It was said of the Spartans that warring was their salvation and ruling was their ruin. The saying holds true of various peoples and races in history. A militant race has often proved to be deficient in the qualities which ensure stable, just, and permanent government; and in such cases, when peace supervenes on war, an era of decline and fall begins for those whom fighting has made great. But even when a conquering race has capacity for government, there come times in its career when Aristotle’s dictum in part holds good. It applied, to some extent, to the English in North America. As long as they were faced by the French on the western continent, common danger and common effort held the mother country and the colonies together. Security against a foreign foe brought difficulties which ended in civil war, and the Peace of 1763 was the beginning of dissolution.
In the present chapter, which covers the history of Canada from the Peace of Paris to the outbreak of the War of Independence, it is proposed, from the point of view of colonization, to examine the ultimate rather than the immediate causes which led to England losing her old North American colonies, while she retained her new possession of Canada.
It had been abundantly prophesied that the outcome of British conquest of Canada would be colonial independence in British North America. In the years 1748-50 the Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, travelled through the British North American colonies and Canada, and left on record his impressions of the feeling towards the mother country which existed at the time in the British provinces. Noting the great increase in these colonies of riches and population, and the growing coolness towards Great Britain, produced at once by commercial restrictions and by the presence among the English colonists of German, Dutch, and French settlers, he arrived at the conclusion that the proximity of a rival and hostile power in Canada was the main factor in keeping the British colonies under the British Crown. ‘The English Government,’ he wrote, ‘has therefore sufficient reason to consider the French in North America as the best means of keeping the colonies in their due submission.’[16]
Others wrote or spoke to the same effect. Montcalm was credited with having prophesied the future before he shared the fall of Canada,[17] and another prophet was the French minister Choiseul, when negotiating the Peace of Paris. To keen, though not always unprejudiced, observers the signs of the times betokened coming conflicts between Great Britain and her colonies; and to us now looking back on history, wise after the event, it is evident that the end of foreign war in North America meant the beginning of troubles within what was then the circle of the British Empire.
Until recent years most Englishmen were taught to believe that the victory of the American colonists and the defeat of the mother country was a striking instance of the power of right over might, of liberty over oppression; that the severance of the American colonies was a net gain to them, and a net loss to England; that Englishmen did right to stand in a white sheet when reflecting on these times and events, as being citizens of a country which grievously sinned and was as grievously punished. All this was pure assumption. The war was one in which there were rights and wrongs on both sides, but, whereas America had in George Washington a leader of the noblest and most effective type, England was for the moment in want both of statesmen and of generals, and had her hands tied by foreign complications. We can recognize that Providence shaped the ends, without going beyond the limits of human common sense. Had Pitt been what he Great Britain failed for want of leaders. was in the years preceding the Peace of Paris, had Wolfe and the eldest of the brothers Howe not been cut off in early manhood, the war might have been averted, or its issue might have been other than it was. One of Wolfe’s best subordinates, Carleton, survived, and Carleton saved Canada; there was no human reason why men of the same stamp, had they been found, should not have kept for England her heritage. The main reason why she lost her North American colonies was not the badness of her cause, but rather want of the right men when the crisis came.
Equally fallacious with the view that England failed because wrong-doing never prospers, is, or was, the view that the independence of the United States was wholly a loss to England and wholly a gain to the colonists. What would have happened if the revolting provinces had not made good their revolt must be matter of speculation, but it is difficult to believe that, if the United States had remained under the British flag, Australia would ever have become a British colony. There is a limit to every political system and every empire, and, with the whole of North America east of the Mississippi for her own, it is not likely that England would have taken in hand the exploiting of a new continent. At any rate it is significant that, within four years of the date of the treaty which recognized the independence of the United States, the first English colonists were sent to Australia. The success or failure of a nation or a race in the field of colonization must not be measured by the number of square miles of the earth’s surface which the home government owns or claims at any given time. To judge aright, we must revert to the older and truer view of colonizing as a planting process, replenishing the earth and subduing it. If the result of the severance of the United States from their mother country was to sow the English seed in other lands, then it may be argued that the defeat of England by her own children was not wholly a loss to the mother country.
