1867 (30 page)

R
OBERT DICKEY
, the lawyer and businessman from Charles Tupper’s home town of Amherst, had been government leader in Nova Scotia’s upper house and a delegate to both the Charlotte-town and Quebec conferences. Despite his ties to Premier Tupper, he began to dissent from the developing consensus at Quebec. He supported the unpopular arguments of New Brunswick’s Edward Chandler for a loose federation, in which sovereignty would be vested in the individual provinces, and he complained that the financial terms proposed at Quebec would bankrupt Nova Scotia. After he came home, Dickey released a letter declaring he had “had the misfortune to differ from my colleagues in several important details of the scheme.”
¹
Since he still hoped to see union take place, Dickey was glad to see Tupper’s better-terms resolution ratified in 1866. But his apostasy had been a boon to the anti-confederate cause, and it was not forgotten by the winners. Dickey was dropped from the delegation Nova Scotia sent to London for the final confederation talks later that year.

Dickey did became a senator in 1867, but he nursed ambitions of becoming lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia. The appointment was the prime minister’s to give, but Sir John A. Macdonald was dubious. He brought up Dickey’s disloyalty during the confederation crisis. Was Dickey really a loyal supporter and worthy of this reward?

Dickey assured the leader he was indeed a loyal party man. “I shall support you whenever I think you are right,” he said.

“Anyone will support me when they think I am right,” Macdonald retorted. “What I want is a man that will support me when I am
wrong!”
Dickey never did become a lieutenant-governor. Macdonald offered the office as bait to recruit one anti-confederate Nova Scotian after another.
²

This may not be entirely a true story. Dickey is only one of the putative victims in the versions that exist. But who was the butt of Macdonald’s wit hardly matters; this has always been a story about Macdonald’s ruthless pragmatism in the use of men and of power. It adapts easily into a criticism of the cynical amorality of his era. Poor Dickey, who had been absolutely right about Nova Scotia’s need for better terms, was first denied the opportunity to help negotiate improvements, and later punished for being right too soon.

The misfortunes of Robert Dickey offer more than a lesson in cynicism about nineteenth-century politics. They point directly to the fundamentals of political leadership in the confederation era. And leadership inevitably brings to the fore John A. Macdonald, so far a minor figure in this account of the making of confederation.

Macdonald is the only politician of his era who still conveys a personal image – so much so that it has become hard to see his peers around him. His vivid personality still half-attracts, half-appals, much as it did in his own time. (Weeks into a progressive drunk, Macdonald once horrified an election crowd by vomiting on the stage when he got up to answer his opponent – and then won them back by saying, “I don’t know how it is, but every time I hear Mr. Jones speak it turns my stomach.”) When Macdonald died, Wilfrid Laurier, his successor as the master of Canadian politics, declared
that the life of Sir John A. Macdonald “is the history of Canada.” More than a century later, that verdict, at least on the history of confederation, remains widely held.
³

Laurier also said that “for the supreme art of governing men, Sir John Macdonald was gifted as few men in any land or any age were gifted.” To get at the leadership secrets of John A. Macdonald and their place in the constitution-making of the 1860s, there is a useful guide in a late-nineteenth-century connoisseur of political leadership, the English journalist Walter Bagehot.

In the years when confederation was being made, Walter Bagehot was a supremely fortunate young man in his late thirties. He came from a family that was very much part of the educated, well-to-do “ten thousand” who were Britain’s acknowledged rulers. He had been to university. He had been called to the bar but never had to practise. For several years he held the kind of position in his father’s bank that was influential and well-paid but left him abundant time to write literary essays. He had run for Parliament and been not much disappointed to lose. Wonderfully connected and well-informed, he was an amused and sceptical observer of politics and finance. He was blissfully married to an
MP’S
daughter, and in 1861 his father-in-law had secured him his dream job: editing the family’s magazine, the
Economist
.

The
Economist
had been founded to preach free trade and individual responsibility. Bagehot shared that faith, but he gave it an infusion of wit and style and tough-minded political analysis. The weekly editorial “leaders” he wrote for the
Economist
for the rest of his life made the magazine what it has been ever since: literate and ruthless at once, the pragmatic adviser to people who had money and power and intended to keep them and use them effectively.

Immersed in the politics, society, and finance of London, the
Economist
naturally saw the colonies as distant and not very interesting; Bagehot could hardly help but condescend. Still, running the Empire was part of the Englishman’s burden, so the
Economist
kept an eye on colonial developments. Starting in 1864, Bagehot offered
his readers concise opinions on all the key developments in British North America’s debates on confederation. Just weeks after the formation of the coalition at Quebec, Bagehot declared that “the latest intelligence from Canada is the most important which has reached us for some years,” though he credited the initiative to a “Mr. Browne.” In the following months his spelling improved. By the end of the year, the
Economist
had published four very enthusiastic Bagehot articles on the progress made at Charlottetown and Quebec and the constitution that was being proposed. “The object of the American colonists, it is clear from every clause of the resolutions, is to form a nation,” he declared after perusing the Quebec resolutions in November 1864.
⁴

In the months when he was taking occasional note of the confederation conferences, Bagehot was also busy writing
The English Constitution
, the book which, along with the
Economist
, preserved his fame. Published in book form in the year of confederation,
The English Constitution
was remarkably vivid for a text in political theory. In
The English Constitution
was born the aphorism that to scrutinize the working of monarchy too closely is to “let in daylight upon magic.” In Queen Victoria’s heyday, it cheerfully characterized the Queen and her son the Prince of Wales as “a retired widow and an unemployed youth.”
⁵
Elsewhere Bagehot deflated a not-quite-first-rank English politician with the throwaway line, “If he were a horse, no one would buy him.” Throughout,
The English Constitution
was remarkable for its clear-eyed, unsentimental look at how power and leadership were exercised in a constitutional monarchy.

