He believed … that the preservation of the union with the mother country was necessary to the making of Canada.
George Monro Grant, about Macdonald
Macdonald’s first trip to Britain after an absence of six years started badly. Just as he was about to leave, at the end of June 1879, an attack of cholera delayed his departure for a month. By the time he arrived in London, Parliament’s session had ended and almost everyone he wanted to meet had left for country houses to shoot grouse. He managed a long session with the colonial secretary, now Sir Michael Hicks Beach, at which he presented the high tariffs of the National Policy as nothing more than “a somewhat complex re-classification of imports.” More persuasively, he argued that Britain should support the transcontinental railway financially because it would enable Britain to trade directly with Japan and China by way of Canada. Hicks Beach was properly diplomatic but urged Macdonald to recognize that Canada’s new tariffs had angered many British businessmen, so it would be wiser to postpone his requests for aid from the government.
Macdonald travelled to Guildford to stay at the country house of his old friend Sir John Rose. They had a delicate and difficult conversation. Macdonald let Rose know that he wanted to appoint a diplomatic representative in London—Canada’s first. No one could be better qualified than Rose himself, who had carried out similar duties for the previous decade with considerable competence, as well as substantial profit for his private bank.* However, as a British resident with an American wife, Rose would be exposed in such a post to charges of conflict of interest. The choice instead had to be Alexander Tilloch Galt, a former finance minister. Rose reluctantly agreed that Macdonald was right.
Ahead was an incomparably more agreeable engagement. During the 1871 Washington Conference years earlier, Lord de Grey, the head of the British delegation, had let Macdonald know that, as a reward for his services, he should become a member of the Imperial Privy Council—the first colonial to attain such an honour. The Canadian Pacific Scandal had scotched that possibility, but the Canadian public having changed its mind, so could the British government. On the morning of August 14, Macdonald travelled to the Queen’s summer home of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, and that afternoon was sworn in as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council, elevating his title from “Hon.” to “Rt. Hon.” By some courtier’s blunder, he hadn’t been invited to stay for dinner, so he journeyed back to London that same evening.†
Instead, he dined a few days later with his hero, Disraeli, now Lord Beaconsfield, who, on learning of the social gaffe at Osborne, wrote to the governor general, “This vexes me as I feel your ministers ought to have been festivaled and banqueted.” As a substitute for a royal banquet, Disraeli offered one of his own for just the two of them at his country mansion, Hughenden Manor, in the Chiltern Hills, north of London. Macdonald accepted, and on Monday, September 1, went by rail to High Wycombe, where Disraeli’s carriage was waiting.
When Macdonald came to Queen Victoria’s house, Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, some hapless courtier had forgotten to invite him to stay on for dinner. The Queen rectified this gaffe a half-dozen years later by extending him an overnight invitation to Windsor Castle, with an excellent dinner included. (photo credit 21.1)
“He is gentlemanlike, agreeable and very intelligent; a considerable man,” Disraeli wrote afterwards in his diary, adding that he lacked “Yankeeisms except a little sing-song at the end of a sentence.” He recorded further that Macdonald, with whom he stayed up well past midnight, had “given me a very bad night and leaving me very exhausted”—meaning that the pair had got into the brandy while exchanging thoughts about the world and, in Joseph Pope’s words, “descanted upon the great poets, orators and philosophers of Athens and Rome.” *
Disraeli and Macdonald shared a good deal in common—theatricality, wit, tolerance, a keen appreciation of human nature and an amused view of its frailties and follies. And both were Conservatives. Nicholas Flood Davin, who had covered Disraeli as a reporter at Westminster, reckoned, “Sir John is probably the better debater of the two, although not equalling Dizzy in invective or in epigram.” Davin judged that, for all Disraeli’s sinuous skill, “it may well be doubted if his power of conciliating men and fixing their emotions surpasses that of [Macdonald].” Both were nationalists, no doubt because they were partly outsiders—Disraeli an assimilated Jew, and Macdonald an assimilated Scot. Both were strong believers in the British Empire, Macdonald to avoid becoming American, and Disraeli because he had recently reinvented it, most particularly in India. Disraeli wrote well-regarded novels; Macdonald late in life wished he had been a writer.
There were similarities in their appearance: both had mobile faces with high cheekbones (Disraeli was better at looking sphinx-like), hair that was either crinkly (Macdonald’s) or ostentatiously curly (Dizzy’s), and both shared a taste for “notice-me” clothes. In 1881, Sir Charles Dilke visited Disraeli on his deathbed, and while he waited later for a train at Euston Station he spotted Macdonald—and believed for a few bewildered moments that Disraeli had somehow made a miraculous recovery.
