Chapter One

An Age of Nation Making: Nation, State, and the Question of Canada’s Future

The sense of scientific change, for all of its boundless ambitions and Frankensteinian failures, promised powerful implications beyond the laboratories and machinery that incited invention. The scientific spirit seemed to permeate ideas of social and political organization, rendering all aspects of life its subjects. Even nations, it seemed to some, were quickly becoming the products of scientific machination. An article on the apparently modern process of “nation making” appeared in the Week in 1891 calling attention to the phenomenon. “The present age has witnessed many curious experiments in the attempt to produce artificially what it was formerly thought to be the function of nature solely to provide,” the author observed. “Some scientists have attempted to produce chickens from artificial eggs; others have devoted their lives to promoting an artificial language; rain making has engaged their more recent efforts; but the most interesting, as it is the most ambitious, has been the promotion of nations.”1

The image of the nation as a scientifically conjured creature, developed and promoted in defiance of nature, is striking. Nations, of course, were not altogether new entities, but the idea that they could be politically engineered rather than develop organically was a defining element of political thought in the nineteenth century. This concept was especially relevant in the case of Canada, which was created as a product of imperial law and grafted political boundaries onto a regionally, linguistically, and demographically diverse territory. The British North America Act initiated a new political jurisdiction at a moment when the professionalization of political science and intellectual attention to the state made the concept of nation and its relationship to political forms a subject of greater scrutiny. In the decades following Confederation, numerous writers sought to locate Canada in prevailing ideas about the meaning of nation and to identify what they understood as either the congruence or division of national and political boundaries.

The implications of the “modern” changes that the author in the Week likened to scientific experimentation were important aspects of late-nineteenth-century political thought. The sense of transition reflects Duncan Bell’s characterization of the late nineteenth century as a period that “witnessed numerous attempts to think beyond the state, to imagine new forms of human association.”2 At the centre of these attempts was the concept of the nation, which by that point had become a prevalent principle of political and social discourse. John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton wrote influential pieces about nationalism in the early 1860s, and Ernest Renan gave his famous address “What Is a Nation?” at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1882.3 As Eric Hobsbawm and others contend, the nineteenth century was an “age of nationalism.”4 Given that Confederation emerged in this specific intellectual and political context, it is worth considering how these debates helped to condition ways of thinking about the meaning of Canada for a generation for whom the answer was far from clear.

Debates about the definition of “nationality” and specifically the relationship between “national” and “political” communities were commonly refracted through the question of Canada’s political status in the years following Confederation. This discourse was typically referred to simply as the “Canadian question,” which became one of the most discussed issues in English Canada in the late nineteenth century.5 The question was in essence an existential angst about the seeming fragility of the new country and the uncertainty of its future. The Canadian question, one writer commented, “is so completely surrounded with enigmas and latent elements that anything beyond mere conjecture is at present next to impossible.”6 Rather than regard Confederation as the terminus of political development, most saw it as one stop along the way to a further destination: the federation of the British Empire, continental union with the United States, or the outright independence of Canada. While on the surface this discussion appeared to be a political debate about Canada’s future, it also marked a divide between various understandings of nationality, conveying in practical terms the different conceptions of nationality and how notions of race and political nationality intersected. The first half of this chapter examines ideas of a new Canadian nationality that emerged after Confederation. Though by no means a widely accepted position, the idea that Confederation marked the emergence of a new and distinct nation gained traction as English Canadian writers discussed the concept of political nationality. Ideas of Canadian political nationality, however, often revealed that race remained at the centre of understandings of political association. The second half of this chapter reveals that many other English Canadians saw the future of Confederation in the wider context of imperial development, including ideas of imperial federation and Anglo-American unity. These writers looked beyond the political boundaries of Canada when thinking about Canada’s political future. For them, Confederation was less a moment of national foundation than a distinct part of an ongoing process of global reordering.

Uncovering the “Science” of Nationality

Nationality was the inescapable category for defining and explaining politics in the late nineteenth century, and its muddled and mutating definitions coursed throughout discussions of global and local political order. Political economist Charles Stuart described nationality as “an idea which [is] not only receiving more wide-spread attention among the masses of mankind than ever before, but dominates entirely the theoretical discussions, the whole political science of the present day.”7 The centrality of the concept was reflected in and, in many ways, augmented by the growing professionalization of social sciences in Europe and North America. It was not difficult to hear the grumbles of anxious writers like N.H. Russell, who complained of “the unanimous verdict of the thinking men of to-day that too little attention has hitherto been given to the important branch of study usually entitled Political Economy.”8 Attention to aspects of political science increased in the 1880s and 1890s as universities added it to their curriculum as a separate field of study. With this new discipline came greater scrutiny of the “state” as an object of analysis.9 Economic and political thinking were animating aspects of debates about the meaning of nation and the role of the state. The “science” of political study made the state, and the political division of people more generally, an inescapable point of reference in discussions of nationality.10

This “scientific” discourse was not limited to universities, but also gained attention in the pages of political and literary periodicals, which conveyed the impression that the basic reference points for understanding political organization were shifting. Noting the advertisement for a position of professor of political science at the University of Toronto, the Week darkly warned that “theories which have long been generally accepted as a matter of course are being largely discarded or assailed.”11 Politics, the economy, and society more generally became objects of sciences and subjects of university instruction and intellectual analysis. The concept of nation gained greater traction as a subject that could be explained by historical, scientific, and political induction.

The person who eventually filled the faculty position noted in the Week was William James Ashley, a rising name in the developing field of economic history. Ashley echoed the sense of a new shift in the study of political science in his inaugural lecture at the university in 1888, in which he described the development of a new generation of political economists who privileged empirical evidence over abstract theories. Political science, he emphasized, was “concerned ultimately with society in its organised form as the State,” adding that “the final test in any matter must be the welfare of the State.”12 Queen’s University political scientist Adam Shortt, Ashley’s contemporary, expanded on this idea, arguing that “modern Political Science is required to be international or cosmopolitan” in order to account for the separate development of nations in the world.13 How the “state” related to the “nation,” and whether the two concepts were inextricably linked, was particularly important in Canada, as writers sought to reconcile the idea of nationality with wider imperial and racial notions of community.

The reshaping of understandings of nationality and its relationship to the state frequently inspired anxious attempts to grapple with the implications of “modern” forms of political community. Arnold Haultain succinctly captured this concern in a Week article titled “The New Spirit.” Haultain was an English-born author, though it was likely his close acquaintanceship with Goldwin Smith, for whom he worked as a personal secretary, that influenced his concerns about the modern age.14 For Haultain, the “new spirit” of the “scientific age” seemed limited by the revolution of long-established norms. In particular, he cited the decline in religion and the aristocracy, which had led many writers to look to the “state” as the key actor of the new age. Haultain, however, was sceptical of this turn to the state, arguing that such writers “would have ‘the State’ educate, feed, supply with books, pension, and all but keep alive the whole community, forgetting, apparently, that ‘the State’ is nothing but the community acting through its chosen representatives.”15 The writers to which he referred reflected a rising focus in attention to political science, or the study of government and political organization, which attracted greater notice by the close of the century.16

The “new spirit” that Haultain described shaped the development of ideas of political community in the late nineteenth century. To many observers, the nature of global order and the evolution of nations appeared to be at a distinct crossroad. In this context, Canadian Confederation marked an uncertain step in the narrative of political development that included not only British North America but also an imagined global community of people across the Anglo world. In English Canada, the sense that Confederation necessarily represented the founding of a new political “nation” was therefore not an automatically assumed position. The nature of the political jurisdiction created by Confederation, particularly whether it initiated a new and distinct nationality or portended the consolidation of a broader global national community, was the concern at the heart of the Canadian question and animated efforts to make sense of the new Dominion of Canada.

The Idea of a Canadian Nationality

Over a century and a half after Confederation, it has become widely popular to mark that date as the emergence of Canadian independence. In all the discussions of the Canadian question, however, the suggestion that Canada ought to establish itself as a fully “independent” state was the rarest one, often dismissed out of hand as an improbable, unfeasible, and undesirable course of action. As Ged Martin has noted, talk of “independence” was usually vague and imprecise, and often couched in the context of a maturation in the relationship between colony and “mother country.”17 The fact that so few English Canadian writers regarded Confederation as the foundation of a sovereign and independent state reveals how the devolution of sovereign states was not necessarily a common idea in nineteenth-century understandings of international order.

Instead, most writers saw the period as one characterized by consolidation. The idea of a kinship of people across the globe who shared a supposedly common origin was a familiar foundation for understanding nationality. As we will see, supporters of imperial federation believed that it was the ultimate phase in the development of the empire, representing all parts of the race sharing equally in self-governance, which was the supposed “genius” of the Anglo-Saxon people.18 But while to many imperialists it seemed that the “modern” age of nationality harkened the greater unity of the empire, others articulated entirely different implications of modern politics that focused on the rise of new nation states. This development worried Nova Scotian journalist Pierce Stevens Hamilton, who condemned “the sad proclivity, among some of us Canadians, for ... theoretical nation-mongering.” “This Canada of ours,” he continued, “is the especial object of the fancied operations to which I refer.” The problem with inventing “theoretical” nations based on political boundaries was that it seemed to violate the natural order of nationalities in the world, which grouped together people who claimed common origins and interests. Hamilton made this point clear by disparaging efforts “to reform our nationality upon an entirely artificial and arbitrary model, and one which is adverse to our better feelings, traditions, prejudices, and ... our interests.”19 The sense that aligning “nationality” with the political boundaries of the state was “artificial and arbitrary” reflected the tension between racial and political ideas of community.

