THE CANADIAN DOMINION

CONTENTS

I. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS

II. THE FIGHT FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT

III. THE UNION ERA

IV. THE DAYS OF TRIAL

V. THE YEARS OF FULFILMENT

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE




THE CANADIAN DOMINION



CHAPTER I. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS

Scarcely more than half a century has passed since the Dominion of
Canada, in its present form, came into existence. But thrice that period
has elapsed since the fateful day when Montcalm and Wolfe laid down
their lives in battle on the Plains of Abraham, and the lands which now
comprise the Dominion finally passed from French hands and came under
British rule.

The Peace of Paris, which brought the Seven Years' War to a close in
1763, marked the termination of the empire of France in the New World.
Over the continent of North America, after that peace, only two flags
floated, the red and yellow banner of Spain and the Union Jack of
Great Britain. Of these the Union Jack held sway over by far the larger
domain--over the vague territories about Hudson Bay, over the great
valley of the St. Lawrence, and over all the lands lying east of the
Mississippi, save only New Orleans. To whom it would fall to develop
this vast claim, what mighty empires would be carved out of the
wilderness, where the boundary lines would run between the nations yet
to be, were secrets the future held. Yet in retrospect it is now
clear that in solving these questions the Peace of Paris played no
inconsiderable part. By removing from the American colonies the menace
of French aggression from the north it relieved them of a sense of
dependence on the mother country and so made possible the birth of a new
nation in the United States. At the same time, in the northern half of
the continent, it made possible that other experiment in democracy, in
the union of diverse races, in international neighborliness, and in
the reconciliation of empire with liberty, which Canada presents to the
whole world, and especially to her elder sister in freedom.

In 1763 the territories which later were to make up the Dominion of
Canada were divided roughly into three parts. These parts had little or
nothing in common. They shared together neither traditions of suffering
or glory nor ties of blood or trade. Acadia, or Nova Scotia, by the
Atlantic, was an old French colony, now British for over a generation.
Canada, or Quebec, on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, with seventy
thousand French habitants and a few hundred English camp followers,
had just passed under the British flag. West and north lay the vaguely
outlined domains of the Hudson's Bay Company, where the red man and the
buffalo still reigned supreme and almost unchallenged.

The old colony of Acadia, save only the island outliers, Cape Breton
and Prince Edward Island, now ceded by the Peace of Paris, had been
in British hands since 1713. It was not, however, until 1749 that any
concerted effort had been made at a settlement of this region. The
menace from the mighty fortress which the French were rebuilding at that
time at Louisbourg, in Cape Breton, and the hostility of the restless
Acadians or old French settlers on the mainland, had compelled action
and the British Government departed from its usual policy of laissez
faire in matters of emigration. Twenty-five hundred English settlers
were brought out to found and hold the town and fort of Halifax. Nearly
as many Germans were planted in Lunenburg, where their descendants
flourish to this day. Then the hapless Acadians were driven into
exile and into the room they left, New Englanders of strictest Puritan
ancestry came, on their own initiative, and built up new communities
like those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Other waves
of voluntary immigration followed--Ulster Presbyterians, driven out by
the attempt of England to crush the Irish woolen manufacture, and,
still later, Highlanders, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian, who soon made
Gaelic the prevailing tongue of the easternmost counties. By 1767 the
colony of Nova Scotia, which then included all Acadia, north and east of
Maine, had a prosperous population of some seven thousand Americans,
two thousand Irish, two thousand Germans, barely a thousand English,
and well over a thousand surviving Acadian French. In short, this
northernmost of the Atlantic colonies appeared to be fast on the way
to become a part of New England. It was chiefly New Englanders who had
peopled it, and it was with New England that for many a year its whole
social and commercial intercourse was carried on. It was no accident
that Nova Scotia later produced the first Yankee humorist, "Sam Slick."