Yet this dinner was their one and only meeting. The flukes of political timing kept them apart, one or other always being out of power when the other was in. This time, they did overlap, but only until 1880, when Disraeli was defeated by Gladstone. He died the following year.
According to one early Macdonald biographer, there was another missed connection between them. E.B. Biggar claims that, after Disraeli’s death, some British Conservatives approached Macdonald to suggest he move to Britain “with a view to succeeding the great English statesman.” There may have been a grain of truth to this anecdote. Some leading British Conservatives such as Lord Carnarvon and Sir Stafford Northcote thought highly of Macdonald; his heavy drinking days were behind him, and his 1878 recovery from crushing defeat had impressed everybody. In Biggar’s version, Macdonald told the British emissaries that “here, he was engaged in the development of a nation; there, he would be struggling to hold together the fabric of an old one.” That response sounds like him, and it captures the complex nature of his feelings about Canada’s relations with its “home” country.
More than once when in London, Macdonald got mistaken for his hero, Disraeli (alone, right). Macdonald spent a night at Disraeli’s country house, and the pair stayed up well past midnight talking about “the great poets, orators and philosophers of Athens and Rome.”
Macdonald was an unregenerate anglophile: he loved Britain, its history, literature, legal system and political system, and London’s bustle and buzz. By comparison, late nineteenth-century Canada—provincial, raw and ridden by religious rivalries—just wasn’t very loveable. In Ottawa, he missed his conversations with British public men: “Their tone is so high and their mode of thinking is so correct,” he once remarked.
On this side of the Atlantic, though, he was engaged in nation-building. His home was now here; as he once put it, “All my hopes and my remembrances are Canadian; and not only are my principles and prejudices Canadian, but … my interests are.” His family was here, including those already buried—mother and father, first wife, first-born son and most recently a sister. If the argument advanced in these two volumes is correct—that no Macdonald would have meant no Canada—it is true equally that had there been no Canada, there could have been no Macdonald of renown, instead perhaps just a likeable small-town lawyer who drank too much.
Macdonald’s emotional attachment to Britain reinforced, but did not cause, his political conviction that Canada had to remain connected to the world’s superpower. He reached that conclusion for reasons of realpolitik—Canada’s survival. From this conviction he never deviated. He defended the connection on every possible occasion, once calling it “a golden chain” connecting Canada to Britain that he personally was “proud to wear.” Most times, his arguments were practical and purposeful. Independence would be “tantamount to annexation.” He opposed Edward Blake’s contention that Canada should gain the power to negotiate its own treaties. If that happened, he argued, Canada would lose “the prestige of England, the whole diplomatic service of England” and find it hard to get noticed, let alone enforce any treaties it signed. He was well aware that, although all the British soldiers had departed, the Royal Navy remained on both coasts, and that its presence enabled Canada to argue with the United States over its fisheries rights. He knew that Britain’s pledge to come to Canada’s aid if it was attacked was its only defence, and he once admitted that the Americans, should they ever choose to invade, could “go where they liked, and do what they pleased.” He was using Britain’s faraway power as a counterweight against the power of a next-door neighbour.
Yet, while he consistently said all the right things about the Mother Country and the British Empire, he actually did remarkably little in return for the benefits of their association. Repeated requests by the Colonial Office for reports on Canada’s military capabilities went unanswered. On the subject of an Imperial Federation—the idea of knitting the Empire together more closely by having British and colonial politicians sit in each other’s legislatures—he kept official comments to a minimum; in private, he dismissed the notion as unworkable. His National Policy tariffs hit British exports as hard as those of the United States.
At the time, this distinction was little noticed, and most subsequent commentators have slotted Macdonald into the category of a knee-bending colonial. One of the very few people who recognized what he was up to was the principal of Queen’s University, George Monro Grant. Macdonald “believed there was room on the continent of America for at least two nations, and he was determined that Canada should be a nation,” Grant commented after Macdonald’s death. “He believed … that the preservation of the union with the mother country was necessary to the making of Canada.”
The Mother Country, thus, no matter how much loved by Macdonald personally, was to him a means to an end, an asset to be used to advance Canadian interests—most particularly to gain it time to become a nation. One other observer also figured out his strategy. Sir Charles Dilke once remarked on the curious fact that those in Britain who strongly advocated Imperial Federation and those who dismissed it as a fantasy both supported their case with words from the same source—John A. Macdonald’s speeches on the subject.