Though he did not name him explicitly, it is likely that Hamilton had William Norris in mind as an exemplar of the “nation-mongering” that he criticized. Norris, after all, was one of the most vocal writers on the issue of Canadian nationality in the 1870s and 1880s. Norris’s writings reveal a critical and often controversial thinker, but one who seldom divulged much about himself. Census records indicate that he was a lawyer, born in Ireland but later of Oxford County in Ontario, and that he served as a captain in the Canadian volunteer militia. He lived in Ingersoll, Ontario, until some point in the 1880s, when he moved to an apartment in the centre of nearby Woodstock. He died in 1904 after apparently moving to Toronto and leaving the legal profession.20 Given his often controversial opinions, it is not surprising that Norris faded into relative obscurity, especially compared to the more thundering imperialist voices that dominated English Canadian public discourse until at least the First World War.21 Yet Norris’s understanding of nationality largely represented “modern” ideas of nation making that prompted anxiety and anticipation in the late nineteenth century.

Despite his diminished legacy, Norris was well known in his day after publishing The Canadian Question in 1875, which, in addition to a number of magazine articles, helped to bring the question of Canada’s future to the public discussion. His support for Canadian independence was provocative, and his writings regularly attracted critical rebuttals. In one of his most explicit pieces, imploringly titled “Canadian Nationality: A Present Day Plea,” the editors of Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly and National Review felt the need to add a rare disclaimer to distance the magazine from the positions he held.22 His provocative opinion – that Canada ought to be considered a unique and independent nation – was quite distinctive at the time and therefore helps to provide a clear understanding of the developing idea and controversy of political nationality in Canada.

The idea of Canadian nationality was not an abstract or esoteric matter for Norris. “We are on the eve of startling events,” he exclaimed in 1880 in the urgent tone typical of the day. “Public opinion has come to the conclusion that something must be done, or some change made, to meet the crisis that is approaching.”23 A little more than a decade following Confederation, the outlook for the new country seemed bleak to him, as it did to many other observers who wrote in Canadian periodicals. The decades following Confederation were marked by uneven economic development and stagnant population growth that portended little optimism for the future viability of a young country.24 Much of Europe and North America was caught up in a long depression in the late nineteenth century, a combined result of the collapse of commodity prices and the subsequent shrinkage of growth. In Canada, economic malaise created a potent atmosphere of anxiety and alarm that invariably shaped opinions about its political status. It was easy to believe in such circumstances that Confederation had produced a precarious political entity that needed to be restructured in some foundational way.

Norris had laid out the urgency of current affairs in The Canadian Question. Canada’s problem, he argued, was its dependence on Britain, and the only remedy was to encourage full Canadian independence. Canadian nationality, as Norris understood it, represented a contractual political arrangement between citizens and the state. In distinct contrast to many of his contemporaries, he denied that nations originated from some original and enduring compact or that people’s attachment to a nation was based on an unconditional allegiance. Instead, he insisted that the leading principle in the “science of government” was the adaptation to change by each successive generation, echoing the call of professionalizing social sciences to make political association an object of “scientific” study.25 This concept meant that people in Canada, irrespective of their own backgrounds, could find common association in their shared political status of citizens in the Canadian state.

What most set Norris’s understanding of nationality apart from the majority of his contemporaries in English Canada was his belief that it was rooted primarily in the self-determination of a political group of people. In this way, he used the term “nationality” to entrench rather than erase a distinction between Canada and the rest of the British Empire. The choice of Canadians to assume an independent nationality, he argued, developed from the attachment that people developed toward Canada. “Interest and sentiment,” he wrote, “combine to make Canadians of the people of the different nationalities which make Canada their home.”26 It is interesting to note that Norris used the term “nationalities” here in the more common contemporary sense of ethnic, linguistic, and religious status and in so doing highlighted the heterogeneity that political nationalism implied. He eschewed the appeal to a common heritage or an organic unity of a particular people, which was a shared foundation of thought for many imperialists and continentalists. As later chapters will show, Norris supported bilingualism of French and English in Canada and a distinct Canadian “citizenship” that new immigrants of diverse backgrounds could acquire.

Importantly, Norris offered critical appraisal of the Canadian state forming an independent nation, and his articulation of Canadian “nationalism” was directly tied to the Canadian state assuming full political sovereignty. Independence would be signified by the ability of the Canadian state to make treaties and advance its own commercial and military interests in the world, notably through reforms to copyright, shipping, and naturalization legislation, as well as reciprocal tariffs.27 To complete the process of independence required a number of practical steps, he argued, including the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, Senate reform, a governor elected by the Canadian parliament, and the appointment of a small diplomatic body. These things, Norris insisted, “must have a tendency to make Canadians patriotic, and to advance our country as a nation.”28

In language jarringly dissimilar to that of many of his contemporaries, Norris described British people as “foreigners,” in contrast to native-born Canadians. He decried how native-born Canadians “are pointed at as if they had committed some crime in loving their native land better than one three thousand miles away.”29 Canada, according to Norris, should be the sole object of attachment for native-born Canadians and immigrants alike. For this reason, he particularly scorned the term “colonist,” believing that it held Canadians in a subordinate position, equating them with the parts of empire that were not “white” or self-governing. “We are now nothing but Colonists,” he wrote, “a political grade above that of the coolie. Let us get rid of this loathsome, this offensive name.”30 It was clear in this sense that, although he viewed Canadians as distinct from British people and Canada as a political container within which more than one pre-political community might be found, he remained ­attached to assumptions about the “whiteness” of the category of self-­governing Canadian. Above all else, the people in Canada had to have the equal standing that independence implied. In explicitly nativist terms, he criticized the fact that so many federal politicians were British-born: “It is an evil thing for a party leader to be a foreigner ... A native leader had only to consult his own feelings, in regard to many questions, in order to understand those of a great number of his fellow citizens.”31 This sentiment led former federal politician and imperial office-holder Sir Francis Hincks, who Norris considered “a politician of a past generation,” to pen an article refuting Norris’s idea of independence, rejecting it as untenable and indefensible.32 Not surprisingly, Norris was subject to much disagreement from critics, most of whom supported the idea of imperial federation.33

Despite the controversial reception of Norris’s idea of Canadian nationality, the key precepts of his argument became recurring aspects of intellectual debate in Canada, particularly his description of a distinct Canadian citizenship and patriotism to the Canadian state. The idea of a new “Canadian nationality” became a fairly common reference in the decades following Confederation, in part because a number of groups and individuals actively promoted it. Canadian historians have often pointed to the Canada First group, which first convened in 1868, as a clear example of this early nationalism. The central feature of Canada First was the belief that Confederation marked the beginning of a “new nationality” that needed to be cultivated. The significance of the group, D.R. Ferrell notes, “was in introducing the subject of nationalism and a concept of the ‘general interest’ into the public arena,” though it ultimately failed to transform itself into a political party.34 According to William Foster, one of the group’s founding members, “the traditions of the past are gradually losing their hold on the imagination of a new generation,” as Canadians looked to their new federation as the primary locus of identity.35 This objective was especially clear in the development of a nationalist literary culture in late-nineteenth-century English Canada.36

References by English Canadian writers to Canadian nationality tended to echo the appeal that George-Étienne Cartier had made in the Confederation debates to creating a “political nationality.” As Cartier described, this concept meant that people of different “racial” backgrounds could find common political identity through their shared common interests and sentiments. The idea that Canadians of different backgrounds, whether religious, linguistic, or the more capacious term “racial,” shared common interests was a common feature in descriptions of Canadian nationality. Author Frank Yeigh remarked on the gradual, almost imperceptible growth of Canada “along national lines,” noting that

federations may be held together by ties of kindred, or by a sense of common interest, apart from any other relationship, as in the case of Austria and Hungary, and the German, French and Italian cantons of the Swiss Confederation. In our Dominion, there is, in large measure, both ties; the one mother-nation, uniting at least the three million of the English-speaking population, and the tie of a common, national interest tending to unify those who own Britain as their national mother, or those who love France for its traditions, its language and its people.37

The Canadian federation, then, combined racial kinship and common interests to form two bases of national unity. In a similar vein, Daniel Clark, a medical doctor living in Princeton, Ontario, believed that nations were the product of gradual processes by which government evolves and consolidates, starting as warrior chiefs and evolving to limited monarchies. He wrote: “Such growth, liberal views, and consolidation of petty nationalities are doubtless elements of popular strength ... We believe this principle is being carried out in the confederation of these provinces, and that we as a people have taken one step forward in the grand march of nationalities.”38 Importantly for Clark, the development of free political institutions was at the core of the development of nationality, and the process of Confederation meant Canada was becoming a nation in the world. As Clark’s words indicate, by the late nineteenth century the concept of “nation” was increasingly conditioned by overlapping debate about the nature of the state and political community.

The effort by Canada First and other English Canadian authors like William Norris to promote a Canadian nation and to make certain people think of themselves as belonging to a Canadian nation reflected developing understandings of nation and its relationship to the state. These efforts should not be understood as an automatic reaction to Confederation, but as part of a broader process of making sense of the new political jurisdiction and investing it with meaning. Moreover, as the next part of this chapter reveals, such efforts to reify Canada as a container of political identity did not necessarily represent a shift away from racialized understandings of political identity, despite the promise of a “modern” nationality based on a contractual relationship between the citizen and the state.

