SIR CHARLES LUCAS ON LORD DURHAM'S REPORT.*

Sus CHARLES LUCAS in this superb edition of Lord Durham's historic Report has done a work which has long been urgently needed. He gives us not only a good edition of the text, but a full reprint of the appendices, and he adds; what has never been published before, Charles Buller's sketch of Lord Durham's mission, which was given by the present Lord Durham to Mr. A. G. Doughty, the Canadian archivist. Further, in the first volume he has given us the most acute and learned examination of the Report which we have seen. in which he provides the proper " orientation " of Durham's work in relation to the historical and political circumstances attending it. No State paper has been more loosely quoted. As in the case of Burke's writings, all parties when in doubt have been apt to fly with vague references to its shelter. We have had occasion to point out how utterly false these parallels often are. The most glaring is the case of Irish Home Rule, which we shall consider later. Another is the precedent so often sought in connexion with the grant of responsible government to the Transvaal. Those who used Durham's authority in support of the grant made a most egregious blunder. It is true that he prescribed responsible government as the cure for Canada's troubles, but he laid it down as a sine quit non that a British majority should be per- manently assured. We leave it to our readers to judge how much weight this stipulation carried in the minds of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Government.

Lord Durham was sent to Canada at the age of forty-six, when the tangle became too hard for the Home Government to undo. He spent five months, all told, in the country, out of which only,eleven days were given to Upper Canada. Early next year the Report was issued, and a year later he died- There is no other instance in history, we think, of a man who in so short a time went to the root of a com- plex situation, and whose diagnosis has stood so well the test of time. Able and industrious as his staff proved, we agree with Sir Charles Lucas, that the Report in form and substance is Lord Durham's alone. Canada had been given representative institutions by the Act of 1791. The Home, Government, however, had had no great experience in deal- ing with self-governing colonies ; the Colonial Office wee. presided over by a very weak Secretary of State ; while the Permanent Under-Secretary was a strong-minded official who was accustomed to the Crown Colony type of government. The division of Canada into two provinces had tended to widen the gulf between French and English, and within each province there was a pretty constant strife between the elected Assembly and the nominated Legislative Council. The worst tussle was in Lower Canada, where Papineau and his followers demanded complete control of the finances, while at the same time they refused to guarantee a Civil List for more than one year. French Canadian Liberalism, being a forced and sudden growth, lacked the balance of a policy gradually matured, and was always apt to be feverish and intransigent. Legislative blundering in England made matters worse, such as the Act of 1831, which handed over the Crown revenues unconditionally to the local Legislature. There were special grievances also, sash as the composition of the Executive Council, the use of Crown patronage, the Imperial land legislation, and the charter granted to the British American Land Company. The upshot was armed rebellion in each of the provinces—not justifiable, Sir Charles Lucas thinks—for though there were the discontents "in Lower Canada of a French race largely officered by Englishmen, in Upper Canada of a democratic party stonewalled by official Conservatism," yet the demands of the reformers were exces- sive, and the speedy 'collapse of both risings testifies to the

absence of any widespread popular grievance. Distorted recol- lections of the American War of Independence and the foolish speeches in the British Parliament of men like Hume and Roebuck were largely responsible for the outbreak. It was quickly suppressed, and the burden of setting up a new

Government for the Canadas fell upon the deeply reluctant British Ministry. Colonial government being temporarily superseded, Lord Durham was dispatched with large powers to inquire, report, and decide, accompanied by Instructions * Lord Durham's Report on the Affiirs of British North America Edited with- an Introduction by Sir C. P. Lucas, S.C.B. S vole: Word: at. the Clarendian Press. [25s. net.]

-containing all the copy-book Whig maxims so dear to Lord Glenelg's heart, The central point in the Report is, of course, the grant of responsible government and, as a first step to this end, the union of the two Canadas, so that French and English might be fused into one nation. Durham was no constitutional pedant. He did not believe in autonomy as a panacea or all ills ; he went deeper, and tried to remedy the evils which, if unremedied, would make autonomy a farce. He refused to be deflected from the path of common sense for the sake of gratifying "some idle and narrow notion of a petty and visionary nationality." On the question of responsible government he laid down his policy with a breadth and a clearness which have not been surpassed.