None of this artfulness lessened Macdonald’s love of Britain. Equally, neither did that love ever lessen his readiness to exploit Britain for Canada’s benefit.
Macdonald and Disraeli met at exactly the right time. The relationship between the two countries was undergoing a profound change, one that Disraeli had done much to bring about—and one that would alter significantly the nature of the challenges Macdonald faced during the latter part of his second term.
The source of the change was the foreign policy that Disraeli pursued during the years 1874–80. It was an extravagantly expansionist policy. He bought the Suez Canal for Britain in 1875 (from the Khedive of Egypt) and a year later raised Queen Victoria to the rank of Empress of India. Later, at the gathering of all the key statesmen of Europe at the Congress of Berlin, he outfoxed Bismarck and, by undermining the League of the Three Emperors (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia), advanced Britain’s balance-of-power strategy in Europe.
Partly by intent, partly by circumstance, Disraeli changed Britain itself. He managed the triumph of the pro-Imperial Big Englanders over the Little Englanders and attracted to the Conservative Party many of the newly enfranchised industrial workers, who found in the Empire the glory and excitement lacking in their hard and narrow lives. Because of Disraeli, the Empire, once accumulated in a fit of absence of mind, became a secular religion, a kind of national signature and a source of delight and pride. Potentially powerful arriviste nations such as Germany envied it.
Much of Disraeli’s grand foreign policy was his response to an intuitive realization that Britain had entered into an era of economic and military decline, and that from this time on, show—in everything from the colour and precision of its military parades to the impeccably polished decks of its warships—would increasingly have to serve as a substitute for strength. Some observers understood this connection: the bard of empire, Rudyard Kipling, issued a call to “Take up the White Man’s burden,” but in “Recessional” he penned the melancholy line, “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”
Still, the Empire was indubitably splendid. As that chronicler of empire James Morris observed, “There was hardly a moment of the day, hardly a facet of daily living, in which the fact of Empire was not emphasized. From exhortatory editorials to match-box lids, from children’s fashions to parlour-games, from music hall lyrics to parish church sermons, the imperial theme was relentlessly drummed.”
If the British people were “imperially brain-washed,” so were a great many Canadians. They too became New Imperialists. “Imperialism was one form of Canadian nationalism,” the historian Carl Berger has written. The nationalist movement of the Canada First intellectuals had by now collapsed, and all talk of “a new nationality” had long since dried up. Just as damaging, the United States no longer performed for Canada’s identity the vital role of threatening its existence, or, as effectively, of appearing to. The annexation movement below the border was dead. And so a growing number of Canadians set out to do their bit for national unity by looking abroad, not for a common enemy but for a common friend.
That friend was the British Empire. A cluster of intellectuals, among them George Grant, the teacher and popular historian George Parkin, the ultra-Tory Colonel George Denison and later the humorist Stephen Leacock and the poet Wilfred Campbell, began to talk up the Empire as the way for Canada to regain energy and spirit. As one of the New Imperialists put it, “How petty our interests, how small most of our public questions, how narrow our sympathies.” Canada might not be able to match American energy and dynamism, but the Empire offered glamour, variety, the exotic (really the sexual, as in India) and the prospect of war—a test of manhood dreamed of by many young men in those innocent years before the War to End All Wars.
The Empire also offered a chance at sanctity: rather than trade following the flag, it was now the Bible, as carried by thousands of ardent and athletic missionaries. The New Imperialism was not itself about idealism; the dictum of “the survival of the fittest,” derived from Darwin’s doctrine of evolution, made it easier to justify the treatment meted out to colonials and indigenous peoples. The assumption became that if these had been truly fit, they would have remained independent—and certainly not have become extinct. Jingoism and racism were as much a part of the New Imperialism as were pith helmets.
Canadians were New Imperialists in a very Canadian way. They weren’t imperialistic: no one ever suggested that Canada should acquire colonies. And they were nationalists every bit as much as imperialists. “I am an Imperialist because I do not wish to be a Colonial,” Leacock would declare.
Being Canadians, they were eager to make the Empire itself better rather than just bigger. In Grant’s view, “In it, the rights of all men are sacred … [it] offers most opportunities for all kinds of noblest service to humanity through the serving of fellow-citizens.” Even Macdonald was drawn in. In a speech in Montreal in 1875, he said that Britain and its colonies, because they all spoke the same language and lived under the same laws, should operate as “one great nation, as it were, for the purpose of operating as a moral police, and of keeping the peace of the world.”