Race and Canadian Nationality

Articulations of Canadian nationality and the more general idea that political boundaries were coextensive with national boundaries did not represent a shift away from the racialized understandings of nationality, but rather formed a different way of seeing the relationship between nation and race. As David Theo Goldberg has indicated, race has been at the centre of the configuration of the modern state and therefore must be central to understanding how people understood the evolution of the state and the nation.39 While some described a new Canadian nation that was distinct from the global British community, the influence of racialized thinking continued to shape understandings of the basis of political community and the relationship between political and national frontiers. It is critical then to avoid what Bernard Yack has called the “myth of civic nationalism,” which assumes a distinctly “non-ethnic” constitution of civic nationalism.40 While in some cases less explicitly racist than visions of British imperial nationalism, the emergence of the concept of Canada as a distinct political nationality was deeply informed by ideas of whiteness and an underlying racial basis of political association.

Race and the sense of racial community were critical elements of late-nineteenth-century political thought, though it was not always clearly and consistently conveyed, despite analogies to the scientific method.41 In an article on the nature of race in Canada, one writer, quoting British legal scholar Henry Maine, exclaimed: “Race is just as ambiguous a term as Nationality.”42 Notions of race permeated discussions of nationality to such an extent that they were mutually reinforcing terms. It was impossible to think of one without the other, and descriptions of a Canadian nationality therefore carried assumptions about the significance of “racial” designations. Although racial thinking was often articulated in vague and shifting terms, two broad observations can be determined. First, notions of racial “diversity” were almost always limited to ideas of whiteness, based on “ethnological” examinations of racial development. Second, considerations of the demography of the Canadian nation almost always ignored the Indigenous peoples of North America, who were either entirely absent or romanticized as tokens of Canadian northern resilience. The idea of Canada was, from its earliest post-Confederation manifestations, one that was predicated on necessary exclusions.

This section examines some of the racial contours of intellectual debate, which resulted in the very real exclusion and forcible removal of people who did not fit in the racialized category of “Canada.” Articles that promoted or proclaimed the existence of a distinct Canadian people were often coloured by assumptions about who could be included in the category and, more implicitly, who were inexorably excluded. This differentiation was especially critical during the period of this study, when immigrants to Canada arrived from many non-British groups, including European Jews, German Mennonites, and people from East Asia.43 Though the “modern” idea of political nationality seemed to promise a legal basis of political association for this expanding population, it was guided by assumptions that restricted understandings of political belonging.

Given the importance of race in defining nation, some English Canadian writers sought to minimize or even erase the perceived racial differences between various racial “nationalities” in Canada. These writers effectively made Canada not a category that transcended race or accommodated racial diversity but one in which it became itself a racial category. For example, John Costley, secretary to the Nova Scotia Board of Statistics, praised the 1871 Canadian census for introducing a column indicating the “nationality of each individual – not his birth-place, though that also is given, but his descent.” The benefit of this information, he asserted, was to uncover “the relative strength of the different nationalities which go to make us up as a people.” He further stated:

The result of the inquiry shows that the aggregate nationality of Canada consists mainly of a mixture of those European nationalities that have contributed chiefly to the progress of science and civilization, to the advancement of literature, art and enterprise among the nations of the Old World.44

Costley’s term “the aggregate nationality of Canada” signified the idea that Canadian nationality was derived from racial agglomeration. His view that the races in Canada were predominately from “European nationalities” reflected the inherent whiteness of much racialized thinking about Canada.

Such notions of whiteness were reinforced by prevailing scientific theories of the nature of human development. The science of race and the tracing of sanguinary lineages were especially popular in the late Victorian period, particularly as anthropology helped to enforce taxonomies of humanity.45 The idea of race, so central to understandings of nationality, was often described in terms of ancient genealogical evolution, usually traced back to the Celtic, Saxon, or Norman races of “ancient Europe.”46 Typically, discussions featured the idea that bloodline inheritances had shaped the race over thousands of years, often traced in its development from Aryan to Teutonic features.47 These narratives were expressions of whiteness, or the sense that certain bloodlines of Western Europe shared common traits that continued to bind them in solidarity, irrespective of the distance and divisions of the race.48

Descriptions of Canadian “national” development were therefore framed in racial terms that sought to illustrate an underlying commonality in the people of Canada. John Reade, a popular poet and regular magazine contributor, described this framing at length in a four-part feature in the Week.49 He traced the development of the Aryan race in Europe and its expansion to North America. The gradual combination of different elements, including “Angles, Jutes, Saxons, and Danes,” had created “a population, the remarkable complexity of which has hardly yet been realized.”50 Importantly, for Reade, this racial genealogy was a story of “nation building” in Canada, explicitly conflating racial and national growth. From this perspective, Canada was not a jurisdictional label or empty political vessel, but a racial designation. Another writer similarly exclaimed that the mixing of races in Canada would ultimately lead to the appearance of a new race that was distinctly “Canadian.” The article, which attempted to prognosticate on the future of Canada, claimed:

In a few more decades every foot of available land will be taken up, and the streams of immigration now flowing to our shores will be turned in other directions, and then the people of different languages and national ancestry must lose all separating characteristics, and, under the modifying influences of climate and situation, so blend together that a new race will finally appear, which should present the very highest type of natural nobility. In its veins will flow the life-currents of all the northern European countries, with a slight but sure tincture of Indian blood.51

This racial development was, the author claimed, undoubtedly part of the building of an “independent nationality” in Canada. The Week made a similar claim about the benefits of mixing blood for the national development of Canada: “A nation is not necessarily the worse and may be very much the better for being to some extent composite ... not only from a healthful admixture of blood, but from the incorporation of distinct races as factors in one great national whole.”52 Racial difference did not necessarily hinder national development, according to these views, but ultimately the end product of nation building in Canada would be the emergence of a fairly homogenous community or race.

Such “mingling” and racial amalgamation into a unified Canadian “nation” was possible because of the supposed common origin of its different races. In other words, the predominant whiteness of Canada accommodated the possibility of such mixing of people.53 Indeed, as Mariana Valverde has illustrated, the notion of white racial “purity” permeated ideas of gender, sexuality, and moral regulation in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.54 This view was often obliquely stated in magazines and usually by way of contrast to the United States, which some framed as having an inferior racial composition. One “Loyalist” writer, citing evidence of racial degeneration in the United States, believed that the deterioration of the “Anglo-Saxon breed” in that country was not found in Canada, where the climate and hard work of the land made a “hardy” race.55 Other writers too focused on Canada’s northern climes and its conduciveness to Anglo-Saxon peoples. The idea of the north and the salubrious subarctic Canadian climate formed an important element of expressions of nationalism in Canada in the late nineteenth century, as Carl Berger has detailed.56

Discussions of “racial” difference often pertained to different European identities, and it only infrequently extended to those who did not fit easily into the “Anglo-Saxon,” “European,” or “Aryan” mould. The concept of a Canadian people was, as its singularity demonstrated, a belief in homogenous identity that could entail ideas of racial amalgamation, but rarely did this union extend to consider people who were not part of a general category of whiteness. Black Canadians, for instance, were rarely mentioned, despite the mythology of Canadian benevolence to freed slaves and the Black Loyalists.57 Little consideration was given to the fact that many people from Asia were living in the Canadian west, even though this reality became a crucial factor in the development of naturalization law, which the final chapter of this study examines.

Writers did sometimes consider the Indigenous population, though it was most often the subject of romantic tales of life in Canada’s early days of settlement, its presence used to convey the pioneering spirit of the European settlers.58 One writer who travelled to observe life on the Saugeen Ojibway Reserve in Ontario expressed hope that its residents might eventually become integrated into the Canadian population. “The worst time is over for the Indian,” he proclaimed. “He is now able to clothe himself better, and has sufficient acquaintance with, and love for the habits of the white man, as to be comparatively comfortable. Once they are generally ‘enfranchised’ they will gradually be lost as a distinct race and become ‘Canadians.’”59 The object of losing racial distinction in order to become “Canadian” is explicit here, revealing the assimilationist narrative of nation building. Others tried to insist that the racial character of Indigenous people was closely tied to the Anglo-Saxon race. John Reade’s examination of ethnological “nation-building” focused on the “mingling” of Indian and European blood at some length in order to argue for an underlying racial homogeneity of the population of Canada.60

Such observations about the need to assimilate Indigenous people into the wider Canadian population illustrated one of the most extreme and violent aspects of constructing the idea of a Canadian nation. This violence was particularly true during a period that saw the expansion of the residential school system, violent conflict with Métis and other Indigenous communities in the Northwest, and, as James Daschuk has recently examined, a “state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities” through disease and starvation.61 Only rarely did Canadian readers in the late nineteenth century get a sense of the realities of Indigenous people. One article written by Eliza Jones, wife of Mississauga Ojibwa missionary Peter Jones, painted a bleak picture: “Disinherited of their lands, in the majority of cases by foul means, the Indians find themselves to-day stripped of all but a miserable fragment of their once glorious patrimony, and the inheritors of the many vices and diseases of their white exterminators.”62 The more common narrative presented was one of Indigenous people as a dying or extinct group, usually described in the past tense.63 Overall, however, it was the larger absence of Indigenous people from descriptions of Canadian nationality that made it possible to imagine a homogenous Canadian nation among those of European ancestry.

