“A Time of Iconoclasm”: Confederation and Transformations in Political Thought
Nothing, it seemed to one editorialist, was as simple as it used to be. When the new year began in 1875, it was hard not to think about all that appeared to be vanishing. “We live in a critical time,” the editorial warned, “when most things for whose stability our fathers had no fear, are shaking like reeds in the winter wind. It is a time of disquiet, when unwonted mutterings are heard in the air, of weird voices boding evil, or beguiling with vain promises of peace. It is a time of iconoclasm, when the old divinities are toppling from their pedestals, and strange gods, whom no man can worship, are being set up.”1 The imagery of collapsing gods and crumbling ideals served as a warning to readers to be aware of the impulses of what many saw as a new age. The perceived pace of change portended radical transformations that no one could predict and few could prevent.
Anxieties about rapid and unpredictable change were pervasive in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The editorialist who penned the lugubrious New Year’s message in the Canadian Monthly and National Review was Goldwin Smith, the Oxford professor turned Canadian journalist who had been an active and often reproachful commentator on political and social controversies of his day. Smith may have been alarmist in describing the violent vicissitudes of change, but it was hard to ignore the fact that much in the world appeared to be rapidly changing in the nineteenth century, a period when, as historian Jürgen Osterhammel puts it, the world transformed.2
From Smith’s vantage point in late Victorian Toronto, one significant change was the political restructuring of British North America through the creation of the Dominion of Canada, the first self-governing federal jurisdiction in the British Empire. With Confederation on 1 July 1867, the colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the united province of Canada (now Quebec and Ontario) united under the British North America Act, an imperial statute. Over the subsequent years, other British colonies joined the Dominion, soon stretching Canada’s expanse from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Yet, for many who witnessed Confederation and the decades that followed, the meaning of that date in 1867 was far from certain. It was a moment whose meaning and future were subject to great uncertainty and multiple possibilities. On the eighth anniversary of Confederation, Smith wrote: “We should be sure what sort of thing was born on that occasion before we celebrate the anniversary.”3
The question of what “sort of thing” Canada was to people who witnessed its creation is this book’s central question. The answer may seem somewhat more obvious today, when the boundaries of the state form the dominant enclosures of political community. In the nineteenth century, however, visions of political community were more variable and amorphous. It made as much sense to understand Confederation as one step in the greater federalization of the British Empire, or indeed of the wider Anglo world. While, to some, Confederation established a new nation, to others, the notion that political boundaries should or could delimit separate “nationalities” was illogical. In a world where so much appeared to be in transition, Canadian Confederation prompted debate and deliberation on the nature of political association and its future development in North America and across the British Empire. Canada was not, therefore, created in a single moment in 1867. It was shaped instead by a gradual process in which many sought to explain the meaning of the new political jurisdiction and how those living within its expanding boundaries could or should identify with it.
1867: A Mutable Moment
Before going further, it is useful to take a step back to look more closely at the moment in 1867 that helped to condition the shifts in political thought described in this book. Ambiguity was embedded in the meaning of Canada from the beginning. In the debates in colonial legislatures on the question of the union of British North America, irresolute intentions abounded. “What are we doing?” Canadian legislator Christopher Dunkin asked, unsure of exactly what others meant when they talked about creating a new “nationality.” Dunkin, who opposed the proposal to federate British North American colonies, insisted that nations were the product of nature, not political craftsmanship. “The phrase ‘political creation’ is no phrase of mine,” he contended. “I hold that the power to create is as much a higher attribute than belongs to man, in the political world, as in any other department of the universe.”4 For him, nationality was an organic identity that developed among a people who shared pre-political ties of community, and so it made more sense to him to contemplate the federation of British colonies across the empire. “Is it a reminder,” he asked about the phrase “new nationality,” “that in fact we have no sort of nationality about us, but are unpleasantly cut up into a lot of struggling nationalities?”5
The criticism was not entirely without merit. British North America was by no means an inherently united polity beyond the common imperial ties that the separate colonies maintained. The different colonies were historically, socially, and politically distinct, making it difficult to imagine that they might form a single national unit. The first post-Confederation census of Canada, conducted in 1871, showed a relatively sparse population of nearly 3.5 million, almost half of which lived in the province of Ontario alone. Sixty per cent of the counted population were of British origin and 30 per cent were French, and the vast majority of the total population was rural.6 It was not surprising then that a number of colonial legislators who opposed Confederation expressed scepticism that the new political jurisdiction under consideration might be considered a new nation. Echoing Dunkin’s scepticism that a “nation” could in fact be “made” by human will, Anselme Pâquet succinctly stated: “I am well aware that the nationality of a people cannot be changed by a mere act of the Legislature.”7
