Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

“ He saw that one leading cause of the rupture between Great Britain and her colonies had been the pettiness of the American democracies, the narrowness of provincial politics, the intensity of democratic feeling cooped up in the small area of a single colony as in a single Greek city, the personal bitterness thereby produced in local politicians, and the obvious semblance of oppression when a great country like England was dealing with one small state and another, not with a larger federated whole. ”

“ In those parts of the world which have been settled and not merely conquered by Europeans, and which are still British possessions, in British North America, Australasia, and South Africa, there has been on the whole parity of progress. No one of the three groups of colonies has in wealth and population wholly out-distanced the others. This fact has unquestionably made for strength and permanence in the British Empire, and it is equally beyond question that the spread of colonization within the Empire would have been wanting, had Great Britain retained her old North American colonies. ”

“ Colonial questions, such as in times of profound peace and goodwill, and after generations of experience, are yet almost insoluble, confronted him, without precedent, without guidance, in their most uncompromising form. He faced them, and through all the mire and mud in which England and English civilians and soldiers and sailors wallowed in these miserable years, he carried one name at any rate which stood for dignity, uprightness, and firm prescient statesmanship. ”

“ Nor was it wholly a gain to the United States. Such at least must be the view of Englishmen who believe in the worth of their country, in its traditions, in the character of the nation, in its political, social, moral, and religious tendencies. The necessary result of the separation was to alienate the American colonists from what was English; to breed generations in the belief that what England did must be wrong, that the enemies of England must be right; to strengthen in English-speaking communities the elements which were opposed to the land and to the race from which they had sprung. ”

“ Widely different was the case of the English colonies in North America. All these settlements started under some form of grant or charter, derived ultimately from the Crown: the Crown from time to time interfered and made a show of its supremacy; but there was no system of any sort or kind, and communities grew up, which in practice had never been governed from home but governed themselves. Most of all, the New England colonies embodied to the full the spirit of colonial independence. ”

“ Many years back the Canadians and their friends had differentiated between the English from England, who came out to fight, and the English colonists in America. The eye-witness of the siege and capture of Louisbourg in 1745 favourably, and probably unfairly, contrasted Warren and his British sailors with Pepperell and the New England levies. To the men from a distance, better disciplined, less prejudiced, less imbued with provincial animosity, there was no such aversion as to the enemy who was ever under their eyes. ”

“ To expect wisdom and moderation from near a score of petty parliaments, consisting in effect of only one of the three necessary branches of a parliament, must, after the light brought by experience, appear to have been a very extravagant expectation.... An American Assembly, quiet in the weakness of their infancy, could not but discover in their elevation to prosperity, that themselves were the substance, and the governor and Board of Council were shadows in their political frame. All America was thus, at the very outset of the plantations, abandoned to democracy. ”

“ How to administer a new domain with equity and sound judgement; how to give to new subjects, acquired by conquest, the privileges enjoyed by the old colonies; how to reconcile the claims of the old colonies, whose inland borders had never been demarcated, with the undoubted rights of native races; how to promote trade and settlement without depriving the Indians of their heritage;—such were the problems which the British Government was called upon to face and if possible to solve. ”

“ The Loyalists had been shabbily treated, without any adequate reason either for sacrificing them or for making various other concessions. That was the verdict of the House of Commons then, and it is the verdict of history now. England had become relatively not weaker but stronger since the disaster at Yorktown, and the United States were at least as much in need of peace as was the mother country. The Americans had done more by bluff than by force, and the wholesale cession of territory, the timorous abandonment of men and places, was an unnecessary price of peace. ”

“ In our own time, steam and telegraphy have been perpetually counteracting the effects of distance. It was not so in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Navigation was improved, but was still the humble handmaid of wind and tide; and on the very eve of the American War of Independence the remoteness of the North American colonies, and the prevailing ignorance in England about the North American colonies were, though no doubt much exaggerated, a commonplace among the speakers and writers of the time. ”

“ The perpetual seeking after compromise, and trying to see two sides after the choice of action has been made, has lost many friends to our country and nation, and made none: while the retracing of steps, unmindful of claims which have arisen, of property which has been acquired, and of responsibilities which have been incurred has, as the record of the past abundantly shows, brought bitterness of spirit to the friends of England, and bred distrust of the English and their works. ”

“ If it was thought necessary thus to limit the liberties of one of the English colonies by Imperial legislation, it would have been hopelessly illogical to enlarge the borders of others among the sister communities; and if the only possible alternative was to keep the Western territories directly under the Crown, it was simpler, and involved less friction and debate, to attach them by a single clause in a Bill to the existing province of Quebec, than to treat them as a separate unit and to provide them with an administration and a legislature by a separate law. ”

“ The Canadians were politically children. They had never known even the semblance of representative institutions. They had from all time been born and bred under authority—under the King, under the Church, under the seigniors. They had learnt unquestioning obedience, and could not at once be re-cast in a democratic [77] mould. The printing press, the Assembly for law-making and debate, the standing quarrels with governors, the withholding of supplies, the aggressive freedom in every form which characterized the English communities in North America, all were alien to the French Canadian. ”

