The Canadian Dominion | Page 9

people to stand fast by the King. So far all went as Carleton had hoped: "The Noblesse, Clergy, and greater part of the Bourgeoisie," he wrote, "have given Government every Assistance in their Power." But the habitants refused to follow their appointed leaders with the old docility, and some even mobbed the seigneurs who tried to enroll them. Ten years of freedom had worked a democratic change in them, and they were much less enthusiastic than their betters about the restoration of seigneurial privileges. Carleton, like many another, had held as public opinion what were merely the opinions of those whom he met at dinner. "These people had been governed with too loose a rein for many years," he now wrote to Burgoyne, "and had imbibed too much of the American Spirit of Licentiousness and Independence administered by a numerous and turbulent Faction here, to be suddenly restored to a proper and desirable Subordination." A few of the habitants joined his forces; fewer joined the invaders or sold them supplies--till they grew suspicious of paper "Continentals." But the majority held passively aloof. Even when France joined the warring colonies and Admiral d'Estaing appealed to the Canadians to rise, they did not heed; though it is difficult to say what the result would have been if Washington had agreed to Lafayette's plan of a joint French and American invasion in 1778.
Nova Scotia also held aloof, in spite of the fact that many of the men who had come from New England and from Ulster were eager to join the colonies to the south. In Nova Scotia democracy was a less hardy plant than in Massachusetts. The town and township institutions, which had been the nurseries of resistance in New England, had not been allowed to take root there. The circumstances of the founding of Halifax had given ripe to a greater tendency, which lasted long, to lean upon the mother country. The Maine wilderness made intercourse between Nova Scotia and New England difficult by land, and the British fleet was in control of the sea until near the close of the war. Nova Scotia stood by Great Britain, and was reserved to become part of a northern nation still in the making.
That nation was to owe its separate existence to the success of the American Revolution. But for that event, coming when it did, the struggling colonies of Quebec and Nova Scotia would in time have become merged with the colonies to the youth and would have followed them, whether they remained within the British Empire or not. Thus it was due to the quarrel between the thirteen colonies and the motherland that Canada did not become merely a fourteenth colony or state. Nor was this the only bearing of the Revolution on Canada's destiny. Thanks to the coming of the Loyalists, those exiles of the Revolution who settled in Canada in large numbers, Canada was after all to be dominantly a land of English speech and of English sympathies. By one of the many paradoxes which mark the history of Canada, the very success of the plan which aimed to save British power by confirming French-Canadian nationality and the loyalty of the French led in the end to making a large part of Canada English. The Revolution meant also that for many a year those in authority in England and in Canada itself were to stand in fear of the principles and institutions which had led the old colonies to rebellion and separation, and were to try to build up in Canada buttresses against the advance of democracy.
The British statesmen who helped to frame the Peace of 1783 were men with broad and generous views as to the future of the seceding colonies and their relations with the mother country. It was perhaps inevitable that they should have given less thought to the future of the colonies in America which remained under the British flag. Few men could realize at the moment that out of these scattered fragments a new nation and a second empire would arise. Not only were the seceding colonies given a share in the fishing grounds of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, which was unfortunately to prove a constant source of friction, but the boundary line was drawn with no thought of the need of broad and easy communication between Nova Scotia and Canada, much less between Canada and the far West. Vague definitions of the boundaries, naturally incident to the prevailing lack of geographical knowledge of the vast continent, held further seeds of trouble. These contentions, however, were far in the future. At the moment another defect of the treaty proved to be Canada's gain. The failure of Lord Shelburne's Ministry to insist upon effective safeguards for the fair treatment of those who had taken the