True Patriot Love (7 page)

The Manitoba schools crisis grieved Grant—the worst civil war, he wrote, is that in which “a church is arrayed against the state.” In September 1895, by now pushing sixty, he took a month away from his duties as university president and went to Manitoba, patiently reporting from both sides of the dispute for the Toronto
Globe
.

His reports strongly condemned the Manitoba government for shutting down the French school system, remarking tartly that there was no need to burn a house down in order to taste crackling. Already Winnipeg schools were crowded with the new immigrants flooding
into the West—Norwegians, Icelanders, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians—but the Franco-Manitobans were staying away, attending their own underfunded private schools rather than submit to Protestant instruction in English. Grant understood and accepted their refusal. He came away believing that national unity did not require a single national school system; confessional education in two languages was a necessity in a country as divided as Canada. What the nation needed was more bilingual education, so that citizens grew up comfortable in both official languages and comfortable with the religious opinions of their neighbours. Nor did he favour the use of federal power to compel national standards. He did not believe the federal government had the right to disallow the provincial schools legislation; instead, he urged the province to think again and provide public support for French Catholic education.

He had learned an important lesson from those hours on the trail with the French Metis, from those days spent patiently listening to aggrieved French schoolteachers in small schoolrooms in St. Boniface. He wrote that the alluring vision of a homogeneous and united people sometimes tempts Canadians, but they must never forget “that a people can be truly united only when great minorities do not feel themselves treated with injustice.”

The railway forged Canada’s identity as a nation from ocean to ocean, but the national vision was linked, in Grant’s and Fleming’s minds, to a still grander imperial design. The transcontinental shortened the distance between London and the Antipodes. It drew the global empire closer together and increased Canada’s importance as a global spoke in the imperial hub. The CPR quickly became a worldwide transportation company, with grand hotels at every terminus, from the Château Frontenac in Quebec to the Empress in Victoria, and steamships travelling from Vancouver to Sydney, Australia, to Yokahama, Japan, and to Calcutta, India.

For Grant this was the grander destiny that made the slog up to the Rogers Pass worthwhile, the vision that made him persevere back home among the doubters and doomsayers, the scornful homebodies whose horizon was the parish pump or the province. Canada itself was always a dream for him, never just a reality. It achieved grandeur in his mind when it took its place in a larger design.

These conceptions were no abstraction. He was a man who lived ideals to the full. He never had a vision but set out immediately to experience it in practice. In 1887, worn out by a decade of work at Queen’s, he was rewarded with a sabbatical, and he took it in a typically ambitious form: a world tour of the British Empire.

The tour took him to Scotland, of course, but also to his home away from home, the Colonial Institute on Northumberland Avenue near Trafalgar Square in London. There he met all the worthies who believed in imperial federation, the ruling idea of the last decades of his life. The federation he sought would leave the dominions in full possession of their domestic independence and sovereignty and, in addition, would give Canada a stronger voice in world affairs because it would have a seat at a federal imperial parliament with jurisdiction over foreign affairs, defence and transportation. Grant was by then a sufficiently senior propagandist in this cause to gain the confidence of British politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain, who were then promoting imperial federation in the British Parliament.

The empire for Grant was both a cause and the most exclusive club to which a provincial Canadian could ever belong. As he prepared to sail for Cape Town, he collected letters of introduction from the leaders of the imperialist cause to their counterparts in the other British colonies. Shipowners gave him free passage around the world on their steamers, so great was the prestige then associated with his cause. Everyone received him, including the greatest living custodian of the English language itself, Dr. James Murray, directing the compilation of the first edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, in a scriptorium—a greenhouse-like shed—constructed in the back garden of his Oxford house.
Murray sought Grant’s assistance with Canadian terms and idioms, though we do not learn what they were.