For others, however, the confederation of British North America signified a new form of political organization. George-Étienne Cartier, a prominent French Canadian political leader, called it the creation of a new “political nationality.” For Cartier, the idea of a political nationality was a thoroughly modern concept, an expression of an age where the organizing principles of political governance were evolving into something distinct from previous eras. “In ancient times,” he argued, “the manner in which a nation grew up was different from that of today. Then the first weak settlement increased into a village, which, by turns, became a town and a city, and the nucleus of a nation. It [is] not so in modern times. Nations [are] now formed by the agglomeration of communities having kindred interests and sympathies.”8 Thus, for Cartier, it was possible to speak of a nation that was at once varied in race and religion, yet united in political purpose. For him, the basis of political organization was rooted in constitutional or legal premises that superseded any linguistic, religious, or racial differences that defined particular villages or communities.
The idea that Confederation created a new “political nationality” has become a popular motif in Canadian history, even though it was a contested concept from the beginning.9 In the decades that followed Confederation, the question of whether nationality was an inherited and organic organization or a legally initiated one shaped discussion about the meaning of Canada and its future development. Depending on how one defined nationality, it was possible to regard Confederation as either a significant reconstitution of political organization in what became Canada or a single step in the greater evolution of the empire. Varying and divergent positions on the future of Canada gave the strong impression that Confederation was not a culmination of a new political nationality, but a turning point in the political development of North America and the British Empire. “Among ourselves,” one writer from Ottawa confessed, “Confederation, with all its benefits, is tacitly admitted to be a transition state.”10 What the next stage of the transition would be was a matter of frequent and impassioned debate in the decades following Confederation.
“Founding” moments rarely have the conscious cohesion and clarity of purpose with which they are later remembered. The eliding effects of commemoration tend to emphasize consensus over discord. The singularity of a founding moment has a way of marshalling together diverse and conflicting visions into a single story.11 The truth is that founding moments exist most vividly in the imagination of posterity, and their retrieval in historical records tends to recover instead only fragments of later possibilities. The challenge then is to avoid the retrospective application of meaning and to disentangle the threads that constitute the multiplicity of past futures.
Despite the initial ambiguity over its meaning and importance, Confederation has become perhaps the most dominant moment in Canadian history, which has long been organized around the year 1867, a common chronological break point that divides the history of northern North America into “pre-Confederation” and “post-Confederation” eras. Emphasizing Confederation as the principal organizational matrix in Canadian history tends to privilege political history, casting the experiences and traditions of a diverse range of peoples and places within categories developed and determined by elite political leaders. To be sure, the road to the political consolidation of British North America was a political process that has been well chronicled. Much of the focus of Confederation has been on the political actors, the colonial politicians in British North America who debated, drafted, or rejected the terms of federation.12 But it is wrong to assume that the product of Confederation was a mere consequence of political engineering. This notion assigns far too much responsibility to the “Fathers” of Confederation – indeed the very term renders them the progenitors of the nation – who, as the story goes, negotiated deals that “made” a country.13
Some historians have been particularly critical of the chasm of Confederation, pointing to the false discontinuities that it implies in the social conditions of British North America and Canada.14 Ian McKay’s influential assessment of Canadian history as a liberal revolution in northern North America, along with other studies that disrupt the Confederation benchmark, help to highlight the longer processes and patterns that shaped the development of British North America and Canada.15 Scholars of environmental history and Indigenous studies problematize the usual colonial and political metrics of measuring the past, which do not encompass or reflect the experiences of Indigenous communities or the climatic and environmental factors that have shaped the past.16 Yet, the political manoeuvring of Confederation still casts a long shadow over the history of Canada, notably in its annual celebration as the founding year of the country.17 The subtle consequence of treating 1867 as a founding moment or “birthday” is that it engrafts cohesive meaning on what was in reality a mutable moment. Regarding Confederation as a distinct foundation moment tends to reduce the history that came before it as embryonic stages of a national development. More significantly for the purposes of this study, however, is that the fixation on Confederation as a foundation moment tends to detach Canadian history from its imperial context. Confederation was an imperial event, not just a Canadian one.18 It set in place a new kind of political configuration within the empire, establishing a federal self-governing jurisdiction. For many who belonged to the Confederation generation, it signified an important milestone in the history of British development.