Nor was it wholly a gain to the United States. Such at least must be the view of Englishmen who believe in the worth of their country, in its traditions, in the character of the nation, in its political, social, moral, and religious tendencies. The necessary result of the separation was to alienate the American colonists from what was English; to breed generations in the belief that what England did must be wrong, that the enemies of England must be right; to strengthen in English-speaking communities the elements which were opposed to the land and to the race from which they had sprung. With English errors and weaknesses there passed away, in course of years and in some measure, English sources of strength; the sober thinking, the slow broadening out, the perpetually leavening sense of responsibility. Had the American provinces remained under the British flag it is difficult to see why they should not have been in the essence as free and independent as they now are; it is at least conceivable that their commercial and industrial prosperity would have been as great; assuredly, for good or for evil, they would have been more English.
The faults and shortcomings of the English, which throughout English history have shown themselves mainly in foreign and colonial matters, seem all to have combined and culminated in the interval of twenty years between the Peace of 1763, which gave Canada to Great Britain, and the Peace of 1783, which took from her the United States; and in addition there were special causes at work in England, which at this more than at any other time militated against national success.
The shortcomings in question are, in part, the result of counterbalancing merits, fair-mindedness, and freedom of thought, speech, and action. Love of liberty among the English has begotten an almost superstitious reverence for Parliamentary institutions. Parliamentary institutions have practically meant the House of Commons; and the House of Commons has for many generations past implied the party system. In regard to foreign and colonial policy the party system has worked the very serious evil that Great Britain has in the past rarely spoken or acted as one nation. The party in power at times of national crisis is constantly obliged to reckon on opposition rather than support, from the large section of Englishmen whose leaders are not in office; and ministers have to frame not so much the most effective measures, as those which can under the circumstances be carried with least friction and delay. The result has been weakness and compromise in action; among the friends of England, suspicion and want of confidence; among her foes, waiting on the event which prolongs the strife. The English have so often gone forward and then back, they have so often said one thing and done another, that their own officers, their friends and allies, their native subjects, and their open enemies, cannot be sure what will be the next move. If the Opposition in Parliament and outside, by speech and writing, attacks the Government, the natural inference to be drawn is that a turn of the electoral tide will reverse the policy.
Apart too from this more or less necessary result of party government, the element of cross-grained men and women, who, when their own country is at issue with another, invariably think that their country must be wrong and its opponent must be right, has always been rather stronger, or, at any rate, rather more tolerated in the United Kingdom than among continental nations. This is due not merely to the habit of free criticism, but also to a kind of conceit familiar enough in private as in public life. Englishmen, living apart from the continent of Europe, are, as a whole, more wrapped up in themselves than are other nations; and in this self-satisfied whole there is a proportion of superior persons who sit in judgement on the rest, and who, having in reality a double dose of the national Pharisaism, think it their duty to belittle their countrymen.
Fault-finders of this kind, or political opponents of the Government for the time being, are apt, as a rule, to make light of any minority in the hostile or rival country, who may be friendly to England: they tend to misrepresent them as being untrue to their own land and people, as wanting to domineer over the majority, as seeking their own interests: and, if they have suffered losses for England’s sake, the tale of the losses is minimized. But it is not only the opponents of the Government who take this line; too often in past history it has been to a large extent the line of the Government itself. The perpetual seeking after compromise, and trying to see two sides after the choice of action has been made, has lost many friends to our country and nation, and made none: while the retracing of steps, unmindful of claims which have arisen, of property which has been acquired, and of responsibilities which have been incurred has, as the record of the past abundantly shows, brought bitterness of spirit to the friends of England, and bred distrust of the English and their works.
The element of uncertainty in British policy and action towards foreign nations or towards British colonies has been in part due to ignorance: and to ignorance and want of preparation have been due most of the disasters in war which have befallen Great Britain. Here again something must be attributed to the fact of the island home. The rulers of continental peoples have been driven by the necessities of their case to learn the conditions of their rivals, by secret service and intelligence agents to ascertain all that is to be known, and at the same time to keep their own arms up to date, and their own powder dry. They have prepared for war. England has prepared for peace. Her policy has paid in the long run, but it would not have been a possible policy for other nations; and at certain times in English history it has wrought terrible mischief. England does not always muddle through, as the English fondly hope she does; notably, she did not muddle through when the United States proclaimed their independence.