Globalization was well underway in Grant’s time. Letters from Kingston, Ontario, could reach London, England, in two weeks. Grant could tell his wife to write him care of the governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa and expect to have the letters awaiting his arrival, three weeks later. The ship that took him south of the equator was carrying frozen New Zealand carcasses of lamb. Sandford Fleming was organizing a global time system, based on the Greenwich meridian, to bring coherence to railway timetables, ship sailings and all the other activities that needed to be coordinated through standard time in a global economy. The leading technologies of the day—such as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, then just entering commercial application—were already pointing the way to undersea cables, and Fleming was already envisaging their use as a way to link the empire in instantaneous communication. This was globalization with a very reassuring face, not under the sovereignty of a market, with a centre everywhere and nowhere, obeying no laws but its own, but a globalization under the sovereignty of a queen, a flag and a navy, a globalization advancing under the language of Shakespeare and under the benediction of a Protestant God.

If other empires were then joining in the scramble for resources and possessions, if Britain was actually fast
approaching imperial twilight, nothing gave George Grant any sign of this. As he travelled into the southern latitudes, dining at the captain’s table, conducting Sunday service for passengers in the lounge, pacing the decks at night, with the stars above and the ship rolling beneath his feet, he wrote home to Jessie and confessed, a little shamefacedly, that he had never felt so well in his life.

The trip was a stupendous adventure encompassing South Africa, Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines and then Canada, where he travelled from Vancouver home to Kingston via his beloved railway. But one stop in particular, South Africa, turned out to be signally important, both to the fate of the empire and to his conception of it.

He had introductions to the governor of the province and all the local dignitaries, and while he was there he visited the vineyards of Stellenbosch, the diamond mines of Kimberley, mulatto churches and Christian missions, and witnessed the sounding fury of the ocean beating on the southernmost rocks of Africa. Everywhere he went he compared what he saw to Canada, the veldt so burnt and bare, like the Prairies in high summer. It was both the same—a British colonial society—and different—a kingdom built upon a brutal racial hierarchy. In the De Beers diamond mine, he peered into a walled enclosure at the mine entrance where the black workers were corralled, forbidden to return to their homes in the bush until
they had finished their contracts. There were more than two thousand “niggers”—he used the term in quotation marks—resting, sleeping, talking, laughing, some in groups preparing their supper, others at a short religious service, still others lighting fires and playing cards. They were indentured slaves, in effect, who on expiry of their contracts would return to tribal homelands and their wives and children. This was the other side of empire, the infernal labour, the primitive accumulation, that made all the high-minded dreams possible.

Grant recoiled at the outright racial hatred of the Boers for the black majority. He wrote home to Jessie to tell her that one of the Boers had taken him aside and recounted in shocked tones that in the nearby Portuguese colony of Mozambique, Portuguese actually married coloured people. We have never sunk so low, the Boer told him.

On the train back from the mines, he shared a carriage with a Mr. Botha, member of the colonial Upper House and president of the Afrikaner Bond, a Boer organization seeking to establish Dutch supremacy in South Africa. Botha, Grant thought, was exactly like a Presbyterian elder in some rural county in the Maritimes, a man, he perceptively added, “to be led not driven.” Grant thought their racial prejudices unchristian, but he could not help admiring men like Botha, industrious, ascetic and severe Christians like himself, so fiercely committed to freedom, as they conceived it, that when the British liberated the slaves
and ended the slave trade in the 1840s, they trekked north to found their own homeland in the Transvaal.

The Boer Wars between 1898 and 1902 were the most serious crisis to befall the British Empire since the loss of the American colonies in 1783. By 1898 Grant was in his sixties, plagued by kidney trouble, exhausted by university administration and visibly aging, drawn and white-whiskered in the photographs. His wife, Jessie, was also failing, having never fully recovered from the loss of their beloved son Geordie.