In English Canada, imperialism was a largely defining characteristic of life in the late nineteenth century, though one which historians have often analysed through the lens of the “nation.” Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power, published in 1970, remains a seminal work in the history of imperialism in Canada. Berger’s main contention that “imperialism was one variety of Canadian nationalism” has fundamentally shaped the historiography of imperialism in Canada.19 According to Berger, prominent Canadian imperialists celebrated the British connection as a means of bolstering a distinct national identity for Canada. In response to Berger, Douglas Cole argued that imperialism was in fact a variety of “Britannic” nationalism, writing that imperialists “had little consciousness of Canadians as a nation, as a self-aware group defining its separateness by language, descent, myths or traditions.”20 For Cole, the nation envisioned by imperialists was not rooted in the political state of Canada but in the wider British Empire. The limitation of describing different “variants” of nationalism, however, is that it assumes a fixed concept of nation. What changes, according to Berger and Cole, is not necessarily the meaning of nation itself, but the nation to which their imperialist subjects subscribed. The more critical effort, therefore, needs to be less focused on taxonomies of nationalisms and more attuned to the specific ways and reasons that different actors invoked the idea of nation. Despite more recent efforts to move toward “post-national” history, it is important to understand how and why the nation became part of a common sense way of understanding, accepting, contesting, and projecting collective political associations, both for historical actors and historians.21 Indeed, as Antoinette Burton notes, historians should not jettison the nation from their analyses completely; rather, they “need to pay more attention to the question of who needs it, who manufactures the ‘need’ for it, and whose interests it serves.”22
For some time now, historians have been directing attention to the fact that the history of “national” development in the British Empire was not always congruent with modern national boundaries. In 1975, J.G.A. Pocock described a history of British people across an expansive archipelago from Australia to Canada.23 In 1993, Phillip Buckner again called for a history of the British world unobstructed by the containing effects of the boundaries of national historiographies.24 More recently, Duncan Bell has shown how the vision of a global “Greater Britain” influenced nineteenth-century political thought.25 These accounts highlight the deep connections that tied together Britain and the settler empire; it is important then not to regard Confederation as a self-evident moment of national inception, but rather as a moment of transition in the development of the British world.
What was clear in the years following Confederation was that the nature of political order in the empire was in a state of transition. While Confederation may be a rather arbitrary dividing line in history, it is nevertheless important because the new political jurisdiction created in that year was distinct from any other created before. This divergence was true not only in its political and legal structure but, more importantly, in the intellectual and political inquiry that its creation occasioned. The purpose of this book is to show that Confederation should not only be looked at as a political event, negotiated and enacted at a particular time by political actors, but as an intellectual process in which “Canada” was the subject of changing understandings of political community that were prompted by efforts to make sense of a “modern” age. By situating Confederation in its particular intellectual place and time, we can see how its meaning was developed over time by broader debates and reasoning about the nature of political community and political relationships between people and the state.
