Canada's Diamond Jubilee
O'Leary, M. Grattan
ON JULY 1 the people of Canada celebrated the diamond jubilee of the confederation of their disunited, warring provinces Into a single, selfgoverning dominion. Never, perhaps, in the...
...Canadian wheat fed half the population of Europe...
...Today an Irish Catholic sits as chief justice of her Supreme Court, and a French-Canadian Catholic Is her minister of justice...
...from a state of non-existence in world affairs to full rights of participation in world policies...
...Pontiac and his allies, this same year, sought to surprise the white man and sweep him from the land...
...These rights, confirmed since the great war, crowned the constitutional development of six decades...
...British and Canadian sympathy for the South brought with it the possibility of war between Great Britain and the United States...
...sea and forest and mine yield fabulous riches...
...his work was consolidated the following year when the Frenchman Vaudreuil gave Montreal to the Englishman Amherst...
...Canadian cities ranked among the great cities of the American continent...
...It was at this juncture that a man appeared in the public life of Canada who will forever find a place in the Valhalla of the Dominion's heroes...
...Italy, her record decorated with the names of Mazzini, Garabaldi and Cavour, was about to begin her career as a unified kingdom under Victor Emmanuel...
...Japan had just emerged on the world after centuries of isolation, and the Japanese people were turning their backs on the historic traditions of their ancestors...
...they had the axe and the spade with which to win the land, and the fusil with which to save it from the bloody Iroquois...
...In 1864 a conference of the leaders of all the provinces, held in Quebec, declared for federation...
...Only by union, it was felt, could the Canadian provinces save themselves from being drawn into the American Union...
...In 1497 Sebastian Cabot came from one of the Henrys and founded England's claim to this continent...
...By 1864 faction had exhausted the country...
...Twelve years later rebelling American colonists, in a northern adventure, captured Montreal, but lost at Quebec...
...Public affairs were at a standstill, and for the moment it seemed as If constitutional government had ended in failure and chaos...
...from submission to external executive authority to a position where the final authority is the king advised by his Canadian ministers...
...There was, apart from physical combats, politics in abundance...
...and the changed feeling of England as to the relation of the great colonies to the parent state—all combine at this moment to arrest earnest attention to the gravity of the situation and unite us all in vigbrous effort to meet the emergency like men...
...there was a condition, practically, of two premiers in controlling partnership, one English and one French...
...For a century and a half the French pioneered the northern half of the continent, struggling with the wilderness, with the natives, and with their English-speaking neighbors, who had colonized the land to the south...
...Schools and churches and hospitals are everywhere...
...it had led to duels...
...Canada has now the largest per capita export trade of any nation in the world...
...It was not to be that such uneasy men as these pioneers would live easily one with another...
...from a colony to a nation—such is the story of constitutional growth in sixty years...
...Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Young Irelander, who had escaped to America with a price upon his head, and who, after some years spent battling Know-nothingism in the United States, had retraced his steps to the British flag, became the prophet of Canadian union...
...The story of Canada, in the centuries before 1867 is a record of adventure and struggle unsurpassed in the romance of history...
...The next adventurers to come were the Loyalists, who left their homes in the United States, and landing in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario, began anew the struggle to hew habitations for man out of the northern wilds...
...The two held the coast for the British, and British it is today...
...So Canada continued British while the Thirteen Colonies went their own way...
...the threatened repeal of the reciprocity treaty...
...It had burned the parliament buildings in Montreal...
...Lawrence with the busy race that dwells there today...
...Today Canada nominates her own governor-general...
...A Klan-controUed politician would be as much an oddity in Canada as an Indian reserve on Manhattan...
...In Germany the amiable Emperor William I, assisted by Count Bismarck's powerful elbow, had nudged Denmark into obscurity and Austria into subservience, and was presently to announce imperial Germany amid the smoking ruins of the Third French Empire...
...Canals have been dug...
...A dark and prolonged drama of blood had forever abolished slavery and preserved the Union on the American continent...
...Political chaos and the American Civil War were his powerful allies...
...In spite of careless diplomats...
...They quested west and south, seeking a road to India and far Cathay, seeking furs from the forests, seeking the souls of the natives for salvation, seeking adventure...
...They pressed into the wilderness by lake and river roads, and left, sometimes their names and sometimes their bones in a savage land of savages...
...appoints her own ministers to foreign capitals...
...Hard on their heels came the peasants of France, men and women, to fill the great valley of the St...
...From their struggle with nature they found time for strife among themselves...
...George Brown, who with McGee, and John A. Macdonald, and A. T. Gait and the French Canadian, George Etienne Cartier, shared the chief architectural labors of confederation, said: The Civil War in the neighboring republic...