The crisis in South Africa taxed Grant further, because it pulled apart two elements—the imperial and the national—that he had managed to reconcile for most of his life. Canada, he believed, had succeded in bringing together these opposing ideals. In the completion of its national dream, it had strengthened both its independence from and its ties to the imperial mother. In the Boer rebellion, the national and the imperial had split apart. A child of empire was demanding complete independence.

Grant’s sympathies with the Boers ran deep, because he was more than sensitive to the imperial injustice and rapacity that had provoked them into revolt. Cecil Rhodes, the British adventurer whose raid on the Transvaal had provoked the second Boer uprising, was, in Grant’s eyes, nothing more than a pirate in top hat and patent leather boots. “I hope to see the rascal hanged,” he confided angrily. As for the Boers, he saw in them the
image of the hardy settlers who were peopling the empty Prairies of Canada.

The Boer struggle triggered deeper doubts about Canada’s own position in the empire. “We govern ourselves, yet are not independent,” he wrote. “We assert that we are now not simply a colony or dependency, but we are unable to define what we really are.” We have few independent thinkers, he conceded, and are accustomed to taking our opinions on most subjects from England.

Grant fumed at the “patronizing language too often used by British newspapers,” and he railed at the “inconsistent language of politicians of the Manchester school who with one breath declare the colonies useless to the empire, and with the next express amazement that they should presume to understand their own business.” It was galling to love an empire that did not love you back.

Worst of all, he admitted, Canada could be plunged into war at any time, “without our having a word to say as to the why.” In 1898, this moment of truth arrived: The empire was insisting that as long as Britain was at war with the Boers, so was Canada. What was Canada to do?

Canada had been asked to provide a contingent to assist Britain in putting down the rebellion, and Grant’s old friend Donald Smith, now Lord Strathcona, living in state on Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street, had offered to assemble, at his own expense, a cavalry regiment of Canadian volunteers to fight for queen and empire.

Until mid-1899, Grant sided with the Boers, opposing a British invasion of the Transvaal, but when the Boers issued an ultimatum in September 1899 ordering the British to remove their troops from the Transvaal border, Grant’s position cracked. He could not stand with renegades when imperial order was defied. When the Boers moved against British possessions in South Africa, “there was nothing to do but fight it out to a finish.”

Canada, he believed, must answer the imperial call. “We aspire to be a nation, and how can we realize that high ideal save by doing the work and submitting to the sacrifices demanded by national life?” He supported the dispatch of Lord Strathcona’s Light Horse contingent and, in letters to Laurier, strongly counselled a much more reluctant prime minister that Parliament should shoulder the expense of a Canadian detachment.

By now the old man was entering his final years alone. His beloved wife had died, his remaining son was teaching in Toronto and his flagging energies were devoted to defending the empire’s unity in its hour of need. The South African war was supposed to be a quick and glorious fight, but it soon turned into a bitter and costly struggle. Quebec refused to support the imperial venture, and the war soon widened existing national divisions. Laurier found himself defied within his own party by Henri Bourassa.

In his last public address, delivered on January 6, 1902, in a quavering voice, Grant appealed to Quebeckers, saying he understood why they wouldn’t want to fight for an English king in a faraway land. But he reserved his bitterest irony for those, including Laurier, who opposed the idea of Canada contributing to the cost of imperial defence:

We give the bravest of our children to die by the bullet or still deadlier disease; but some one else must pay their wages. We do not grudge the blood of our sons, but with a treasury so full … we grudge food, clothing and transport for them. Let Canada accept the blood money without a blush. This state of things cannot continue. The empire must be practically as well as nominally united.

Unity of nation and empire, unity of one
through
the consolidation of the other: this had been his life’s vision, and he stood by it to his last breath, as Canadian soldiers were cut down in the velds and kopjes of a faraway country, as the British herded the Boers into their new invention, the concentration camp, and thousands died of disease and starvation. I do not know whether my great-grandfather knew, at the end, that the empire had come to this, because in May 1902, as the war dragged into its third year, he died in his sleep, at the age of sixty-seven.