Declaration of Independence had not been declared quite so suddenly, Canada would now have been included in the United States. The lines of demarcation between the two countries are altogether arbitrary, and the intersection of railroads and canals has in reality, though not in law, effected a complete fusion of commercial interests. The best summary of the natural physical relations of the two countries is to be found in Professor Goldwin Smith's work already quoted. He says:
"Whoever wishes to know what Canada is, and to understand the Canadian question, should begin by turning from the political to the natural mapр. The political map displays a vast and unbroken area of territory, extending from the boundary of the United States up to the North Pole, and equalling or surpassing the United States in magnitude. The physical map displays four separate projections of the cultivable and habitable part of the Continent into arctic waste. The four vary greatly in size, and one of them is very large. They are, beginning from the east, the Maritime Provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island; Old Canada, comprising the present provinces of Quebec and Ontario; the newly-opened region of the Northwest, comprising the Province of Manitoba and the districts of Alberta, Athabasca, Assiniboia, and Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. The habitable and cultivable parts of these blocks of territory are all contiguous, but are divided from each other by great barriers of nature, wide and unclaimable wildernesses or manifold chains of mountains. The Maritime Provinces are divided from Old Canada by the wilderness of many hundred miles, through which the Intercolonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a passenger or a bale of freight by the way. Old Canada is divided from Manitoba and the Northwest by the great fresh water sea of Lake Superior, and a wide wilderness on either side of it. Manitoba and the Northwest again are divided from British Columbia by a triple range of mountains, the Rockies, the Selkirks, and the Golden or Coast range. Each of the blocks, on the other hand, is closely connected by nature, physically and economically, with that portion of the habitable and cultivable continent to the south of it which it immediately adjoins, and in which are its natural markets—the Maritime Provinces, with Maine and the New England States; Old Canada with New York and with Pennsylvania, from which she draws her coal, Manitoba and the Northwest, with Minnesota and Dakota, which share with her the Great Prairie; British Columbia, with the States of the Union on the Pacific. Between the divisions of the Dominion there is hardly any natural trace, and but little even of forced trade has been called into existence under a stringent system of protection. The Canadian cities are all on or near the southern edge of the Dominica,—the natural cities, at least, for Ottawa, the politiical capital, is artificial. The principal ports of the Dominion in winter, and its ports largely throughout the year, are in the United States, trade coming through in bond. . . . Such is the real Canada. Whether the four blocks of territory constituting the Dominion can forever be kept by political agencies united among themselves and separate from the Continent of which geographically, economically, and with the exception of Quebec ethnologically, they are parts, is the Canadian question."
The difficulties in the way of assimilation consist almost purely of tariff entanglements; and these, with an enlightened government, are easily disposed of. It is not too much to say that the election of an honest government, for the people and not for the plutocracy of the United States, which would put the commerce of the nation upon the only logical basis of national, and not clique, prosperity, would soon bring about the end of all the prejudices now existing between the United States, Canada, and England, and establish the most cordial feelings between the three peoples, now practically united in the aims of a common democracy.
One of the arguments of the government organs against destroying the customs wall between the two countries is that it will be discriminating against the British manufacturer, and that is too ​iniquitous to be considered in cool blood The very loyal partisans of the conservative persuasion think this argument clinching and irrefutable it certainly has considerable weight with the unintelligent portion of the agricultural population, in whose veins run Scotch and English blood, undiluted by even a generation. "At home" they always voted for the church and "the squire," without inquiry into the issues of the hour, and in their new home they vote on the same plan for "the old flag." Appeals are in variably made during election tapes by the conservative stamp orators to the "old flag"; it is a telling cord in an illiterate constituency. But the young men of Canada are beginning to do their own thinking, and they ask, "Why all this anxiety about the interest of the British manufacturer? why are not British goods admitted into the country free now, if we love the British manufacturer so much, and owe him so much consideration? and what does this British manufacturer, to whom we owe so much deference, do for us?" The illogical position of the Protectionist Imperialists who shut out the British manufacturer in favor of the Canadian manufacturer, and at the same time wax indignant if his interests are threatened, could not be better shown than in these few questions. The thoughtful people of Canada are not hood winked by such ridiculous arguments. They cannot be persuaded that Canada was discovered, and settled, and developed for the sole benefit of the British manufacturer; and they will not be galled into sacrificing their own commercial future for any such airy sentiment with such a leaden weight beneath it. The Imperialists argue that as Canada is at present a part of the British Empire, subject to British laws, therefore the Canadian people must confine their purchasing to British manufacturers, however superior may be the advantage offered by the great trading nation immediately to the south of them. That is, Canada is to remain crude and undeveloped, with in exhaustible natural resources, because a few manufacturers three thousand miles away might be slightly inconvenienced if those of the United States were allowed to compete. But, as a matter of fact, even now the British manufacturer has to pay higher duties than the American manufacturer.
