1867 (11 page)

T
HE CANADIAN
steamship
Queen Victoria
, which had carried the Canadian delegation down to Charlottetown in August 1864, sailed again in October. This time, she collected Maritime delegates at Pictou, Charlottetown, and Shediac, and carried them up the St. Lawrence, bucking headwinds and snow squalls all the way. Among the passengers eager to get to Quebec and the second confederation conference was Edward Whelan, who had recently been added to Prince Edward Island’s delegation.

Whelan makes an odd figure among the makers of confederation, at least among the anti-democratic, élitist fathers we take for granted. He was of working-class origins, raised by his mother and largely self-educated. He never had money or any security beyond what an Island printing office provided, and he had built his political career as a troublemaker and an agent of change. He once declared that all of history was an endless battle of aristocratic power against “the humbler classes of society, the men of small means and limited education.” In the cause of the humbler classes, he was capable of calling loyalty to the Empire “old rubbish” and the British
constitution “a mockery, a sham, and a delusion.” Smashing the existing state of property relations on Prince Edward Island was the foundation of his twenty-year political career there.
¹

In the tributes given him after his early death, everyone said Ned Whelan was “convivial.” There are just hints that he ate and drank too much and neglected his family. His power base lay with the Island’s Irish Catholic minority, but he was a backsliding Catholic and occasionally a thorn in the bishop’s side. Yet neither his confrontational politics nor his private life made him an outcast. He was generally acknowledged as Prince Edward Island’s liveliest orator on any subject from Shakespeare to educational reform. He ran the Island’s best newspaper, the
Examiner
, and filled it with his perceptive and wide-ranging writing. Though he was just forty in 1864, Whelan had been in Island politics since 1846 and he had never lost an election. In 1864, he was in opposition, but he had been a cabinet minister during most of the 1850s.

A perceptive political tactician, Whelan understood why he had been invited to join the delegation going to Quebec. As an opposition member who favoured union, he was doubly useful to provincial secretary (and confederation advocate) William Henry Pope, usually his bitter foe, who seems to have secured his appointment, along with that of an establishment tory, Heath Haviland. Whelan and Haviland would become Pope’s strongest pro-confederation allies among the increasingly sceptical delegates from the Island.

Whelan was the only confederation delegate to note the political calculation behind the recruiting of opposition members to the conferences. “Politicians are generally cunning fellows, and those in the several Maritime governments showed this quality to great advantage when they appointed members of the opposition,” he told a Montreal banquet in October, “because if the people of the several provinces should be so unwise as to complain, … the opposition would have to bear the censure as well as those in the administration.”
²

Whelan, so clear-eyed about why he had been invited, was none the less happy to participate. No apolitical ambassador, he saw
himself “representing the opinions of the liberal party” at the conference, and he had his own political agenda to pursue. Whelan had endorsed confederation mostly for its promise to bring the changes he wanted for the Island, and he wanted his views on this confederation heard, whatever the political risk. He boarded the
Queen Victoria
in high enthusiasm. From shipboard he sent back a promise to his readers to report on “the ancient and historic city” and its “mazy, crooked, narrow, and bewildering streets,” as well as “the great question of inter-colonial union.” He had never been to Quebec – or any part of the united Canadas – before.
³

Whelan had a magpie curiosity about people and places, but he was also temperamentally inclined to argue all his political stances back to principles. This makes him doubly curious, for historians have been at pains to insist that the makers of confederation were plain-speaking pragmatists, not philosophers. It was a point of pride, almost, for the historians of the 1960s to declare that the makers of confederation, as Donald Creighton put it in his forthright way, “saw no merit in setting out on a highly unreal voyage of discovery for first principles.” In the pragmatic, end-of-ideology 1950s and early 1960s, historians preferred to see the constitution-makers as politicians to their fingertips, manoeuvring their way with one eye on the voters and the other on Westminster toward any deal that seemed possible.
⁴