Political Association in a “Modern” Time
Confederation was not the first major political reconstitution in British North America, let alone in the British Empire, and it was not the first time that political change prompted deliberation on political questions of empire. European and American political thinkers had been writing about the nature of colonial sovereignty and imperial rule since at least the eighteenth century.26 The intellectual conditions that fostered inquiry about the nature of political association in the late nineteenth century germinated from a longer genealogy, especially the expansion of the public sphere and the discourses of liberty and democracy that reverberated from the age of revolutions around the turn of the nineteenth century.27 What was distinct about the time period of Confederation, however, was the extent of the unfolding sense of transition in social, intellectual, scientific, and religious inquiry. As Jose Harris argues in her analysis of Britain in the late nineteenth century, the years following 1870 formed a major watershed in social, intellectual, and cultural experiences.28 To many, this rupture was captured by the sense that the period was one of unprecedented progress, which made it a fundamentally new and different age. Progress, as Carl Berger has noted, “was a major certitude of Victorian culture.”29 Writing on the Victorian age in 1887, a Canadian Methodist minister declared that the “half-century just closing represents more of real progress and substantial achievement along all the lines that affect a people’s true well-being than can be shown by any similar period in the whole history of the world.”30 It was true that the period in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was distinct in many ways from the earlier part of the century, and it set in place much of the social, political, and intellectual contexts that would shape life in Europe and America after the turn of the century.
As this study illustrates, the sense of change, especially the perception that political organization was evolving toward something that contemporaries thought of as distinctly modern, was a defining element in the developing understandings of Canada and its place in the world. The tremendous pace of change in the late Victorian period, especially the “iconoclasm” it engendered, constituted a new sense of being modern. Christopher Bayly appropriately called the long nineteenth century the “birth of the modern world,” though not because of an inherent or self-evident advent of modernity but because “increasing numbers of people decided that they were modern, or that they were living in a modern world, whether they liked it or not.”31 Indeed, throughout late-nineteenth-century or fin-de-siècle Europe and America, the sense of being modern was a pervasive influence on social, political, and cultural activity and, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, formed a motivation and justification for European imperialism.32 As Stephen Kern has illustrated, cultural and technological changes that marked the period garnered a sense that the very nature of time and space had shifted in a “cultural revolution of the broadest scope.”33
The scope of this cultural revolution extended to expressions of political ideas. British legal scholar Henry Maine famously observed that “modern” political organization was shifting from an order based on familial kinship to one based on contractual obligations between individuals.34 Crucially, the state assumed the predominant role in mediating the contractual ties that Maine saw as foundational to modern political organization. Interpersonal relations were more and more defined and regulated by law rather than kinship agreement, becoming more impersonal as a result. The remarkable growth of the bureaucratic state in the nineteenth century was a key aspect in making the state a more impersonal structure of power, most evidently characterized in the development of the “official mind” of the empire.35 In British North America, the expansion of the state was evident in the physical construction of educational, health, and penal institutions, as well as in the expanding powers of taxation, census taking, and schooling.36 The nineteenth century, Elsbeth Heaman notes, saw the creation of a more robust and more liberal state in Britain’s North American colonies.37 While the expanding state provided for the construction of infrastructure including canals, roads, and bridges, technological changes such as the invention of the steamship and telegraph further accelerated travel and communication.38 These conditions added to the sense that modern political organization was undergoing a transformation and provided a basis for reimagining the political ties that connected individuals together and the lines of exclusions that resulted.
Three overarching and interrelated patterns bolstered the sense of modernity that shaped political and social thought examined in this study. The first was the significant demographic restructuring of the British Empire. In Replenishing the Earth, James Belich describes the “settler revolution” that gave rise to an astonishingly expansive Anglo world throughout the nineteenth century.39 Settler colonialism transformed the nature of imperialism, creating societies around the world that were widely regarded as extensions of Europe.40 The mass migration of people from the British Isles over the nineteenth century resulted in the creation of a global network of people who often shared social, cultural, and economic ties to Britain.41 The idea that Britain’s settler colonies were constituent parts of “Greater Britain” was a major motivation of political thought in late Victorian Britain and across parts of the empire, including, as the following chapters show, post-Confederation Canada.42
In the imperial imagination, British North America, Australia, New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, South Africa were expanses of land ripe for the settlement of British people, separate from colonies of conquest like India, which were peopled by distinct and foreign people. The violent contradiction, of course, was that settlement colonies were not open spaces for settlement, but were peopled by Indigenous societies. The creation of British settler colonies prompted not only the coercive dispossession of Indigenous land but also the exclusion of Indigenous people from the settlers’ imagined political community.43 It is deeply revealing, though not surprising, that in all of the primary sources examined in this study, Indigenous people were rarely mentioned or thought about, reflecting a sustained erasure from settler societies that has only recently become widely acknowledged.44 Most of the ideas of political order examined in this study were premised on the view that British settler societies established new and fertile frontiers for the expansion of the British people.
