EMPIRE COMMONWEALTH STUDIES IN GOVERNANCE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT IN CANADA BY CHESTER MARTIN HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OV HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA CANADA OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1929 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMEN HOUSE, E. G. 4 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW LEIPZIG NEWYORK TORONTO CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI HUMPHREY MILFORD PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY Printed in Great Britain PREFACE IN the play of practical politics there is little scope for that precision which is claimed for jurisprudence or political science. It is possible that studies in politics, however scrupulously historical, may be thought to share the same infirmity. A preface which is the last page of a book to be written and the first to be read may be a convenient place to forecast the nature of these studies without seeming to anticipate the evidence. The development from the first Empire in America to the modern Commonwealth falls into three clearly marked cycles. The first closed in revolution for all but four or five of the American provinces. Without the concession of responsible government at the middle of the next century, the second Empire, in the opinion of both Elgin and Grey, would have invited the same disaster. Responsible government has since been conceded to a score of British provinces and Dominions, with results that have transformed the second Empire into the Commonwealth. At each crisis of this trilogy certain decisive factors have been political. For the first, the economic and social background was so complex, on both sides of the Atlantic, that much of it came only subconsciously into the political issues of that day. At the second crisis, however, the lines are more clearly drawn. Responsible government was a political achievement, and it was won by the most distinctive and dynamic agency known to politics after the British model the agency of dominant political parties. At their best, these parties in Nova Scotia and the old province of Canada conformed to the spirit of Burke s classic definition. They were bodies of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. Let it be added that this applies, at the climax of the contest, to Johnston and the Nova Scotia Tories as well as to the followers of Howe, Uniacke, and Huntington. The economic and social background is still as widely varied as the scattered provinces of the second Empire. The evidence here, in each case, must tell its own story. In truth there are few incentives of human conduct that have not contributed, at one time or another, to this historic issue. At the Grand Remonstrance where the contest for responsible government may be said to have begun, the undercurrent was religion. In Prince Edward Island two centuries later it was part of the eternal land question. In the old province of Canada problems of patronage the universal thirst for place, as Bagot wrote played no small part. In the North-West Territories of Canada fifty years later the issue turned largely upon parliamentary technique the appropriation of federal subsidies by the local Assembly. But while the motives have been infinitely varied the political tendencies have been remarkably constant. The clearing-house for all these issues has been found in the same expedient. It is the genius of British peoples in both hemispheres, exclaimed Robert Baldwin to Lord Durham in 1838, to be concerned in the government of themselves. The next year, two Nova Scotian’s crossed the Atlantic to claim the rights of Englishmen for the people of this country. Your Lordships declaration, wrote Joseph Howe to Lord John Russell on that occasion, tells me, that on this point they will be unsuccessful but patient perseverance is a political characteristic of the stock from which we spring...
