British North American colonies

“ But no British colonist doubts that further pacific defeats (if only by being bought out of their possessions) await the French in different quarters of the globe, for it is the colonies that press forward. The North American colonies were at all times more aggressive than the mother state, as the Australasian are now. They are unconsciously on the way to become the suns of new systems. ”

“ In the event of our being at war with those nations which had possessions in the West Indies, the islands formed convenient bases for operations against our North American Colonies, as well as harbours of refuge for the innumerable privateers which preyed upon our commerce. When war unhappily broke out between our Colonies and the Mother-Country, it became more than ever a matter of paramount necessity that no Power but ourselves should hold possession of these islands. ”

“ One more point may be noted as having an important bearing upon the general question of the relations between a mother country and its colonies, one which in particular contributed to ill-feeling between England and the North American states. Colonization rarely takes place in an empty land. The colonists on arrival find native inhabitants, strong or weak, few or many, as the case may be. In North America there were strong fighting races of Indians, and the native question played an all-important part in the early history of European settlement in this part of the world. ”

“ The history of the British colonies in North America is of a very different character from that of British South Africa. We have spoken in an earlier page of the gallant aid which the colonists gave to England in her struggle with the United States during the years 1812-15. When the excitement of this war had died down, there arose a slowly increasing estrangement between the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada; the English settlers of the former and the old French habitans of the latter were separated from each other by race, language, religion, and prejudices. ”

“ It was not policy, it was not system, which gave North America to the English rather than to the French, and yet there was a certain gain even from the utter absence of both policy and system. Natural forces had more play on the English side than on the French, and in a sense it might be said of the English colonies that their strength was to sit still. ”

“ The southern colonies awoke only when the French in the Ohio valley did them active and present hurt; but, with many times the numbers of the Canadian population, the English colonies as a rule showed themselves to be no match for Canada. The first decisive treaty in North America—the Peace of Utrecht, which gave Acadia to Great Britain—was the result of fighting by English, not colonial soldiers, and not in America, but in Flanders under Marlborough. ”

“ On the continent of Europe, Great Britain had Frederick of Prussia for an ally; on the other side were France, Austria, Russia, and Sweden. Beyond the Atlantic, a French population in Canada, Acadia, and Louisiana of less than 90,000 souls was ranged against British colonies with a population at least thirteen times as numerous. One or other of the larger British colonies, taken alone, was better peopled with white colonists than Canada. ”

“ And an Englishman after traveling in the French and British Antilles in 1825 wrote: "The French colonists, whether Creoles or Europeans, consider the West Indies as their country; they cast no wistful looks toward France.... In our colonies it is quite different; ... every one regards the colony as a temporary lodging place where they must sojourn in sugar and molasses till their mortgages will let them live elsewhere. They call England their home though many of them have never been there.... The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself; the Englishman never." ”

“ It operates, too, still more to deter emigration from England to the Provinces, and thus both to retard the advance of the Colony, and to deprive the mother country of one of the principal advantages on account of which the existence of Colonies is desirable—the field which they afford for the employment of her surplus population and wealth. The native Canadians, however, to whatever political party they may belong, appear to be unanimous in the wish to preserve these exclusive privileges. ”

“ Only, as colonization spread in the long course of years, the dwellers in one province came into contact with the dwellers in another, and both the one and the other came face to face with the French advance. Then the pressure of common danger made for union, and the race instinct gathered strength. The mother country sent out soldiers; colonists were enlisted in royal regiments to supplement the provincial militias; and in clumsy, most imperfect fashion, the English in North America began to shape themselves into a nation. ”

“ To use a modern term, two separate spheres of influence in North America had not been marked out by nature. But in new countries, unless there is some strongly defined natural line of division, it is true to say, however paradoxical it may appear, that there is not room for two incoming white races to colonize as equals side by side. ”

“ Source.—Debates in the Parliament of Canada on the Confederation of British North America, 1865.
The colonies are now in a transition state. Gradually a different colonial system is being developed—and it will become year by year less a case of dependence on our part, and of overruling protection on the part of the Mother-country, and more a case of a healthy and cordial alliance. Instead of looking upon us as a merely dependent colony, England will have in us a friendly nation—a subordinate but still a powerful people—to stand by her in North America in peace or in war. ”

“ The new problems were how to administer and to develop not a small island or peninsula but a very large continental area, and how to rule a rival white race which from the [70] beginnings of colonization in North America had made that area, or part of it, its own. To these two most difficult problems was added a third, how to administer the new territory and to rule the French colonists, so as to work in harmony with the adjacent British colonies. Conquest and settlement, so to speak, overlapped. ”

“ Colony was jealous of colony, petty legislatures wrangled, and farmers resented being called to fight instead of sowing or harvesting their crops. Over and above all, whether as friends or as foes, the Frenchmen stretched out their right hands to the native races of North America; the English lived their lives apart, and for the time they paid the penalty.
Thus the Five Nations made peace with the French at Montreal. At the very same time, at Albany,16 they gave the English a title to the lake regions. ”