In these years, 1763-83, there was the party system in England with all its mischievous bitterness; there was a weak Executive at home, and a still weaker Executive in the colonies; there was ignorance of the real conditions in America, unwise handling of the colonial Loyalists, threatening talk coupled with vacillation in action, laws made which gave offence, and, when they had given offence, not quite repealed. All the normal English weaknesses flourished and abounded at this period, and were supplemented by certain sources of danger which were the outcome of the particular time.
It was a special time, a time of reaction. England had lately gone through a great struggle, made a great effort, incurred great expense, and won great success. She was for the moment vegetating, not inclined or ready for a A time of reaction. second crisis. Second-rate politicians were handling matters, and the influence of the new King was all in favour of their being and remaining second-rate; for George the Third intended, by meddling in party politics, Partisan attitude of the Crown. and by Parliamentary intrigues, to rule Parliament. Thus the Crown became a partisan in home politics, and in colonial politics was placed in declared opposition to the colonies, instead of remaining the great bond between the colonies and the mother country.
The result was, that throughout the years of the American quarrel, and in a growing degree, the colonies found powerful support in this country, because they were, after all, not foreigners but Englishmen—Englishmen who compared favourably with Englishmen at home and whom patriotic Englishmen at home could admire and uphold; because they were apparently the weaker side, attracting the sympathy which in England the weaker side always attracts; and because, through the attitude of the King, their cause was associated with the cause of political liberty at home. Add to this that the one great English statesman of world-wide reputation, Chatham, had warmly espoused the colonial side, and it may well be seen that, unless some able general, as Wellington in later days, by military success, saved his country from the results of political blunders, the position was hopeless.
But for the special purpose of determining what place the episode of the severance of the British North American colonies holds in the history of colonization we must look still further afield. The constitutional question as to whether the colonies were subject to the Parliament of the mother country or to the Crown alone may, from this particular point of view, be omitted, for the story of the troubled years abundantly shows that theories would have slept, if certain practical difficulties had not called them into waking existence, and if lawyers had not been so much to the front, holding briefs on either side. Nor is it necessary to dwell upon the specific and immediate causes of the strife, except so far as they were ultimate causes also. Among such immediate causes, some of which have been already noted, were the personal character of the English king for the time being, the corruption and jobbery of public life in England, the weakness of the Executive in the colonies, the enforcing of commercial restrictions already placed by the mother country on the colonies, the kind of new taxes which the Home Government imposed, the method of imposing them, and the object with which they were devised; the outrageous laws of 1774 for penalizing Massachusetts, the Quebec Act, and the employment of German mercenaries against the colonists, which gave justification to the colonists for calling in aid from France. All these and other causes might have been powerless to affect the issue, if England had possessed statesmen and generals, and if the growing plant of disunion had not been deeply rooted in the past.
When France lost Canada and Louisiana, two European nations, other than the Portuguese in Brazil, practically shared the mainland of America. They were Spain and Great Britain. Spain won her American empire not far short of a hundred years before Great Britain had any strong footing on the American continent; she kept it for Spain held her American possessions for a longer time than Great Britain held the North American colonies. some thirty or forty years after the United States had achieved their independence. The Spanish-American empire was therefore much longer-lived than the first colonial dominion of Great Britain in North America, and the natural inference is, either that the Spaniards treated their colonies or dependencies better than the English treated theirs, or that the English colonies were in a better position than the Spanish dependencies to assert their independence, or that both causes operated simultaneously.