The seemingly pervasive and expanding reach of science was the second major factor that contributed to the sense that the late nineteenth century formed a new and modern era. Scientific innovation led to what historian Ramsay Cook called a “crisis of faith,” which coloured late Victorian social criticism.45 This dilemma was developed primarily by the rise of Darwinism, which shook the established intellectual orthodoxy in the mid-nineteenth century and indelibly shaped new forms of critical inquiry.46 The greatest threat of Darwinism, and the corresponding growth of new critical inquiry, was its apparent assault on religious belief and clerical authority, prompting efforts to synthesize new intellectual trends with evangelical mission.47 Indeed, the legacy of Darwin was central to the sense of change that permeated essays and commentaries in Canadian periodicals. Describing Darwinism as a “nightmare,” one writer complained that the “theory presses upon us, and we fight against it, and try to throw it off, but it is ever present, and its weight still felt.”48 Regardless of their views on Darwinism, few could dispute its apparent influence.
The importance of scientific inquiry, with its fixation on empiricism and criticism of assumed understandings, further complicated notions of tradition and prompted consideration of new forms of political association. An author in Stewart’s Quarterly argued in 1871 that a distinguishing characteristic of modern times was the placing of the “sceptre of authority in the hands of intellect,” or the prioritization of physical over metaphysical sciences.49 For some writers, this line of thinking was symptomatic of a more materialistic society, which was increasingly driven by profits and commerce.50 The evangel of the nineteenth century, according to one, was “free trade – commerce – competition – production – and John Stuart Mill is its prophet. It is the gospel of selfishness, without prayer, without praise.”51 As writer John Reade warned in 1874, the rise of science would have significant repercussions on understandings of political community. “We live in an age of criticism,” he declared, “of ruthless criticism. It glories in dis-enchantment. It delights, with appalling calmness, to demonstrate the absurdity of what we and ours from time to time immemorial had considered true.”52 It was clear, Reade believed, that looking back on the past could no longer be simple and comforting. For him, scientific endeavour and the priority of reason had usurped the place of enchantment.53 Writing about the nature of politics and community in a time that seemed dominated by scientific endeavour and Darwinian scepticism would, it seemed, be unavoidably affected by “modern” preoccupations.
Finally, the expanding reach of democracy and political society fuelled the impression that the period was modern and, in particular, that the nature of political association was becoming something different from before. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, Canadian Magazine editor John Cooper explained, society was “essentially individualistic in its theories ... But the latter half of the century has witnessed the growth of new ideas, based upon the conviction that a government – which is society as a unit – can do a great deal for the elevation of the individual.”54 For Cooper, as for others, it was clear that the emergence of new ideas of the state would invariably shape the course of political and social development, especially what appeared to be a growing attraction to developing ideas of socialism.55
The sense of political change was amplified by reforms to the franchise and the perceptible expansion of democratic participation. In the same year that the British North America Act federated Canada, the British parliament passed the Reform Act, which was the most substantial expansion of the franchise in Britain since the first Reform Act of 1832.56 In Canada, questions about who should be included in the franchise were recurrent debates in the late nineteenth century, though key points like the Electoral Franchise Act of 1885 reinforced limited lines of official inclusion with a franchise largely limited to white men who met prescribed financial requirements.57 Nevertheless, debate on electoral voting rights reflected the increased attention to questions of who could participate in the politics of the country. Even though the expansion of the franchise was restrained, it was impossible to ignore the mass political culture that was emerging in the late nineteenth century. A major motivation for many of the writers examined in this study was the worry about the expansion of democracy and, more specifically, the concern that people participating in political deliberation should have the proper capacity to do so.58 “Now that political power has passed into the hands of the masses,” Newfoundland preacher Moses Harvey warned, “their education must be attended to, or society will be overthrown.”59 Such anxieties about what Harvey called “modern democracy” prompted a wave of attention to the teaching of political and legal ideas to a wide public audience.
