Confederation of the provinces means separation of the Canadas, which regain each its Parliament; and the French Catholics begin to hope that the Irish of Upper Canada, now that they are less completely overshaded by the more numerous French, will again act with their co-religionists: the Catholic vote in the new confederation will be nearly half the whole. In Toronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in Montreal their presence is not unknown: it is a question whether the whole of the Canadian Irish are not disaffected. The Irish of the chief city have their Irish priests, their cathedral of St. Patrick, while the French have theirs upon the Place d‘Armes. The want of union may save the dominion from the establishment of Catholicism as a State Church.
The confederation of our provinces was necessary, if British North America was to have a chance for life; but it cannot be said to be accomplished while British Columbia and the Red River tract are not included. To give Canada an outlet on one side is something, but communication with the Atlantic is a small matter by the side of communication at once with Atlantic and Pacific through British territory. We shall soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior, and thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that the line is far north, and exposed to heavy snows and bitter cold; but, on the other hand, it is well supplied with wood, and if it possess no such fertile tracts as that of Kansas and Colorado, it at least escapes the frightful wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains.
We are now even left in doubt how long we shall continue to possess so much as a route across the continent on paper. Since the cession of Russian America to the United States, a map of North America has been published in which the name of the Great Republic sprawls across the continent from Behring‘s Straits to Mexico, with the “E” in “United” ominously near Vancouver‘s Island, and the “T” actually planted upon British territory. If we take up the British Columbian, we find the citizens of the mainland portion of the province proposing to sell the island for twenty million dollars to the States.
Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and California, and situated, for purposes of reinforcement, immigration, and supply, at a distance of not less than twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific colonies can hardly be considered strong in their allegiance to the crown: we have here the reductio ad absurdum of home government.
Our hindering trade, by tolerating the presence of two sets of custom-houses and two sets of coins between Halifax and Lake Superior, was less absurd than our altogether preventing its extension now. Under a so-called confederation of our American possessions, we have left a country the size of civilized Europe, and nearly as large as the United States – lying too, upon the track of commerce and highroad to China – to be despotically governed by a company of traders in skins and peltries, and to remain as long as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and desertion needed to insure the presence of fur-bearing beasts.
“Red River” should be a second Minnesota, Halifax a second Liverpool, Esquimault a second San Francisco; but double government has done its work, and the outposts of the line of trade are already in American, not British hands. The gold mines of Nova Scotia, the coal mines and forests of British Columbia, are owned in New England and New York, and the Californians are expecting the proclamation of an American territorial government in the capital of Vancouver‘s Island.
As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of the “colonization” of Red River by citizens of the United States, such as preceded the hoisting of the “lone star” in Texas, and the “bear flag” in California, by Fremont; and resistance by the Hudson‘s Bay Company will neither be possible, nor, in the interests of civilization, desirable.
Even supposing a great popular awakening upon colonial questions, and the destruction of the Hudson‘s Bay monopoly, we never could make the Canadian dominion strong. With the addition of Columbia and Red River, British America would hardly be as powerful or populous as the two Northwestern States of Ohio and Illinois, or the single State of New York – one out of forty-five. “Help us for ten years, and then we‘ll help ourselves,” the Canadians say; “help us to become ten millions, and then we will stand alone;” but this becoming ten millions is not such an easy thing.
The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British territories are derived from maps of North America, made upon Mercator‘s projection, which are grossly out in high latitudes, though correct at the equator. The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their proper size, and such gigantic proportions are given to the northern parts of the Hudson territory that we are tempted to believe that in a country so vast there must be some little value. The true size is no more shown upon the map than is the nine-months’ winter.
To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is not for lack of asking that population fails to come. Admirably executed gazettes give the fullest information about the British possessions in the most glowing of terms; offices and agencies are established in Liverpool, London, Cork, Londonderry, and a dozen other cities; government immigration agents and information offices are to be found in every town in Canada; the government immigrant is looked after in health, comfort, and religion; directions of the fullest kind are given him in the matters of money, clothes, tools, luggage; Canada, he is told by the government papers, possesses perfect religious, political, and social freedom; British subjects step at once into the possession of political rights; the winter is but bracing, the climate the healthiest in the world. Millions of acres of surveyed crown lands are continually in the market. To one who knows what the northern forests are there is perhaps something of satire in the statement that “there is generally on crown lands an unlimited supply of the best fuel.” What of that, however? The intending immigrant knows nothing of the struggle with the woods, and fuel is fuel in Old England. The mining of the precious metals, the fisheries, petroleum, all are open to the settler – let him but come. Reading these documents, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how it is that human selfishness allows the Canadian officials to disclose the wonders of their El Dorado to the outer world, and invite all men to share blessings which we should have expected them to keep as a close preserve for themselves and their nearest and dearest friends. Taxation in the States, the immigrants are told, is five and a half times what it is in Canada, two and a half times the English rate. Laborers by the thousand, merchants and farmers by the score, are said to be flocking into Canada to avoid the taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life in Canada is 37 per cent. higher than in the States. Yet, in the face of all these facts, only twenty or two and twenty thousand immigrants come to Canada for three hundred thousand that flock annually to the States, and of the former many thousands do but pass through on their way to the Great West. Of the twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year, but four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada; and there are a quarter of a million of persons born in British America now naturalized in the United States.
The passage of the immigrants to the Western States is not for want of warning. The Canadian government advertise every Coloradan duel, every lynching in Montana, every Opposition speech in Kansas, by way of teaching the immigrants to respect the country of which they are about to become free citizens.
It is an unfortunate fact, that these strange statements are not harmless – not harmless to Canada, I mean. The Provincial government by these publications seems to confess to the world that Canada can live only by running down the great republic. Canadian sympathy for the rebellion tends to make us think that these northern statesmen must not only share in our old-world confusion of the notions of right and wrong, but must be sadly short-sighted into the bargain. It is only by their position that they are blinded, for few countries have abler men than Sir James Macdonald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Galt; but, like men standing on the edge of a cliff, Canadian statesmen are always wanting to jump off. Had Great Britain left them to their own devices, we should have had war with America in the spring of 1866.
The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous: of the two chief sections of our race – that in Britain and that in America – the latter is again split in twain, and one division governed from across the Atlantic. For such government there is no pretext, except the wishes of the governed, who gain by the connection men for their defense, and the opportunity of gratifying their spite for their neighbors at our expense. Those who ask why a connection so one-sided, so opposed to the best interests of our race, should be suffered to continue, are answered,