Examinations of the racial character of Canada often focused on defining common racial identity between French- and English-speaking populations. Sandford Fleming’s presidential speech to the Royal Society of Canada in 1889 attempted to illustrate “the common origin of both the great sections of our population” by tracing the shared ethnological heritage of the English and French.64 In another article on the “ethnology of the British race,” an author stressed the point that French, or “Gauls,” were once part of the same “race” as British people. He concluded: “We hope that the time may not be far distant when the Gallic tie will again become sufficiently apparent as to, at any rate, excite an interest in the enquiry as to origin, to such an extent as to, if possible, unite the severed portion once more to its parent stock.”65 In the pseudo-scientific language of “ethnology,” numerous commentators believed in the blood genealogy of racial groups that could be traced back to common origins. Differences in the “Anglo-Saxon” bloodline were more attributive to linguistic or religious segmentation than actual racial mutation. One writer, for example, insisted that French and English Canadians shared the same racial lineage, and therefore, “if the French Canadian wishes to claim a distinct nationality of his own, he must base his claim on language and religion; certainly not on race.”66

Of course, this attitude toward French Canada was not universal in English Canadian magazines. Other writers looked with suspicion and veiled hostility on French Canadians, often positioning them as unable to be part of the same nationality because of racial difference. In an article sketching James Craig’s administration of Lower Canada in the early nineteenth century, the author remarked that “Frenchman are perhaps constitutionally incapable of enjoying liberty” and hoped to form “La Nation Canadienne, meaning by that a separate clique, speaking nothing but French, and hating with hatred bitter and deep everything Protestant and English.”67 One writer spoke of the “want of manliness” of the French Canadians, whom he considered a “Latin race,” distinct from the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic races.68 Goldwin Smith was one of the most vocal critics of French Canadians, often referring to them as a separate nationality that could not fully integrate with the rest of Canada.69 He believed certain “races” could indeed assimilate together and form racial unity. He wrote: “The best individuals of different races, when brought under the same culture, are thoroughly assimilated; the special defects of the nationality, whether English, French, or Irish, disappear.”70 In his own magazine Bystander, Smith regularly raised the issue of the French “nationality” in Canada, citing the difference in religion and language as impediments to a common nationality in Canada.71

Smith was certainly one of the most prominent voices on this issue, which, given his understanding of “nation” as a racially homogenous entity, underpinned his pessimism about the viability of Confederation. Smith, however, was not alone in this view. Toronto accountant W.H. Cross wrote an article about enforcing Canadian unity in which he insisted that

so long as the people of one province are separated from their fellow citizens by a different language; so long as they are trained differently, have different institutions, and a different kind of law, so long will political equality and solidarity be impossible. If it be conceded that the more homogenous a population the better will it be adapted to representative institutions, it follows that the policy of breaking down all barriers that separate becomes a patriotic duty equally incumbent upon all classes in every State where such institutions have been adopted.72

The endurance of different languages in Canada, according to this view, arrested the possibility of “fellow citizens” knowing each other and affiliating with a common sense of “solidarity.” This position was fairly prevalent, as language was often understood as one of the most important bases of nations and people in the nineteenth century. Writers who worried about “French domination” believed that, as more English-speaking immigrants arrived in Canada, the “chasm” between French and English would close.73

By the century’s end, however, some argued that bilingualism was not necessarily an impediment to Canadian national growth. The rancour and division surrounding the issue of schooling rights prompted some to see campaigns for unilingualism in Canada as more of a threat to the viability of a common people. During the parliamentary debate over D’Alton McCarthy’s bill to remove French from the legislature of the Northwest Assembly, the Week described the right of French Canadians to use French in the Dominion parliament and in Quebec as “indefeasible.”74 In an article on the constitutional aspects of the Manitoba school question, lawyer Edward Meek concluded: “Canada is evidently destined to be a nation of two languages ... It would be an advantage to all if both languages were taught in all our schools.”75 Queen’s University principal George Monro Grant recognized a similar fate, writing that French and English Canadian children would learn the other’s language.76 William Norris, whose advocacy of independence was based on the assumption of the common political identity of Canadians, argued that “the acquirement of the French language ought to be made compulsory in our common schools” and that “French must be a necessity for every man in the Dominion who aspires to the legal profession, as Supreme Court judgements are now given in French and English.”77 Saint John writer James Woodrow was even more sanguine, claiming that, despite earlier conflicts between French and English in Canadian history, “the days of intolerance have gone by.”78 The purpose in minimizing differences between French and English Canadians was to reinforce the idea that the political jurisdiction created in 1867 could endure despite linguistic or “racial” differences.

A number of French Canadians who wrote in English expressed a similar understanding of a Canadian nationality that accommodated “racial” diversity.79 James MacPherson LeMoine, a bilingual writer of works on history and the natural sciences, also wrote a number of pieces for the New Dominion Monthly, frequently commenting on the French heritage of Canada and the coalescing of French and English Canadian history in the cause of building a common nationality. In an article titled “The Component Parts of Our Nationality,” he described the “brave, hardy, and devoted” French ancestors and indicated that the advent of self-­government in Canada provided “equality to all races.”80 By emphasizing the shared institutions of French and English Canadians, both in terms of parliamentary institutions and “British liberty,” some writers claimed that both groups formed part of the same nation. Quebec lawyer and writer Errol Bouchette made this point in an article in Canadian Magazine that emphasized the loyalty of the French Canadian population. Both populations, he argued, “have grown side by side and together become a nation,” adding that “British ideas and institutions ... are the very essence of life in French-Canada.”81 The concept of nation, according to these accounts, did not inherently correspond to perceived racial distinctions. Yet, despite these efforts to naturalize Canada as a national unit, many English Canadian writers looked beyond the limits of the Canadian state in drawing the lines of political community and imagining the logical future of political order. Their answer to the Canadian question was to continue the momentum of federation, looking not only to the British Empire but to the wider Anglo world.

The Canadian Question and the Imperial Answer

The late nineteenth century was a questioning time in the British Empire, with topics like the Irish question and the Eastern question occupying considerable space in the daily press and periodicals. In this context, the so-called Canadian question was one manifestation of a larger imperial question about the status and future political organization of the empire. The developing consolidation of Britain’s North American colonies into a new federal state certainly made the question especially acute in Canada, but visions of restructured political organization rippled across the empire. Arguments about the development of the British Empire were certainly not uncommon features in British and even some American periodicals in the late nineteenth century. For many writers on the subject, the future development of the British Empire lay definitively, though often indistinctly, in the direction of consolidation or federation. It was clear to many that Canadian Confederation was but a transition state in a much larger narrative of the political evolution of the empire. As one writer put it in 1876, Confederation was “regarded merely as the first step to a far grander and more comprehensive union, upon a federal basis, which will include all self-governing British possessions.”82 Confederation offered to some a clear model for the federalization of the empire; as British politician and imperial enthusiast Edward Jenkins wrote, it offered “not only a precedent but a demonstration.”83

Confederation provided momentum to the sense that imperial federation was an unfolding reality. With the world appearing to change rapidly, it became more possible to imagine structures of global order and national bodies in new ways, and late Victorian imperialism accordingly became largely defined by the mission to consolidate and entrench the unity of the British Empire. This mission was not strictly political or economic, but rather a powerful expression of a concept of nationality that transcended geographical or political limits. In his study of British thinking about this “Greater Britain,” Duncan Bell stresses that it “embodied a radical claim about the globalization of the nation, insisting that a tightly integrated and self-consciously cohesive political community could now spread across the face of the earth, escaping spatial restrictions that had traditionally delimited such visions.”84 The fundamental premise of the movement for imperial unity was the belief that the British nation was organic and intrinsic in nature, defined primarily, though imprecisely, by racial belonging.

The development of the idea of a global British community, or “Greater Britain,” was underscored by a belief that the closing decades of the nineteenth century represented an epochal point in history signified by the consolidation of “nations.” Political changes in Europe, especially the establishment of federations in Italy, Germany, and Austro-Hungary, added a sense of dramatic unfolding to the notion of “national consolidation.” Moreover, changing technology, especially the steamship, railways, and telegraph, was frequently invoked as evidence that distance could be “annihilated.”85 For example, John Castell Hopkins, an active imperialist known in particular for writing historical chronicles of Canada, wrote that, despite the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean that separated Canada and Australia, “the iron links of steamers, railways, and telegraph cables are now bringing them into closer connection.”86 Geographical contiguity was therefore not thought to be a necessary precondition of national unity, and the impressions of a rapidly modernizing and globalizing world facilitated vivid appearances of an accelerated progression of national development.

In Canada, Edward Blake was the unlikely figure to have ignited a storm of debate on imperial federation. He tends to be remembered more for the political shortcomings that punctuated his long career. He served briefly as the premier of Ontario, before his largely unsuccessful and often rocky leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada; indeed, he tends to be remembered as the only leader of that party who did not serve as prime minister up to the twenty-first century.87 Yet, a speech he gave at the newly constructed Aurora Armoury in 1874 became an influential reference point in discussions of Canada’s future. The prefatory comments in the pamphlet reprint of Blake’s speech entitled “A National Sentiment!” called it a “new departure in the discussion of political topics in Canada,” noting that it “caused a profound sensation throughout the country.”88 In a preface to a reprint of the speech in the Canadian Historical Review in 1921, historian W.S. Wallace wrote: “There have been few speeches in Canada which have been more justly famous, and ... exerted a wider influence on Canadian popular opinion.”89 Frank Underhill later observed: “The Aurora speech aroused more discussion than any other utterance of a Canadian statesman” in the decades following Confederation.90

The importance placed on the speech at the time highlights the significance of the question of Canada’s future and the prominence of discussions related to the meaning and form of nationality. While the lengthy speech touched on numerous issues such as Senate reform, mandatory voting, and manhood suffrage, it was Blake’s desire to see Canada join an imperial federation that attracted the most sustained attention. His position largely germinated from political dynamics that, in his mind, threatened the political sovereignty of Canada.

Top of mind for him was the Treaty of Washington of 1871, ratified between the United States and Britain, which granted Americans fishing rights in inland Canadian waters while ignoring Canadian demands that the American government provide restitution for the Fenian raids launched from the United States.91 The treaty highlighted the aggravation that Canada did not have control over its foreign relations and that Britain would not necessarily negotiate in its favour. For this reason, Blake grieved in his speech that “we are four million Britons who are not free.” The solution, he argued, was “to reorganize the Empire upon a Federal basis,” noting that “it is impossible to foster a national spirit unless you have national interests to attend to.”92 Notably, the national spirit that he sought was found in the consolidation of the empire rather than the establishment of Canada as a separate self-governing political entity.