Together, these factors contributed to the sense that Confederation marked a turning point in the development of “modern” political association. Modernity, of course, is a relative term, distinguished particularly by the perception of precipitous transition. Yet, as Marshall Berman influentially noted, modernity has long been an ongoing phenomenon. To be modern, he writes, “is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformations of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything that we have, everything we know, everything we are.”60 It is worth remembering then that, beyond the macroscopic changes that gave the impression of modernity, it was also an experience of daily life. In the late Victorian period, this transformation was perhaps most obvious in the rapidly expanding urban centres where people found themselves increasingly living in a society of strangers.61 Historian Keith Walden notes the “staggering” extent of this change in his study of the Toronto Industrial Exhibition. “As so much gave way,” he writes, “as so much was pushed together, people were required to re-establish the comprehensibility of their physical and intellectual environments.”62 As others have noted, representations of all that was new and “modern” appeared with greater frequency in cities, assuming seemingly ordinary forms like bicycles, store window displays, urban infrastructure, and even telling the time.63 This unfolding modernity and its attendant changes in daily life was marked by a maelstrom of new discoveries mixed with the miasma of urbanity, a dizzying and dislocating process of unbecoming. It was in these conditions – in both the wider changes in intellectual inquiry and the experiences of daily life – that the new Canadian state developed in the late nineteenth century. Against this backdrop, refashioned senses of identity challenged and defined new thinking about forms of political association.
Debates about the meaning of Canada that followed Confederation were as much attempts to make sense of and give order to a seemingly chaotic and changing world as they were political arguments. Canadian Confederation prompted multiple endeavours to explain and, in some cases, redefine the basis of political association. An intellectual history of Confederation therefore goes beyond debates about federalism, partisan conflicts, and economic dynamics to consider how the delimiting of new jurisdictions motivated different models of social and political thinking. The idea, for instance, that a nation could be based in secular law was a primary source of interest and intellectual divergence. Throughout this study, a fundamental tension emerges between those who believed that nationality, constitutions, citizenship, and allegiance were products of the law and others who believed that they were features of pre-political, organic, or “natural” association. Visions of Canada’s future, therefore, were not merely differing political positions, but were also expressions of fundamentally variant understandings of the nature of political association and community.
Study Overview
The extent of political change across the world in the late nineteenth century was indeed significant. As Charles Maier notes, the transformations of states between 1850 and 1880 “constitute a genuine ‘moment’ of world history,” as they emerged as the hegemonic container of political organization.64 Closely connected to this development was the robust expression of nationalism, which by the late nineteenth century had become a powerful means of claiming and enforcing political identity.65 Together, centralized states and vigorous nationalism shaped a resurgence in European imperialism, so that, by the turn of the century, as John Hobson wrote, the word imperialism was “on everybody’s lips.”66 Within the expanding British Empire, the spirit of imperialism fostered new visions of imperial unity of Britain and its overseas dominions. British dominions – the supposedly white and self-governing parts of the empire – were themselves undergoing important transformations in political organization, as they were reconstituted as separate and distinct political jurisdictions.
Writers in civil society, including prominent intellectuals and lesser-known contributors, took to the pages of magazines and produced books and pamphlets to express their views on the shifting political dynamics that they witnessed. This study examines these writings published in English in Canada between 1867 and 1900, nearly a third of a century that can be described as the Confederation generation, which witnessed Confederation and the malleable and uncertain development of the new political jurisdiction that followed. In their efforts to describe and influence the political changes they witnessed, public writers in this generation developed many enduring assumptions about Canada through their fashioning of key political concepts.
