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The Scot and Canada
II. The Scot in Canada


Although it is not until towards the end of the eighteenth century that the Scot begins to play an important role on the Canadian stage, his connection with the Dominion is far older. The Scots have always been wanderers, but until the Union of 1707 they went mostly to the Continent of Europe. The reason for this was that the colonies across the Atlantic were English settlements and the Scot was not permitted to go there. He was an alien in the eyes of the English law. Navigation Acts, ever since the time of Cromwell, had been passed for the fostering of English and the crippling of Scottish trade. The English Navy enforced these decrees. The result was that the Continent was literally filled with Scottish soldiers of fortune. As Scott puts it in the Introduction to A Legend of Montrose:

'The contempt of commerce entertained by young men having some pretence to gentility, the poverty of the country of Scotland, the natural disposition to . . . adventure, all conduced to lead the Scots abroad into the military service of countries which were at war with each other.'

In France, particularly, the Scots acquired an immense influence. In fact, they were destined to prove "the nerve of the French army at a time when the people were sunk in wretchedness, dispirited by defeats of no ordinary character, and had lost all hope of self-helpfulness."

Poland was another happy hunting-ground for the Scots. They went to that country in various capacities — as pedlars of tinware and knives and scissors, as colporteurs, as soldiers, as statesmen. Fynes Morison, writing in 1598, tells us that

'The Scots flock in great numbers into Poland, abounding in all things for food and yielding many commodities. And in these kingdoms they lived at this time in great multitudes, rather for the poverty of their own kingdom than for any great traffic they exercised there.'

Many of the Scots who went to Poland grew rich, and Stephen Batory, who was King in Poland from 1576 until 1586, gave them a special district in Cracow to live in. That amazing peripatetic, William Lithgow, who wrote The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adven-tures and Painfull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares, asserts that there were thirty thousand Scots in the country in 1625. The tie between the Poles and the Scots was strengthened, if that is the correct word in this connection, when James Stuart, the Old Pretender, married Clementina, the daughter of John Sobieski. They were the parents of "Bonnie" Prince Charles who, according to his admirers, was a presentable young man, but according to the ladies of Glasgow, who were Whigs, the very reverse. Ivor Brown, the versatile editor of The Observer, goes so far as to assert that "the various strangely dissimilar portraits (of Ascanius) are a greater tribute to Highland finery than to the Stuart facade."

A typical Scots soldier of fortune was Sir James Turner, (1615-1686), a son of the minister of Borth-wick. Turner is the original of Dugald Dalgetty. His Memoirs make fascinating reading.

'I was not seventeen years old when I left the schooles, where I had lightlie passed through that course of philosophie which is ordinarlie taught in the Universities of Scotland ... I stayed a yeare after with my father at Dalkeith, applying myself to the study of humane letters and historic, in both which I always tooke delight . . . But before I attained to the eighteenth yeare of my age, a restless desire entered my mind to be, if not an actor, at least a spectator of these warrs which at that time made so much a noyse over all the world, and were managed against the Roman Emperor and the Catholicke League in Germanie, under the auspicious conduct of the thrice famous Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden. Sir James Lumsdaine was then levieing a regiment for that service; with him (my neer-est friends consenting to it) I engaged to go over ensigney to his brother Robert Lumsdaine, eldest Capitaine.'

Turner was an unprincipled gun-man, a bullying, hard-drinking thug; but he was not the "butcher" Defoe makes him out to have been. Andrew Lang's opinion that Turner was "infinitely more of a Christian than the Saints of the Covenant" is preposterous. It is the sort of thing we would expect Lang to say. Turner spent the latter years of his life at his place in Ayrshire writing his Memoirs and his Pallas Armata, a series of essay jottings on the art of war.

Another fascinating autobiography is that of Patrick Gordon of Cruden (1635-1699), extracts from which were edited by Joseph Robertson in 1859. Under the year 1651 Gordon writes:

'Having thus, by the most loveing care of my dear parents attained to as much learning as the ordinary country schools affoard, and being unwilling, because of my dissenting in religion, to go to the University in Scotland, I resolved . . . to go to some foreigne country, not careing much on what pretence, or to what country I should go, seeing I had no knowne friend in any foreigne place.'

Gordon had a chance to take service under the King of Poland but decided not to do so for this reason:

'If I take service in Poland there are the ordinary risks of the soldier's life, the ordinary chances of promotion; if, however, I take service under the Czar, the risks are greater, but the chances of promotion likewise greater.'

So Patrick went to Muscovy and became Commander-in-Chief of the armies of Peter the Great.

* * * * * *

In the seventeenth century many young Scots students of law attended the Dutch Universities and during the "persecuting times" the Low Countries were a haven for the Covenanters. John Erskine of Carnock describes in his Diary the Scots colony in Rotterdam in March, 1685.

4th.— This afternoon I landed at Rotterdam, and went to James Bruce's coffee-house, where I met first with my brother Charles.

5th.— I was dining in Mr. Robert Fleming, and did see the Laird of Westshields.

6th.— I met with Mr. Robert Langlands, my old master, whom I longed much to see. I was with William Sythrum and several other friends.

7th.— I dined with Mr. Forrester, and was afternoon in Mr. Russell's, and with Doctor Blackader in the Scots coffee-house.

8th.— I was at the Scots Church and did hear Mr. Robert Fleming, Acts xiv. 22, and Mr. John Hogg, Psalm xi. 1, both ministers of the Scots congregation at Rotterdam. I heard also Mr. Patrick Verner in the Kirk.

9th.— I took a chamber this day in Robert Gibb's, sometime merchant in Stirling, having staid until now with my brother Charles.

The Jacobite troubles sent many Scots scurrying to the Continent — men like the Keith brothers, one of whom became a Field-Marshal under Frederick the Great and died "gloriously" at Hochkirchen in 1758. The '45 was responsible for another Scots invasion, and at least two of the Prince's followers, the Chevalier de Johnstone and the Commandant de Ramezay, took service with the French and fought against the English at Louisbourg and Quebec. The Chevalier wrote an account of the battle on the heights of Abraham, which he called a Dialogue in Hades, where the speakers were supposed to be Wolfe and Montcalm; the Franco-Scottish de Ramezay handed over the keys of the Citadel of Quebec to General James Murray, another Scot, who had been Wolfe's ablest lieutenant.

* * * * * *

But, despite the prohibitions and the Navigation Acts of the English, the Scots actually did try their hand at colonising. They were extraordinarily successful in Ulster, for instance, although Ulster can hardly be termed a colonial venture in the strict sense of the term. But in 1621, thirty-eight years after the founding of the first English colony, Newfoundland, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the Privy Council of Scotland granted Sir William Alexander a charter for the territory which is now roughly covered by Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The French knew the district as Acadie, and when Richelieu learned what was afoot he sent a squadron to enforce the claims of his master, Louis XIII, to the territory. The expedition was wiped out by a Franco-Scot, David Kirke. Kirke not only destroyed seventeen of the eighteen ships that were sent by Richelieu, but seized Tadoussac, and in July, 1629, forced Champlain to surrender at Quebec. Three years later, however, Charles I gave the French back their colony in return for half of his marriage settlement which had never been paid. Scotland thus lost her first colony. The Scots who had gone there as settlers either came back to Scotland thoroughly disgruntled or stayed on and intermarried with the French.

In the year in which Sir William Alexander obtained his Charter for Nova Scotia the name of Abraham Martin, dit l'Ecossais, appears in the Quebec registers. Martin, after whom the Plains were named, was the first known pilot on the St. Lawrence. A daughter of his married Medart Chouart Groseillers, whom we have mentioned already and who, indirectly, played an important part in the development of Canada. Sir George Carteret met Groseillers and his friend Radisson at Boston in 1665, heard about the fur trade from them and induced them to come to England, where they met Charles II at Oxford. The result was the granting of a Royal Charter five years later to Prince Rupert and the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company. The Company was at first an entirely English concern, but it gradually fell into the hands of the Scots. Its officials were largely recruited from the Orkneys and the Highlands. Douglas MacKay, who wrote The Honourable Company, describes the

Orcadians as "a close, prudent, quiet people, strictly faithful to their employers." But there is reason to doubt the accuracy of this picture.

* * * * * *

The Scots made another attempt at colonisation. Lord Ochiltree tried to settle some of his countrymen in Cape Breton Island but in the fall of 1629 the settlers were ejected by the French and shipped back to Europe. To add insult to injury the French built the fortress of Louisburg on the site of the Scots settlement. The Scots also founded settlements in East New Jersey and South Carolina. They called the latter Stuart's Town. These Scots were refugees from religious persecution in their own country and one of their leaders was William Dunbar, afterwards Principal of Glasgow University. In 1686 the Spaniards and their Indian allies wiped the place out. Then the Scots made one last effort as an independent nation to have a colony of their own. A company was organised by William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England, to trade with the West Indies, and in 1695 the settlement was authorised by the Scots Parliament. Settlers were sent out to Darien but everything was against them. William was officially opposed to the scheme because the London merchants who financed him hated the idea of independent Scottish colonial competition. The Governors of the English colonies in the West Indies were accordingly ordered to give the Scots no help whatsoever, and the result was that the Scots had to surrender to the Spaniards. That was the end of their dream of colonial expansion as an independent nation. The immediate result of the Darien fiasco was intense bitterness between the English because they had been wronged by them; the English hated the Scots because they had injured them. The affair almost issued in war between the two countries. What it finally did was to hasten the Union of 1707, and when that Treaty was signed the English gave their northern neighbours £398,085 to compensate them for the financial loss they had suffered. The Union meant the death of the Scots as an independent nation; it also meant the opening up of new possibilities for them. But from now on, as Andrew Dewar Gibbs points out, the directing brain lay ... in England, and it was an essentially English Empire that Scotsmen were ... to help in building . . . When Scotsmen next went overseas it was to do the business, fight the battles, and found the colonies of imperial England.' [Scottish Empire, pp. 5 and 30.]

* * * * * *

Until three years or so before the American Revolution the coming of the Scots to Canada was sporadic. Most of these Scots were soldiers and administrators; those who came later were traders and colonisers. The wars with the French brought an influx of Scottish soldiers to the country and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that if it had not been for the valour of these men the conquest of Canada could not have taken place as quickly as it did. Some years before the '45 Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session, had suggested the formation of a Gaelic gendarmerie to police the Highlands. Out of this idea grew first the famous Black Watch. Then the elder Pitt, taking his cue from Forbes, formed the 77th, or Montgomery's regiment, which was named after the Colonel, Archibald Mont-gomerie, son of the Earl of Eglintoun. In the words of John Richard Green, at a time "when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had . . . enlist(ed) on the side of loyalty." ['I sought for merit wherever it could be found . . . and found it in the mountains of the North. I called it forth, and drew into your service a hardy and intrepid race of men; men who, when left by your jealousy, became a prey to the artifices of your enemies, and had gone nigh to have overturned the State, in the war before the last. These men, in the last war, were brought to combat on your side; they served with fidelity as they fought with valour, and conquered for you in every quarter of the world.' Extract from speech, delivered in the House of Commons in 1759. Quoted by John Anderson in his Essay On the State of Society and Knowledge in the Highlands of Scotland, p. 137, (1827).] Another regiment, the 78th, or Fraser Highlanders, was raised by Simon Fraser, the son of the notorious Simon who was executed on Tower Hill in 1747 for his share in the '45.