The inconsistency of the disloyal discrimination" argument is best shown in a crystallization of its manifold absurdities. It is the Conservative Government which brought in the protective policy of Canada, and has shut out the British manufacturer, and it is the Conservative Government and its supporters, mostly manufacturers, and those indirectly and directly interested in manufactures, who plead so pathetically for the British manufacturer. The farmers feel the iron grip of the manufacturing and railroad hierarchy upon them, and, as in the States, they are becoming a little alarmed and restless. They find the "National Road" giving reduced rates of freight to their competitors across the boundary; they find that Canadian manufactures are only about one or two per cent cheaper than a much superior grade of American manufactures; they find that in exporting to the United States the whole burden of the customs appraisement falls upon them; and they are beginning to question whether they are benefited by the policy of protection that was to have made everybody happy and prosperous. And yet their best market is in the United States,—and this makes them reflect. Indeed, since 1878 the trade with Great Britain has diminished, while that with the United States has rapidly increased. The national policy was strenuously opposed in England, and Sir John Macdonald's government twists the lion's tail a great deal more frequently than does Mr. Blaine; and the irony of Sir John's atten tions is that he twists the lion's tail in the alleged interests of the lion.
The old argument of the protectionists, that Canada would become the slaughter market of American manufactures if the tariff barrier was removed, is a ridiculous one. A great many Canadian manufacturers are willing to compete on equal terms with their American rivals in trade: and there would be no possibility of, or necessity for American manufacturers making a slaughter market of the Canadian ​states, as the natural competition of trade would bring prices in all parts of the country to the same level. The cost of carriage to the northern parts of the Union would protect the northern manufacturers, who would have all the facilities for the same production at their doors, with labor possibly cheaper than in the great centres of the Union. And, too, Canada thrown open without restriction would soon attract American capitalists, so that in stead of all the present industries being swept away, they would be greatly augmented.
Of course, there are quarters in Canada where the calm discussion of the advantages of annexation is impossible, and where a man advocating such a change would incur the risk of being insulted. But such circles are by no means representative of Canadian sentiment. I do not mean to affirm that the masses of the Canadian people are seriously considering annexation as an immediate question of practical politics; but everybody in Canada assents to the proposition that a change from existing conditions is inevitable, and that the present relations with the United States are becoming intolerable. The feasibility of a closer union with the United States is the topic of the hour, and those who believe that nothing short of political union is practicable, are listened to, with perfect good humor, by those who are in favor of a less radical change.
The British lion that is supposed by some Americans to stalk through the land and roar, whenever annexation is spoken of in Canada, is a purely mythical animal. He does not even roar in Downing Street. It is a matter of fact that the British Government does not expect to hold the colonies for very much longer. For years past every British statesman has acknowledged that the colonies must outgrow the restrictions of any sort of political allegiance to the mother country, and it would give them no greater concern to have Canada link her destinies with those of the United States than to have her begin her own national housekeeping in complete independence. As an appendage of the British crown, Canada imposes the same duties upon all English goods as does the United States, and English capitalists who have investments in Canada would congratulate themselves upon the enhanced value of their properties, which would certainly be one of the results of the admission of Canada into the Union. The English are, as they always have been, a nation of shopkeepers, and they only wax sentimental when their pockets are touched; witness their indifference over the alleged French encroachments upon the Newfoundland fisheries, and their Downing Street policy of masterly procrastination in the Behring Sea difficulties, which have been a thorn in the side of Canadian loyalty for so many years. Everybody knows that English syndicates are a great deal more anxious to secure commercial properties in the United States than in the Dominion; half the development of Canada's immense natural resources has been through the investment of American capital.