To understand the development of these political ideas in late-nineteenth-century Canada, this study is based on a wide reading of magazine literature published in English Canada between 1867 and 1900. Magazines were the primary conduit for the expression and exchange of political ideas during this time, assembling together writers who exemplified what Stefan Collini calls public moralists. Indeed, many magazine contributors effected a moralizing mission to, as Collini puts it, “persuade their contemporaries to live up to their professed ideals.”67 One such public moralist featured in this book, William Dawson LeSueur, described the mission of Canadian intellectuals as imparting “a life in which high thoughts and high aims are harmoniously and indissolubly blended.”68 Although magazines were published across Canada, most major titles were Toronto-based publications. Readers and contributors were nevertheless located across Canada and even in Newfoundland, which did not join Confederation until 1949. While a number of important magazines were published in French, including Revue canadienne and Nouvelles soirées canadiennes, the issues and problems discussed in them tended to be distinct from their English-language counterparts, and English- and French-language magazines rarely engaged directly with one another.69 English-language magazines in Canada were far more likely to look to British and American periodicals as their literary interlocutors than to French-language magazines from Canada.
Unlike the daily newspaper press, which was often perceived to be rancorously partisan in tone and objective, magazines often described themselves as more serious and substantive, having the space to print longer essays on literary, social, and political issues.70 James Gordon Mowat, founder of the Canadian Magazine, penned a column on the purpose of magazines, stating: “The newspaper is too transient, too hurriedly read, and often too hurriedly written.”71 The New Dominion Monthly appealed to readers “who wish to study the progress of contemporary history in the light of the past, and rid of the excitement and feeling which color the hurried utterances of a newspaper press, necessarily more or less engaged in the conflicts of the day.”72 While some magazines, like Canadian Monthly and National Review and Week, featured sections digesting current events in Canada and around the world in each issue, most magazines avoided detailed coverage of daily events.
Across Britain and the United States, major magazines like Macmillan’s, Contemporary Review, and Nineteenth Century offered extensive space for dialogue on political, social, and religious concerns of the day.73 Against the weight of these larger and more formidable magazines, Canadian publishers promoted a fledgling magazine industry to a Canadian public, often using their “national” scope to encourage subscriptions.74 Although magazines had been printed in British North America since the late eighteenth century, they assumed a more distinct and prominent place in the periodical press after Confederation.75 Most magazines sought to reach or even create a “national” audience of Canadians. Mowat claimed, for example, that his magazine “is a great national university, diffused without loss of effectiveness, throughout the entire nation.”76 Canadian Magazine announced its lofty objective of “cultivating Canadian patriotism and Canadian interests, and of endeavouring to aid in the consolidation of the Dominion on a basis of national self-respect and a mutual regard for the rights of the great elements which make up the population of Canada.”77 These magazines understood themselves to be constructive forces in the creation of a solidified sense of Canadian identity. The editor of the short-lived Lake Magazine asserted in its inaugural issue that it “believes in a broad, national spirit; in the consolidation of Canada on a basis of mutual respect for the rights and prejudices of the various and grand elements that go to make up the Canadian people.”78
Magazines like these, therefore, not only provided space for writers to propose and debate different ideas about Canadian issues but also formed the means for bringing together a “national” audience. They claimed to provide an important educating influence on the population, offering readers a venue to better understand Canada and the public concerns of the day. “In a new country like Canada,” wrote one school headmaster in an article that argued for the importance of national magazines, “it is important that there should be some means of directing public attention to those subjects affecting national welfare which yet never decide the casting of a single vote at the polls.”79 Magazines, in this sense, formed a self-consciously distinct aspect of public sphere deliberation, acquiring a didactic purpose. They aimed not only to inform but also to edify and educate readers, often based on concerns about the influence of the partisan press and the higher aims of public opinion. Such claims were self-serving and not always substantiated, but these sources nevertheless provided some of the most extensive spaces for writers to engage in debates on political philosophy and deliberate on current political issues.
The chapters that follow trace how Confederation affected and, in some cases, reshaped foundational concepts of political association. The term “political association” signifies the real or imagined political ties shared between different people, irrespective of distance or legal boundaries. While the state forms perhaps the most powerful basis of political association, it does not necessarily define or restrict the expression of common political community. This point is especially true in the context of the British Empire, where the “state” could be defined in wide imperial dimensions or according to local or colonial jurisdictional boundaries. What this book indicates, however, is that the creation of the federal Canadian state in 1867 influenced and reshaped expressions of key concepts of political association, which are the focus of different chapters.