The history of the Fraser Highlanders is an interesting one and has a very direct bearing on Canadian development. After Culloden one of the English officers stationed in Inverness with the English "army of occupation" was young Major Wolfe, who was on Cumberland's staff at Culloden. Wolfe disliked Scotland and the Scots, the Highlanders, especially. He was an odd young man. He did not make friends easily and had the reputation among the Highland families who put themselves out of the way to be pleasant to the English officers of the army of occupation, of being stiff and aloof. He was bored and unhappy and wrote disgruntled and bitter letters to his father. But by a fortunate chance John Forbes, the son of the famous Duncan, was living in Culloden House, or, rather, was occupying part of it, as his father had lost thousands of pounds in the Hanoverian cause and had left the estate, in consequence, heavily mortgaged. John Forbes remembered Wolfe; they had been subalterns together and had fought with the Guards at Dettingen. They had never been particularly friendly as John was bent on having what is called a good time while Wolfe studied his military manuals. It was, however, the most natural thing in the world that Forbes — although he had a sickly wife — should invite his former comrade to Culloden House and that Wolfe should meet there young Simon Fraser who had lost his title and estates temporarily and was at the time practising law in Edinburgh.

Wolfe was, despite his dislike for the Scots, a fair and open-minded young man. He was an English officer, loyal to his caste, but under no delusions as to the quality of the troops in the English regiments in those days. When he heard of Braddock's disaster at Fort Duquesne, (1755), he wrote to his father these scathing words about the red-coats:

'I know their discipline to be bad and their valour precarious. They are easily put into disorder, and hard to recover out of it. They frequently kill their officers through fear, and murder one another in their confusion. Their shameful behaviour in Scotland . . . clearly denoted the extreme ignorance of the officers, and the disobedient and dastardly courage of the men.'

Wolfe knew, too, that the Government victory at Culloden had been a touch-and-go affair. Jail-birds, drunkards and hardened criminals had been pitted against a disorderly and disorganised medley of starved and disgruntled Highlanders, and the luck was with the English. Wolfe had little use for his Commander-in-chief, the "Butcher" Cumberland. "I

have surveyed the field of battle of Culloden with great exactness," he wrote, "and find room for a military criticism as well as a place for a little ridicule upon some famous transactions of that memorable day." Contrasting the conduct of the red-coated, white-breeched, spatterdashed scum of the English prisons with the Highlanders with whom he came into contact and had the opportunity of observing daily, Wolfe came to one conclusion — the Highlanders were good people and there was admirable fighting material among their young men. Especially among the Frasers. He did not like their chief but he saw more in him than did Robert Louis Stevenson. So young Simon, who had really gone out in the '45 under duress, was commissioned to raise the Fraser Highlanders — the sons of the men, and the very men themselves, who only a few years before had fought against the Hanoverian George. Young Lovat led his clansmen up the heights at Quebec, guided by a Glasgow man, Major Stobo, and was wounded in the battle. He died a Major-General in the British army with his title, honours, and estates restored.

* * * * * *

After the capture of Quebec, a Scot, General James Murray, served as military Governor of the district and became the first civil Governor of Canada. He did his best to conciliate the French but his policy roused the most bitter opposition. He believed, as he explained to the Lords of Trade in London, that

'Little, very little, will content the New Subjects, but nothing will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here, but the expulsion of the Canadians (French), who are perhaps the bravest and best race upon the Globe, a race who cou'd they be indulged with a few priviledges wch. the laws of England deny to Roman Catholicks at home, wou'd soon get the better of every National antipathy to their Conquerors and become the most faithful and most useful set of Men in this American Empire.'

Naturally, a man of vision like Murray had his political and personal enemies. The Scots fur-traders, who had their headquarters in Montreal, were amongst his bitterest critics. "The most immoral collection of men" he had ever known, Murray called them, "four hundred contemptible sutlers and traders." These men complained that the Governor had adopted a highhanded military attitude towards them and treated them, when they presented their case before him, with "A Rage and Rudeness of Language and Demeanour." They managed in the end to get him recalled, but if the Government in London had only listened to Murray and taken his advice, many later problems need not have arisen. On the other hand, the seeds of the policy he had sowed brought forth good fruit in the near future. The new trouble for England came from the older colonies in the South.

When these colonies began to get restive, General Sir Guy Carleton, who had succeeded Murray and became Governor-in-Chief of Quebec in 1774, took counsel with the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church and with those Seigneurs who had not gone back to France. One immediate result was the Quebec Act of 1774. The main object of this Act was to strengthen British power by attaching the leaders of French-Canadian opinion more firmly to the British Crown. Many of the French rights were restored; the Roman Catholics were allowed the free exercise

of their religion and the clergy were confirmed in their right "to hold, receive and enjoy their accustomed dues and rights, with respect to such persons only as shall confess the said religion." Socially, Carleton with his Versailles-educated wife, the Catholic Lady Maria Howard, did much to cement relations between the French and the English, but the very fact that an English Governor of an English colony should have married a Catholic wife, goaded the ultra-Protestant colonists in the South to near insurrection. They regarded the Quebec Act as a challenge to their political and religious liberties. They petitioned for its repeal on the ground that it established on the Continent of America a Church and a religion which they feared and hated. Carleton's paradox that, in order to make Quebec British, it had to be prevented from becoming English, proved a boomerang in the end. The famous clash at Lexington on April 19, 1775, was the beginning of the end of the British domination of the vast continent of North America. There were Scots on both sides in that conflict and one of them, John Witherspoon, who had been at one time minister of Paisley Abbey Church, became possibly the most powerful propagandist in the revolutionary cause. "Jupiter" Carlyle, who naturally disliked him intensely, says somewhere in his Autobiography that Witherspoon was one of the most formidable antagonists of the British Government in the revolted colonies.

But all the Scots did not become citizens of the new Republic. One group from Tryon county in the State of New York, women, children and the older men, trekked north to Glengarry. The younger men who were fit at all enlisted in the King's Loyal Americans.

* * * * * *

When the Americans invaded Canada in 1775 there were less than 2,000 soldiers in the country. But one battalion, known as the Royal Highland Emigrants, or the 84th, was mainly recruited from colonies of Frasers and commanded by Colonel Allan Maclean of the Macleans of Torluisk. When the Americans laid siege to Quebec in December, 1775, a former member the Fraser Highlanders, James Thompson, organised the defences of the capital. When the Americans under General Montgomery tried to take the Citadel during a heavy snow-storm, it was a Scot, "honest Hugh McQuarters of the Royal Artillery", who put the match to the gun which killed the revolutionary commander and his two aides. Some of the Scots who took part in the defence of Quebec were Catholics and Jacobites. "I will help to defend the country from our invaders," said one of these, a Cameron, "but I will not take service under the House of Hanover." When the war was over John Nairne and Malcolm Fraser, both Captains in the Fraser Highlanders, obtained grants of land in the neighbourhood of Murray Bay and took some of their men, discharged from the army, with them. These men, as Le Moyne puts it, became "the immediate progenitors of genuine Jean-Baptistes — such as the Warrens, McLeans, Harveys, the Blackburns and several other families who, of their Scotch ancestry, have retained nothing save the name." [Maple Leaves, First Series, p. 71.]

Meanwhile the Hudson's Bay trade, which had suffered during the wars with the French, was picking up again. The Scottish tobacco trade, ruined by the American war, had driven the Glasgow merchants to bleaching and dyeing. But the Scot in America had different ideas. One of the first of these far-seeing speculators was Alexander Henry, a native of the Scottish colony of New Jersey. Henry, who had obtained a license to trade on Lake Superior, went into partnership with an old Frenchman, Jean Baptiste Cadotte, and this association developed, ultimately, into the North West Company. Henry published the story of his experiences under the title, Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, in 1807. Mrs. Jameson, for a time the wife of the Attorney-General of Ontario and the author of a book on Shakespeare's Heroines, describes Henry in her Winter Sketches and Summer Rambles as

'plain, unaffected, telling what he has to tell in few and simple words, and without comment — the internal evidence of truth — render not only the narrative, but the man himself, his personal character, unspeakably interesting . . . He is the Ulysses of these parts, and to cruise among the shores, rocks, and islands of Lake Huron without Henry's Travels were like coasting Calabria and Sicily without the Odyssey in your head or hand.'

In 1779 the old originals formed a Joint Stock Company, which was to be known as the North West Company. It was reorganised in 1783 by that dominating autocrat, Simon McTavish, a Scot who had been fur-trading in Albany, as its President. One of the charter members of the Company was James McGill, the founder of McGill University.

* * * * * *

Another of these Scottish fur-traders was Alexander Mackenzie, a Stornoway lad. Mackenzie came to Montreal during the American Revolutionary war and was sent to a post at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca. From there he made his celebrated journeys to the Arctic and the Pacific. He went to the Pacific in 1793 with a Glengarry Scot, Alexander Mackay, and reached his objective after a series of hairbreadth escapes. The Mackenzie River he had explored four years earlier. At the age of forty-five Mackenzie went back to Scotland, where he published his Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, in the years 1789 and 1793. Francis Jeffrey praised the work highly in the Edinburgh Review; Napoleon read it at Longwood. For his work of exploration Mackenzie was knighted. He died in 1820.

Another early chronicler of Canada was Alexander Ross (1783-1856), a Scot in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. In 1849 Ross published the Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River, which the Athenaeum called "one of the most striking pictures of a life of adventure." He also wrote the Fur Traders of the Far West, a work which he dedicated to his countryman, Sir George Simpson, the most famous Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Simpson was a great traveller and the story of his journeyings in his vast bailiwick was set down in the diary of his companion, Archibald McDonald. Simpson was a flamboyant, histrionic sort of character and insisted that the highest deference should be paid him in his capacity as Governor. But, whatever his faults, he did "a great work in

Canada in reconciling those who had been deadly rivals in the North-West and in exploring, opening up and settling this vast territory. In his long reign . . . he drove home and consolidated the foundations laid by the heroic efforts of Selkirk and Mackenzie. He was not a Selkirk, nor yet a Mackenzie, but his name will live." [Gibb, op. cit. p. 59.] Simpson went back to London via Montreal, Vancouver, and Siberia, and published the account of his travels in a Narrative of a journey Round the World, in 1847. He was knighted in that year and died in 1860.

* * * * * *

The Earl of Selkirk was the fifth of that rank and title, the uncle of Burns's friend Daer, the lord he "dinner'd wi'" at Professor Dugald Stewart's. Selkirk, although a Lowlander, had been greatly perturbed by the 'Clearances' in the Highlands. Realising, with reluctance, that the English Government would do absolutely nothing to assist emigration, he decided to do what he could for the Highlanders himself. Mackenzie's journal had put ideas into his head. The Red River fascinated him and he decided to settle some of his countrymen there.