The Canadian Pacific Railroad, which the Government and Tory papers refer to with pride as "the national highway," is not only officered by Americans, from the president down, but has for one of its highest officials on the directorate a vice-president of the United States. It is to all intents and purposes an American enterprise. Its termini are in American cities. Halifax and St. John were originally the winter ports of the Dominion on the Atlantic seaboard, but these were too remote, and the Canadian Pacific built a line through the State of Maine, at the expense of the loyal Canadian tax-payer, and now the bulk of the Canadian exports in winter go by way of Boston, and Halifax and St. John are rapidly becoming, if they are not already, decadent and insignificant "coasting" ports, like the Salem of to-day. Rates from Boston over the Canadian Pacific to points in Western Canada are considerably lower than those over the same railroad from St. John and Halifax; and rates from the West to Boston are lower than those to either of the Canadian ports. The arrangement recently made, by which the Canadian Pacific enters New York over the New York Central and reaches tide-water there, will most assuredly diminish the im​portance of Montreal as the summer port of Canada, jest as Montreal wrested the trade from Quebec after the deepening of the channel, making it possible for ocean-going vessels to ascend the St. Lawrence. Between Boston and New York the winter trade of the Maritime ports will vanish into thin air. Being brought into competition with the other great American roads, the Canadian Pacific offers its American patrons lower rates of freight than are given to the Canadian farmers who have been taxed for its construction and support. Why? Because, although there may be truth in the assertion of the Opposition party's statement that the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the Dominion Government are one and the same thing, the railroad as a commercial enterprise must pay running expenses and produce a profit for its shareholders, and to do this it must obtain an amount of business which the Canadian traffic does not afford.
The ultra-conservative classes in the Dominion, who pooh-pooh the annexation movement, and attempt to vilify and browbeat its promoters and adherents, are merely those who would necessarily be the victims of a national reorganization. They adore all the British institutions—especially the hereditary and "letters patent" social hierarchies. They are the imported civil service heavy swells of Ottawa; the Ministers of the Crown, who would lose a portfolio; and the "skippers" of the government organs, who would lose subsidies, government printing, and, in fact, a reason for existence. But the Canadian people, in whose hands rest the destinies of Canada, are wedded to democracy irrevocably, and the whole paraphernalia of titular distinction and hereditary precedence, which is the creed of English society, is utterly distasteful to them. In fact, Anglomania is not so popular an exotic in Canada as it is in New York. A sentiment, to be enduring, must always have a basis of fact in common aspirations, interests, and sympathies. English-speaking Canadians cannot have any such bond of sympathy with the people of Great Britain; all their interests belong distinctively to this continent. With the growth of cosmopolitanism, of course, the English-speaking Canadians, like all other peoples sprung from the old Anglo-Saxon stock, look to England with a reverence which is natural, but which, like the similar sentiment in the States, has nothing of servile deference in it. Canadians are gradually outgrowing some of the provincialism which their isolation, belonging neither to this hemisphere nor the other, quite naturally forced upon them; and now, equally naturally, they are turning toward their near neighbor rather than to the parent country, removed from them in ideas, institutions, and sentiment, and too much inclined to sneer at all things colonial. Canadians are as much at home in New York or Boston—if any one not a native can feel absolutely annexed to Boston—as in Montreal, Toronto, or Ottawa.
The small clique of Canadian aspirants for minor titles at the Court of St. James, who wax enthusiastic over the glories of an Imperial Federation of England with all her colonies, are the laughing stock of Downing Street. The following excerpt from a letter written by Lord Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, is very interesting, as showing the indifference about Canada which has always existed in England:
"The fisheries affair is a bad business. Pakington's circular is not written with a thorough knowledge of the circumstances. He is out of his depth, more than three marine miles from shore. These wretched colonies will all be independent, too, in a few years, and are a millstone around our necks. If I were you I would push matters with Filmore, who has no interest to pander to a populace, like Webster, and make an honorable and speedy settlement."