The first chapter examines the concept of nationality, which was a dominant aspect of debate in the late nineteenth century and was reflected in different visions of Canada’s future. The meaning of the nation and the state, and the nature of political community more generally, became an important feature of late-nineteenth-century social criticism and informed and motivated exchanges about “nation.” The prominence of the concept of nation developed from a debate over the nature of political association, specifically whether it was an inherited “racial” community or whether it could be a politically engineered community based on jurisdictional boundaries.
One of the most important aspects of ideas of political association was the concept of the constitution, which is the focus of the second chapter. Rather than looking to political and legal articulations of constitutionalism, this chapter turns to expressions of vernacular constitutions, or the way in which different writers crafted various constitutional narratives to ground and legitimize ideas of nationality. While some sought to describe the British North America Act as a unique Canadian constitution, others defended ideas of the imperial or British constitution and local or provincial constitutions. At stake here was the question of whether a constitution was an organic development linked to an “ancient” heritage or a “modern” political instrument that tied individuals to a given political jurisdiction. This chapter examines various expressions of the constitution that were developed in magazine articles, legal journals, and pamphlets and monographs published specifically on the topic of the constitution. The extensive interest in the subject of the constitution following Confederation reflected the ambiguity about what the creation of a new political jurisdiction by the British North America Act in 1867 really meant.
The idea of a common people, sometimes described as “citizenship,” is the subject of chapter three. One of the most powerful ways of authenticating ideas of political community was to describe who could claim membership and who could not. While some writers, including many imperialists, understood citizenship as a permanent connection to a racial community, others described the concept more as a political relationship between individuals and the state, particularly the Canadian state. Some expressed this idea in explicit terms of citizenship, envisioning distinct “Canadian” and “imperial” citizenships. Others took seriously the endeavour to consolidate Confederation by imagining a common Canadian people so that individuals would think of themselves foremost as “Canadian.” This chapter also includes an examination of efforts to explicitly educate Canadians on citizenship and its accompanying duties and expectations.
The fourth chapter turns to the concept of loyalty. It begins with an examination of debates about the term “loyalty” and what the term signified, especially the dispute about whether loyalty was owed to the laws and institutions of a state or to an inherited sense of community and the British Crown specifically. The chapter then assesses the ambiguity of whether a person’s primary loyalty was to their province, Canada, or the empire, which was related to extensive debates about the supposed dangers of party and “sectional” loyalties.
The final chapter of this book is a case study that brings together the concepts developed in the first four chapters through an analysis of the evolution of naturalization and nationality law in Canada and the British Empire between 1867 and 1914. The ambiguity of the nature of political community and the meaning of Confederation was most evident in the inconsistencies and imprecisions of developing nationality law. This case study, which brings in legal and governmental sources, illustrates the interaction between the development of concepts in parts of the public sphere and the evolution of legal principles and regulations. It argues that, even as many of the concepts examined in this study became regarded as “modern” bases of political association, they remained imbued with assumptions about racial belonging and imperial community.
Together, these chapters illustrate how the establishment of a new state in northern North America in 1867 challenged assumptions about the nature of political association and inspired or influenced new ways of thinking about it. A tension runs throughout this study between those who understood the supposedly modern age as a harbinger of imperial unity and those who believed that it represented the certain fragmentation of the empire as new national states developed. For imperialists – an intellectually diverse group who believed in sustaining and bolstering Canada’s connection to Britain – the modern era appeared to auger the prospect of imperial unity. Technological changes facilitated optimism for the consolidation of the empire, effectively “annihilating distance,” to use the preferred imperialist slogan, and the growth of dominions added to the sense of an increasingly united empire. It was true that expanses of land and ocean divided the British world, but, Queen’s University Principal George Monro Grant insisted, “modern conditions have changed all of that.”80 Modern conditions seemed to have changed so much, and for all of the anxieties of their repercussions, they offered much promise for new answers to fundamental questions of order.