* * * * * *

Lord Selkirk had practical experience of the difficulties of a settler's life in a new country. A settlement of his in Prince Edward Island had been highly successful; another, composed entirely of United Empire Loyalists, was doing well on Lake St. Clair. In order to further his scheme for a Red River colony Selkirk went to Montreal, then largely a Scottish town. He was warmly received and lavishly entertained. He met everyone that mattered, discussed his plans with the great fur-traders and thought he had won them over. In 1810 he was ready to start work in the Red River area. Then he struck a snag. As the district he had marked out for settlement fell within the scope of the Hudson's Bay charter, he obtained a controlling interest in that Company. But the North West Company, which had been founded in 1783 and was directed and controlled from Montreal and was a purely Scottish concern, saw in this move a plot between his lordship and the Hudson's Bay Company directed against their interests. Mackenzie, the explorer, and others, although they belonged to the North West Company, then acquired shares in the rival Company with a view to blocking the scheme. They failed and 116,000 square miles of land in the Red River district were set aside for settlement. Selkirk's idea of cultivating the land was obviously radically opposed to the notions of the fur-traders, who flourished only because the territory was given over to the fur-bearing animals. In other words, the traders saw in Selkirk not an altruist who had nothing but the interests of his poor fellow countrymen at heart, but a scheming, crafty politician who was seeking to ruin them. His motives were deliberately misrepresented and the Nor'-Westers did their best to discredit him and destroy his scheme. But Selkirk pushed on with his plans.

The first party of settlers, from Stornoway, landed at York Factory on Hudson Bay in September, 1811. Their leader was a Scots Canadian, Miles MacDonnel. The following June they reached the Red River after a seven hundred miles' difficult trek. There, living conditions were thoroughly miserable. Food was scarce, the half-breeds were unfriendly. The North West Company sent two Gaelic-speaking agents provocateurs, Duncan Cameron and Alexander Macdonell, to stir up trouble among the colonists. Many of them deserted. Finally, under the leadership of a Scots half-breed, Cuthbert Grant, a number of hoodlums disguised as Indians attacked the settlement and murdered the Governor, Robert Semple. The massacre is known as the battle of Seven Oaks.

This spurred Selkirk to action. He went to Montreal towards the end of 1815 and tried to get Sir Gordon Drummond, who was in command of the troops there, to help him. But Drummond refused. Selkirk then took a hundred Swiss mercenaries of the De Meuron regiment, which was about to be disbanded, and set off with this force to restore order in the Red River Settlement. He marched to Fort William, the chief trading post of the North West Company, occupied it, and arrested a number of persons, among whom was Simon Fraser, the explorer. Sending the prisoners eastward for trial, he made a treaty with the Indian chiefs and gave land to his veteran De Meurons. The worst days of the settlement were over but Selkirk became the target for the most bitter persecution. His enemies were utterly unscrupulous and in the end they drove him from Canada in 1818, a broken man. He died in the south of France in 1820. After his death the Nor'-Westers and the Hudson's Bay Company amalgamated, and young George Simpson was appointed Governor. The man who was mainly responsible for bringing about the amalgamation was Edward Ellice, an Aberdonian. Selkirk, writes Gibb,

... 'in his courage, his integrity, and his selflessness, was one of the few wholly admirable men who ever greatly served the Empire. For great his services were, beyond all question. His was the vision that foresaw abundance on the plains of central Canada and his the brain and hand that converted vision into reality. And that reality is Canadian reality. For had not Selkirk undertaken his task when he did, it might well, in those days of indefinite boundaries, have been undertaken by one whose allegiance was not to the British Empire and so a rich province might have been lost. But the greatest service of all consisted in the example of a man, nobly born, rich, beloved, who used and gave all his gifts and his very life for the sake of Scotland and the Empire. His name is little known in Scotland to-day. His example has never been followed.'

In his Observations on the Present State of the Highlands of Scotland (1805) Selkirk paints a much brighter picture of his settlement on Prince Edward Island. In 1803 he sent eight hundred persons in three ships to help colonise the Island. They came from Skye, Ross-shire, North Argyllshire, Inverness-shire and Uist. Selkirk visited the new arrivals just after the first ship had landed them.

'I left the island in September, 1803; and after an extensive tour on the Continent, returned in the end of the same month the following year. It was with the utmost satisfaction I then found that my plans had been followed up with attention and judgment.

'I found the settlers engaged in securing the harvest which their industry had produced. They had a small proportion of grain of various kinds, but potatoes were the principal crop; these were of excellent quality, and would have been alone sufficient for the entire support of the settlement. ... In little more than a year, one year from the date of their landing on the island, had these people made themselves independent of any supply that did not arise from their own labour.

'Having secured the first great object, subsistence, most of them are now proceeding to improve their habitations and some are already lodged in a manner superior to the utmost wishes they would have formed in their native country. . . . The commencement of improvement to be seen in some of these habitations is, I believe, not so much of a personal wish for better accommodation as of the pride of landed property, a feeling natural to the human breast, and particularly consonant to the ancient habits of the Highlanders . . .'

Selkirk's settlement was by no means the first in Prince Edward Island. In 1771 Judge Stewart of Cantyre in Argyllshire went there with his family and in 1772 Captain John MacDonald of Glenaladale led a batch of Catholic Highlanders from Uist and the mainland to the Island. In 1774 a settlement of Low-landers from Dumfries, under Wellwood Waugh of Lockerbie, looked the place over, found it not to their liking and left for Pictou.

* * * * * *

It is not our purpose to discuss the terrible and tragic story of the Highland "Clearances". There is an extensive literature on the subject and anyone who wishes to do so may consult books like Mackenzie's The History of the Highland Clearances, Donald MacLeod's Gloomy Memories, Donald Sage's Memorabilia Domestica, Stewart of Garth's Sketches of the Manners and Character of the Highlanders, Donald Ross's The Glengarry Evictions, or the Gaelic poems of Duncan Ban Maclntyre, John Maclean, or Ewan Maclachlan. Bishop Macdonell, who was ordained in 1787 and was stationed for several years as priest in Lochaber, tells us that "it was not uncommon to see from one to two hundred families evicted, and the farms which they had occupied converted into a sheep-walk for the accommodation of some south-country shepherd, or, as it was termed in the country, one hundred and fifty or two hundred smokes went through one chimney." Even Dr. Johnson, who was no lover of the Scots and had little respect for their loyalties, was profoundly disturbed at the tales he heard in the Highlands about rack rents and emigration. "A rapacious chief would make a wilderness of his estate," he commented. Almost sixty years later, after James Hogg and Sir Walter and Hugh Miller had said their say about the tragic depopulation in the Highlands, John Galt takes up the subject in his little known novel, Bogle Corbet, where the emigrant is represented as saying:

'The Highlands have seen their best days; the chieftains are gone, and the glory of the claymore is departed for ever . . . The country is now but for the sheep. Men have no business here; and one like me, who has lived in activity, makes misery for himself when he imagines that the stirring spirit of the world can be brought home to the glen, the island, or the moor.'

The same tragic story is the theme of the well-known verses, The Lone Shieling, which appeared for the first time in the September issue of Blackwood's in 1829. John Galt may have been the author but Dr. G. H. Needier argues very plausibly in favour of the authorship of Gait's friend, David Macbeth Moir, the Musselburgh doctor. [G. H. Needler, The Lone Shieling, 1941. Edward MacCurdy had reached the same conclusion in A Literary Enigma, (1935).] The poem which is certainly not "from the Gaelic", as its anonymous maker claims, is the lament of Hebridean Highlanders who have been exiled to Canada, but might well have been composed by a Lowland Scot. In fact, the weight of evidence seems to point to its having been written by a member of the "Delta" or Blackwood circle. The Lone Shieling also contains a bitter attack on landlords who had shared in the 'Clearances.' The sentiment of these lines must have stirred the hearts of Lord Selkirk's emigrants, the men and women who preferred to face the dangers and distresses of an unknown land rather than endure the humiliation and torments of their native Scotland:

'From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas—
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides:

Fair these broad meads — the hoary woods are grand;
But we are exiles from our fathers' land.

These few words express much of the sorrow and suffering on which Canada has been built.

* * * * * *

The symposium at "Christopher North's", at which The Lone Shieling was supposed to have been read, was discussing among other things the benefits that Scotland was supposed to have obtained by the Union. The Union had taken place well over a century before, but some patriotic Scots were no more reconciled to it then than are some of their successors to-day. A few Scots had managed to climb to the top in England and in different parts of the Empire.

'As for Canada, why it's as Scotch as Lochaber —whatever of it is not French, I mean. Even omitting our friend John Galt, have we not hodie our Bishop Macdonell for the Papists — our Archdeacon Strachan for the Episcopals — and our Tiger Dunlop for the Presbyterians? and 'tis the same, I believe, all downwards.'

But in Scotland things have been going from bad to worse.

'Our magnates have been Englified in all their notions, and that to their own ruin and to ours . .. Our nobility being wiled away (to all substantial purposes) by the Southron, the lairds have been left to themselves, and, no examples of really great wealth being before their eyes to overawe them, they have all, forsooth, entered into a deliberate system of competition with each other in point of show and expense . . . The English nobility turn up their noses at the Scotch . . . From a kingdom, we have already sunk into a province; let the thing go on much longer, and from a province we shall fall to a colony . . . They are knocking our old entail law to pieces as fast as they can, and the English capitalists and our Glossins between them will, before many days pass, have the soil to themselves.'

And the Shepherd says:

'Weel, if the gentry lose the land, the Highland anes at ony rate, it will only be the Lord's righteous judgment on them. Ah! wae's me — I hear the Duke of Hamilton's cottars are a' gaun away, man and mither's son, frae the Isle o' Arran. Pity on us! Was there a bonnier sight in the warld, than to sail by yon green shores on a braw summer's evening, and see the smoke risin' frae the puir bodies' bit shielings, ilk ane wi' its peatstack and its twa three auld donnerd pines, or saughs, or elms, sugh-sughin' owre the thack in the gloamin' breese?'

The Exile's Song, by Robert Gilfillan, the following stanza of which was found in the pocket of one of the two hundred Scottish emigrants who perished when the steamer Montreal was burned, near Quebec, in June 1857, is another little poem which expresses the nostalgic mood of the exiled Scot.

'Oh! why left I my hame,
Why did I cross the deep?
Oh! why left I the land
Where my forefathers sleep?
I sigh for Scotia's shore,
And I gaze across the sea;
But I canna get a blink
O' my ain countrie!'

Yes, much blood and sweat and tears has gone to the making of this Dominion — and the Scots have paid in full.