This was in a confidential letter, and may be found in Lord Walmesbury's "Memoirs of an ex-Minister." In his public utterances, Lord Beaconsfield was as conventionally sentimental as his successors and admirers. He said in the House: "No minister in this country will do his duty who neglects an opportunity of reconstructing as much as possible our Colonial Empire, and of ​responding to those distant sympathies which may become the source of incalculable strength and happiness to this land."
It is worthy of remark that Canada and the United States have not yet come to "an honorable and speedy settlement" of the fisheries' question; and they never will until Canada can act with entire independence of Great Britain.
The utter dissimilarity in the point of view and aims of native born Canadians and Englishmen is especially marked in Ontario and Manitoba, the two greatest provinces of the Dominion, where the scheme of existence and the popular pulse are such that the traveller immediately perceives the influence of the neighboring republic. The difference between the farmers of Dakota and Manitoba is so subtile that, if one did not know positively on which side of the line one was, one would certainly become confused as to their nationality. Any intelligent observer, who has had frequent opportunities of visiting the cities growing up in the West on both sides of the line, must have been impressed with the Canadian duplication of American manners, methods, and aims.
The subsidized government organs of Eastern Canada, which preach that the remedy for Canada's commercial disabilities is the stopping of railroad traffic in its natural channels north and south, and the opening of a stage coach line to the antipodes, have no influence in Manitoba or the Maritime Provinces, and very little in Ontario, the most progressive commonwealth in the Dominion.
The people in the northwest are cramped by the tariff at every turn, and they know that Canada's natural market is to the south. In comparison with that market, England, Australia, Japan, and all the other British colonies are insignificant, because the cost of transportation is prohibitive to Canadian producers, who are, to begin with, in the hands of a "national" railroad which discriminates in favor of their rivals in trade. Two-thirds of the Canadian exports go to the United States to-day, even with a prohibitive line of custom houses on the border, and a free market across the Atlantic. In the West, the people, unable to get their products into the American market at their doors without paying heavy duties, and nearly two thousand miles away from their own eastern seaboard, without any railroad competition to keep down rates, make no pretence about it. They want annexation, and are not afraid to say so. And what is somewhat peculiar, many of the settlers who have gone to the West direct from England are the most ardent disciples of the leaders of the agitation, a circumstance which shows that in these days of a generally diffused cosmopolitanism, the love of the almighty dollar is not a peculiarly American trait.
In politics the similarity of the Canadian ideas to those that obtain in the United States is very marked. The standard of political ethics on both sides of the line is deplorably low. It is resolved for the most part into a scramble for the loaves and fishes. Politics have degenerated into a profession, and its professors do not live in the odor of sanctity. As for principles—one only hears of them during general elections. The object of government is to remain in office, and the value of "burning questions" is reckoned by ballot returns. Virtue is only to be found on the opposition benches, whichever party is in power.
A favorite argument of the opponents of commercial and political union with the United States is that the boundaries dividing all countries are always arbitrary, unless they are formed by the sea, as in the case of Great Britain and Australia. It is argued that the United States and Canada can grow up as separate nations just the same as France and Belgium and the other continental countries of Europe. The chain of great lakes between the two countries is also mentioned as an evidence that Nature intended them to separate. One might as well argue that the river Thames is a natural boundary for the separation of the interests of Londoners on the Middlesex and Surrey sides. The great lakes, with the irenormous traffic, are the strongest link in the argument for annexation. It is proved by the annual shipping statistics that there is a larger traffic on these lakes during the short season of six months they are open than there is ​through the Suez Canal, open all the year round.
It must be remembered also that the continental countries of Europe are separated by a barrier that the history of the world from the time of label has proved to be almost insuperable the difference of language. The only really distinctive Canada is the old Canada of the French, of which Quebec and the quaint villages along the St. Lawrence are the historic remnants, a mediæval province, in which the street cars and telegraphs strike one as something strange and out of harmony. The English cities and provinces of the Dominion could all be dropped into New York and Massachusetts without one's discovering any in congraity. They are not English; they are American, only a little sleepier than most American cities of the same size.
