Lord Elgin by Sir John George Bourinot (ebooks online reader .txt) 📖

of 1791, which provided that there should be reserved for the maintenance and support of a "Protestant clergy," in the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, "a quantity of land equal in value to a seventh part of grants that had been made in the past, or might be made in the future." Subsequent clauses of the same act made provision for the erection and endowment of one or more rectories in every township or parish, "according to the establishment of the Church of England," and at the same time gave power to the legislature of the two provinces "to vary or repeal" these enactments of the law with the important reservation that all bills of such a character could not receive the royal assent until thirty days after they had been laid before both Houses of the imperial parliament. Whenever it was practicable, the lands were reserved under the act among those already granted to settlers with the intention of creating parishes as soon as possible in every settled township throughout the province. However, it was not always possible to carry out this plan, in consequence of whole townships having been granted _en bloc_ to the Loyalists in certain districts, especially in those of the Bay of Quinté, Kingston and Niagara, and it was therefore necessary to carry out the intention of the law in adjoining townships where no lands of any extent had been granted to settlers.

The Church of England, at a very early period, claimed, as the only "Protestant clergy" recognized by English law, the exclusive use of the lands in question, and Bishop Mountain, who became in 1793 Anglican bishop of Quebec, with a jurisdiction extending over all Canada, took the first steps to sustain this assertion of exclusive right. Leases were given to applicants by a clerical corporation established by the Anglican Church for the express purpose of administering the reserves. For some years the Anglican claim passed without special notice, and it is not until 1817 that we see the germ of the dispute which afterwards so seriously agitated Upper Canada. It was proposed in the assembly to sell half the lands and devote the proceeds to secular purposes, but the sudden prorogation of the legislature by Lieutenant-Governor Gore, prevented any definite action on the resolutions, although the debate that arose on the subject had the effect of showing the existence of a marked public grievance. The feeling at this time in the country was shown in answers given to circulars sent out by Robert Gourlay, an energetic Scottish busy-body, to a number of townships, asking an expression of opinion as to the causes which retarded improvement and the best means of developing the resources of the province. The answer from Sandwich emphatically set forth that the reasons of the existing depression were the reserves of land for the Crown and clergy, "which must for long keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, and a hindrance to compact and good neighbourhood; defects in the system of colonization; too great a quantity of land in the hands of individuals who do not reside in the province, and are not assessed for their property." The select committee of the House of Commons on the civil government of Canada reported in 1828 that "these reserved lands, as they are at present distributed over the country, retard more than any other circumstance the improvement of the colony, lying as they do in detached portions of each township and intervening between the occupations of actual settlers, who have no means of cutting roads through the woods and morasses which thus separate them from their neighbours." It appears, too, that the quantity of land actually reserved was in excess of that which appears to have been contemplated by the Constitutional Act. "A quantity equal to one-seventh of all grants," wrote Lord Durham in his report of 1839, "would be one-eighth of each township, or of all the public land. Instead of this proportion, the practice has been ever since the act passed, and in the clearest violation of its provisions, to set apart for the clergy in Upper Canada, a seventh of all the land, which is a quantity equal to a sixth of the land granted.... In Lower Canada the same violation of the law has taken place, with this difference--that upon every sale of Crown and clergy reserves, a fresh reserve for the clergy has been made, equal to a fifth of such reserves." In that way the public in both provinces was systematically robbed of a large quantity of land, which, Lord Durham estimated, was worth about £280,000 at the time he wrote. He acknowledges, however, that the clergy had no part in "this great misappropriation of the public property," but that it had arisen "entirely from heedless misconception, or some other error of the civil government of the province." All this, however, goes to show the maladministration of the public lands, and is one of the many reasons the people of the Canadas had for considering these reserves a public grievance.