“ But the question, whether a decisive war between the two races in North America was inevitable, is one which may well be asked and answered, inasmuch as a similar question has in our own day troubled many minds in regard to other parts of the world where colonizing races have been side by side. Surely, it might be said, and probably was said, there was room enough in the great continent of North America for both French and English to work out their national destinies, without trying to supplant each other. ”

“ They succeeded because their trade was war not peace, because they were roving adventurers who had only their lives to lose, ravening among quiet men of substance who had homes and wives and children to be plundered and slain. It was as certain that in course of time the cause of the English colonists would prevail, as that the Highland clans, who in Scotland marauded their southern neighbours, would eventually be broken, or that the Five Nations themselves, if left to fight alone, would eventually go down before the settled life of Canada. ”

“ It was too late in the world's history to carry out such a scheme upon European soil. Every acre of territory there was appropriated. The only favourable outlook was upon the Atlantic coast of America, where English cruisers had now successfully disputed the pretensions of Spain, and where after forty years of disappointment and disaster a flourishing colony had at length been founded in Virginia. The colonization of the North American coast had now become part of the avowed policy of the British government. ”

“ For a hundred years preceding the Revolution the commerce of the colonies may be said to have been in the main practically free, as Great Britain was able to furnish the manufactures which the colony needed. But now the mother country undertook to enforce the obsolete navigation act and her revenue laws with a new vigor, which was not confined to the American colonies, but embraced the whole British empire. As applied to the colonies the measure was equally impolitic and unjust: impolitic, because by breaking up the colonial trade with the West Indies, England crippled her own customer ”

“ Up to pre-revolutionary times the colonists in the Maritime Provinces, in Canada, and in the Atlantic Colonies thought of themselves as British people merely separated from the people in the Old Country by the main of the Atlantic. ”

“ The result was the defeat of the French in North America, and the British conquest of Canada. Whatever might have been the result if the crisis had been postponed, it was not the British colonists but the troops from England, who, in 1758-60, decided the fate of North America. It is customary, in writing accounts of the colonial wars of Great Britain, to emphasize the merits of the colonial soldiers, who have the advantage of knowing the country and the mode of fighting appropriate to it ”

“ The thirteen original colonies were now "full grown." Their population had increased to 2,000,000 and was fast growing. Their men had proven their bravery and generalship in the French and Indian War. Many of them had developed into fine officers, and all compared favorably with the British regulars. Their loyalty to England was proven by the 30,000 lives that had been given that she might conquer her traditional rival and enemy. ”

“ No colonists were ever more carefully drilled and organized than the Canadian agriculturists; none ever lived a life of more unbounded freedom than the Canadian coureurs de bois. The drilling and organization of the one element, and the roving enterprise of the other, combined to produce a good fighting population; but the extremes in either case were too great to result in forming a community, which should be at once stable and progressive. What was natural in Canada was not colonization. What was colonization, that is to say permanent European settlement in the land, was purely artificial. ”

“ When the Seven Years' War came, the English colonists in North America outnumbered the French by thirteen to one; but, at the moment, superiority in numbers was largely counterbalanced by the want of union in the English colonies, whereas Canada was one. Therefore the issue largely depended on the forces and the leaders sent out by the two mother countries respectively. England, inspired by Pitt, sent out abundant troops. France, inspired by Madame de Pompadour, kept nearly all her troops to fight Frederick of Prussia, with his few English and Hanoverian allies. ”

“ In the thousands of appeals, memorials, petitions, and complaints, and the rulings and decisions upon them, were written the real history of British imperial control over the American colonies.
So great was the business before the Lords of Trade that the colonies had to keep skilled agents in London to protect their interests. As common grievances against the operation of this machinery of control arose, there appeared in each colony a considerable body of men, with the merchants in the lead, who chafed at the restraints imposed on their enterprise. ”

“ The reason was that the French relations to the Indians were more human than those of the English. No doubt, among the English colonists were Quakers and Moravians, whose tenets bade them deal gently with the people of the soil; and on the New York frontier, from Dutch times, there had been friendship, sometimes warmer sometimes cooler, between the Dutch and the English colonists on the one hand, and the Iroquois on the other. But the ordinary English colonist's view of the red man was the Old Testament view—hard, exclusive, and often cruel. ”

“ A full-blown colony was called into being under regulations which implied childhood, and the result was to leave the Canadians contented so long as they knew no other rules of life, but to leave them standing still, while their English rivals, neither too lawless nor too conservative, grew out of infancy into clumsy manhood, and proved their strength when the fullness of the time was come. ”

“ The many advantages of such lands that produce a staple for Britain, in North America, are not to be told. The whole interest of the nation in those colonies depends upon them, if not the colonies themselves. Such lands alone enable the colonies to take their manufactures and other necessaries from Britain, to the mutual advantage of both. ”

“ The seigniorial systems of Europe have never prospered in America, and the early experiments in founding colonies by the mere exportation of men to this soil were failures even when the men were of English blood. The efforts to colonize the seaboard region of North Carolina without giving the fee of the land to the people, and without care in the selection of the colonists, resulted in a failure even more complete than that of the Canadian colonies. ”