The isolation enforced upon communities by the conservation of distinct tongues is shown in Canada, where the French hove remained French, after a century of commingled commercial interests with the English and a common citizenship. Europe, on the other hand, contains a wonderful example in the German Empire of different elements, springing from a common stock, only held apart by political and superficial diversities, being forged together by the genius of one man, and the sympathy of a common tongue, into one of the greatest of nations. The English speaking race on this continent has the same advantages. It has the same language, the same ideals and fundamental principles of law and religion, and behind all this there is the force of commerce impelling it onward to a complete unification. Mr. Gladstone, in a recent public utterance, said that he thought in another century the American people would number six hundred millions, and to them must be committed the conservation of that civilization England has built up by centuries of effort. Canada could not want a better national future than to form a part of such a nation.
Professor Goldwin Smith, throughout the whole agitation for and against the political union of Canada and the United States, has taken the most independent and rational view, pandering neither to the blatant partisans of the Canadian or Imperial Government, nor to the Anglophobists, who are as strong in the Dominion as in an Irish ward in New York City; and nothing could be more clear and convincing than what he writes in "Canada and the Canadian Question" on this subject. He is eminently practical and unprejudiced, avoiding the pitfall of reckless over-zealous championship, and of wavering incertitude and concession to nebulous sentiment. He does not wait to see which way the "cat is going to jump": he is one of the few public men in the Dominion who can afford to have convictions, or at least avow them. He says:
"Annexation is an ugly word; it seems to convey the idea of force or pressure applied to the smaller state, not of free, equal, and honorable union, like that between England and Scotland. Yet there is no reason why the union of the two sections of the English-speaking people on this continent should not be as free, as equal, and as honorable as the union of England and Scotland. We would rather say their reunion than their union, for before their unhappy schism they were one people. Nothing but the historical accident of a civil war ending in secession, instead of amnesty, has made them two. When the Anglo-Saxons of England and those of Scotland were reunited they had been many centuries apart: those of the United States and Canada have been separated for one century only. The Anglo-Saxons of England and Scotland had the memory of many wars to estrange them; the Anglo-Saxons of Canada and the United States have the memory, since their separation, only of one war. That a union of Canada with the American Commonwealth, like that into which Scotland entered with England, would in itself be attended with great advantages cannot be questioned, whatever may be the considerations or the other side, or the reasons for delay. It would give to the inhabitants of the whole continent as complete a security for peace and immunity from war taxation as is likely to be attained by any community or group of communities on this side of the millenium. Canadians almost with one voice say that it would greatly raise the value of property in Canada: in other words, that it would bring with it a great increase of prosperity. The writer has seldom heard this seriously disputed, while he has heard it admitted in the plainest terms by men who were strongly opposed to union on political or sentimental grounds, and who had spent their lives in the service of separation. . . . The Americans, on the other hand, would gain in full proportion as England gains by her commercial unions with Wales and Scotland. These inducements are always present to the minds of the Canadian people, and they are specially present when the trade of Canada, with the rest of the continent, is barred by such legislation as the McKinley Act, when her security is threatened by the ​imminence of war in Europe, or when from ternal causes she happens to be acutely feeling the conmercial atrophy to which her isolation condemns her. Canadians who live on the border, and who from the shape of the country form a large portion of the population, have always before their eyes the fields and cities of a kindred people, whose immense prosperity they are prevented from sharing only by a political line, while socially, and in every other respect, the identity and even be fusion is complete. . . . Union with the rest of the race on this continent, under the sanction of the mother country, would not really be a breach of affection for her. . . . It would be no mere a breach of affection than the naturalization, now fully recognized by British law, of multitudes both of Englishmen and of Canadians in the United States. Let us suppose that the calamitous rupture of the last century had never taken place, that the whole race on this continent had remained united, and had parted, when the time came, from the mother country in peace: where would the outrage in love or loyalty have been? Admitted into the councils of their own continent, and exercising their fair share of influence there, Canadians would render the mother country the best of all services, and the only service in their power, by neutralizing the votes of her enemies."