* * * * * *

During the half century following the '45 there were many rapid and disturbing changes in the Highlands. The partriarchal life of the clans became a thing of the past. Land was valuable henceforth as a revenue-producing investment. New landlords who took over from the old had few contacts with their tenants and showed little interest in their personal welfare. The tacksmen who came with the new landlords were concerned with the people merely as economic assets. The poor crofters hated the new order of things, but could do nothing to put a stop to the commercial exploitation of their country. The natural consequence of these conditions was dissatisfaction and unrest. Many of the chiefs themselves, although they were gainers financially by the new system which had turned them into landlords and their clansmen into rent-paying tenants, were gravely perturbed by the state of affairs. As one old Argyllshire chieftain said: "I have lived to woeful days; when I was young, the only question asked concerning a man's rank was how many men lived on his estate; then it came to be how many black cattle it would keep; but now they only ask how many sheep the lands will carry." In discussing the Culloden Papers in the Quarterly Review for January, 1816, Scott writes:

'In many instances, Highland proprietors have laboured with laudable and humane precaution to render the change introduced by a new mode of cultivation gentle and gradual, and to provide, as far as possible, employment and protection for those families who were thereby dispossessed of their ancient habitations. But in other, and in but too many instances, the glens of the Highlands have been drained, not of their superfluity of population, but of the whole mass of the inhabitants, dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice, which will be one day found to have been as shortsighted as it is unjust and selfish.'

Increased rentals, unemployment, emigration propaganda, the promise of political freedom — all helped the embittered Highlanders to make up their minds to emigrate at the earliest possible moment or at least to leave their native glens and escape from the clutches of rapacious landlords. Father Macdonell found work for six hundred Gaelic-speaking Roman Catholic Highlanders in Glasgow. During the depression caused by the French Revolution many of these found themselves unemployed, but the resourceful priest persuaded them to join the Glengarry Fencibles in 1798 and went with them to Ireland as their chaplain although this was utterly contrary to the law. In 1804 he was able to get passage for and to settle large numbers of them in what is now Glengarry county.

* * * * * *

Almost until the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, North Carolina had been a happy hunting-ground for the Highland emigrant. The most famous of these North Carolina settlers was Flora Macdonald. Flora's husband was the son of Mac-donald of Kingsburgh, who had sheltered the Prince for one night after Flora had brought him to the house, 'maigre, ill-coloured, and over-run with the scab . . . having had no meat or sleep for two days and two nights, sitting on a rock beat upon by the rains; and when they ceased, ate up by flies.' Dr. Johnson and Boswell were entertained by Flora and her husband, "a name that will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour." Boswell was grieved to hear that the Macdonalds were 'embarrassed in (their) affairs and intended to go to America." They went there the following year arriving in the autumn of 1774.

At their new home, "Killigray", in Anson County, the Macdonalds began "the world again anewe." They built a dwelling house with barns and a kitchen, and took a leading part in the social life of the community. Allan became a Justice of the Peace, and, in the words of one of Flora's American biographers, "they were the most commanding figures among all the Highlanders in North Carolina. Their influence was everywhere felt and acknowledged." Their hope for the future was bright. Then came the war between Britain and her American colonies and the Macdonalds were soon involved in it. In August, 1775, General Donald Macdonald came from Nova Scotia empowered to raise three regiments of Royal Highland Emigrants; during the winter months men were recruited and trained and armed. On the 18th of February, 1776, Flora watched her countrymen, three thousand strong, march out from Fayetteville to do battle for their King in the war of the Revolution. Among the officers were her husband, her son and her son-in-law; they never came back. A few years ago the Reverend J. A. Macdonald, ("Macdonald of the Globe", who discovered "Ralph Connor"), wrote a graphic account of the scene:

'The fiery cross had been sent through the Scottish counties of North Carolina (and) Flora herself had carried it, summoning the clansmen once again to battle for their king. The Highlanders came from far and near, and gathered to the Royal Standard set up in the town square. Veterans were there who answered the call of Highland chiefs for the Prince in the "Forty-Five," and with them their sons not out of their teens. Through the solemn silence of the pine forests the shrill notes of the bagpipes broke wild and high as in the days of old they sounded through the glen for Lochiel or Argyll or the Lord of the Isles. On the day of the march-out, Flora, mounted on her white pony, addressed the troops in Gaelic as they were reviewed by General Gage. She appealed to their loyalty to King and country. She rallied them by the memories of Highland heroism, and .... the clansmen, wild in their enthusiasm, answered her in fierce Gaelic oaths of loyalty to King George and defiance to all traitors .... It was a sad and sorry day for (Flora). Her husband, her son, and her son-in-law, .... marched out that day to defeat and imprisonment. They were all taken at the battle of Moore's Creek. As she said herself, she served the House of Stuart in Scotland and the House of Hanover in America, and she lost for both.'

After the disaster at Moore's Creek Flora passed through a horrible period of suffering and persecution. She was turned out of "Killigray", which was plundered before her eyes. She was deserted by her servants, robbed of her personal belongings, spied upon, and dragged before the Committee of Safety to answer a charge of sedition. In August 1777, seventeen months after his capture, her husband with his son, Alexander, along with a number of fellow-prisoners were exchanged for a corresponding number of Americans of equal rank and allowed to go to New York. In March, 1778, Flora was permitted to join her husband. She had to sell her silver plate and personal ornaments to pay the expense of her journey.

A few months later Allan joined his regiment in Nova Scotia and Flora followed him. This is part of her story:

'I was obliged, tho' tender, to follow, and was very nigh death's door by a violent disorder the rough sea and long passage had brought on. At last, landing in Halifax, we were allowed to stay there for eight days on account of my tender state. The ninth day sett off for Windsor, on the Bay of Minas, throw woods and snow and arrived on the fifth day. There we continued all winter and spring, covered with frost and snow, and almost starved with cold to death, it being one of the wors(t) winters ever seen there, a detachment of the Regiment being there; and by ane accedentall fall next summer (I) dislokated the wrist of the other hand and brock some tendons, which confined me for two months, altho' I had the assistance of the regimentall surgeon. When I got the better of this missfortune, I fixed my thoughts on seeing my native country, tho' in a tender state.'

In October, 1779, Flora Macdonald sailed for home on the Lord Dunmore from Halifax. There was a fight between the British vessel and a French warship, and during the engagement Flora had her weak arm broken. She reached the Thames late in December. There she learned of the death of two of her sons. "These melancholy strokes, by the death of my children," she wrote, "brought on a violent fitt of sickness, which confined me to bed in London for half a year, and would have brought me to my grave, if, under God's hand, Dr. Munro had not given his friendly assistance." In May she was in Edinburgh, at the end of July she was in Skye, broken and penniless. In 1783 the Highland Regiment was disbanded and Allan went back to Scotland on half-pay. The couple spent their few remaining years on the Kingsburgh estate. Flora died on March 4th, 1790, in her sixty-ninth year: Allan in September, 1792. They lie buried in the ancient churchyard at Kilmuir, Skye.

* * * * * *

After the Revolutionary War many of the Scottish families who had sided with the Loyalists moved north to Canada. Some of them settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; others in Upper and Lower Canada. A number of veterans of the 84th Highland Regiment were given grants of land in the East River valley in Pictou County. The first settlement there had been made by a handful of wanderers from Maryland in 1765, who were joined later in the year by thirty families of Highlanders. These unfortunates had to suffer a great deal of hardship owing to their late arrival. In 1773 the good ship Hector, which had been used by Dr. Witherspoon to bring emigrants to the New England colonies, arrived at Pictou with thirty-three families from Inverness and Sutherland. This was the start of a great influx of settlers into the Lower Provinces, checked for a time, however, by the American War. When peace was concluded the Highlanders began to emigrate again in greater numbers than before. Conditions in the Highlands had become impossible for the very poor. The harvest had failed in 1782; the potato crop was a total loss. The people were reduced to eating a sort of soup made of the nettles growing in the churchyards. More than 10,000 were enlisting every year in the army in order to escape starvation. In 1784, largely owing to the efforts of Henry Mackenzie, the "Man of Feeling", the Highland Society was founded to encourage the development of scientific agriculture and to try to bring back some measure of prosperity to the distressed areas. But the main solution of the problem of the Highlanders was emigration, until at last the exodus became so alarming that in 1804 a ban was put on emigrant ships leaving Scotland. Ten years earlier Dr. Johnson had commented on 'the epidemic desire for wandering which spreads its contagion from valley to valley' and declared that something must be done to put a stop to it. One of the problems created by the second wave of emigration was that the majority of the exiles were not only young and able-bodied but the workers and craftsmen of their communities. That created a serious problem for the Highlands. On the other hand, when they reached their destination many of these emigrants were literally penniless. In 1815 the Legislature of Nova Scotia had to vote £500 for their relief. [D. M. Sinclair, "Highland Emigration to Nova Scotia", Dalhousie Review, vol. xxiii, No. 2, July, 1943]

The Pictou Scots, Highland and Lowland, like their countrymen at home, were great believers in education, and, no matter whether they themselves were well or poorly educated, they were determined that their children should not suffer in this regard. But it was not easy for poor people, no matter how ambitious they were for their children, to make headway in a Province where not only education but every office of honour and emolument was in the hands of the privileged few. For some time after Halifax was founded in 1749, its official persons were English rather than Scottish, Anglican rather than Presbyterian. They were apt to form a selfish oligarchy in ecclesiastical as in civil politics, regardless of the views of other Nova Scotians. King's College had received a royal charter in 1789, and was generously supported by the Government, but it was hedged round with denominational restrictions and made a preserve for Anglicans. Others were debarred from a college education and, consequently, from any chance of advancement. This was all the more absurd, as the majority of the people were non-Anglicans.

In Pictou, so we learn from John McGregor, whose British America appeared in 1832,

'In the streets, within the houses, in the shops, on board vessels, and along the roads, we hear little but Gaelic and broad Scotch. The Highland dress, the bagpipe, and Scottish music are also more general in this part of the country, while the red gowns of the students which we see waving here and there like streamers, bring the colleges of Aberdeen and Glasgow with their associations into recollection.'
[St. Andrew's, too, wears "the scarlet gown". Andrew Lang, in his tender and lovely Almae Matres has expressed what everyone must feel who knows and loves the place:

'St. Andrews by the Northern sea,
A haunted town it is to me!
A little city, worn and grey.
The grey North Ocean girds it round.
And o'er the rocks and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound . . .
The drifting surf, the wintry year,
The college of the scarlet gown,']

It was not likely that the Scots would continue to acquiesce tamely in this inequable state of affairs. But they needed a leader. They found him in the Reverend Mr. McCulloch, a young minister from Renfrewshire who had studied Arts and Divinity at Glasgow. McCulloch had accepted a call from a congregation in Pictou and was inducted into his new charge on June 6, 1804. The congregation was poor and the minister's salary was paid irregularly; it left nothing over for luxuries like new books, gave no feeling of social security. But McCulloch was a fighter and feared no man. After he got "settled down" he took stock of the situation and found many things little to his liking. Education was one of them; there was an obvious necessity for a change there. Of course the easier way would have been to accept it; if he had not been McCulloch, he might even have taken orders in the Church of England and possibly have become a bishop. But McCulloch was no worldling like Strachan: he came of stern anti-Burgher stock, and if he was no mystic or inspired visionary, at least the flesh-pots made no appeal to him. He believed that a principle was involved — the question of popular rights as against class privileges, and he did not shirk the issues.