That was Macdonald’s one sortie into Imperial altruism. His opinion about the purpose of the Empire was always practical. It was also always vague—and curiously static. It’s very likely that the source of both these characteristics was Macdonald’s reluctance to be an imperialist himself. His Montreal speech provides the clue. He denounced annexation as a “treasonable proposition” and made his best-known declaration about the transatlantic connection: “A British subject I was born, and a British subject I hope to die.” But he said nothing at all about what Canada might contribute to the Empire.
From time to time, Macdonald made some extremely interesting statements about the way the relationship between Canada and its Mother Country might evolve. In that same 1875 speech, he promulgated the idea that “England would be the central power and we the auxiliary nations; that Canada would by degrees have less of dependence and more of alliance than at present.” He had said much the same as far back as the Confederation Debate of 1865, when he forecast, “Gradually a different colonial system is being developed, and it will become, year by year, less a case of dependence on our own part … and more a case of healthy and cordial alliance.” Another decade on, he was still at it: in an 1884 letter to his friend Judge James Robert Gowan, he suggested that colonies such as Canada and Australia should function as “auxiliary kingdoms” by “seeking common cause with England by a quasi-treaty.”
These ideas were indeed interesting, and it’s even possible to discern in them the outlines of the future Commonwealth. He was certainly savvy enough to recognize early on that the Empire was becoming far more a matter of show than of strength. In that same letter to Gowan, he remarked that the colonies had to “strengthen the shaky old mother.” And after learning that the jihad-type uprising in the Sudan had succeeded in capturing the capital, Khartoum, and in killing General Charles Gordon, Macdonald commented to Gowan, “England has I fear culminated, but her children must take care of her.” His concerns obviously became known because in 1891 the Imperial magnate Cecil Rhodes wrote to him suggesting they meet to discuss “some tie with our mother country that will prevent separation.” Rhodes went on to criticize many of Britain’s inhabitants: “They cannot see the future,” he complained. “They think they will always be the manufacturing mart of the world.” Rhodes’s letter, though, reached Ottawa a few days after Macdonald’s death.
The most important aspect of Macdonald’s musings about some possible new, more equal relationship between the colonies and Britain was that in fact he pursued none of them. Rather, such actions as he took inched Canada away from the Mother Country, even while he was protesting how loyal he and the country were to it. In 1882, when the Colonial Office suggested that Canada send four battalions to Britain so the same number of British battalions could be moved to Egypt, he refused. After the fall of Khartoum, Britain made no request for colonial troops, but Australia and New Zealand sent some anyway. Macdonald commented to Tupper that Canada was not Australia: “The Suez Canal is nothing to us,” he wrote. “We do not ask England to quarrel with France or Germany for our sakes. Why should we waste money or men … to get Gladstone & Co out of the hole they have plunged themselves into by their imbecility?”
Over the long span, from 1867 to 1891, Macdonald’s military policy was consistent and clear. If Britain itself was threatened, Canadian troops would be sent out; but if Britain had started the scrap on some patch of its Empire, the problem was for it to solve. Macdonald spelled out this view when he appeared before an Imperial Defence Commission while he was visiting Britain in 1880. He told the commissioners that, if Britain precipitated some colonial war, the feeling of Canadians would be, “Well, here is a war the mother country has gone into in which we are not interested and about which we have not been consulted.” But if Britain itself should be attacked, Canadians, with “their strong affection for the mother country, and their desire to maintain the connection,” would immediately offer substantial aid in the form of both men and money.
Macdonald was even more vague about the much-discussed Imperial Federation. In a speech in Toronto in November 1881, he described the scheme as “impossible” and explained why. “We would never agree to send a number of men over to England to sit in Parliament there and vote away our rights and privileges.… We will govern our country. We will put on the taxes ourselves.” When a founding convention of the Imperial Federation League was held in London in 1884, he directed Charles Tupper, who was then high commissioner, to attend but to say nothing except amiable generalities.
Macdonald got away with so unsentimental a policy because he was genuinely sentimental about his admiration and love for Britain. His feelings about the monarchy were especially strong because the throne was occupied by Queen Victoria. Patently, he enjoyed immensely bending the knee to her. Even here, though, his nationalism showed. In a speech in Toronto in 1875, he referred to her—the first to do so, all but certainly—as “Queen of Canada.”* As helped immensely in his daily dealings with the British, high or low, there was “nothing viewy” about Macdonald, as the journalist Nicholas Flood Davin put it, meaning that, unlike some Canadians, he never lectured the British about morality.
Being Janus-faced earned him another victory, small but useful, in his “long game” of nudging and tugging Canada towards national maturity. This one involved getting the country onto the international diplomatic stage, even though, as a colony, it had no legal right to be there at all.