It is difficult to compare Spain and Great Britain as regards their respective colonial policies in America, for their possessions differed in kind. Spain owned dependencies rather than colonies, Great Britain owned colonies rather than dependencies. Spanish America was the result of conquest: English America, not including Canada, was the result of settlement. But, so far as a comparison can be instituted, it will probably not be seriously contended that the British colonies suffered more grievously at the hands of the mother country than did the colonial possessions of Spain. The main charge brought against England was that she neglected her colonies and left them to themselves. Whether the charge was true or not—as to which there is more to be said—neglect is not oppression; and within limits the kindest and wisest policy towards colonies, which are colonies in the true sense, is to leave them alone. ‘The wise neglect of Walpole and Newcastle,’ writes Mr. Lecky, ‘was eminently conducive to colonial interests.’[18]
The real, ultimate reasons why England held her North American colonies, which now form the United States of America, for a shorter time than Spain retained her Central and South American possessions were two: first, Absence of system in British colonial policy in North America. that the English colonies were in a better position than the Spanish dependencies to assert their independence; secondly, that—largely because she owned dependencies rather than colonies—Spain was more systematic than England in her dealings with her colonial possessions. These two reasons are in truth one and the same, looked at from different sides. The English colonies were able to assert their independence, because they had on the whole always been more or less independent. They had always been more or less independent, because the mother country had never adopted any definite system of colonial administration. The Spanish system was not good—quite the contrary; but it was a system, and those who lived under it were accustomed to restrictions and to rules imposed by the home government. Similarly in Canada, under French rule, there was a system, kindlier and better than that of Spain, but one which had the gravest defects, which stunted growth and precluded freedom: yet there it was, clear and definite; the colonists of New France had grown up under it; they knew where they were in relation to the mother country; it had never occurred to them to try and make headway against the King of France and his regulations. Widely different was the case of the English colonies in North America. All these settlements started under some form of grant or charter, derived ultimately from the Crown: the Crown from time to time interfered and made a show of its supremacy; but there was no system of any sort or kind, and communities grew up, which in practice had never been governed from home but governed themselves. Most of all, the New England colonies embodied to the full the spirit of colonial independence. Their founders, men of the strongest English type, went out to live in their own way, to be free from restrictions which trammelled them at home, to found small English-speaking commonwealths which should be self-governing and self-supporting, ordered from within, not from without.
The English have never been systematic or continuous in their policy throughout their history; but the period of English history when North America was colonized was the one of all others when system and continuity were most conspicuously absent. It was a time of violent political changes at home, of strife between king and people. A line of kings was brought in from Scotland, they were overturned, they were restored, and they were finally driven out again. This was the condition of the Crown to which the newly-planted colonies owed allegiance, and which was supposed to exercise supreme authority over the colonies. Under the Crown were Proprietors and Companies, whose charters, being derived from a perpetually disputed source, were a series of dissolving views; and under the Proprietors and Companies were a number of strong English citizens who, caring little for the theoretical basis of their position, cared very much for practical independence, and ordered their ways accordingly, becoming steadily and stubbornly more independent through perpetual friction and perpetual absence of systematic control. Thus it was that the North American colonies drank in, as their mother’s milk, the traditions and the habits of independence. They carried with them English citizenship, but the privileges of such citizenship rather than the responsibilities; and, in so far as the mother country was inclined to ignore the privileges, the colonies were glad to disclaim the responsibilities.
