THE POLITICAL DESTINY OF CANADA. 



13 



comprehensive view, or the knowledge necessary 

 for the formation of it ? The colonial secretary 

 himself is as often as not a man personally unac- 

 quainted with the colonies, not called to his post 

 by special aptitude, but placed in it by party con- 

 venience. He must often depend for his infor- 

 mation on such colonists as may find special ac- 

 cess to Downing Street, or on the reports of gov- 

 ernors, who, being images of royalty, are apt, like 

 royalty, to be screened from truth. A peer he 

 may be, but his peerage will not make him a 

 Providence. The annexation of Manitoba and 

 of British Columbia to Canada — with which the 

 latter, at all events, has no geographical connec- 

 tion — is by some thought to have been a disas- 

 trous, by all allowed to have been a most critical? 

 step : it was taken under the auspices of the late 

 Lord Lytton, a brilliant and prolific novelist, 

 brought into the government to make set speeches. 



If any one supposes that the retention in 

 Canada of the forms of monarchy excludes or 

 mitigates any of the political evils, or even the 

 coarseness to which democracy is liable in its 

 crude condition, a year's residence in the coun- 

 try, a month's perusal of the party newspapers, or 

 an hour's conversation with any Canadian man 

 of business who has watched politics without 

 taking part in them, will probably settle his opin- 

 ion on that subject. That monarchical forms are 

 no safeguard against corruption is a fact of which, 

 unhappily, the colony has of late years had de- 

 cisive proof. If the inquirer wishes to enlarge 

 the basis of his induction, let him go through a 

 file of Australian journals : he will there find a 

 picture of public life, public character, and sena- 

 torial manners, decidedly below the level of the 

 better States of the Union. Canada has escaped 

 the elective judiciary, but so has Massachusetts ; 

 and both that and the removable civil service 

 were the work not of real Republicans, but of 

 the Democratic party — that is, of the slave-own- 

 ing oligarchy of the South using as its instru- 

 ments the Northern mob. Her exemption from 

 the civil war and its fiscal consequences, Canada 

 owes merely to her separation from the States ; 

 it would have been the same had she been an in- 

 dependent nation. Had the political connection 

 with Great Britain never existed, and had the 

 weight of Canada been early thrown into the 

 scale of freedom, there might have been no civil 

 war. 



In the case of the Pacific Railway scandal, the 

 Governor - General may be said to have formal- 

 ly avowed himself a faineant. He decided that 

 he was absolutely bound to follow the advice of 



his ministers, even when those ministers lay un- 

 der the heaviest charges of corruption, and even 

 as to the mode in which the investigation into 

 those charges should be conducted ; and his con- 

 duct was approved by the home Government. 

 He has, therefore, no authority, and of nothing, 

 nothing comes. 



Most readers of the Fortnightly are probably 

 prepared to regard with tolerance the proposition 

 that figments and hypocrisies do no more good in 

 politics than they do in general life. In Canadian 

 politics they do much evil by blinding public men 

 and the people generally to the real requirements 

 of the situation. The hereditary principle was 

 dead at its root ; its work was done, and its age 

 had passed away in the more advanced portion 

 of humanity when the communities of the New 

 World were founded. It lingers on, as things do 

 linger on, in its native soil ; but it can furnish no 

 sound basis for government in the soil of reason 

 and equality. The only conceivable basis for gov- 

 ernment in the New World is the national will ; 

 and the political problem of the New World is 

 how to build a strong, stable, enlightened, and 

 impartial government on that foundation. That 

 it is a very difficult problem, daily experience 

 in Canada, as well as in the neighboring re- 

 public, shows, and to be successfully resolved 

 it must be seen in its true bearings, which 

 the ostensible retention of the hereditary prin- 

 ciple as the security for good and stable gov- 

 ernment obscures. Canada, though adorned with 

 the paraphernalia of eight constitutional monar- 

 chies (one central and seven provincial), is a 

 democracy of the most pronounced kind ; the 

 Governor-General was not wrong in saying that 

 she is more democratic than the United States, 

 where the President is an elective king, and where 

 the Senate, which though elective is conservative, 

 possesses great power, whereas the nominated 

 Senate of Canada is a cipher. Demagogism and 

 the other pests of democratic institutions are not 

 to be conjured away by forms and phrases ; they 

 can be repressed and prevented from ruining the 

 state only by developing remedial forces of a real- 

 ly effective kind, and by adjusting the actual ma- 

 chinery of the constitution so as to meet the 

 dangers which experience may reveal. The trea- 

 son-law of the Plantagenets with which, as well 

 as with the Lord-Chamberlain's code of prece- 

 dence, Canada is endowed, is not of much use to 

 her while she is left without any legal means of 

 repressing her real cancer, political corruption. 

 Loyalty to the faineant deputy of a distant crown 

 may be in a certain sense real ; it may be felt by 