McCulloch opened a school in Pictou which became the famous Pictou Academy. He wanted to make it into a College, supported by the Government and open to all who desired learning and deserved education. But he also wanted to make it a Seminary to train ministers. The project became tangled in politics, and he grew disheartened over the hostility and indifference shown even by those of his own Church. In 1838 he went to Halifax to become the first President of Dalhousie College, which had been founded by Lord Dalhousie in 1818 on the model of Edinburgh, but which had been prevented by political intrigue from carrying on the work of a non-sectarian university. Pictou Academy maintained the high standards which McCulloch had set; twenty years later its graduates, studying classics, mathematics, and science at Edinburgh or Glasgow, competed on even terms with men trained in Scottish schools. For Dalhousie his immediate ambitions were modest and sensible. In a letter to Charles D. Archibald, written in 1838, the year in which he began his new work, he wrote:

'In the present state of this province all that is requisite is a professor who can give his pupils specimens of just translation, and instil into them ideas of accuracy of interpretation. Afterward if they choose to devote themselves to the study of languages, their collegiate instruction will contribute to their success, but should they direct themselves to the real business of life, they will not have just cause to complain that they have spent their youth upon studies foreign to their success. If Dalhousie College acquires usefulness and eminence, it will not be as an imitation of Oxford, but as an institution of science and practical intelligence.' [Life of Thomas McCulloch, by his Son, William McCulloch, pp. 172-3.]

The secret of McCulloch's influence lay in his ability and enterprise, in the encouragement which he gave and the enthusiasm which he inspired for higher education among people who had hitherto regarded its acquisition as an unattainable ideal. This was no mean achievement even in a level-headed and progressive province like Nova Scotia, for, as one scholar points out, at that time

'. . . . the majority of communities, not only in new countries like (Canada), but even in the old leading nations of Europe, were very indifferent with regard to the benefits of popular instruction. If the labouring classes in town and country were mostly provided with employment and sufficient food to maintain life and enjoyed, besides, the advantages of religious ministrations, the nature of which they but imperfectly understood, they were considered by the higher orders sufficiently cared for. Their mental wants and social improvement were objects but of secondary importance, the belief of many being that workmen needed little, or no knowledge beyond that necessary to the proper performance of their manual tasks. "Popular rights", "popular instruction" and "popular franchise" were phrases rarely or never heard in an age of aristocratic jealousy and exclusiveness; mediaeval routine and prejudice were still supreme, while national objects centred in dynastic wars and schemes of self-aggrandisement. Clear-sighted and philanthropic men .... were by but too many regarded as well-meaning theorists. However, in Montreal, an eminent Scotch merchant, the Hon. James McGill, had established for himself a permanent claim to the gratitude of its citizens by his noble endowment of an institution . . . .' [P. Bender, Old and New Canada, 1753-1844, or, The Life of Joseph-Francois Perrault. (Montreal, 1882).]

McCulloch also made some contribution to the early beginnings of Canadian literature. In 1832, remembering, no doubt, Sir Walter's "Malachi Malgrowther" letters in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal, he published a series of "Chronicles" in the Acadian Recorder. William Blackwood thought highly of them and invited the author to become a regular contributor to "Maga". But as McCulloch detested the Tory politics of Black-woods he declined the offer. After a visit to Scotland in 1825-6 he planned to write something after the style of John Gait's Ringan Gilhaize as a reply to Scott's caricature of the Covenanters in Old Mortality. He carried out his plan and sent the manuscript to friends in Scotland. But it got lost and McCulloch never tried to re-write it. Some years before the appearance of the "Chronicle of Our Town" a fellow-Scot, who was born in Glasgow, John Young, published the Letters of Agricola in the Acadian Recorder. The purpose of these articles, which were widely read and greatly appreciated, was to suggest to the farmers of Nova Scotia means by which they might improve their crops by a more intelligent cultivation of their soil.

* * * * * *

The Scots have been prominent in journalism in Canada. The Halifax Gazette, which was established in 1752, was hardly a newspaper in the modern sense of the word, being devoted almost entirely to the publication of military and governmental intelligence. The first real Canadian newspaper was the Quebec Gazette, which was founded in 1764 by two Scots, William Brown and Thomas Gilmour, who had come from Philadelphia. The Canadian Revieiw and Literary and Historical Journal (1824-6), which contained 240 pages of solid reading in each number, was modelled after the Edinburgh Review. But the most noteworthy periodical of Pre-Confederation times was the Literary Garland (1838-1851) to which the celebrated William ("Tiger") Dunlop (1792-1848) contributed his Recollections of the American War 1812-4. Dunlop was born in Greenock, Scotland, and came to Canada in 1826 with John Galt. He had led an interesting life, had served as surgeon with the Connaught Rangers in India and retired from the army on half-pay. He had lectured in Edinburgh on Medical Jurisprudence, done editorial work in London, contributed regularly to Blackwood's, and was an intimate of the "Christopher North" circle. In Canada he not only continued to write for Blackwood's but contributed to the Canadian Literary Magazine of York, as well as to the Literary Garland of Montreal.

Dunlop was also the author of a guide to emigrants called The Backwoodsman, which is not to be confused with Two and Twenty Years Ago, A Tale of the Canadian Rebellion, of which he is also the author. Of The Backwoodsman the Lizars wrote in their pleasant gossipy chronicle, In the Days of the Canada Company:

'The little book did great work in its day, and was instrumental in bringing out settlers of a different stamp from those then on the way or in the humour for emigrating.'

But if Nova Scotia holds the primacy in the intellectual development of the Dominion, and if the Scots have made a great contribution to the intellectual development of Nova Scotia and of Canada as a whole, they have not made a corresponding contribution to what one might term the creative literature of the country. A very great proportion of the Canadian people are the descendants of the working populations of the Old World. That does not imply that there was any inferiority in brain power or potentiality, but the fact that these Scots who had to toil with their hands for a living were sadly lacking in cultural background and a cultural background has obviously much — though not everything to do — with the making of creative and critical literature. Alexander McLachlan, the Glasgow tailor who came to Canada in 1840 and wrote part of an epic, The Emigrant, reflects the political radicalism which the Scots brought to Ontario; but he is at best an imitator of Burns without a trace of his genius and he was not in the true sense of the word a Canadian poet. Evan MacColl, who was born in Inverary in 1808, and wrote in Gaelic and English, was never happy in Canada and his best poems are about the Scotland he had left and which he could never forget. In sentiment MacColl is purely Scottish.

These emigre poets had one standard — the work of the poets in the country of their birth. They made no attempt at originality; they had no new-fangled theories about their craft. They merely sought to interpret their emotions in the speech and the rhythms they had been brought up on. They had no conception that there might one day be a truly Canadian literature which would seek to express itself in the rhythm of a Canadian people. "Revolt is essential to progress," said Duncan Campbell Scott some years ago, "not necessarily the revolt of violence, but always the revolt that questions the established past and puts it to the proof, that finds the old forms outworn and invents new forms for new matters." It needs insight and education to understand all this, and the emigres were sadly lacking in these essentials.

* * * * * *

The Scots did make, however, a contribution to the early literature of Canada — the folklore and balladry of their native land, in English and Gaelic. The ballad is very old, but to-day, except in concert halls or at musical gatherings, one rarely hears a ballad. That is not the fault of the people who made them; it is simply that the times have changed and literary fashions along with them. The ballads, which we call "popular", did not come into the world in the ragged and irregular form in which we have them to-day. The "common people" as they were called, recited the ballads they liked and so preserved them despite the thunders of the Reformers and the fulminations of generations of ministers who were as narrow-minded as they were "gude and godlie", and in spite of the invention of printing and more exacting standards of criticism and new literary modes of expression. But the people who composed these old ballads in England and Scotland were men of culture and good social standing, whose position was midway between the stately court poets and the "common people" we have mentioned. Their work was passed on by word of mouth, went through many hands, and by slow degrees became corrupt. In the reign of Edward IV, the King's Minstrels, as the professional makers of ballads were called, formed themselves into a Fraternity, or Popular Gild. They were granted a charter and members were appointed for life. This step, Bishop Percy tells us in his Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, was necessary to protect the royal entertainers from certain "rude husbandmen and artificers of various trades (who) had assumed their title and livery, and under that colour and pretence had collected money in divers parts of the kingdom, and committed other disorders." But like other ancient Orders, the Minstrels, decayed in time and with them the ballad. We get a glimpse of these "makaris" in their decline in a curious book, The State of the See of St. Andrews, which was written by George Martine in 1683. "To our fathers' time and ours something remained and still does of this ancient order," he writes. "And they are called by others and by themselves jockies; who go about begging and use still to recite the sluggornes of most of the true ancient surnames of Scotland from old experience and observation. Some of them I have discoursed, and found them to have reason and discretion. One of them told me that there were not twelve of them in the whole isle; but he remembered when they abounded, so that one time he was one of five that usually met at St. Andrews."

The story of the Scots ballads in Nova Scotia can be read in W. Roy Mackenzie's two fascinating volumes, The Quest of the Ballad and Ballads and Sea Songs of Nova Scotia. The ballads which the Scottish exile brought with him and crooned and recited in his isolated little circle, acquired in time a local colouring. Then they began to wither and die. Some have survived as greatly modified relics; others have vanished from the memory of man. What happened to the Scottish ballads in Nova Scotia was exactly what happened to them in Scotland. The Scots experienced a change of heart and in their new scheme of things there was no place for the vain and profane art of ballad-making or ballad-singing. Newcomers to the Province, men of mixed French, Alsatian, and Swiss descent and parentage, "a singing and a song-loving race", picked up what the Scots had thrown away or deliberately allowed to fall into neglect. The man who was mainly responsible for converting the ballad-loving, fiddle-playing, rum-drinking early Scots settlers into a race of sober-sided Puritans, was the Reverend James McGregor, who was born in St. Fillans in Perthshire in 1759. McGregor's father was a disciple of Ebenezer Erskine and he himself was brought up under the stern discipline of the Anti-burghers. Almost at the beginning of his ministry he heard the call to labour among his Highland countrymen in Nova Scotia. He arrived in 1786. But let Dr. Mackenzie have the word:

'There were unredeemed Scots who refused to subject themselves to the laws of Moses and the precepts of St. Paul, and there were pious children of Huguenot fathers who believed that the cause of righteousness could be better served on earth by singing the songs of Zion than by entertaining their friends with ballads of profane love and adventure. But so much at least is certain: in my time the only districts in which the ancient ballads of Scotland have appreciably survived are those where the Huguenot settlers built their homes near those of the Scotch farmers .... In the upland region the case is sadly different. Here the Scotch alone cleared the land for their hamlets and farms in the early days, rejoicing sternly in the spectacle of hills that strangely materialised their recollections of the older Scotland. A regional song composed over a hundred years ago by Alexander McRae of the West River .... ends with the significant lines

Now I'll pass on to the head of the river,
For there I do mean for to dwell,
For there it wants nothing but heather
To make it like bonnie Dunkeld.

In those brave days the Scots of the West River could not only compose new songs about the country of their adoption but could also draw at will from a goodly store of old songs which had sprung from the soil of their parent land; and now the popular ballads which made glad their hearts have survived only as a vaguely remembered tradition or have failed to perpetuate even the faint record of a title or a name.' [Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia. Introduction, pp. xvii-xviii.]