They were separate and distinct, not only from the mother country, but also from each other, and they could not in consequence from first to last be held collectively responsible. In the wars with Canada, New England and New York, though alike exposed to French invasion, and from time to time co-operating to repel the invaders or to organize counter-raids, yet acted throughout as entirely separate entities, in no way inclined to bear each other’s burdens as common citizens of a common country. The southern colonies, until the French, shortly before the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, came down into the valley of the Ohio, took no part whatever in the fight between Great Britain and France for North America. The New Englanders, most patriotic of the colonists, beyond all others went their own ways in war and peace; uninvited and unauthorized from home they formed a confederation among themselves: early in their history they tried to make a treaty with Canada on the basis that, whatever might be the relations between France and England in Europe, there should be peace between French and English in North America: they took Port Royal: they attacked Quebec: they captured Louisbourg: and the anonymous French eye-witness of the first siege and capture of Louisbourg commented as follows on the difference between the colonial land forces and the men of the small Imperial squadron which Warren brought to the colonists’ aid: ‘In fact one could never have told that these troops belonged to the same nation and obeyed the same prince. Only the English are capable of such oddities, which nevertheless form a part of that precious liberty of which they show themselves so jealous.’[19]
Most of all it should be remembered that, though subject to the Navigation laws imposed by the mother country and to that extent restricted in their commercial dealings, no English colony in North America, before the days of the Stamp Act, had ever been taxed by Crown or Parliament for revenue purposes. In the year 1758 Montcalm was supposed to have written on this subject in the following terms: ‘As to the English colonies, one essential point should be known, it is that they are never taxed. They keep that to themselves, an enormous fault this in the policy of the mother country. She should have taxed them from the foundation. I have certain advice that all the colonies would take fire at being taxed now.’[20] This judgement was probably sound. It might have been well if from the first, when charters were issued and colonial communities were formed, some small tax had been levied for Imperial purposes upon the British colonies, if some contribution of only nominal amount had been exacted as a condition of retaining British citizenship. There would then have been a precedent, such as Englishmen always try to find, and there would have been in existence a reminder that all members of a family should contribute to the household expenses.[21]
We are accustomed to think and to read of the separation of the American colonies from the mother country as wholly an abnormal incident, the result of bad handiwork, not the outcome of natural forces. This view is incorrect. History ultimately depends on geography. When two members of the same race, nation, or family pass their lives at a long distance from each other, in different lands, in different climates, under different conditions, the natural and inevitable result is that they diverge from each other. The centrifugal tendency may be counteracted by tact and clever statesmanship, and still more by sense of common danger; but it is a natural tendency. Men cannot live at a distance from each other without becoming to some extent estranged. The Greeks, with their instinctive love of logic and of symmetry, and with their fundamental conception of a city as the political unit, looked on colonization as separation, and called a colony a departure from home. The colonists carried with them reverence for the mother state, but not dependence upon it; and, if there was any political bond, it was embodied in the words that those who went out went out on terms of equality with, not of subordination to, those who remained behind. The English, in fact, though not in principle, planted colonies on the model of the Greek settlements; their theories and their practice collided; and, being a practical race, their theories eventually went by the board.
When an over-sea colony is founded, the new settlement is in effect most distant from the old country; that is to say, means of communication between the one point and the other are least frequent and least developed. The tendency to separation—as far as geography is concerned—is therefore strongest at the outset. On the other hand, in the foundation of a colony, unless the foundation is due to political disruption at home, the sentiment towards the mother country is warmer and closer than in after years, for the founders remember where they were born and where they grew to manhood. As generations go on, the tie of sentiment becomes necessarily weaker, but, with better communication, distance becomes less; there is therefore a competition between the opposing tendencies. Many of the Greek colonies were the result of στάσις στάσις and colonization. or division in the mother cities. The unsuccessful party went out and made a separate home. In a very modified form the same cause was at work in the founding of the Puritan colonies of North America. Notably, the emigrants on the Mayflower were already exiles from England, political refugees, who had found a temporary home in the Netherlands. These founders of the Plymouth settlement were by no means the chief colonizers of North America, or even of New England, but their story—the story of the ‘Pilgrim fathers’—became a nucleus of Puritan tradition; and from it after generations deduced that New England was the home of English citizens whom England had cast out. Thus one group, at any rate, of North American colonies traced their origin to separation. Then came the element of distance. ‘The European colonies in America,’ wrote Adam Smith, with some exaggeration, ‘are more remote than the most distant provinces of the greatest empires which had ever been known before.’[22] The Atlantic Ocean lay between them and the motherland, and cycles went by before that distance was perceptibly modified. In our own time, steam and telegraphy have been perpetually counteracting the effects of distance. It was not so in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Navigation was improved, but was still the humble handmaid of wind and tide; and on the very eve of the American War of Independence the remoteness of the North American colonies, and the prevailing ignorance in England about the North American colonies were, though no doubt much exaggerated, a commonplace among the speakers and writers of the time.
We start then with colonies planted from a land which had no thought of systematic control over colonies or dependencies, whose government was at the time of colonization in a chaotic state, whose colonists went out in part, at any rate, intent on practical separation, and who all settled themselves or were settled in a remote region at a time when distance did not grow less.