One of Macdonald’s early acts during his 1879 visit to Britain had been to hand over to Colonial Secretary Hicks Beach a long memorandum titled “Confidential Memorandum on Canada’s Representative in London.” Its opening sentence defined its purposes: “Canada has ceased to occupy the position of an ordinary possession of the Crown.” The country therefore needed someone to represent its national interests at the Imperial centre of London, as no other colony did at the time.
Macdonald had prepared the ground carefully. He informed Governor General Lorne fully on the project and was rewarded with a briefing note from Lorne to London describing him as “perhaps the last statesman who entirely looks to England and who may be believed to be devoted to imperial interests.” Much of the credit for Lorne’s helpfulness was due to his predecessor, Lord Dufferin, who had sent a perceptive report advising the Colonial Office to yield to Canadian demands for increased autonomy, because the alternative was likely to be “that the cry of Independence would be raised a generation too soon, and Annexation would be the direct and immediate consequence.”
Both Hicks Beach and Lord Salisbury, the foreign secretary, had serious reservations about an official Canadian representative. Macdonald resorted to “buncombe” arguments, such as that Canada might be able to benefit the Empire by offering specialized knowledge of what was going on in Washington. When these politicians yielded the field, the bureaucrats took over, arguing at length the proper title for an official Canadian representative. Finally, Macdonald exploded, “We might call him Nuncio or Legate or Letere Gubernatoris if we pleased.” Eventually, the title of high commissioner was agreed to—the title used today by all Commonwealth ambassadors in Commonwealth capitals. The bureaucrats won the last round: to Alexander Galt’s great disappointment, he was not granted official status as a diplomat.
Galt, able but highly temperamental, did some useful work, principally in attracting immigration. He made major efforts in Ireland, though with little success, because most priests feared that their flock would lose the faith in faraway lands. Galt’s great achievement was to convince Lord Rothschild, until then quite hostile to Canada, to sponsor some 1,500 Russian Jews to move to Moosomin in present-day Saskatchewan. Macdonald was ecstatic, telling Galt, “By establishing a Jew colony here, whether ultimately successful or not, a link—a missing link—will be established between Canada and Sidonia” (an ancient Phoenician city). He also negotiated trade pacts with France and Spain, with a Foreign Office official sitting in.
Repeatedly, though, Galt embarrassed Macdonald by interfering in British politics, as by making public speeches calling for Home Rule for Ireland. He also annoyed him by complaining he had insufficient funds to entertain guests.* By 1882, Galt had threatened to resign once too often, and Macdonald accepted his offer. Tupper succeeded him and functioned as high commissioner with previously concealed skill.
The New Imperialism remained a political force throughout the remainder of Macdonald’s career and on into the First World War. Then, Canadians came to realize they had more in common with American GIs—more open, more egalitarian and above all less class ridden—than with the British Tommies. Many of the effects of the New Imperialism were deeply dysfunctional, because it amounted to the ascendency of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. It threatened French Canadians and was one of the causes of the bitter sectarian wars of the late 1880s. Its clearest effect was to make English Canadians a great deal more English and so slow the country’s progress towards national maturity. This process would take another two-thirds of a century, and, legally, it happened only in 1931, when the Statute of Westminster raised all the dominions to the status of independent nation-states.*
Although Macdonald himself was never a New Imperialist, nor an imperialist of any kind, his love for Britain was absolute. He never accepted a peerage, but he was delighted to receive the highest offer the British establishment could extend to him—membership in the Athenaeum on Pall Mall, London’s grandest club, where dukes, ambassadors, bishops and generals turned the pages of the Times while sipping Scotch or brandy. Still, as Grant noted, that never stopped him from using Britain as a tool for “the making of Canada.”
* Rose’s post had been unofficial, and he was always described as someone “enjoying the confidence of the Canadian Government.”
† In 1885, the Queen made up for her unintended rudeness by awarding Macdonald the Grand Cross of the Bath. After he received it at a ceremony at Windsor Castle, he both dined with her and spent the night in the castle.
* Both were partial to brandy, Macdonald enjoying nips of it, while Disraeli often sipped white brandy when giving long public speeches—much as Macdonald once substituted gin for water.
* Almost a century had to pass before any British monarch gained that title, it being extended officially to Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, her coronation year.
* Macdonald’s guileful response was that Galt should deliberately serve poor food to Canadian guests, who would complain about their treatment when they returned home and so make it easier for the government to increase the entertainment budget.
* Not all British politicians agreed with this concession, one denouncing it as “repellent legalism.” His name was Winston Churchill.