As Blake’s speech indicated, the uncertainty about Canada’s future and the sense that it was facing tempestuous tides of political, social, and economic change became a recurrent fixation of public debate. Political motivations certainly inspired Blake’s speech and the reactions to it, but these were not simply expressions of partisan differences, nor were positions on the “Canadian question” merely policy preferences. Rather, the debate that it helped to popularize about the future of Canada was more substantially a reflection of changing and competing understandings of the concept of nation and its relationship to forms of political community.

Reflecting on the prominence of this debate after Blake’s speech, Toronto writer Jehu Mathews noted: “There can be little doubt of late a feeling of anxiety in regard to the political future of Canada, and a desire to find an answer to the question, Whither are we drifting?”93 Mathews was one of the initial catalysts of debate, with the publication of his 1872 book A Colonist on the Colonial Question. In it, he outlined in some detail plans for a federation of the British Empire.94 While the book was published in Britain primarily for a British audience, he reiterated many of its points in a two-part essay published in the Canadian Monthly and National Review in 1875, in which he argued in favour of the federation of the empire, including a formal federal legislature.95 It was part of a fairly extensive concentration of articles and publications on the subject of Canada’s future and “national status” in the years following Blake’s Aurora speech.

Despite the apparent momentum of imperial federation, the practical plan for formally uniting the empire was rarely explicated in firm detail. One critic claimed: “It is quite fashionable now in London to talk of Imperial unity in glowing and abstract terms. But it is the concrete and definite which kills.”96 The most concerted effort to promote imperial federation was the Imperial Federation League, a trans-imperial organization first established in London in 1884 and in Canada the following year.97 For its supporters, imagining the political future of Canada without reference to the empire was impossible, however vague their vision of imperial federation may have been.98 While historians have sometimes dismissed the idea of imperial federation as a chimerical fantasy of a limited group of imperial enthusiasts, the concept of nationality that underscored the idea warrants greater attention because it reveals the shifting understandings of political order in the nineteenth century.99 Ultimately, imperial federation entailed an understanding of the concept of nation as rooted in a racial community that transcended the parameters of distance and jurisdictional boundaries. Cambridge historian John Robert Seeley, who the Week labelled “the father of the idea of Imperial Federation,” described this notion of “Greater Britain” in his influential 1883 book The Expansion of England.100 “If the state is the nation,” Seeley argued, it was logical to regard “emigrants not as going out of the state, but as carrying the State with them.”101 The nation, according to this view, was defined as the aggregate character of the individuals of which it was comprised, a type of pre-political ascription that created a community based on an idea of familial kinship.102

Defining the nature of such kinship was a problematic and often complicated matter. There was no single understanding of nationality that can be appropriately described as “imperialist.” What united imperialists in apparent common cause was the belief that Canada’s connections to Britain and other settler colonies in the empire should be preserved and strengthened. Many imperialists opined loquaciously about the future prospects for Canadian growth and economic success in ways that historian Carl Berger describes as iterations of Canadian nationalism.103 Indeed, it is hard to miss the incipient patriotism in many of their writings. Their purpose, by and large, was to indicate that Canada was ready to assume a larger and more equal position – or “political manhood,” as it was frequently described – in the governance of the British Empire.104 Though it was not uncommon for advocates of imperial federation to speak of a new Canadian “nationality,” it was always in the context of wider British nationality. Their position was not to advocate the detachment of Canada from the imperial state, but rather to argue for the achievement of the full capacities of self-government that were understood to be the basis of imperial order. A major speech given by George Monro Grant at an Imperial Federation League meeting in Winnipeg, for example, traced the development of Canada from “the position of a British colony into that of a British nationality.”105 By this, he meant the development of fuller Canadian participation within the empire, so that all of its self-governing parts would practically be equal in governing imperial affairs.

Imperialist ideas of a federalized empire were premised on the racialized belief that only the “white race” had evolved to a point of self-government.106 Though rarely explained in precise detail, “race” was a common reference point for most other supporters of imperial federation.107 As one supporter explained, the plan represented an “appeal to the nobler impulses of the Anglo-Saxon race.”108 Nationality, according to this assumption, meant a more or less homogenous group of people who claimed origin in a common racial source. The sense, however, that nationality was an intrinsic element of personal identity, an ascription rather than an elected or fungible status, was at the core of most imperialist understandings of an anticipated federation. Such a political order was preceded by, rather than consequent of, an existing national unity of its imagined populous. This view made it possible to envision the expansion of the British nation into the ostensibly unsettled parts of the empire, effectively transplanting the foundations of that nation to distant parts of the globe and across existing political boundaries. Given that racial community was at the centre of these ideas of nationality, it became impossible to escape the question of the position of the United States in an Anglo-Saxon union when contemplating the development of Canadian Confederation and of the British Empire.

Confederation and the Promise of Anglo-American Union

The United States loomed large in late Victorian Canada for the obvious reason that so much of the new federation’s economic, social, cultural, and demographic stability was tied to it. The relationship between the two countries was shaped by a certain sense of rivalry and a strong air of moral superiority from the Canadian side.109 “Our people are a moral, law-abiding people,” imperial advocate George Denison smugly declared before laying out figures showing alarming American murder rates and embezzlement charges.110 As Damien-Claude Bélanger has explained, prominent intellectuals in Canada liked to point to the United States as an example of what Canada ought not to become, providing a model of vice and moral depravity against which a more genteel and religious Canadian society could be contrasted.111 Anti-Americanism had long been a part of Canadian identity, and the emphasis on Canada’s British character as a contrast to the republicanism of the United States was a frequent feature of Canadian political and social life.112

As Canadians questioned the future of the new Dominion, racial rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon kinship gained greater popularity and deeply informed understandings of the meaning of the political jurisdiction created by Confederation.113 English Canadians became increasingly inclined to see themselves not only as Canadians or British subjects but as part of the Anglo-Saxon people. In fact, by the close of the nineteenth century, it was nearly impossible to consider social and political questions in Canada without reference to the wider Anglo-Saxon world; even Wilfrid Laurier, who became the first French Canadian prime minister in 1896, invoked the rhetoric in his speeches.114 The idea of a global Anglo-Saxon racial community was also a common characteristic of international political thought. As Duncan Bell explains, prominent British and American thinkers including Edward Freeman, Charles Dilke, and Andrew Carnegie contemplated a “new Anglo century” that would ultimately see some form of Anglo-Saxon union.115 In the last decade of the nineteenth century in particular, the Anglo-American relationship developed a closer diplomatic bond or rapprochement, reflected in moments like the Venezuela boundary agreement in 1895.116 The rise of what would later become known as the “Anglosphere,” originally based on a racialized notion of common identity, positioned the United States and Britain, as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in a “special relationship” that persisted through the twentieth century.117

Warming relations between Britain and the United States in the 1890s added a different dimension to discussions of racial unity. Edward Kohn notes that, by the 1890s, “English Canadians viewed Americans as ‘cousins’ within a larger Anglo Saxon family,” which shaped not only their impressions of the United States but also their ideas of Canada’s role in fostering closer “family” ties.118 Of course, not everyone was satisfied with the warming relations between Britain and the United States. “Cease this Anglo-American nonsense,” Canadian writer Rupert Kingsford exclaimed, evidently exasperated by what he saw as an abandonment of colonial preferences.119 American writers like Erastus Wiman did little to allay fears of American aggression toward Canada; his comment in the North American Review in 1891 that “Canada should be captured” was an unambiguous provocation.120 Suspicions of annexationism – the outright subsuming of Canada into the United States – therefore attracted considerable hostility. Yet, in debates about Canada’s uncertain future, the idea of a common community linked by racial solidarity became a frequent reference point.

Worries about the splintering of the Anglo-Saxon race compounded anxieties about the future of Canada and added to the conviction that Confederation was part of an ongoing process of racial consolidation that would eventually bridge the United States and Britain. John Redpath Dougall, editor of the Montreal Witness and a member of one of the city’s most prominent families, expounded the weaknesses of Confederation in an 1885 Contemporary Review article that highlighted the sense of an unfolding period of racial reunion. Canadian Confederation, he explained, “was an expedient devised to meet a political exigency.”121 It was hard to see any enduring qualities in the federation, and when thinking of its future, it was impossible not to see it bound to the United States. If Confederation was but a temporary stage in political development, then the next steps would have to be toward a more cohesive union of the Anglo-Saxon race on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing shortly after the establishment of the Imperial Federation League, Dougall insisted that “no federation of the Empire will be complete which does not make room for the whole of Greater Britain.”122 Any prognostications of imperial federation, in other words, would have to include the United States. For Dougall, it was less an argument for outright annexation than for a fuller global union based on what he called the deep ties of kinship.

Dougall’s call for Anglo-American unity did not diminish quietly, as the idea of racial unity gained traction over subsequent years. Thirteen years after it was published, the editor of the Canada Educational Monthly recalled Dougall’s article as a prescient example of the drawing together of Britain and the United States, which the editor considered “the great event discussed in school and playground, at church and market, in newspaper and magazine.”123 Indeed, in the pages of Canadian magazines the idea of racial unity surfaced as a likely and preferable trajectory of political development.