Since then, Creighton’s praise has often been turned into a rebuke to the delegates, used to characterize them – and their confederation – as unintellectual, reactionary, and incapable of assimilating big ideas. Professor Russell backhands the Canadian constitution as “a practical, though not philosophical accord.” Writer George Woodcock, less restrained, sneers at it as “a makeshift document cobbled together by colonial politicians.”
⁵

If historians and political scientists do challenge this aphilosophical view of confederation, they do so by invoking the name of Edmund Burke. This is no compliment. In the twentieth century, Burke has become perhaps the most spectacularly out-of-fashion
political philosopher in the canon. Few who point to Burke’s influences on the makers of confederation mean to honour them by the identification.

Edward Whelan would not admit being a disciple of Edmund Burke. An Irish Catholic immigrant with more than a little sympathy for Irish nationalism and Irish rebels, he preferred as his role model Henry Grattan, who, as the founder of a short-lived Irish parliament in the late 1700s, was a hero to mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalists. Edmund Burke was Irish, but he had made his career in London and had opposed Grattan’s plans for Ireland. To Whelan, he seemed entirely too English and too conservative. Whelan ranked Grattan far above Burke both as orator and thinker.
⁶

As an ink-stained newspaperman in a small town in a small colony where politics were mostly known for their petty viciousness, Whelan wrote to meet deadlines rather than out of philosophical contemplation. He had gone to work at Joseph Howe’s newspaper office at the age of eight, and his further education, at a modest Catholic institute in Halifax, ended at nineteen when he moved to Charlottetown to launch his own newspaper. He had none of the cultivated leisure of Burke in England or Madison and Jefferson among the American founding fathers. No philosophical giant, simply someone who had absorbed Howe’s – and the age’s – love for wide reading, debate, and self-improvement, Whelan was never intimidated by ideas. He cited English political writer “Junius” for the motto of one of his Charlottetown papers and Euripides for another, and he studded his speeches with literary and historical references in the best Victorian fashion.
⁷

Whelan expressed and acted on a philosophy of government virtually extinct today, easily caricatured and easily misunderstood, but characteristic of his era and shared by many of his fellow makers of the Canadian constitution. Despite Whelan’s urge to make government an engine of social change in Prince Edward Island, that philosophy was indeed best exemplified and argued out by Edmund Burke. And so, arriving at Quebec in October 1864, Whelan brought
with him the ghost of Edmund Burke to haunt the proceedings of the conference. We cannot take that conference’s measure without measuring Burke’s shadow on it.

In life, Edmund Burke never walked the ramparts of Quebec. Born in Ireland in 1729, he went to London as a student, and remained near there as a writer, a political adviser, and a member of Parliament, mostly in opposition, until his death in 1797. He went once to France, but rarely anywhere else. He did not visit North America, even when he was the London agent for the colony of New York in the years before the American Revolution, and he made few substantial references to Canadian matters.

In Whelan’s day as in ours, Edmund Burke was most famous as the author of
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, a spectacular polemic, one of the greatest in the language. Published in 1790,
Reflections
condemned every part of the French Revolution, even its rights-of-man,
Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité
phase, before the Terror and the rise of Napoleon soured many of Burke’s fellow citizens on it. Burke called ceaselessly not merely for resistance to revolutionary France but for war, “a long war,” to confront, contain, and overthrow the revolution abroad and to repress its admirers in England.

The uncompromising force and rhetorical brilliance of
Reflections
made it an inspiration for every counter-revolutionary tract for the next two centuries.
Reflections
was also an impassioned declaration of the sacredness of the Bourbon monarchy, with a paean to the glories of Marie Antoinette that today is incomprehensible. “The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!” was the lesson Burke drew from the queen’s fall from the elevated sphere where he had once worshipped her, “glittering like the morningstar, full of life and splendor and joy.”
⁸

More deeply,
Reflections
was an argument against abstract theories of government and in favour of tradition – seemingly, in favour of any tradition, no matter how unjust (or actually
because
of its
injustice, in the view of those who saw Burke as the paid apologist of the ruling class). While its subject was France,
Reflections
was addressed to Burke’s British compatriots. It was an argument against political change in Britain.