...The public stood bewildered, aghast...
...There remained nearly three years of political struggle in Canada, in New Brunswick and In Nova Scotia...
...Wolfe took the land for the English on the Plains of Abraham in 1759...
...McGee, in his first newspaper article after coming to Canada, predicted confederation and the establishment of a "new nationality" upon the North American continent...
...As the years went by, the obscurities of factional politics disappeared, and a common interest attracted the energies of a united population...
...Hecete came from Mexico—all of them by sea...
...The land has been girdled with rails...
...From self-government in domestic matters under sharp limitations, to complete self-mastery...
...Jogues, Lalement, Lemoine, Broebuef were some of the priests who came to plant the Faith...
...negotiates her own treaties...
...It was the Briton who stayed, first as a fur-gatherer, and then as a gold-seeker...
...Power multiplied, wealth increased, responsibility expanded...
...The French Catholic Wilfrid Laurier, and the Irish Catholic D'Arcy McGee, are among her national heroes...
...and on July i, 1867, the four provinces, Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, took form as the Dominion of Canada...
...the possibility of war between Canada and the United States...
...Sixty years ago saw the world on the threshold of a new era In Europe, in the Far East, and on this northern continent: new forces, new impulses, new passions, were being liberated which in the course of time were to lead out to unlmaglned convulsions and the liberation of greater forces still...
...Sixty percent Protestant, she has had two Catholic prime ministers, and Catholics have ever been fully represented in her parliaments and her legislatures...
...and their work was confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which gave Canada, Acadia and Newfoundland to England...
...there were deadlocks and demagogues...
...During that time a French Louis, on the advice of Richelieu, made to the Hundred Associates the splendid gift of Canada, which another and later Louis contemptuously called a few acres of snow...
...It has remained English, though the tenure was not always an easy one...
...great harbors throng with commerce...
...And Canada, from being a dominion, limited in external power, has become an absolute nation, controlling her own destiny...
...mighty water powers have been developed...
...Canada, finally, has become a land of perfect religious freedom, and of the widest religious tolerance...
...Never, perhaps, in the world's history has a nation composed of scattered communities and of diverse races and creeds given a more imposing demonstration of unity and solidarity...
...With a free political form and a liberal constitutional theory, the forward march was natural and inevitable...
...Great factories today smoke throughout the land...
...Her French-Canadian population, grown to 3,000,000, have their own schools, teach their own language and have the fullest religious freedom, under the Constitution...
...Thereafter, by pen and on the platform—for he was an orator whose services were in demand not only in upper Canada, but throughout the maritime provinces —he did more than any other man to force the idea of federation upon Parliament and the country...
...there had been faction fights in elections...
...The capital had been hunted from Quebec to Montreal, to Kingston, to Toronto, and finally to both Quebec and Kingston, and then to Ottawa...
...Sixty years have abundantly justified the step thus taken...
...a Canadian company has realized the dream of the old, bold explorers...
...There were differences between the French and English communities, expressed In political issues...
...Bering came from Russia and planted a community of hunters in Alaska...
...By a series of steps, covering sixty years, she has advanced to a point where her right and power to deal with all her foreign interests can no longer be constitutionally questioned...
...To the first four, five more provinces have been added, and all are greater than at confederation...
...The achievement of 1867, which lifted four uncomblned provinces, bitterly hostile toward each other, out of a condition of weak and futile detachment and formed them into a federation with one common national aspiration, was impressively vindicated...
...Everywhere forces were making their first movements which in five decades have transformed society over the whole face of the globe...
...It was because of these things that Canadians, not with vain boasting, but unitedly, prayerfully, and with thankfulness to Divine Providence for the blessings showered upon them for sixty years, celebrated their diamond jubilee as a people on July i...
...Theirs was the adventure of both toil and danger...
...Champlain, Pontgrave, LaTour, Maisonneuve and Frontenac were some of the soldiers who came to the land for adventure...
...Alexander Mackenzie, who had gone down the great river of his name to the Arctic Ocean, came to the Pacific by a wonderful journey across the land...
...but the zeal of the advocates of union, the pressure of events and the steady Influence of the British govern ment triumphed over all difficulties...
...Cook and Vancouver came from England...
...It was amid these beginnings that the Dominion of Canada was born...
...there had been British protests, and a British governor-general had been driven home...
...From their advent dates much of the solid growth of Canada...
...Explorers, too, were being attracted to the Pacific...
...Repeated changes of cabinets, dissolutions of parliaments, every constitutional specific, had failed...
...thirty-seven years later, Jacques Cartler came and claimed this world for the French and was followed by soldiers and priests from the land of the Louis kings...
...it had brought Ontario and Quebec together, driven them apart and brought them together again...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 12