The sense of converging ties between Britain, Canada, the United States, and the rest of the Anglo world was often overshadowed by the sensationalist rage of annexationism that was most often directed at Goldwin Smith. Smith, born in England, was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford until moving to the United States in 1868, where he became a history professor at Cornell University. He relocated to Toronto in 1871, where he lived in the stately Grange manor until his death in 1910. In Canada, Smith did not become involved in politics, but, as he wrote, opted to be an “independent observer and writer” and took “a lively interest in public affairs.”124 It was appropriate then that Smith chose the pseudonym “Bystander” for himself, which also became the name of his own magazine, for which he wrote every article. He was also a regular contributor in the Week and the Canadian Monthly and National Review, in addition to the many articles he published in American and British periodicals.125

Smith was initially attracted to the ideas of Canadian nationalism associated with the Canada First movement, occasionally writing for The Nation, the short-lived journal of the organization. Yet, by the late 1870s, he had apparently abandoned his hope for the establishment of a Canadian nationality, declaring that “Canadian nationality being a lost cause, the ultimate union of Canada with the United States appears now to be morally certain.”126 Though the argument for annexation had been a prominent though often small and episodic movement in Canada throughout the nineteenth century, it became most closely associated with Smith.127 His 1877 article titled “The Political Destiny of Canada” vaulted his reputation as a controversialist on the subject of Canadian-American relations.128 The article quickly became a sensation. Originally published in the Fortnightly Review, it was reprinted in the Montreal-based New Dominion Monthly, the Canadian Monthly and National Review, the New York–based Eclectic Magazine, Current Discussions, and Popular Science Monthly.129 It was also republished as a pamphlet in Toronto and London, and received a lengthy reply in Nineteenth Century from Canadian politician Francis Hincks, which was itself republished numerous times.130 Smith extended the argument of the paper in his controversial 1891 polemic, Canada and the Canadian Question, which detailed his support for continental union, or the commercial and political union of Canada and the United States.

Smith’s advocacy of continental union was an expression of his understanding of nationality as the political representation of common racial community. For Smith, the meaning of nation was essentially and invariably tied to racial homogeneity. As biographer Paul T. Phillips has noted: “There is no question that Smith saw race as the most important factor in determining the course of history.”131 Though race was always a complex category, Smith was clear that race included common religion – “a natural bond” – and language.132 It was on this point that he was especially adamant about the impossibility of a distinct Canadian nationality because of its large French Catholic population. Confederation was a failure, he insisted, because it “has done nothing to fuse the races.”133 Citing events like the New Brunswick schools case, the growth of ultramontanism, and the killing of Thomas Scott in Red River, Smith insisted that such homogeneity could not be achieved with “a million of unassimilated and politically antagonistic Frenchmen.”134 In his magazine Bystander, Smith stated: “Mere political lines or uniformity of colouring on the map will not make a nation ... To make a nation there must be a common life, common sentiments, common aims, and common hopes.” For this reason, he saw no hope “of fusing or even harmonizing a French and Papal with a British and Protestant community.”135 Smith, of course, was another in a long line of British liberals, such as Lord Durham, to see “racial fusion” as a prerequisite of political stability.136

Smith often invoked the idea of an underlying and enduring “moral unity” between Canada, Britain, and the United States, suggesting in a vague way the permanence of common political association despite political separation.137 In a Bystander article on British emigration, he insisted that

the unity of the English-speaking race is an idea which is more and more embodying itself in practical forms ... Gradually it will be seen that while a political federation of the Empire is impracticable, there is no reason for despairing of a moral federation, which shall include, instead of excluding, the fifty millions of English-speaking people who share with us this continent.138

In contrast to this evolving moral unity, Smith criticized the “impracticable” idea of imperial federation for actually counteracting the ongoing “fusion” of the “great sections of the race.”139 For Smith, nationality was not contingent on the political boundaries of the sovereign state, but defined instead by the inherited moral association of members of a common race. “The national sentiment” inspired by such a moral union, he argued, “is gradually superseding the narrower and less genial sentiment bred by the Revolutionary quarrel” that led to American independence.140

Undeterred by the criticism he received, Smith recalibrated his position and produced a forceful call for continental union in his 1891 book Canada and the Canadian Question. He expanded on his belief that Canada and the United States shared an essentially common racial heritage, making the political division between the two countries artificial and unnecessary. He argued that “geography, commerce, identity of race, language and institutions, which with the mingling of population and constant intercourse of every kind, acting in ever-increasing intensity, have brought about a general fusion, leaving no barriers standing but the political and fiscal lines.”141 While much of the attention in Smith’s book was on the historical development of Canada, his main argument was premised on his often-repeated conviction that, despite distance and political separation, Canada, the United States, and Britain remained connected by an underlying “moral” unity. “There is no apparent reason why,” Smith insisted, “among all the states of our race, there should not be a community of citizenship.”142 From Smith’s perspective, the American Revolution was but a squabble that divided a single people; the reconnection of Canada and the United States would merely be a “reunion” of the schism.

For imperialists in Canada, Smith offered a profane response to the Canadian question, which they often characterized as the complete absorption of Canada into the American republic.143 Smith’s vision of political association seemed to represent the antithesis of the project of imperial federation. Rather than safeguarding the achievement of self-government within a federated empire, his vision appeared to represent the complete extinction of any sense of a distinct “Canadian” jurisdiction. Smith attracted an outsized share of critical reviews throughout his lengthy career, but it was George Monro Grant’s critical appraisal of Canada and the Canadian Question, which called it out as an ignorant and error-ridden account of the Canadian question, that stood out as a particularly severe and personal criticism.144 Their disagreement on the Canadian question became more than an intellectual disagreement, as the relationship between the two turned increasingly acrimonious. English-born Smith, Grant contended, “is almost incapable of rightly understanding Canadian sentiment.”145 He blasted the book’s various proposals and ridiculed Smith’s assumption that the union of Canada and the United States could be comparable to that of England and Scotland. Even five years later, the two maintained a fairly combative dialogue on the question of Canada in the empire, with an uncharacteristically offended Smith complaining of hurt feelings and personal insults.146 In 1896, Smith wrote privately to Grant to formally sever their relationship, and they never spoke again.147

It would appear, given the vigour of their exchanges, that Grant and Smith held divergent opinions on the Canadian question, but the differences between them tended to be overemphasized by the acerbic nature of their disagreement. While Grant excoriated Smith’s position, he nevertheless agreed with the idea that the Anglo-Saxon people should, at some future point, be reunited. In his review of Canada and the Canadian Question, Grant conceded his agreement with Smith’s call for common citizenship between the states of the race, but insisted that Smith’s union proposal amounted to “the throwing away by us of our British citizenship.”148 In response to Smith’s frequent invocation of a “moral reunion of the race,” Grant wrote in 1895: “The reunion of the race! Certainly, but why limit it to America? Why begin a reunion with a separation?”149 Grant had long proposed the eventual creation of what he called an “alliance or league of all the English-speaking peoples,” and it was clear to him that the project of imperial federation was its prerequisite step.150 Whether by imperial federation or continental union, the eventuality of a form of Anglo-American union appeared to be a certain prospect for Canada’s future.

Canadian Confederation and the “Unfinished Drama” of Racial Unity

The intellectual convergence between Smith and his imperialist critics was perhaps best signified by a book that appeared the same year as Smith’s Canada and the Canadian Question. Oliver Aiken Howland’s The New Empire, though less familiar to historians today, provided a more palatable assessment of the Canadian question for imperialist critics because it positioned the principle of self-government as the basis of Anglo-American unity. Howland, a Toronto lawyer who would later briefly serve as the city’s mayor and as a provincial legislator, understood racial unity less as a full political consolidation than a coordinated alliance that was rooted in shared racial kinship. His book laid out an innovative recasting of Anglo-American history, framing the American Revolution as ultimately a step toward the consolidation of the English race rather than a seismic and irredeemable division. He noted at the outset of his book that he shared Smith’s desire to ensure the unity of the “English race,” but unlike Smith’s proposal to abolish international divisions, namely the boundary between Canada and the United States, he argued that racial unity could only be achieved by formalizing the international divisions of the Anglo-American people because it protected their historically developed capacity for self-government.

Like most of his contemporaries, Howland did not directly explain the nature of Anglo-American identity, though he made clear that it was ultimately an expression of perceived racial cohesion. Unlike Smith, Howland was willing to admit non-anglophones who would “enter into the spirit of English institutions” into his definition of racial community.151 In contrast to Smith’s clear aversion to the French Catholic population in Canada, Howland was willing to extend this definition of “English” to include French-speaking Canadians. He reassured readers that French Canadians expressed none of the violent revolutionary zeal of France, having been conquered by the British three decades before the French Revolution. This view was similar to his inclusion of Catholic populations in Canada and the empire. In his earlier book on the Irish question, Howland framed Irish Home Rule as “only a scene in the action of a greater and more cheering drama – the united progress of the English-speaking nations.”152

In The New Empire, Howland laid out his argument by framing the American Revolution as a necessary moment in the development of English liberties that defined the Anglo-American people. “Not the United States alone,” he argued, “but all the English nations, participate as common inheritors in the benefits of the Declaration of Rights of 1774, and in the many fruits of the Declaration of Independence of 1776.”153 Readers in the late Victorian empire could find much sympathy in the struggles for American independence, according to Howland, seeing it less as a tragedy of imperial loss than an “unfinished drama” of racial development. The American revolutionaries were simply taking up their rights to exercise self-government, asking “for a logical application of the principles of liberty to a novel situation.”154 Even though it led to the political division of a common race, the American Revolution was ultimately a “necessary incident” because it gave rise to a “liberalizing vigor” in the empire that allowed for its further growth in the nineteenth century.155

The important milestone to Howland was not the revolution itself, but the establishment in 1791 of the new colony of Upper Canada, the foundation of what he called the “new empire.” The Constitution Act of 1791, which carved off Upper Canada from the largely French Catholic colony that became Lower Canada, was enacted to provide British institutions to Loyalist migrants from the United States. Unlike the obstinate monarchical authority that defined the earlier British Empire and sparked the American Revolution, the “new empire” created in 1791 would thenceforth be defined by constitutional self-government. Canadian Confederation in 1867 offered a vivid example of the development of the new empire, as it established a constitution written by colonists for themselves, indicating how British subjects in the colonies had the full rights of self-government that had been denied to American colonists in the eighteenth century. In this sense, Confederation ironically represented to Howland the fulfilment of George Washington’s dream of British colonists assuming their rights as British citizens to create their constitutional self-government.