When political parties were organized in Upper Canada some years after the war of 1812-14, which had for a while united all classes and creeds for the common defence, we see on one side a Tory compact for the maintenance of the old condition of things, the control of patronage, and the protection of the interests of the Church of England; on the other, a combination of Reformers, chiefly composed of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who clamoured for reforms in government and above all for relief from the dominance of the Anglican Church, which, with respect to the clergy reserves and other matters, was seeking a _quasi_ recognition as a state church. As the Puritans of New England at the commencement of the American Revolution inveighed against any attempt to establish an Anglican episcopate in the country as an insidious attack by the monarchy on their civil and religious liberty--most unjustly, as any impartial historian must now admit[17]--so in Upper Canada the dissenters made it one of their strongest grievances that favouritism was shown to the Anglican Church in the distribution of the public lands and the public patronage, to the detriment of all other religious bodies in the province. The bitterness that was evoked on this question had much to do with bringing about the rebellion of 1837. If the whole question could have been removed from the arena of political discussion, the Reformers would have been deprived of one of their most potent agencies to create a feeling against the "family compact" and the government at Toronto. But Bishop Strachan, who was a member of both the executive and legislative councils--in other words, the most influential member of the "family compact"--could not agree to any compromise which would conciliate the aggrieved dissenters and at the same time preserve a large part of the claim made by the Church of England. Such a compromise in the opinion of this sturdy, obstinate ecclesiastic, would be nothing else than a sop to his Satanic majesty. It was always with him a battle _à l'outrance,_ and as we shall soon see, in the end he suffered the bitterness of defeat.

In these later days when we can review the whole question without any of the prejudice and passion which embittered the controversy while it was a burning issue, we can see that the Church of England had strong historical and legal arguments to justify its claim to the exclusive use of the clergy reserves. When the Constitutional Act of 1791 was passed, the only Protestant clergy recognized in British statutes were those of the Church of England, and, as we shall see later, those of the established Church of Scotland. The dissenting denominations had no more a legal status in the constitutional system of England than the Roman Catholics, and indeed it was very much the same thing in some respects in the provinces of Canada. So late as 1824 the legislative council, largely composed of Anglicans, rejected a bill allowing Methodist ministers to solemnize marriages, and it was not until 1831 that recognized ministers of all denominations were placed on an equality with the Anglican clergy in such matters. The employment of the words "Protestant Clergy" in the act, it was urged with force, was simply to distinguish the Church of England clergy from those of the Church of Rome, who, otherwise, would be legally entitled to participate in the grant.

The loyalists, who founded the province of Upper Canada, established formally by the Constitutional Act of 1791, were largely composed of adherents of the Church of England, and it was one of the dearest objects of Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe to place that body on a stable basis and give it all the influence possible in the state. A considerable number had also settled in Lower Canada, and received, as in other parts of British North America, the sympathy and aid of the parent state. It was the object of the British government to make the constitution of the Canadas "an image and transcript" as far as possible of the British system of government. In no better way could this be done, in the opinion of the framers of the Constitutional Act, than by creating a titled legislative council;[18] and though this effort came to naught, it is noteworthy as showing the tendency at that time of imperial legislation. If such a council could be established, then it was all important that there should be a religious body, supported by the state, to surround the political institutions of the country with the safeguards which a conservative and aristocratic church like that of England would give. The erection and endowment of rectories "according to the establishment of the Church of England"--words of the act to be construed in connection with the previous clauses--was obviously a part of the original scheme of 1791 to anglicize Upper Canada and make it as far as possible a reflex of Anglican England.

It does not appear that at any time there was any such feeling of dissatisfaction with respect to the reserves in French Canada as existed throughout Upper Canada, The Protestant clergy in the former province were relatively few in number, and the Roman Catholic Church, which dominated the whole country, was quite content with its own large endowments received from the bounty of the king or private individuals during the days of French occupation, and did not care to meddle in a question which in no sense affected it. On the other hand, in Upper Canada, the arguments used by the Anglican clergy in support of their claims to the exclusive administration of the reserves were constantly answered not only in the legislative bodies, but in the Liberal papers, and by appeals to the imperial government. It was contended that the phrase "Protestant clergy" used in the Constitutional Act, was simply intended to distinguish all Protestant denominations from the Roman Catholic Church, and that, had there been any intention to give exclusive rights to the Anglican Church, it would have been expressly so stated in the section reserving the lands, just as had been done in the sections specially providing for the erection and endowment of Anglican rectories.

The first successful blow against the claims of the English Church in Canada was struck by that branch of the Presbyterian Church known in law as the Established Church of Scotland. It obtained an opinion from the British law officers in 1819, entirely favourable to its own participation in the reserves on the ground that it had been fully recognized as a state church, not only in the act uniting the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, but in several British statutes passed later than the Constitutional Act whose doubtful phraseology had originated the whole controversy. While the law officers admitted that the provisions of this act might be "extended also to the