After the Napoleonic wars many retired half-pay officers were confronted with a serious problem — the future of their families. Most of these men were unfit for a commercial career both by temperament and previous military training. One possible outlet for their energies was farming, and the district North of the St. Lawrence in Upper Canada seemed an ideal location. "There were many who possessed small capital . . . but it was not everyone who possessed the judgment and industry required for a life in the bush (as readers of Mrs. Moodie will agree). As an octogenarian (a wealthy man who came to the country as a lad in service and saw his master and his master's friends disappear, their means dissipated, and the world and themselves no better for their having been) has said, "Sure they all had money; but few of them had any sinse, and none of them knew how to work".' [Robina and Kathleen Macfarlane Lizars, In the Days of the Canada Company, p. 20.]

The two chief propagandists in favour of a policy of emigration were John Galt and William Dunlop, whose guide to emigrants, The Backwoodsman has been already referred to. Galt, who was famous as a novelist, had long been interested in the question of emigration and had managed to get himself appointed as legal agent for those settlers in Upper Canada who claimed compensation for losses incurred during the war of 1812 with the United States. But he soon realised that the problem was much bigger than merely having to decide how much money was to be paid to individual claimants. It was, he saw, really a matter of opening up, and developing the resources of a vast and unexplored territory. He therefore organised what was known as the Canada Company, in London, which was to finance the enterprise, and had himself appointed secretary. He sailed for Canada as one of five commissioners, appointed jointly by the government and the Company, whose duty was to negotiate for the sale and the settlement of the Clergy Reserves. He was away from England, engaged on this work, from January to June, 1825. Things went wrong, however. The Anglican Church in Upper Canada strongly objected to the sale of their reserves when it came to the point, and the matter was left for final negotiation between Galt and Archdeacon John Strachan. Strachan was an Aberdeen Scot who came to Canada in 1799 to be a teacher in Cornwall and Kingston. On the advice of the Honourable Richard Cartwright, who had been largely responsible for his leaving Scotland, Strachan, originally a Presbyterian, became a member of the Church of England. He took deacon's orders in 1803 and went to York in 1812 as rector.

That was in the days of the Family Compact. This oligarchy was identified with the Church of England and Strachan became its mouthpiece. The Family Compact, wrote William Lyon Mackenzie in his Sketches of Canada and the United States, (1833)

'surround the Lieutenant-Governor, and mould him like wax to their will; they fill every office with their relatives, dependants, and partisans; by them justices of the peace and officers of the militia are made and unmade; they have increased the number of the Legislative Council by recommending through the Governor, half a dozen of nobodies and a few placemen, pensioners and individuals of well-known narrow and bigoted principles; the whole of the revenue of Upper Canada are in reality at their mercy — they are Paymasters, Receivers, Auditors, King, Lords, and Commons.'

Galt had thus to meet a formidable opponent, and the result was that the Clergy Reserves were withdrawn from the market and an enormous tract of unsurveyed land of more than a million acres, recently purchased from the Indians, was substituted. This was the so-called Huron Tract, and Gait's great work was the opening up of this virgin territory. "Profit to the Company, which I saw would come of course," he told his friend, David Macbeth Moir, "was less my object than to build in the wilderness an asylum for the exiles of society, — a refuge for the fleers from the calamities of the old world and its systems foredoomed."

The charter for the Canada Company was granted in August, 1826, and in October Galt sailed for Canada for the second time. Dunlop went with him. They landed in New York on November 23. There, according to Charles Lindsey, who wrote his Life; [Lindsey, Life of William Lyon Mackenzie, (1862).] they learned of the trial of William Lyon Mackenzie, the editor of the Colonial Advocate. Gait's connection with Mackenzie was a slight one, but it caused him much trouble and vexation of spirit.

* * * * * *

Mackenzie, the son of poor parents, was born in Dundee, Scotland, on March 12th, 1796. Put to work at an early age he was in turn a draper's assistant, a clerk in a counting-house, and the proprietor of a small "general" store and a circulating library in the little town of Alyth. The business collapsed, and in the spring of 1820 the disgruntled young fellow sailed for Canada. He tried his hand at various trades in that country, too, and failed in them all. Finally, when just under thirty, he decided to start a newspaper in Toronto. The Colonial Advocate, which made its first appearance on May 18, 1824, and ran for ten years, was bitterly opposed to the Family Compact as the enemy of popular education, of a liberal immigration policy, and of civil and religious liberty. But, although the paper was the mouthpiece of the Reform party, it was not a financial success and Mackenzie soon found himself in difficulties. Then he had a stroke of good luck. A gang of young "Mohocks" in York, as Toronto was then called, who belonged to the Upper Four Hundred, decided to get rid of their enemy once and for all. On June 18, 1826, they broke into the office of The Colonial Advocate during Mackenzie's absence, smashed the printing machinery and scattered the type. The Compact realised too late that this act of vandalism was likely to prove most damaging to their interests, for popular sympathy immediately swung round to Mackenzie and he became a political martyr overnight. Dr. Strachan and his friends tried through Hon. J. B. Macaulay to make a settlement but Mackenzie refused even to consider the proposition and the case went on trial. It was heard before Chief-Justice Campbell, a Scot who had fought on the Loyalist side during the Revolutionary War, and the plaintiff was awarded heavy damages. The net result of the affair was that an obnoxious journal, which probably would have perished of inanition, received a new lease of life, and its proprietor was at once elevated to a prominent place in the sympathies of the people."

On his previous visit to Canada Galt had read The Colonial Advocate and had spoken a few words in praise of the paper. During his trial Mackenzie remembered this and claimed Galt as a friend. That was enough for Strachan and his friends and Galt was from then on regarded by the Compact as a man of dangerous radical sympathies. Already during the course of his negotiations for the purchase of the Clergy Reserves, Strachan had shown his dislike for Galt's ideas. The latter wanted no paupers or wastrels among his settlers; they must have good character references and be able to pay their way. They had to be men of enlightenment and progressive ideas, and men of enlightenment were regarded by Strachan and Peregrine Maitland, the Lieutenant-Governor, as dangerous enemies of the Family Compact. Maitland's dislike for Galt was of long standing. According to his latest biographer, it "had some connection with (his) satiric reflections on the Church, expressed in his Letters from the Levant (1813). 'If you have read Mr. Gait's published Tour through the Levant, no sneer or insinuation with respect to the Established Church could surprise you'." Thus, from the beginning of his work, Galt had to face the jealousy and the disapproval of the higher circles of Colonial Government. In Maitland's eyes especially, Galt could do nothing right. His actions and motives were constantly misrepresented to his Board of Directors at home, and in the end he was removed. His immediate reward for the splendid work he did in Canada was incarceration for months in a London debtors' jail.

After Galt's deposition the Scots who had taken up their lands in the township named after Sir John Colborne, revolted against the autocratic rule of the Canada Company. The Lizars paint a most pleasing and attractive picture of "The Colborne Clique", as it came to be known, and of the social gatherings at Goderich. That is one side of the picture. But there is this other: "In Upper Canada, Scotsmen denounced and reviled one another, they tyrannised over one another and in the end they did not hesitate to take up arms and slay one another in the field."

William Lyon Mackenzie was a grim, bitter sort of man. J. W. L. Forster's admirable painting reveals his character very plainly. He was born and bred in an older Scotland which produced such men — men of iron will, of unshakable convictions, dour, uncompromising men who hated class privilege and social wrong, who had something of the Celt in them, vision and enthusiasm which, if thwarted, could easily kindle into fanaticism. Such men are bound to clash with authority and when they do they either go to jail and disappear, or triumph in the end and leave their imprint on history.

Mackenzie was elected first Mayor of Toronto by acclamation in 1834, after having been expelled from the Assembly three years earlier for his scurrilous tongue. The Family Compact pursued him relentlessly; he was assaulted physically, his meetings were broken up, his life was threatened. After the appointment of Sir Francis Head as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (1836-7) an election was held in which the Family Compact had a large majority; Mackenzie failed to be returned to the Assembly. Thoroughly disgruntled, he saw only one way to get his ideas put into effect. The Upper Canada rebellion was the result. The story of that rebellion is told in a rare little volume, Two and Twenty Years Ago; also in

Anison North's Forging of the Pikes. The latter story gives an excellent and realistic sketch of Toronto in 1837; also of Mackenzie. After the fiasco at Montgomery's Tavern, Mackenzie had to go into hiding, and finally managed to escape across the border into the United States, where for a time he was a nuisance to the Canadian Government. He came back to Canada twelve years later, only to find that a new king had arisen over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. During his absence many of the reforms for which he had fought had been brought about, and his day as a political gad-fly, or reformer, was ended. The Papineau rebellion which took place in the same year as Mackenzie's, 1837, helped to emphasize the need for speedy action on the part of the authorities, for that uprising was not so much an armed protest on the part of the French-Canadians against British rule as it was a gesture of sympathy with Mackenzie's onslaught on the Family Compact. Despite his bitterness against Strachan, Mackenzie was wholeheartedly in favour of the Archdeacon's project for the University which he was trying to get started and for which he secured the Charter in 1827. And Mackenzie was among the first to suggest a confederation of the British North American Colonies.

* * * * * *:

Another Scot, prominent in the days of the Compact, was Robert Fleming Gourlay. Gourlay, who was a friend of Dr. Thomas Chalmers, was born in Fifeshire about the year 1780. After a chequered career in England he sailed for New York in 1817. He visited some relatives in Canada, was well received by the authorities, and came to the conclusion

that this was "the most desirable place of refuge for the redundant population of Britain." That was exactly the sort of thing that John Galt and William Dunlop had been saying, and the Family Compact did not like it. They would have let it pass if Gourlay had gone back to New York. But he did not go back to New York. When the Legislature was suddenly, and as it seemed to him, arbitrarily prorogued, with its business unfinished, he decided to take a hand in the local political game, with results that were disastrous for himself. "Without the slightest idea of evil," writes this "Banished Briton and Neptunian", "he took the novel step of proposing that a Convention should be called of Deputies from all the constituencies to deliberate upon the propriety of sending Commissioners to England to call attention to the affairs of the Province." [Statistical Account of Upper Canada, compiled with a view to a Grand System of Emigration, by Robert Gourlay (London, 1822). Genera] Introduction.] This was too much and the Family Compact decided to eliminate this new critic of their rights and privileges. The man who led the attack on Gourlay was again the "turbulent priest of Toronto", the Reverend John Strachan. Gourlay did not mend matters by characterising the cleric as 'that lying little fool of a renegade Presbyterian.' Strachan may have been "one of the most unlovable and unchristian men of God who ever put on a surplice," but he was certainly a dangerous man to cross. Gourlay was prosecuted on the charge of having libelled the Government; that attack failed. A private action against him had no success either. Then his enemies changed their tactics. They passed an Act which made illegal such conventions as Gourlay had called for the purpose of expressing grievances. Gourlay protested against this measure and the Government replied by throwing him into jail, illegally, under a statute directed against aliens. It was an extraordinary action to take against a loyal British subject, and, what made matters worse, Chief Justice Powell would neither set him free nor grant him bail. When he finally was brought to trial he was sentenced to leave Upper Canada within twenty-four hours on pain of death. He left the Province and found refuge in the United States. When the sentence of banishment was annulled, Gourlay returned to Canada and petitioned the Canadian Parliament for compensation. His imprisonment was declared by that body to be "illegal, unconstitutional and without the possibility of excuse or palliation" and Sir Charles Bagot granted him a pension of £50 from the Civil List, which was declined. Gourlay went back to Edinburgh, where he died in 1863.