Importantly, for Howland, the political division of the United States and the British Empire did not signify a division in the race. For him, as for Goldwin Smith, the enduring racial unity of the United States and the empire was undeniable, but while Smith saw the political boundary between Canada and the United States as a threat to the future of this unity, Howland saw it as its safeguard. The political separation of Canada and the United States guaranteed racial unity precisely because their equal political standing ensured a mutual respect and assurances of peace. By engaging with the other on equal terms as self-governing polities, they demonstrated the genius of English government, and together they could “prove to the world that two civilized nations may be as one people.” Their enduring racial unity tied them in a common mission, which Howland defined as “the spread of inherited institutions and principles, the development of the cause – abused and betrayed, but still great – of Freedom.”156

Having witnessed Canadian Confederation in 1867 and observing the developing federation movement in Australia, Howland was captivated by the sense that “we are now standing on the threshold of one of the great revivifying periods of human history.”157 Here Howland expressed a vision of the moral union of the United States and the British Empire as the vanguard international comity. The creation of an international supreme court of appeal, he argued, would work to arbitrate disputes between the two states and ensure their peaceful coexistence. Howland placed great hope in the idea that the development of new supranational institutions could govern and secure international cooperation. Four years after publishing The New Empire, he became the chairman of the International Commission on Deep Water Ways, which was a cooperative body of American and Canadian representatives to plan a seaway from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic.158 Howland’s vision of an international court, however, was more than an institutional mechanism for resolving disputes. At a more fundamental level, it laid “the corner-stone, planned more than a hundred years ago, of a Confederacy of the English-speaking world.”159

George Monro Grant, who in the same year had excoriated Smith in his review of Canada and the Canadian Question, commended Howland’s book highly to readers, calling it the “book of the year,” a clear repudiation of Smith’s highly publicized tract. Even though Howland was sceptical of the imperial federation movement of which Grant was a leading figure, Grant approvingly echoed Howland’s key arguments. “What is needed now,” he concluded, “is that those two halves of one race should be again as one people.”160 He found particular encouragement in the book’s suggestions for an international supreme court to govern disputes between the United States, Canada, and Britain. Grant, a pacifist who saw empire as a way of ensuring peace in the world, viewed this proposal as a sign that “humanity is gradually evolving to a higher plane,” which would be defined by men submitting “to the decisions of International Courts or Congresses, instead of appealing to the arbitrament of war.”161 Such mediation, he added, was particularly suited for “our own race,” again emphasizing the shared racial community of Canada and the United States.

As Carl Berger has indicated, Grant saw Canada as a vital link between Britain and the United States, forming the essential nexus of a transatlantic community.162 Grant’s own writings on the Canadian question and the future of the empire were coloured by his optimism in the development of international cosmopolitanism. The chief advantage of federation, he argued in a speech to members of the Imperial Federation League in Winnipeg, was “to be the link that shall bind into a worldwide brotherhood, into a moral – it may even be a political – unity.”163 Grant’s thinking was influenced by idealism, shared notably with his colleague at Queen’s University, philosopher John Watson, who stressed the fundamental unity of “the one great nation of mankind.”164 By emphasizing the inextricable ties between the individual and the community, idealist thinkers like Watson saw the late nineteenth century more as an age of broad consolidation than of nation making.165 The basis of the unity of the British Empire, according to Grant, was the legal and political institutions that stood as the hallmarks of the British people. By contrast, he framed Smith’s argument for racial unity as driven primarily by commercial expediency. “The highest form of national life does not depend on identity,” Grant argued in an 1896 article on the political status of the empire, “but rather by differences that are transcended by common political interests and sentiments.”166 The higher purpose of imperial federation for him was less about ensuring the commercial or military supremacy of the British Empire than facilitating “a moral union of our race.”167

Despite their outward disagreement, Smith and his imperialist critics had much in common on the question of racial unity, and it was not uncommon for imperial federationists to anticipate an eventual partnership or union with the United States.168 This expectation was true in Canada, where the American republic was an unescapable topic of consideration. Thomas Macfarlane, a geologist known for his tireless promotion of imperial federation in Canada, concluded his imperialist tract, also published in 1891, by expressing hope for Anglo-Saxon unity. Noting Smith’s vision of a “moral federation of the whole English speaking race,” he approvingly added that he “is anxious to accept it as the ultimate goal of those who are, at present, striving for the permanent unity of the British Empire.”169 Like Grant, Macfarlane insisted that Smith had approached the idea from the wrong end, preferring instead that the United States join in a consolidated British Empire. American protectionism, notably the McKinley tariff that levied an import fee on foreign goods, dampened the prospect of any immediate movement in this direction for Macfarlane and other imperial federationists.170

As Grant’s reviews of Smith and Howland reveal, the apparent divergence of opinion on the Canadian question was ultimately rooted in a shared belief that Anglo-Saxon unity should be the outcome of imperial reordering. While, for Smith, this unity meant the formal political unification of Canada and the United States, Howland’s suggestion of formalized international cooperation was similarly based on a belief in the enduring racial connection between the countries. For advocates of imperial federation, this plan was not necessarily inconsistent with the project of imperial unity. In fact, the sense that Anglo-American union would be the ultimate culmination of imperial development took on greater urgency in the closing years of the nineteenth century as worries of war and racial conflict spread.

Confederation in a Shifting Global Order

Howland’s vision of Anglo-American unity was more receptive in Canada than Smith’s, not only because it emphasized local self-government but also because it appeared as a natural evolution of the federal system created by Confederation. As the first federal jurisdiction in the British Empire, controversies over the political and judicial negotiation of federal and provincial powers consumed considerable attention in the late nineteenth century.171 It was not coincidental then that David Mills, one of the strongest defenders of federalism in Canada, believed that racial unity should be the ultimate outcome of federal political development. As a Liberal member of Parliament (MP), Mills was widely known for his tireless defence of provincial rights and had earned a reputation for his long parliamentary speeches on federalism that even Canada’s leading constitutional scholar considered “too didactic.”172 As Robert Vipond notes, advocates of provincial rights in Canada like Mills regarded the safeguarding of provincial autonomy as an extension of an imperial policy that was built on the diffusion of autonomy.173 The vitality of federalism and the supremacy of the race were directly interlinked for Mills. The empire, he believed, could be a full federal unit, where each part exercised full sovereignty “upon a footing of perfect equality” but without total political separation.174

Recent Russian incursions in Afghanistan and Persia gave Mills the impression that the next great struggle would be between an expansionist Russia and the British Empire, especially in contesting supremacy over India. His worries of a racial struggle between Anglo-Saxon and Russian ways of life was an extension of his ardent advocacy of federalism, as he understood the exercise of local self-government to be an essential cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon life that was a common feature of American and Canadian society. The difference between the two sides was more than political, he argued, declaring Russia to be an “Asiatic power” with conceptions of law and justice that were fundamentally different from those of Britain. Given the racial basis of this struggle, he insisted that the United States was part of the fight for Anglo-Saxon supremacy:

The United States have, in the highest sense, no independent existence. They are a part and parcel of the Anglo-Saxon race, at the head of which is the United Kingdom. In science, in literature, in government, in religion, and in the conception of human rights, we are all one people, having a common aim, a common origin, and a common destiny.175

Mills drew out a Darwinian picture of racial struggle in the world, where human history was characterized by a succession of races occupying the apex of supremacy among rivals. Set against the contrast of a divergent racial foe, the political differences between the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world melted away. The loss of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, he contended, would be equally disastrous for the United States, and it was therefore a common mission of the race to ensure their supreme position in the world.

Mills’s anxiety about racial struggle corresponded to a developing theme in Anglo international relations that envisioned that the nature of future conflicts would be defined by interracial struggles.176 The Australian politician and writer Charles Pearson popularized the notion of racial conflict in his 1893 book National Life and Character: A Forecast. Motivated by fears of Asian migration in particular, his book served as a dark warning to readers about the unfolding rivalry between the “white race” and other races. He feared that “we shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs.”177 His ominous forecasting of racial rivalry became a popular motivation for containing together the “white” world against others. As Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds note, Pearson’s book was studied by Australian politicians when devising the “White Australia” policy, as well as by Theodore Roosevelt, who was developing a more aggressive American foreign policy.178 The idea that coming conflicts would be defined primarily along the lines of race made the mission of Anglo-American unity seem all the more urgent.

Worries of racial conflict like those expressed by David Mills and Charles Pearson helped to transform the idea of Anglo-Saxon unity from a vague wish for future development into a practical plan for achieving world peace. Ensuring a stable and peaceful world order was a chief concern for Howland, and was what made his suggestions of supranational arbitration especially appealing for Grant. In fact, the emphasis on racial union as a portent of world peace was a familiar fixture in arguments about Anglo-American relations. As Duncan Bell indicates, the “racial peace thesis was an important element of the Anglo-Saxonist ideology that saturated political culture in the United States and the British Empire at the end of the 19th century.”179 Anglo-Saxon unity would not only safeguard peace by asserting its superior position in the world, but would also provide a practical example of a cooperative alliance that worked to resolve disputes without resorting to war.