The English Constitution
was also remarkable for its class prejudice. Racial minorities and women were largely beneath Bagehot’s gaze, but he was deeply alarmed by the prospect that Britain might grant voting rights to men of classes lower than his own. Bagehot thought himself principled in his insistence that the elected representatives of the people of Britain must continue to be chosen by “the ten thousand.” “The masses of England are not fit for an elective government,” he wrote in
The English Constitution
, and it was
simply self-defeating to give votes to people incompetent to choose their representatives intelligently. “The working classes contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion and therefore the fact of their want of influence in parliament does not impair the coincidence of parliament with public opinion,” said
The English Constitution.
⁶

Despite his deep hostility to votes for working people, Bagehot faintly regretted the impossibility of universal manhood suffrage in Britain. By keeping its population uneducated and in servitude, he wrote, Britain had left them too ignorant to vote. But he conceded that a literate population, one with widespread prosperity and relative social equality, could enjoy universal suffrage without disaster. This thought inspired the only reference to British North America in
The English Constitution:
“Where there is not honest poverty, where education is diffused, and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass of the people to elect a fair government. The idea is roughly realized in the North American colonies of England.” For a moment, Bagehot had grasped that British North America had both representative government on the British model and voting rights far broader than those existing in Britain itself.
⁷

Bagehot was too much an Englishman of “the ten thousand” to pursue this thought. It was impossible, really, to consider whether the English constitution might be working better in a colony than at home. Phrases from
The English Constitution
appeared in Bagehot’s articles on confederation, but Canadian processes did not influence
The English Constitution
. To tease out how Bagehot’s analysis of power and leadership might apply in a society of (by English standards) social equality, general education, and widespread participation in civil society – in British North America, that is – we have to read Canadian evidence into the Bagehot description.

The key to
The English Constitution
was Bagehot’s dictum that all constitutions have “dignified” and “efficient” parts. “Dignified” parts could command respect and wield influence – as the monarch did, and the great aristocrats of Britain often did – but real power
to govern lay with the “efficient” parts. The analyst’s challenge, said Bagehot, was always to discern which was which. In
The English Constitution
, Bagehot used this device to cut through the blather about the British government. He dismissed lofty notions of Britain’s “balanced” constitution of monarchy, Lords, and Commons. “A republic has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a monarchy,” Bagehot declared; Britain had become a state where the people’s representatives were supreme. In phrases he might have borrowed from George Brown’s analysis of the Canadian Senate, Bagehot argued that, in a parliamentary government with two chambers, only the more representative one could have real power. Accordingly, the House of Lords had become “a subordinate assembly,” dignified but without significant political power, and sure to be defeated in any serious confrontation with the Commons. Bagehot saw at once it would be the same with the Canadian Senate proposed in the Quebec resolutions, and he approved.
⁸

That left only the House of Commons, but Bagehot was just as hard on the Commons. The Commons, he said, was “a big meeting,” and everyone knows nothing ever gets done in a big meeting. Practical leadership lay with the cabinet, which put structure into the Commons’s discussions and, even more, with the prime minister who dominated the cabinet. The rise of cabinet government had brought about what Bagehot called “the close union, the near complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers” in the English constitution. Britain was “a disguised republic” whose “president” was the prime minister, said Bagehot. Under the constitution proposed by the Quebec conference, he saw, Canada would be the same.
⁹

The British constitution, however, provided a control upon the prime minister and his cabinet. An elected president, like the American one, held office for a fixed term of office. Whether or not he proved right for the job, those who made him president had no power over him between elections. A prime minister, however, was a president whose electoral college was the House of Commons, and the Commons was always ready and able to throw out a prime
minister at a moment’s notice. In Bagehot’s view, the power to make and destroy governments, not the power to make laws, was the root of the Commons’s power. In
The English Constitution
, he imagined a prime minister dismissing the often-heard suggestion that the Commons had not been accomplishing much lately. It had kept
him
in office, the prime minister might say, and keeping or dismissing him was its only really important job. Without the power to sustain or to dismiss the prime minister and cabinet, said Bagehot, the House would become merely a debating society. It would join the dignified parts of the constitution, while power migrated elsewhere.

Prime-ministerial leadership was the crucial subject of
The English Constitution
. Bagehot had learned about leadership by close observation of British politics, and he illustrated his book with lively references to many British statesmen, now mostly forgotten. Neither his book nor his editorials on confederation mentioned John A. Macdonald.
^*
But if he could have put aside his essential Englishness, Walter Bagehot might have found in Macdonald the perfect illustration for his case about leadership. What Bagehot set out in a book-length argument about parliamentary leadership, John A. Macdonald had always known in his fingertips.

For Donald Creighton, John A. Macdonald
was
confederation, Creighton left behind the widely held impression that confederation was made by Macdonald; that Cartier, Brown, various docile Maritimers, some bankers and railway magnates, and the Colonial Office all followed the lead of his visionary statesmanship. In fact, Macdonald was at first a minor figure in the making of confederation,
even though he was joint leader of the government of the Province of Canada. In the spring of 1864, he opposed George Brown’s federalism initiatives, standing among a handful of doubters, virtually all the rest of whom became anti-confederates. It was George-Étienne Cartier’s sudden willingness to deal with Brown which brought in Macdonald. In June 1864, the parties led by Cartier and Brown were the essential elements in the confederation coalition. Macdonald, leading only a handful of Upper Canadian politicians, had to follow Cartier or be dropped from power. Walter Bagehot, watching from faraway London, had it essentially right when he wrote of the new Canadian coalition as the Cartier–Brown ministry.