Gourlay was an honest man but a rash one. He had only been a few months in Canada when he began interfering in politics about which he knew nothing. He failed completely to realise that the men who had successfully repelled the American invaders in the war of 1812 had no wish to see their position and their gains challenged by immigrants and riff-raff from Europe and the United States. Mrs. Anna Jameson describes some of these people. She saw them while on a visit to Colonel Talbot at his Castle of Malahide:

'On leaving my apartment in the morning, I used to find groups of strange figures lounging round the door, ragged, black-bearded, gaunt, travel-worn and toil-worn emigrants, Irish, Scotch and American, come to offer themselves as settlers. These he used to call his land-pirates and curious, and characteristic, and dramatic beyond description, were the scenes which used to take place between this grand bashaw of the wilderness and his hungry, importunate clients and petitioners.'

Gourlay had no patience with Lyon Mackenzie and his ideas of "independence of European domination for ever." In his Banished Briton, No. 2, he thus addresses his fellow Scot:

'Mr. Hume is a little man, and you, less. During four years in the United States I have witnessed far worse than European domination. You call yourself a patriot, and fly from home, and enlist scoundrels for the conquest of your country. This is patriotism with a vengeance: but God will avenge. I am, more in sorrow than in anger, yours, etc. R.F.G.'

Gourlay was a man of vision. He hailed the Durham Report with enthusiasm as "candid, fearless, straightforward, and to the point." But the Serbonian bog of partisan politics was too strong for him to struggle against, and it engulfed him.

* * * * * *

Another Scot who has left his imprint on Canada is James Bruce, eighth Earl of Elgin. Elgin, who had been educated at Eton and was a Fellow of Merton, came to Canada in 1847 as Governor-General, at the age of thirty-six and stayed in the country until 1854. It was a difficult time. Canada had hardly recovered from the effects of the Mackenzie and Papineau rebellions and although the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada had been united in 1841, there was still much political unrest and a bitter feeling of racial animosity. Under a Governor of less tact, understanding and patience, Canada might well have been lost to the Empire. Elgin was a great reconciler. He invited Papineau to dinner and found him 'a very well-bred, intelligent man.' [J. L. Morison, The Eighth Earl of Elgin, pp. 89. ] He delivered the speech from the Throne in English and French and asked the Baldwin-Lafontaine Ministry to return to power after the Reform Party had scored a complete victory at the close 1847. He had a great deal to do with the establishment of Responsible Government and successfully negotiated a Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. His stand on the Rebellion Losses Bill led to disgraceful rioting in Montreal and to cowardly attacks upon himself, but Elgin remained unmoved. It was his courage in assenting to the Rebellion Losses Bill that made responsible government in Canada a reality. Elgin is remembered by French-Canadians as the Gouverneur aux larges vues et au coeur droit and his place is amongst the greatest of the Governors-General of the Dominion.

* * * * * *

In the same year that William Lyon Mackenzie came to Canada another Scot arrived — John A. Macdonald, then a child of five. His father settled in Kingston, a city with which his famous son was associated until his death in 1891 and where he lies buried. Macdonald studied law, was admitted to the Bar, and came into public notice by his eloquent defence of von Schultz, who had taken part in the 1837 invasion of Canada in support of Mackenzie. Macdonald's defence was unsuccessful and Schultz was hanged at Fort Henry in Kingston.

In 1844 the young lawyer was elected Member for Kingston and three years later he became Receiver-General in the Conservative Government. The life story of "John A." has never been satisfactorily written on a "now-it-can-be-told" basis. He was many-sided. His weaknesses were obvious, but they were balanced not only by his quick wit and ready humour, but also by his genuine and genial kindness. The most popular figure in Canadian political history, beloved as well as admired, "John A." is the subject of countless stories, but he is never the butt. With the vision of a great statesman, he had a practical mind; he saw that the old party lines were breaking down, and he believed that the immediate future in politics lay with a Liberal-Conservative coalition. In 1854 he succeeded in forming a permanent alliance with the majority of French-Canadian Liberals, by this time under the leadership of Cartier. Along with Alexander Tilloch Galt, the son of the founder of Guelph, as Finance Minister, this coalition held power for almost a dozen years. Not that its supremacy went unchallenged. On the contrary. Its chief assailants were the left-wing Clear Grits, who were mainly Scots Presbyterians. Their leader was George Brown, who hated, above all things on earth, the Roman Catholic hierarchy and "John A."

* * * * * *

George Brown was born in Edinburgh in 1821. His father, an unsuccessful business man, emigrated to New York in 1838. There he founded the British Chronicle, which was intended to become the mouthpiece of British opinion in the United States. George Brown did his best to make the paper a success, but that was impossible. He went to Canada to try to push its sale and while he was there the great Disruption of the Church in Scotland took place. Knowing the type of man he was and the opinions he held, certain friends of the Free Church approached him and invited him to put their case before the Canadian public in the press. The result was that, instead of the British Chronicle, the Banner appeared on August 18, 1843. The paper, which was published in Toronto, was religious in tone and leftist in politics. The Banner presently became the Globe, the first number appearing on March 5th, 1844. Through the Globe George Brown became a mighty power in the land.

* * * * * *

Meanwhile Canada was slowly emerging from the purely colonial stage; she had won self-government in domestic affairs; she had seen the secularization of the Clergy Reserves and the abolition of the old seigneurial system of tenure. But the Clear Grits, or Reformers, were still far from satisfied. One reason was that although Canada West had by now by far the larger population, owing to steady overseas immigration, she had no corresponding parliamentary representation. The Grits therefore raised the cry, "Representation by Population," and the result was, in the words of O. D. Skelton, that "Macdonald, relying for power on his alliance with Cartier, could not accept the demand, and saw seat after seat in Canada West fall to Brown and his "Rep. by Pop." crusaders." [Skelton, The Canadian Dominion, pp. 138-9.] But the success of the "Rep. by Pop." party acted as a boomerang and with the even balance of parties the work of government became almost impossible. Between 1854-1864 there were actually ten Ministries. The Liberal-Conservative Government of 1864 found itself powerless. Something had, obviously, to be done, if the work of administration were not to be reduced to a mere farce.

It was George Brown who, when all attempts to form a Ministry with a safe working majority had failed, came forward with the suggestion that the party leaders should unite in working out some kind of federation. The result of this gesture was that a Coalition Cabinet was formed in which the Tories, Macdonald and Galt, sat in deliberative council with the leftists, Brown and Macdougall. Brown had seen the light at last and in order that that light should shine more brightly he had shown his willingness to subordinate himself and his former principles to the greater cause. In June, 1864, a Coalition Cabinet was formed with Sir Etienne Tache as nominal Premier. Macdonald and Brown were members of it. At the Quebec Conference, which met at Quebec on October 10th, the dominating figure was Macdonald. In February, 1865, he introduced resolutions in favour of confederation and later in the year a delegation consisting of Macdonald, Brown, Galt and Cartier left for England to discuss the question of confederation with the British Government. Late in 1866 the delegates from Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick met in London, and in consultation with the British Colonial Office drew up final resolutions. These were embodied in the British North America Act, and on July 1, 1867, the Dominion of Canada came into being.

With the birth of the Dominion, George Brown vanished from the political scene, but the intellectual qualities of his editorials in The Globe continued to have a vast influence in the country. He became President of Council and a Senator, refused the honour of K.C.M.G. and died from the effects of a shot fired by a discharged employe at the Globe office.

* * * * * *

Meanwhile Sir John had been going from strength to strength. He was not merely the first Premier of the Dominion of Canada; he was a man of wide imperial vision with a concept of Empire that was far ahead of his times. His ideal was a free federation of independent peoples bound together precisely as the British Commonwealth is bound together to-day — a voluntary association of free nations owning a com-man allegiance to the Crown. Gailly de Taurines wrote of him: "Son oeuvre fut digne de son talent: Un Etat grand comme l'Europe entiere, baigne par deux oceans, et traverse par la voie ferree la plus etendue de l'univers, certes, c'est la une creation dont plus d'un serait fier." Alexander Mackenzie, the Logierait boy who arrived in Canada in 1842 and became Prime Minister in 1873 when "John A." went into temporary retirement owing to the Pacific Railway scandals, was a mere pygmy compared with his Disraeli-ish-looking fellow Scot. Mackenzie was a builder and contractor in Kingston and Goldwin Smith said of him, when Premier, that he was still a stonemason. A rigid teetotaller, Mackenzie was a hardworking and conscientious man and his administration accomplished much good work including the creation of the Supreme Court, the introduction of voting by ballot, and temperance legislation. But he had no popular appeal and speedily lost touch with the feeling of the country. Macdonald bided his time and worked subtly for his opponent's undoing. At the election of 1878, which was fought on the protection issue, Macdonald's 'National Policy' easily carried the day and he converted his minority of forty-five into a majority of eighty-six. Mackenzie, the free-trade theorist, resigned as leader of the Opposition two years later. And Canada has remained protectionist.

Sir John A. Macdonald, the politician, worked in close collaboration with the French-Canadians; in fact, if it had not been for their support he could not have remained in power for so long. It has been suggested that he understood the French-Canadian better than the Englishman, and that he preferred him. In a letter to Sir John Rose, the Aberdonian who had been the first Minister of Finance for the Dominion and was then living in England, Macdonald wrote a propos of the Louis Riel troubles:

Private.

Ottawa, February 23rd, 1870

'Bishop Tache has been here and has left for the Red River, after exceedingly full and unreserved communication with him as to our policy and requirements, all of which he approves. He is strongly opposed to the idea of an Imperial Commission, believing, as indeed we all do, that to send out an overwashed Englishman, utterly ignorant of the country and full of crotchets, as all Englishmen are, would be a mistake. He would be certain to make propositions and consent to arrangements which Canada could not possibly accept.'

Primarily Sir John cultivated the French in his own interests. He was not concerned with their religion, like George Brown, but, on the other hand, the thought of the 'Auld Alliance' and the Catholic Stewarts, and the past of Scotland must have made a powerful appeal to the romantic Scot whose father was a dispossessed Macdonald. And it must not be forgotten that, while he made his political alliance with the French, Macdonald drew much of his strength and his reputation from his close association with fellow-countrymen like George Stephen, James Ross, Sir William Mackenzie, Sir Donald Mann, David Macnicol, Sir William Whyte and Sandford Fleming. Without these men he could have done comparatively little.