It was in the spirit of achieving world peace that Week contributor James Bell called for the integration of Canada and the United States as part of a “grand alliance” of English-speaking people.180 Bell was born in Canada and studied at the University of Toronto before moving to Germany, where he earned his PhD at Leipzig University. He moved to the United States to become professor of political economy at the newly established University of Colorado in Boulder in 1883.181 Upon his first visit back to Canada in 1886, he was astonished at how pressing the question of Canada’s future had become. Independence and imperial federation were entirely implausible plans, he thought, but the idea of an alliance of the English-speaking people struck him as the most desirable course of future development. The “process of reunion,” which he emphasized as the guarantee of local autonomy, would likely “establish a common court of arbitration, and even a Pan-Anglican council to regulate, or at least, discuss the numerous questions in which some uniformity or understanding is desirable.”182 The details were vague, but the ultimate objective was clear to Bell, who believed that a “grand alliance” of the race would “banish war from half the globe, and make it next to impossible on any large scale in the rest.”183 Though a seemingly lofty ambition, the idea that racial alliance could engender a future world order marked by peace and stability was a common motivation in descriptions of Anglo-American unity.

For writer Charles Stuart, racial unity through some form of political coordination or consolidation was an essential antidote to what he regarded as an increasingly hostile and unpredictable world. “The world is moving very fast,” he warned. “Some sort of firmer political system must soon appear, and in its formation America will undoubtedly take a leading part.”184 Stuart, who had just graduated from the University of Toronto in political science, was evidently concerned by what felt like the shifting grounds of world order. Though he would later go on to a career as a politician and judge in Alberta, as well as serving as the first chancellor of the University of Alberta, his first public contributions were articles on the nature of nationality and the future of Canada. He worried in particular that efforts to establish Canada as a new and distinct “nationality” would serve only to further entrench divisions. Instead, Canada’s purpose ought to be to secure “the maintenance of political connection between Europe and America.”185 The tendency toward “national states,” he argued, led to destructive economic and military competition. “It is time,” he declared, “we veered round again towards unity – not to uniformity – but to that truer unity which preserves diversity.”186

Stuart was particularly concerned with the lessons of Greek and Roman history, and he traced the decline of both empires to the problem of securing political unity without despotism or anarchy. Federalism offered the solution to this problem, because it offered the possibility of racial unity without abating local self-government. “Excessive centralization is the enemy of liberty,” he wrote, and it was therefore through the “Teutonic spirit of Federation” that a free and peaceful union would be achieved.187 In practical terms, this concept meant the maintenance of local political sovereignty, but with full free trade between parts of the wider union. It would also mean, in language that was increasingly familiar, that “the breach of 1776 would then be healed by those who caused it.”188 Once again, it was the prospect of world peace that motivated Stuart’s thinking of racial federation, just as it was for Howland and Grant. Stuart worried that, as the new century dawned, an age of accelerated industrial activity would lead to industrial warfare and unprecedented conflict.

As much as Confederation had created a new political jurisdiction in North America, it also gave the sense to some that the momentum of political development was leading in the direction of Anglo-Saxon unity. In an article in Canadian Magazine, Toronto lawyer Edward Meek asked:

May we not, with a confident hope, look forward to the time when not only the Anglo-Saxon race of both continents, but all the nations of Europe from whom the inhabitants of America have come, – learning the lesson taught by American Federalism, – will in a Federal Union, find the surest method of preserving and promoting the civilization to which they have, with so much contention and bloodshed, and after so many centuries of commotion and effort, finally attained?189

In the university periodical Queen’s Quarterly, writer Andrew Drummond argued along similar lines that an Anglo-American union would bring about greater security in international relations. “The world,” he wrote, “knows no more noble effort among nations than the promotion of peace and the suppression of the horrors of war.”190 As far as he could see, the advocacy of imperial federation that had captured much space in the Canadian press over the past few decades did little to provide a realistic plan for achieving unity or peace. A more worthy ambition, Drummond contended, “is a close permanent alliance between the two great English nations.”191 Echoing Howland’s idea of an international court, he claimed that supranational arbitration could secure a permanent alliance of English nations. It was clear to Drummond that, while full political or commercial unity was unfeasible, a formal alliance between the United States and Britain would help secure international peace. In their alliance, the two could “be made the instruments for the promotion of peace and good will throughout the world.” Not only would the alliance be a defensive league, but more importantly, he claimed, it would offer to the world a “moral and diplomatic influence” that would be sure to condition friendly and stable international relations.192

The alignment of Anglo-American unity with the quest for establishing a “moral” world order was a recurrent argument, shaped in part by religious concern about the development of racial rivalries. The Methodist Magazine and Review warned that the possibility of a conflict between Saxon and Slavic races, like that which David Mills foreboded, “would be a battle of Armageddon.”193 The biblical overtones here reflected how racial forecasting influenced evangelical mission in Canada, as well as in Britain and the United States.194 Popular Toronto preacher Joseph Wild, for example, frequently pointed to Anglo-Saxon unity as a culmination of prophetic mission. He described the race as the inheritor of ancient Israelite tribes and maintained that its political unity would restore peace to the world.195

The possibility of Anglo-American unity served to signify not just racial consolidation but also a peaceful world order based on consolidating the interests of all humanity. It was not uncommon then for writers to refer to “higher” ambitions of racial unity. Stuart, for example, saw it as the precondition of “a closer unity in the political relations of mankind.”196 Grant likewise emphasized this point in much of his writings on imperial federation, seeing it not just as a consolidation of the empire, but as facilitating a cosmopolitan world order. Grant saw the mission of Anglo-Saxon unity less as establishing political or economic unity than as facilitating “a moral union of our race.”197 Here, once again, he used Smith’s often-repeated expression of “moral union” without confessing agreement with his intellectual foe.

Given the uncertainty of the political status of Canada in the decades following Confederation, the prospect of Canada playing a key role in a wider racial union provided an indication of its political future for some writers. The purpose of this kind of racial alliance was to achieve international comity, ensuring that the twentieth century would be one marked by world peace. It was an optimistic, though ultimately ill-fated contention. Writing in 1891, Canadian poet Frederick George Scott claimed with hope that “every day brings us nearer to the federation, not only of the Empire, but of the whole Anglo-Saxon race, when the world shall be clasped in the English arms and speak in English speech.”198 Despite his quixotic vision, however, as the twentieth century unfolded it was war and violence that would come to characterize much of his prose.199

Conclusion

The creation of a new Canadian “nationality” through an imperial statute that combined together different regions, people, and languages was seemingly an ultimate example of the “nation making” process that many saw as the product of a modern age. The idea of a nationality created by legislative means and based on political boundaries was a distinct shift away from an understanding of nation as a natural, non-territorial unit based on common inherited association. How, then, to explain and make sense of the political jurisdiction that appeared through an imperial statute in northern North America in 1867, an apparent specimen in the political laboratory of the “modern” age?

The “Canadian question” that captured so much attention in the decades after Confederation was not just a matter of different political positions but was also fundamentally an attempt to make sense of that political jurisdiction. For those who believed that the nation was an organic and inherited association of people, the idea that Canada would become an independent or sovereign entity was illogical. Imperialists and Goldwin Smith, though often regarded as espousing antithetical positions, shared an understanding of this concept of nation based on a common “racial” community. While for imperialists, this idea generally meant that the boundaries of the imperial state should align with that nation, for Smith the national boundaries were not necessarily congruent to the sovereign territorial state.

And while the idea of full Canadian independence was generally controversial, some writers in Canadian magazines contributed to a process of conceptual change that began to regard the political state as the origin and basis of nationality. In the context of a time when the study of politics became a “science” and when growing liberal democracy fostered greater and wider attention to the state, they began to think of and describe Canada as a distinct political nationality. In the pages of Canadian magazines, the concerted mission of numerous writers was to describe Canada as a natural unit, something to be instinctively thought of as a nation. This goal should not be looked back on as a reflexive or intuitive reaction, but one that was very much developed from changing concepts of what a nation was and how it represented political association.

The variants of nationality discussed here cannot be divided into distinct camps or partisan stripes because they were often unclear and inconsistent categories. Edward Blake’s support for imperial federation, for example, looked very different from the more effusively imperialist vision of Jehu Mathews. Blake sought imperial federation as a way of ensuring Canadian political sovereignty, while Mathews saw it as a culturally and politically unifying community. In both cases, however, imperial federation rested ultimately on the understanding of nationality that held common origin – however vaguely defined – as its basis. What set William Norris apart from most of his contemporaries was his insistence on a definition of nationality that was not only based in but also limited by political boundaries.

There is no easy narrative to sketch in the transition from “ethnic” to “civic” nationalism, two categories that are greatly complicated in the light of historical scrutiny.200 The creation of a new political federation in British North America prompted deliberation of the basic meaning of nationality and the relationship between “national” and jurisdictional boundaries. Combined with the flourishing of political science, this discussion gave rise to a belief that modern nationality was something different from what it had been, that it represented something more political than tribal. Yet, even the most explicit articulations of a new Canadian political nationality remained imbued with racialized and exclusionary language. As this chapter has stressed, the development of a new concept of political nationality did not altogether abandon racialized assumptions about nationality, evident in descriptions of an underlying whiteness of the “heterogeneous” population or in describing Canada itself as a racial category. While the congruence of the Canadian state and Canadian nationality became a common element in political thought, the ideas of legal order and citizenship that accompanied understandings of Canadian nationality were deeply informed by racialized thinking about political association. As the following chapters investigate, this way of thinking bore enormous consequences, not just in the exclusion of certain people from the idea of Canada but also in their coercive exclusion from the land.