Reflections
has remained Burke’s most famous work, the one most often anthologized and reprinted. It is frequently taken as the essence of Burke’s political philosophy. As disciples of Burke, therefore, the confederation-makers are often declared to be not merely averse to change, but positively hostile to it and to democracy, national autonomy, and most of the values that have held sway in the twentieth century. Ned Whelan’s case suggests, however, that the lessons they drew from Burke were hardly so simple.

As a counter-revolutionary monarchist and impassioned defender of the British constitution, Burke might be expected to be a blimpish Imperialist, celebrating the blessings of British rule worldwide. Yet, during the American Revolution, Burke consistently supported the cause of the American colonists, even when he was a member of the Parliament that was waging war against the Thirteen Colonies. He devoted decades to a probing criticism of Britain’s empire in India, going so far as to argue that, in ruling India, Britain’s goal should be “studying the genius, the temper, and the manners of the people, and adapting to them the laws that we establish” – an incomprehensible and subversive notion to most of the builders of the British Raj. The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien has discovered inside Burke the tribune of Protestant England an Irishman with deep sympathies for oppressed Catholic Ireland. Burke opposed Whelan’s hero Grattan because Grattan’s Irish Parliament, despite the rhetoric of national independence that attracted Whelan, had mostly empowered Irish Protestants to oppress Irish Catholics more effectively.
⁹

Burke was hardly more favourable to Imperial power in his comments about British North America. Canada, a minor appendage to the more consequential Thirteen Colonies, was mostly beneath his notice, but his few remarks about it were strikingly unsympathetic
to the cause of Empire. Burke had condemned Britain’s deportation of the Acadians as both evil and self-defeating. “We did, in my opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretenses that in the eye of an honest man are not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern, or to reconcile, gave us no sort of right to extirpate.”
¹⁰
In 1780 he attacked Acadia’s successor colony, Nova Scotia – then serving as a vital bulwark in Britain’s war against the Americans – as an “ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favoured brat,” and an endless, useless drain on the British taxpayer.
¹¹
In 1774, just a decade after the conquest of New France, he made a proposal to empower the conquered French Canadians that would have been startling in Lord Durham’s day – and long after. “Give them English liberty, give them an English constitution,” he told Parliament about the Canadians, “and then, whether they speak French or English, whether they go to mass or attend our own communion, you will render them valuable and useful subjects of Great Britain.”
¹²

Why did Burke consistently dismiss the whole basis of British Imperial rule in Canada? Burke was an anti-imperialist at the heart of the Empire, and his anti-imperialism grew from the same roots as his counter-revolutionary fervour. He believed British political usages were best for Britain because they had evolved in Britain for British needs, and he believed all governments should, in effect, be grown rather than invented according to a theory. Against the theoretical Enlightenment philosophy of the rights of man, adopted enthusiastically by slave-holding Virginians and despotic French revolutionaries, Burke preferred the actual rights that Englishmen had evolved ad hoc over centuries. In his opposition to building governments on a theory lay the root of the
Reflections’s
attack on the French Revolution and the root of its defence of the British constitution.

But if the constitution that had evolved in Britain was appropriate for Britain, it followed that it might not be appropriate for societies that had evolved differently. In an age that had made General Wolfe a heroic martyr, Burke was sceptical of governments rooted
in conquest. He argued that ties between a nation and its colonies could only be rooted in common interests and a shared heritage, never in coercion. His willingness to let colonies go if those ties could not be sustained was, of course, heresy and treason to the handfuls of Protestant Englishmen struggling to maintain and to justify their authority over the Catholics of Ireland, the Hindus of India – and the French population of Canada.