The next point to notice is that it has always been held that, as between a mother country and its colonies, if they are colonies in the true sense and not merely tributary states, it is rather for the mother country to give and her colonies to take, than vice versa. This is a view which has been held at all times and among all races, but especially among members of the English race. Other nations and General view of the duty of a mother country towards its colonies. races have, it is true, felt as strongly as, or more strongly than, the English the duty of protecting their outlying possessions: they have in some cases lavished more money directly upon them at the expense of the taxpayers at home; but, on the other hand, they have almost invariably regarded their colonies as dependencies pure and simple, constrained to take the course of the dominant partner in preference to their own. The English alone in history have bred communities protected by, but in practice not subject to, the mother country. They have given, without exacting toll in return.
No writer has laid greater stress on this view of the relations between the mother country and the colonies than Adam Smith, who published the Wealth of Nations just as the American colonies were breaking away from Great Britain. ‘The English colonists,’ he wrote, ‘have never yet contributed anything towards the defence of the mother country, or towards the support of its civil government. They themselves, on the contrary, have hitherto been defended almost entirely at the expense of the mother country;’ and again, ‘Under the present system of management, Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she has assumed over her colonies.’ ‘Great Britain is, perhaps, since the world began, the only state which, as it has extended its empire, has only increased its expense without once augmenting its resources.’[23] His opinion would have been modified could he have foreseen the help given to the mother country in our own day by the self-governing colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in a war far removed from their shores; but even in our own day the old view, against which he contended, largely holds the field, that more is due from the mother country to the colonies than from the colonies to the mother country, that what the mother country spends on the Empire is payment of a debt, while what the colonies spend on the Empire is a free gift.
This view of the relations between a mother country and its colonies takes its ultimate source largely from the fact that the mother country is nearly always[24] greater and stronger than any one colony or group of colonies; and in the English mind the instinct of fair play invariably makes in favour of the party to a contract which is or appears to be the weaker party. It is in the light of the fact that the American colonies were numerically the weaker party in their contention with the mother country, and with the misleading deduction that any demand made upon them was therefore unjust, that the story of the War of Independence has over and over again been wrongly told. In one of the more recent books on the subject, Sir George Trevelyan’s American Revolution, it is stated that all the colonies asked of the King was to be let alone.[25] That is all that any man or any community asks, when called upon to pay a bill; and the question at issue between the mother country and the colonies in the eighteenth century was the eternal question, which vexes every community and every federation of communities, who ought to pay. The bill was one for defence purposes; but, when it was presented, the colonists’ answer was in effect, first, that it was the duty of the mother country to Contentions of the colonists. defend the colonies; secondly, that that duty had been neglected; and thirdly, that, assuming that it had been performed, it was for the colonies and not for the mother country to determine what proportion of the expense, if any, should be defrayed by the colonies.
The first of these three contentions may not have been fully avowed, but deep down in the minds of men there lay the conviction that the mother country ought to pay for defending the colonies, and there it has remained, more or less, ever since. It is true that the grant of self-government in its fullest sense to the present great provinces of the British Empire has been coupled with the withdrawal of the regular forces from all but a few points of selected Imperial vantage, and to that extent the colonies have taken up, This view still prevails. and well taken up, the duty of self-defence; but the burden of the fleet, the great defensive force of the Empire as a whole, is still borne in the main, and was till recently entirely borne, by the mother country. When colonies or foreign possessions are in a condition of complete political dependence upon the mother country, it may fairly be argued that the latter, in insisting upon dependence, should, as the price of supremacy, undertake to some extent the duty of defence. And yet a survey of the British Empire at the present day shows that no self-governing province of the Empire is so highly organized or so fully charged for the purposes of defence as is the great dependency of India.
The first and most elementary duty of an independent community, the one condition without which it cannot be independent, is providing for its own defence. The American colonies claimed in reality political independence, at any rate as far as internal matters were concerned; but they did not admit, except to a limited extent, that it was their duty to provide against foreign invasion. That duty, in their eyes, devolved upon the mother country because it was the mother country; because it was held that the mother country derived more advantage from the colonies than—apart from defence—the colonies derived from her; and because the mother country dictated the foreign policy of the Empire; in common parlance, it called the tune and therefore, it was argued, should pay the piper.