* * * * * *

Compared with Sir John A. Macdonald, the vast majority of his fellow-Scots seem colourless and almost insignificant, and his death, which took place in 1891, marks the end of an epoch. But there are many other Scots names that occur at random — John Neilson, who was born at Dornald in Kirkcudbright in 1776 and edited the Quebec Gazette for many years; John Gordon Brown, who succeeded his brother as editor of the Globe; Thomas McQueen, an Ayrshire lad who founded the Huron Signal at Goderich in 1848 and fought the battle for Responsible Government; John Maclean, who was born in Glasgow and came to Canada in 1838 when he was thirteen and advocated Protection in his People's Journal; Alexander Somerville, who belonged to Haddingtonshire, an ex-Colour-Sergeant of the 8th Highlanders who became widely known under his pseudonym, "The Whistler at the Plough." Richard Cobden thought highly of Somerville's work and said of his Toronto articles on Canada: "I know nothing in the English language, which for graphic narrative and picturesque description of places, persons and things surpasses some of the letters of Alexander Somerville, the "Whistler at the Plough'." James Innes, who hailed from Huntly made a notable contribution to the cause of reform in the Guelph Mercury, of which he became editor and publisher in 1862; John Lesslie, who arrived from Dundee in 1820 and set up business in "Muddy Little York", selling books and drugs, gave William Lyon Mackenzie one of his first jobs in Canada. Two years later the rest of the Lesslie family sailed from Scotland and made their home in Dundas. During the Rebellion of 1837 the Lesslies suffered at the hands of the drunken militia and had the honour of being stigmatized, by Bond Head, as "notorious republicans." Later, James Lesslie purchased the Examiner and the two brothers fought the battle for religious equality. In 1854 the paper was sold to George Brown of the Globe.

* * * * * *

Some of the earliest chronicles of Canada in English were written by Scots, but these works were Canadian by accident and are to be found mainly in the libraries of collectors. No Scot has left his mark on the literature of Canada as has Macdonald on politics or Mackenzie in exploration. In 1848 R. M. Ballantyne, a nephew of Scott's printers, published a record of his personal experiences during a six-years' residence in the territories of the Hudson's Bay Company. The Young Fur Traders appeared in 1856 and Ungava in the following year. But Ballantyne was a writer of boys' stories. It was not until 1897, with the publication of "Ralph Connor's" Black Rock in The Westminster, a Presbyterian monthly magazine, that the Canadian novel began to come into its own. "Ralph Connor" was not Scottish born, but his people were Highlanders settled in Glengarry. His novels, like those of Lucy Montgomery, have a strong religious atmosphere, and the influence of the Manse is found in them all. The same may be said to-day of the work of Grace Campbell and of C. Holmes Mac-gillivray. Contemporary novelists lie beyond our scope, but these writers embody in their novels the religious and social ideals that came to Canada with Scottish immigrants. Another novel, which excellently reproduces the atmosphere of a Presbyterian community and at times reminds one of the Annals of the Parish, is St. Cuthbert's, by Robert E. Knowles. The Span of Life, which was written by William Mac-Lennan and Jean N. Mcllwraith, is an admirable tale of Jacobite days and of the Chevalier de Johnstone, subjects treated more recently by Thomas Raddall. The Flying Years, by Frederick Niven, is a link between the Scottish Highlands and the rapidly developing Canadian Northwest.

Duncan Campbell Scott, the most austerely intellectual of Canadian poets, has nothing Scottish about him except his name. That is as near as he ever gets to Scotland. Wilfred Campbell called himself a Scot, and his hymn to "The World Mother" is a panegyric upon Scotland. The setting of his play, The Heir of Lynne, is Scottish, and he wrote ballads and three long novels on Scotland. On the other hand, Alexander Muir, a Scot, was stirred to write his famous verses, The Maple Leaf, in Canada, Muir was born in Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire. A graduate of Queen's University, he taught school in Ontario until his death in 1906. The Maple Leaf, the song which made Canada articulate, was written, and the words were set to music by the author himself, in 1867, the year in which the British North America Act was passed and the Dominion became a reality.

The Scots have had little to do with Canadian drama. Its volume is small and its quality poor. One early Scottish actor of the name of Ormsby, who played in Montreal in 1804, appeared on the stage, drunk. But there are at least two distinguished Scottish names in Canadian music — Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie and Sir Ernest MacMIllan. George A. Reid, William Brymner, and William Cruik-shank, the grandnephew of the caricaturist, are Canadian artists of Scottish descent. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was an Edinburgh man.

* * * * * *

We have touched on the matter of the Scottish contribution to the higher education in the Dominion. That cannot be over-estimated. McGill, Toronto, Dalhousie, Queen's, St. Francis Xavier, Morrin College were all founded by Scots. The re-establishing of Dalhousie as a University in 1863 was almost entirely Scottish. It was the Aberdonian John Strachan, when he was Anglican rector of Cornwall in Ontario, who persuaded the Glaswegian James McGill to bequeath his 48-acre estate and £10,000 for the purpose of establishing a college which would bear his name. The University was formally opened in 1829, Strachan being one of the original trustees. The first Principal of McGill was the Reverend John Bethune, the son of the Presbyterian minister of Williamstown. There was organising ability in the family; after having served as Chaplain and being taken prisoner along with Flora Macdonald's husband in the ambush at Moore's Creek, this Skye-man went to Montreal when the Revolutionary War was ended, and organised the first Presbyterian congregation in Ontario, about 1786. The future Principal was a pupil of Dr. Strachan's at the Cornwall Grammar School and succeeded him when the latter went to York in 1812. Alexander Neil Bethune, a brother, was another pupil of Strachan's and ultimately succeeded him as second Bishop of Toronto. Dr. Strachan, who had secured a charter for King's College, Toronto, in 1827, was President of that institution for twenty-one years, and when the College was separated from the Anglican Church in 1849 and secularised, the Bishop gathered funds for a new College, and Trinity College was established in 1852. Bishop Strachan preferred to cater for students of the English type rather than the Scottish and his educational ideals were far removed from those of his Northern Alma Mater.

The Queen's tradition, on the other hand, has always been strongly Scottish. The university was founded primarily to train ministers for the Church of Scotland in Canada. On the Charter granted in 1841 appears the name of John A. Macdonald and the majority of the other twenty-five names are Scottish. The first Principal, Dr. James Liddell, was a Scot and every one of his successors has either been a Scot or of Scottish descent. St. Francis Xavier, which was founded in 1853 and became a University in 1866, is a college chiefly for Roman Catholics of Scottish origin. The University of New Brunswick has distinguished Scots on its roll — names like David Grey, James Robb, and William Brydone Jack. In Manitoba we find Archbishop Machray and Principal John M. King a Presbyterian graduate of Edinburgh.

Although not all the educational influences that have come to Canada through Scotsmen have sprung from Scottish ideals of training, yet in the main there are certain elements in our Canadian system which follow the Scottish ideal. The cultivation of individuality and self-reliance, for example, is Scottish rather than English or American. If the Canadian student on the average takes more naturally to science than to literature, this is easily accounted for by the lack of opportunity for linguistic or literary study in the schools or in the early days at home. Many of the best teachers of science have come from Scotland, or have studied there. Sir William Logan, an Edinburgh-trained Montrealer, published his monumental Geology of Canada in 1863. Sir William Dawson, the geologist and one of the great builders of McGill, was a Pictou boy of Scottish origin. He was educated at Pictou Academy, and at Edinburgh University which was for long the dominating influence on Canadian science and scholarship.

* * * * * *

There are many other Scots who deserve honourable mention in our survey — Sir James Douglas, who was the first Governor of British Columbia, and the Honourable William Dickson who founded Galt and brought out many emigrants from the South of Scotland. Scots were the pioneers in the export trade in lumber to Britain. During the later stages of the

Napoleonic Wars, when Britain was denied free access to the Baltic, her source of timber, the British Government decided to turn to the timber resources of the North American colonies. A timber firm, Pollock and Gilmour of Glasgow, was granted a huge empire of timber on the Miramichi in New Brunswick and also given preferential customs rates and Admiralty contracts. They prospered from the start and several huge fortunes arose out of this venture. At one time, in the thirties of last century, the firm had over a hundred ships plying between Canada and Britain and on the return voyages they brought out emigrants. They extended their operations to Quebec City, to the Gatineau Country and even to Trenton in Ontario.

The woollen industry in Canada also owes its start to Scots emigrants. Through the efforts of Lord Archibald Hamilton, the Whig member for Lanarkshire, many people from that county were settled in what was called the Bathurst district, now divided into the counties of Lanark and Renfrew. Among them were many weavers thrown out of work by the coming of the power loom. These weavers brought their weaving skill and traditions with them and some of them started woollen mills in the Ottawa Valley. Today Almonte, Arnprior, Perth and Carleton Place have their woollen mills. [See Andrew Haydon's Pioneer Sketches in the District of Bathurst, (1925).]

* * * * * *

Now we must write FINIS to our short essay on The Scot and Canada. He has by no manner of means ceased to make his contribution, but Canada is no longer a second Scotland, as it was in the days of "Christopher North." The Scot who comes to Canada to-day — if he decides to remain in the country — has to fit into the mosaic, and in the fullness of time he becomes a Canadian citizen — not just a Scotsman resident in Canada. Canada is now Canada and not merely another British Dominion, and a Canadian is a far more definite political entity than a Scotsman because there is no such thing, officially recognised, as a Scottish citizen, while there most certainly is a Canadian citizen. That is because Canada is looking more to the future than to the past and can consolidate her position internationally only by welding her miscellaneous population into a homogeneous whole; homogeneous, that is to say, in undivided allegiance if not in racial outlook, to the ideals of liberty and progress for which the Dominion stands. And for the same reason too, Scotland has begun to repair her fences.

Scotland is an old country but she is still young in spirit. She has reached that stage in life, however, when she realises that she must conserve her forces. That does not mean that she feels she is finished or that the time has come for her to quit. On the contrary. Scotland has attained to an honourable position in the world; she has won it by character and hard work. She had few natural advantages to start with and to-day she could not hope for one moment to compete economically or financially with more richly endowed nations. Therein lies not her strength. The Jacobites who gathered round Prince Charles at Glenfinnan were an insignificant group; but they were a devoted band, and although they went down to defeat at Culloden, their deeds as told in song and story still ring down the years. So it is with Scotland and her people — a little land as countries go but a land that has been inspired with a great vision. Scotland's story is a long tale of bitter struggle in the cause of Freedom. She has just emerged with deep but honourable scars from the Second World War and is hotly engaged in the stern battle of rehabilitation and is seeking to hold the rewards of peace. It is not an easy fight. But she will not fail. Despite disappointment and frustration and past failure Scotland goes forward in this belief:

'The brotherhood of man is no longer a text for a pulpit sermon. The claim of our national poet, Robert Burns, that "a man's a man for a' that", must now be the practical politics for this new scientific age. Ideas are power, and it is now for the people of all nations, and particularly the Scots, through the teaching of Robert Burns, and by the force and confidence of our expression and belief in the brotherhood of man to ensure that brave new world so many seek.

"That man to man the warld o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that".

This is the faith which she has handed on to her sons and daughters in Canada.


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