The secret of the sudden dissolution of Parliament this year instead of next, is that Sir John Macdonald is always very prompt in recognizing a trump card in the hands of his opponents; and he foresaw very clearly that the Canadian people, especially the farmers, were be coming very dissatisfied with the so-called National Policy, and were suffering very keenly on account of being shut out of their legitimate market to the south of them. The sentiment of the country in favor of free trade with the United States is unmistakable; in Manitoba and the Northwest, the farmers are handicapped and impoverished by the necessity of sending their products two thousand miles to the Canadian eastern seaboard, instead of a few hundred miles due south; and in Ontario and Quebec the enormous growth of the loan associations, and the miles and miles of mortgaged homesteads tell their own story. Sir John Macdonald knew that in 1892 there could be but one great issue before the country, and that would be free trade with the United States. The recent passage of the McKinley Bill afforded a side issue, which he was wily enough to see, in the angered state of the Canadian people, would effectually blind them to their own interests, and secure for him a new lease of political life. In order to procure a dissolution of parliament, which, according to constitutional usage, is only permissible when a government has not a working majority or has just been defeated upon an important measure, Sir John resorted to the subterfuge of declaring that the government was anxious to negotiate for more favorable trade relations with the United States than those at present existing, and for this purpose considered it necessary to go to the country on the question, and consider it with a newly elected parliament. This was practically an attempt on the part of the government to borrow from the liberal party the chief plank in its platform, make a political dodge of it, and then, as events will probably show, discreetly drop it; or bring the pretence to an abrupt conclusion by sending a delegation to Washington, that will make proposals which Sir John knows very well will not be seriously entertained for a moment.
Sir John has a great deal of Lord Beaconsfield's shrewd perception of the right moment to take advantage of a strong change in the popular sentiment; and he somersaults on all questions at just such a moment as will insure him a return of the public confidence and enable him to ride again into office on the back of his opponents' policy: The liberals for years have been committed to unrestricted reciprocity and free trade with the United States, while the conservative government has done everything in its power to force an artificial commercial intercourse between the different provinces of the Dominion, and keep trade from floating in its natural channels north and south.
It is a government of a plutocracy, tempered by the theocratic influence of Quebec. The chief supporters of the Macdonald government are the wealthy manufacturers—a class which is endeavoring to arrogate to itself the absolutism and the autocracy of the old world hereditary "aristocracy," and which has no principle whatever but toryism and dollars, if these things may stand for principles. This class, as in previous elections, was the main sup​port of the Macdonald government last March. Sir John knew that the farmers of Ontario and Quebec were waking to the fact that they were being made the puppets of the wealthy subsidized corporations which upheld the government, and it was this which induced him to dangle before the farmer's eyes the alluring bait of reciprocity in natura! products with the United States; but in Ontario, which had always sent a strong conservative contingent to the Dominion House, it was too late. The gospel of the real free trade party had sunk too deep into the minds of the community; and be sides this, there was a strong feeling of resentment against the government for having ratified the acts of incorporation and endowment of the Jesuit Society in 1888. In Quebec, Sir John depended upon the Church to force her sons to vote, as usual, for the conservative party (although there is a strong feeling in French Canada for free trade), in return for favors received by the Church from the government—notably, the recent passage of the Jesuits Estates Bill. But, for once, politics took precedence of "spiritual pains and penalties," and the vigorous campaign inaugurated in Quebec by the Hon. Wilfred Laurier, the leader of the Liberal party, resulted in a strong liberal representation being sent to Ottawa,—contrary to all expectations—and to the surprise even of the liberal party itself.
This does not mean that the habitants are opposed to the Jesuit domination, or that Mr. Laurier himself is an opponent of the Church. It simply means that the question of free trade with the United States has sunk every other question into insignificance, and even the well-drilled political troops of the Church in Quebec are not always to be depended upon to vote against their material commercial in tcrests. Ontario and Quebec both sunk their prejudices—the one, its anti-Jesuit sentiment; the other, its anti-English feeling—and united for free trade and less government.