The Navigation laws, the commercial restrictions imposed by Great Britain on her colonies, were assumed to represent the price which the colonies paid in return for the protection which the mother country gave or professed to give to the colonies; and these same laws and restrictions, viewed in the light of later times, have been held to be the burden of oppression which was greater than the colonies could bear. Adam Smith, the writer who most forcibly exposed the unsoundness of the old mercantile system, also demonstrated most conclusively that that system was universal in the eighteenth century; that it was less oppressively applied by England than by other countries which owned colonies; that under it, if the colonies were restricted in trade, they were also in receipt of bounties; and lastly, that the undoubted disadvantages which were the result of the system were shared by the mother country with the colonies, though they weighed more heavily upon the colonies than on the mother country, and were to the colonies ‘impertinent badges of slavery’. The conclusion to be drawn is that, assuming Great Britain to have adequately discharged the duty of protecting the colonies, she was not adequately paid for doing so by the results of the mercantile system.
But it was further contended that the duty of protecting her colonies was one which Great Britain neglected. While the colonies were poor and insignificant, the mother country, it was alleged, neglected them. When they became richer and more valuable she tried to oppress them. If the charge of neglect in the general sense was true, we may refer to Mr. Lecky’s words already quoted, as showing that it may well be argued that the colonies profited by it.[26] Mr. Lecky writes of conditions in the eighteenth century, but Adam Smith used similar terms with reference to the earlier days of the colonies. Contrasting the Spanish colonies in America with those owned by other European nations on that continent, he wrote: ‘The Spanish colonies’ (in consequence of their mineral wealth) ‘from the moment of their first establishment attracted very much the attention of their mother country; while those of the other European nations were for a long time in a great measure neglected. The former did not perhaps thrive the better in consequence of this attention, nor the latter the worse in consequence of their neglect.’[27] It may be answered, however, that the neglect here referred to was neglect of the colonies in their internal concerns, leaving them, as Adam Smith puts it, to pursue their interest in their own way. This was an undeniably beneficial form of neglect, wholly different from the neglect which leaves distant dependencies exposed to foreign invasion and native raids. Was then the British Government guilty of the latter form of neglect in the case of the American colonies?
There were many instances in the history of these colonies, while they were still under the British flag, of the Imperial Government promising assistance which was never sent, or only sent after months of delay: there were instances of gross incapacity on the part of leaders of expeditions sent out from home, notably in the case of Walker and Hill, who commanded the disgracefully abortive enterprise against Quebec in 1711. The state of Acadia, when nominally in British keeping after the Treaty of Utrecht, was a glaring illustration of English supineness and procrastination. There was, at any rate, one notable instance of the mother country depriving the colonies of a great result of their own brilliant enterprise, viz. when Louisbourg, taken by the New Englanders in 1745, was restored by Great Britain to France under the terms of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle in 1748. Undoubtedly Great Britain on many occasions disappointed and disheartened the colonies, and especially the most patriotic of the colonies, the New England states. On the other hand, it is beyond question that the colonies were never seriously attacked by sea. They were threatened, sometimes badly threatened, as by d’Anville’s fleet in 1746; they were liable to the raids of daring partisan leaders, such as d’Iberville; but either good fortune or the British fleet, supplemented no doubt by a wholesome respect for the energy and activity of the New England sailors themselves, kept the coasts and seaports of the American colonies in comparative security through all the years of war. It must be noted too that, while the colonies suffered because Great Britain had interests elsewhere than in America; while, for instance, a fleet designed for the benefit of the colonies in 1709 was sent off to Portugal, and the New Englanders’ prize of Louisbourg was forfeited in order to secure Madras for the British Empire, the colonies at the same time shared in the results of victories won in other parts of the world than America. The Peace of Utrecht, with what it gave to the English in America, was entirely the outcome of Marlborough’s victories on the continent of Europe. Nothing that was done in America contributed to it. The failures of England were under the colonies’ eyes; her successes, the fruits of which they shared, were often achieved at the other side of the world.