“ If Canada had not been a French colony, and had been inhabited by coloured men alone, or if Canada, as a French colony, had been in a different continent from the British North American colonies, the task of construction or re-construction would have been infinitely easier. It would have been easier, too, if the French Canadians had been the only inhabitants of Canada. But, as it was, one white race conquered another white race, which in its turn had secured mastery over a coloured race, and in the land of that coloured race had not merely conquered or traded, but settled and colonized ”

“ Though the United States, in the war and in the treaty which followed it, attained in the fullest possible measure the objects for which they had contended, it is a question whether, of all the countries concerned in the war, Canada did not really gain most, notwithstanding the hardship which she suffered in respect of the boundary line between the Dominion and the United States. For Canada to have a future as a nation, it was necessary, in the first place, that she should be cut adrift from the French colonial system as it existed in the eighteenth century. ”

“ The Government fared ill at the hands of the best speakers in the House, of all shades of opinion. ‘Never was the honour, the humanity, the principles, the policy of a nation so grossly abused,’ said Lord North now happy in opposition, ‘as in the desertion of those men who are now exposed to every punishment that desertion and poverty can inflict because they were not rebels,’ and he denounced the discrimination made in the fifth article of the Peace against those who had borne arms for Great Britain. ”

“ The North American colonies were a group of young communities, whose citizens were, at any rate in New England and Pennsylvania, of a strong, sober, and very tenacious type: the late war had taught them to fight: its issue had given them a feeling of strength and security: there had been no extraordinary strain upon their resources: they had reached a stage in their history when they were most dangerous to offend and not unlikely to take offence unless very carefully handled, and careful handling on the part of the mother country, as all the world knows, was conspicuous by its absence. ”

“ The newly-created people, as Lord North styled the Americans, did not show themselves wise in their generation. Their policy towards the Loyalists was not that of men confident in the strength and the righteousness of their cause; nor, if they wished to drive the English out of America and, as Franklin tried in his dealings with Oswald, to secure Canada for the United States, did they take the right course to achieve their end. ”

“ The coming century and the New World were not the time and place for reviving feudal institutions. But on paper it was an attractive scheme. Side by side with the British Loyalists who had been driven out of the newly-formed American republic, would be settled French Loyalists whom the Revolution had hunted from France. Their loyalty and their sufferings for their cause would commend them to their British fellow colonists: their kinship in race, religion, and language would commend them to the French Canadians, who in turn had little sympathy with a France that knew not Church or King. ”

“ The acquisition of Canada presented to British statesmen a wholly new problem. The British Empire had hitherto widened mainly by means of settlement, for the seventeenth century, as far as Great Britain was concerned, was a time of settlement, not of conquest. Jamaica, it is true, had been taken from the Spaniards, and New York from the Dutch; but, great as was the importance of securing those two dependencies in the light of subsequent history, the conquest or cession of both the one and the other was rather an incident than the result of an era of war and conquest. ”

“ Unstable as friends, ferocious as foes, they were not fit helpmates for Englishmen in fighting Englishmen, even their value as scouts was diminished by their incurable habit of believing and exaggerating any report. As in the war with the French in Canada, the English gained ground by the scrupulous care which they took to prevent outrages on the part of the savages who accompanied their armies, so in the later war with their own countrymen, they distinctly lost ground through calling out the coloured men of America against colonists of British birth. ”

“ No men of good English type cheered and supported him at home, the patriotism which inspired his life was unknown alike to the ministers who preceded William Pitt and to an Opposition which, as embodied in Fox, lost all sense of proportion, and almost all sense of duty, or principle. Yet he held Quebec and saved Canada. Men turned to him to gather up the fragments after the War of Independence; and he reconciled French Canada to British rule and held the balance even between conflicting races and creeds. ”

“ The tone of the opposition was unworthy of the men, but minds had been so embittered and judgements so clouded by years of wrangle and debate on the American question, that the Act for the better government of Canada was viewed by the opponents of the ministry and the partisans of the colonies mainly as a case of French against English, and Papists against Protestants. None the less, the Act was a just and generous measure, and, when Carleton returned to Canada in September, 1774, his reception by the leading French Canadians showed that they appreciated it. ”

“ The peasantry found old rules relaxed and unaccustomed freedom. Strength was nowhere in evidence in Canada. The forts were falling into ruin; the English soldiers were few; there was the King’s Government without the backing of the King’s men; the old subjects were a small number of men, of whom a large proportion were noisy, disloyal, adventurers; the new subjects were not held in submission, but not admitted to confidence. On the other hand, the French Canadians had recent and undeniable evidence of the goodwill of the British Government in the passing of the Quebec Act. ”

“ Especially is it a mistake when, as in the case of the Americans, the causes of the war and the ultimate objects are at the outset not yet clearly defined, when there are misgivings and hesitations as to the rights and wrongs, the necessities of the case, the most desirable issue: most of all when one side represents a loose confederation of jealous states, and not one single-minded nation. ”