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Authors: Michael Ignatieff
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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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
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
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