But, taking the main events which contributed to the security and greatness of the American colonies, how far should they be credited to Great Britain and how far to the colonies themselves? In earlier days, nothing was more important to the future of the English in America than securing a continuous seaboard and linking the southern to the northern colonies. This object was obtained by taking New York from the Dutch, the result of action initiated in Europe, not in America. The final reduction of Port Royal was effected with the assistance of troops and ships from England. The Peace of Utrecht, which deprived the French of Acadia and their settlements in Newfoundland, was, as already stated, wholly the result of Marlborough’s fighting in Europe. Though the The conquest of Canada was mainly due to the mother country. New Englanders took Louisbourg, and England gave it back to France, the colonists’ success was largely aided by Warren’s squadron of Imperial ships. But, most of all, the final conquest of Canada was due far more to the action of the mother country than to that of the colonies.
The great, almost the only, foreign danger to the English colonies in North America was from the French in Canada and Louisiana, but it is not generally realized how enormously the English on the North American continent outnumbered the French. At the time of the conquest of Canada, the white population of the English colonies in North America was to that of the French colonies as thirteen to one. It is true that the English did not form one community, whereas the French were united; but it is also true, on the other hand, that the several English communities were more concentrated than the French, and that they held the base of the triangle, which base was the sea. A single one of the larger English colonies had a white population equal to or surpassing the whole French population in North America. Under these circumstances it might fairly be asked why the English colonists required any help at all from the mother country to conquer Canada. The war was one in which they were vitally concerned. Its object was to give present security to their frontiers, to rid them once for all from the raids of French and Indians, which had for generations desolated their villages, farms, and homesteads, and to leave the West as a heritage to their children’s children, instead of allowing the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio to remain a French preserve. No doubt it was to the interest of Great Britain, as an Imperial Power, that France should be attacked and, if possible, overthrown in the New World as in the Old. The conquest of Canada was part of Pitt’s general scheme of policy, and English regiments were not sent to America for the sake of the American colonists alone.[28] But the allegation made in after years, that the campaigns in America were of great concern to the mother country and of little concern to the American colonies, was on the face of it untrue. To the English colonists in North America the French in Canada were the one great present danger, and the conquest of Canada was the one thing needful. Yet we find that, in 1758, the troops, nearly 12,000 in number, which achieved the second capture of Louisbourg were nearly all regulars; that in the force which Abercromby led against Ticonderoga about one-half of the total fighting men were soldiers of the line, and that even Forbes’ little army, which took Fort Duquesne, contained 1,600 regulars out of a total of 6,000 men. In the following year, Wolfe’s army, which took Quebec, was almost entirely composed of Imperial troops. Nor was this all. Although, in 1758, the colonies, or rather the New England colonies, readily answered to Pitt’s call for a levy of 20,000 men, a considerable part of the expense which was thus incurred was recouped from the Imperial exchequer.[29] The conclusion of the whole matter is that to the mother country, rather than to the colonies themselves, was it due that the great danger which had menaced the latter for a century and a half was finally removed. England gave the best of her fighting men, and loaded her people at home with a debt of many millions, in order that her great competitor might be weakened, and that her children on the other side of the Atlantic might be for all time secure on land from foreign foes, while her fleets kept them safe from attack by sea; and, inasmuch as the French in America were numerically insignificant as compared with the English colonists, the only real justification for the colonists requiring aid from the mother country to overcome the difficulty was, that the English colonies were by geography and interest divided from each other and consequently indifferent to each other’s burdens and perils; while Canada, united in aim and organization, received also assistance, though niggardly assistance, from France.
The French were the main enemies to the English in North America. The native Indians were the only other human beings against whom the colonists had to defend themselves, and here clearly it was their concern alone. Aid given by the mother country against the Indians. The New Englanders took the burden on themselves manfully, so far as related to their own borders, but they were not prepared to fight the battles of the Pennsylvanians and Virginians; and the Pennsylvanians and Virginians were slow to help themselves. The result was, as told in the last chapter, that the brunt of the war with Pontiac and his confederates fell largely on the mother country, her officers, and her troops, and this fact alone was sufficient justification for Grenville’s contention, that a small Imperial force ought to be maintained in, and be in part paid by, the American colonies.