He distinguished between matters of Imperial and matters of purely local concern, and with regard to the latter gave to the colony the status of a nation, the Governor being hound to act on the advice of the Colonial Cabinet. At the same time he classed certain subjects as Imperial which might generally be considered as local. The most important of them was the control of the public lands, which he desired to reserve for the Imperial Government. Nothing is more remarkable in the Report than its spirit of manly and far-sighted Imperialism. He refused to treat a .colony as a spoiled child.

" The country which has founded and maintained the Colonies at a vast expense of blood and treasure very justly expects its co-operation in turning their unappropriated resources to the account of its own redundant population ; they are the rightful patrimony of the English people, the ample appanage which God and Nature have set aside in the New World for those whose lot has assigned them but insufficient portions in the Old."

As Sir Charles Lucas puts it, to Durham's mind public lands :and emigration formed a necessary complement to constitu- tional reform. It was a matter on which his lieutenants, Charles Buller and Wakefield, enthusiastically supported him. Unfor- tunately it was politically impracticable. He was really with- holding from the new national legislature more than the British 'Government had ever dreamed of withholding in the past, and -experience teaches us that nothing is so jealous of every right and privilege as a land which is newly set upon its own feet.

We cannot wonder that his recommendation was not carried out, but in the interests of the Empire we may well regret it. The same is true of his pleading for a system of carefully organized and subsidized State emigration.

There are obvious criticisms to be made on the Report. He did not recognize the tenacity of the French-Canadian race. Far-sighted as he was, he did not see the extension of Canada to the Pacific, nor did he realize the difficulty of keeping to his strict delimitation of Imperial and local questions. We must not forget, too, that if Durham sowed the seed, it was Sydenham who performed the difficult task of watering and tending it to maturity. But his work remains as on the whole the greatest statement of the general principle of our free Empire. Sir Charles Lucas sums up its effect in eloquent words :—

" To all times and to all sorts and conditions of men he has preached the doctrine that for peoples, as for individuals, the one thing worth living for is to make, not to destroy ; to build up, not to pull down; to unite small disjointed elements into a single whole ; to reject absolutely and always the doctrine of Divide et ,impera, because it is a sign of weakness, not of strength ; to be strong and fear not ; to speak unto the peoples of the earth that they go forward. In this constructiveness, which is embodied in All parts of the Report, he has beyond any other man illustrated in writing the genius of the English race, the element which in the British Empire is common alike to the sphere of settlement and the sphere of rule. It is as a race of makers that the English will live to all time, and it is as a prophet of a race of makers that Lord Durham lives."

One final note. Lord Durham's views have been frequently referred to in recent controversy as if they supported the policy of Home Rule for Ireland. Sir Charles Lucas shows how far different is the truth. It is clear from the single

marginal note in which Ireland is introduced that he saw no analogy between it and Canada. For one thing the two Canadas had never enjoyed full Parliamentary liberties such as Ireland enjoyed. Further, he sets out as the root of all the mischief the folly of giving separate treatment to the French Canadians. " Unhappily the system of government favoured in Lower Canada has been based on the policy of perpetuating the very separation of the races and encouraging those very notions of conflicting nationalities which it ought to

have been the first care of government to check and extin- guish." As a cure he prescribed, not the federation, but the union of the two colonies in order that "the national character to be given to French Canada should be that of the British Empire." Sir Charles Lucas well sums up the position

:-

"Lord Durham, then, recommended self-government for Lower Canada, but not Home Rule ; and if any inference can be drawn from his Report with regard to Ireland, it would seem that he would not only not have recommended Home Rule for Ireland, but would have contended that it has self-government already, and that it was a mistake ever to have given it any shrod of separate treatment, such as a fixed number of members in the Parliament of the United Kingdom."