In justice to Fox we may note that he treated the proposal to cede Canada as outrageous, but the record of Oswald's folly was not to end here. In drawing the boundaries between Canada and the United States he accepted a boundary which would have abandoned to the States the whole southwestern portion of the present province of Ontario. In a similar spirit he was willing that the river St. John should be the southern boundary on the North-East. Instead of this, the river St. Croix was substituted at the suggestion of Strachey. The exact meaning of this was not settled till years later. Upon the whole question of boundaries there appeared no recognition of the fact that Canada was a great and growing portion of the Empire, and that it was necessary that her future interests should be carefully safe-guarded. The one aim of the English negotiators was peace at almost any price. Another provision of the Treaty of Versailles laid the seeds of future trouble. The engagement was entered into that the coast of the Island of Newfoundland should remain unsettled from Cape St. John to the Straits of Belle Isle, and thence continuing down the whole west coast of the island, a grievance the onerous nature of which is year by year more felt in Newfoundland.

Under the separate Treaty with the United States of November 1782, it was agreed that creditors on either side should meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value in sterling money of all bond-fide debts. It was further agreed that Congress should earnestly recommend to the State legislatures to provide for the restitution of the property of British subjects which had been confiscated. A further clause provided that there should be no further confiscations or prosecutions by reason of the part taken in the war. It has been asserted that these provisions were never intended to be carried out. "The American Commissioners," writes Hildreth, "made no secret of the certain futility of all

generation, but Shelburne was, in his views and methods of thought, in advance of his times. Hence the need for a circumspection and an "economy," which puzzled his contemporaries and still puzzles the student. The nickname was given by George III.

such recommendations." It is clear, however, that the English Government intended them seriously, and the long delay to give up the western posts abandoned under the Treaty was occasioned by the non-fulfilment of these conditions. No British minister had been sent to the United States prior to the arrival of J. Adams in England in 1786.

So far as intention was concerned, the statement in the King's speech of 1783 was doubtless made good. "I trust you will agree with me that a due and generous attention ought to be shown to those who have relinquished their properties or their possessions from motives of loyalty to me or attachment to the mother country." Unhappily, however, the wheels of official routine move slowly, and it was not till 1788 that the final report of the Commissioners appointed to enquire into loyalist claims was issued. In any case the work of examining over 2,200 claims must have taken time. The total amount originally claimed was over £10,000,000 and the sum actually paid nearly £4,000,000.

Under the Treaty of Versailles, both the Floridas were restored to Spain. In the West Indies, England gave up to France St Lucia and Tobago, while France yielded to England Grenada, St Vincent, Dominica, St Christopher's, Nevis and Montserrat.

of the

Colonies.

In closing this page, the most shameful in English history, Lesson of it was for a long time customary to point the moral, which the loss saw in the failure of England the results of despotism. On American this point enough has been already said. At the present time, when the average reader, American and English, is, for the most part, shaking himself free from the fumes of the escaping gas of Bancroft's eloquence, the lesson is substituted "behold the consequences of excessive interference." Interference, of course, there was, and assuredly mischievous enough, but it might with equal plausibility be held that the failure was due to careless neglect. In considering carefully the matter, one seems to apprehend a lesson, perhaps as trite but at least more practical, than the one generally drawn. The task of the maintenance of a Colonial Empire must be, in any case, one of danger and difficulty. Not by any means

to every people is reserved this crowning proof of overflowing vitality. But there were special circumstances connected with the origin of the American Colonies, which made the task in their case exceptionally difficult. In these circumstances, the Mother country had need to secure the services and energies of the most able Englishmen. Unhappily the miserable jobbing eighteenth century system confined honours for the most part to second rate men. According to Lord Shelburne,1 who had good opportunities for knowing. "There was not literally a single office in the kingdom which was not worn out with corruption and intrigue. All the executive offices were sold to the enemy by inferior persons in each department." The brilliant comets, which flashed across the firmament, a Pitt and a Wolfe, only served to make darker the general gloom, and the treatment accorded to Wolfe, in his lifetime, and, after his death, to his mother, strengthens the argument. In this state of things, England was like some man of delicate constitution. In ordinary times things went well enough, but when the strain came there was not the strength to resist it. Some recognition of the truth here hinted at seems to have dawned upon the consciousness of Parliament. Among the most useful of the zz G. III., measures of the short-lived Rockingham Administration of c. 75. 1782 was an Act "for preventing certain offices in the plantations from being executed by deputy or granted for life.” Lord Shelburne 2 asserts that it had been the practice for Secretaries of State to give Colonial offices which produced from £1000 to £3000 a year to their near relatives, who executed such office by deputies, who in turn recouped themselves by means of fees. At the time of the passing of the Act younger sons of Lord Egremont and Lord Sackville were thus provided for.

The judgment of history, it would seem, cares very little for constitutional questions, and turns with a grim indifference from conflicts of principles and parties. In that final Court of Appeal the decision depends upon the answer to the question, has there or has there not prevailed that equality

1 Life by Lord E. Fitzmaurice, Vol. III., p. 332.. 2 Life, Vol. III. p. 337.

of opportunity, that "carrière ouverte aux talents," the presence of which alone keeps the air of public life fresh and wholesome. The recognition of this principle belongs to no one form of government. None was more faithful to it than the despotism of the first Napoleon, and it is by no means a necessary consequence of popular government. It is because, in the England of to-day, this equality of opportunity prevails under democracy, far more than it ever did under other forms of government, that many, who approach it without predilections and not without misgivings, are still forced to subscribe themselves convinced democrats.

conquest.

CHAPTER IX

Canada IN the foregoing summary of American affairs, one potent after its cause of colonial dissatisfaction has been purposely omitted. 14 G. III., The Quebec Act of 1774 must be considered in connection c. 83. with the general question of Canada. We have already noted how the long struggle for pre-eminence between France and England ended in the final triumph of the latter, and how the genius of Pitt and Wolfe decided that whatever might be the political future of North America, at least it should not fall under French dominion. The government of French Canada was a new experiment in British Colonial history. It is true that Jamaica had been acquired by conquest, but Jamaica, so far as settlement was concerned, was a tabula rasa, on which England might write what she pleased. The peculiarity of Canada was that it possessed a French population, enjoying French customs and French laws. The total population at the time of the treaty of Paris was about 62,000 and for many years the number of English immigrants was very small. The French were concentrated in the present province of Quebec, there being no French settlers in Ontario. In this state of things, the problem of obtaining both security to the Empire and liberty to the subject was one of no little difficulty. The keynote of British policy was given in Amherst's instructions to Gage1-"These newly-acquired subjects, when they have taken the oath, are as much His Majesty's subjects as any of us, and are, so long as they remain deserving of it, entitled to the same protection." The period between 1760 and 1764 is known as the "Règne Militaire," but, in fact, the government introduced had nothing in common with martial law. French Canadian 1 Kingsford Hist. of Can., Vol. IV., p. 441.