The issue was a momentous one, and although the continental free trade party does not now occupy the treasury benches, it has, nevertheless, secured a victory. Sir John, for the first time for many years, felt his hold loosening, and anticipated a possible defeat. He, in despair, resorted to the old stupid but effective cry of the "old flag" and "Britons never shall be slaves." Sir Charles Tapper, the High Commissioner for Canada, specially visited Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to arouse the anti-American feeling, which is the especial pride of the United Loyalists, whose ancestors settled there after the close of the Revolutionary War. The Maritime Provinces have, perhaps, more to gain from a free admission to the American market than any of the other provinces of the Dominion; for since the abrogation of the old reciprocity treaty in 1864 they have been completely isolated from the rest of the Dominion, in spite of a political railroad built especially to conciliate them, and cut off from the market which formerly made them rich and prosperous, they have steadily declined in importance, until they are now on the verge of commercial atrophy. It was an opportune moment to play upon their anti-American proclivities—a sentiment which has always been carefully nurtured by the conservative organs—for the people are still smarting under the effects of the McKinley Bill, which seemed to spell complete extinction of their already impoverished trade. Besides, there was behind all this exhibition of patriotic devotion to Great Britain a promise of something a great deal more tangible—extended trade relations with the United States, upon whose cordiality, however much the "Blue Noses" may affect to despise them, the Maritime Provinces depend for an existence—an existence which has been rather precarious during the conservative administration. Sir John Macdonald knows too well that commercial union, or unrestricted reciprocity, alone, is an impossibility—that is, such a union as the mas of the people in Canada desire to-day; not a repetition of the old reciprocity treaty, which neither country could now accept—and he has no intention of promoting any legislation which would necessarily involve important changes and modifications in the procedure and constitution of the government. He is well aware also that the present administration at ​Washington would not seriously entertain any proposals in the direction of free trade; for despite all Mr. Blaine's anxiety to secure extended trade relations with the South American republics, his party is pledged to protectionism, and must in consistency disapprove of all at tempts to emancipate the masses from the "protection" of the plutocracy, which rules in the United States, as well as in Canada.
The lesson of the Dominion election, however, is obvious to every intelligent observer. Sir John's government has from the beginning depended upon the support of the manufacturers it has artificially created out of the nation's coffers; millions of borrowed money have been sunk in building railroads to lull the people to sleep, with apparent evidences of prosperity and development; and the agricultural community, the backbone of Canada, has been taught to believe that all this taxation was for its ultimate benefit, in opening up vast new home markets, which would more than compensate for the markets cut off by the policy of isolation and high tariff adopted by the government. Some one has said that "the nation which builds on manufactures sleeps upon gunpowder"; and Sir John Macdonald, after a long and successful policy of procrastination, is just being forced to recognize that a system of wholesale political corruption and reckless postponement and promises must end in an explosion. The Canadian people have long and patiently borne impoverishment at the hands of the subsidized manufacturing corporations, deluded by the conservative theories that only through the creation of manufactures by high tariff legislation could the country attain prosperity. Now there is a movement throughout the country similar to that of the Farmers' Alliance in the Western States and in New England, and Sir John and his followers hope to compromise with this growing sentiment in favor of free trade in natural channels, by pretending to try to obtain for the people the commercial liberty they desire, and by skilful manipulation obtaining a sharp refusal of free trade from Congress, and so bring the advocates of free trade in Canada into disfavor, as traitors desiring to sell their country to a foreign nation which will have none of them. But this cannot last. A change from the existing order of things in Canada is inevitable; and Sir John Macdonald's sudden conversion to the unrestricted reciprocity idea is one of the surest indications of the fact that commercial union, with its natural sequence of political union, will be the supreme issue in Canada at no very distant date.
There is still a protectionist government at Ottawa, but the whole Dominion is saturated with free trade ideas; and the growing discontent with protection in the United States is a good augury of success in future negotiations, when true democracy and liberalism shall have obtained both at Washington and at Ottawa—events which present indications seem to point to as being possible before the end of this century. In 1900, this continent will most probably have shaken off the last shred of monarchism, and will be one harmonious and powerful republic—truly, the greatest nation in the world.