Protection, with the attitude of economic warfare which it involved and bred, was then at its height.Much of this hostility was directed against Canada, as the nearest British territory.
The Dominion, on its part, while persistently seeking closer trade relations, sometimes sought this end in unwise ways.Many good people in Canada were still fighting the War of 1812.The desire to use the inshore fishery privileges as a lever to force tariff reductions led to a rigid and literal enforcement of Canadian rights and claims which provoked widespread anger in New England.The policy of discrimination in canal tolls in favor of Canadian as against United States ports was none the less irritating because it was a retort in kind.And when United States customs officials levied a tax on the tin cans containing fish free by treaty, Canadian officials had retaliated by taxing the baskets containing duty-free peaches.
The most important specific issue was once more the northeastern fisheries.As a result of notice given by the United States the fisheries clauses of the Treaty of Washington ceased to operate on July 1, 1885.Canada, for the sake of peace, admitted American fishing vessels for the rest of that season, though Canadian fish at once became dutiable.No further grace was given.The Canadian authorities rigidly enforced the rules barring inshore fishing, and in addition denied port privileges to deep-sea fishing vessels and forbade American boats to enter Canadian ports for the purpose of trans-shipping crews, purchasing bait, or shipping fish in bond to the United States.Every time a Canadian fishery cruiser and a Gloucester skipper had a difference of opinion as to the exact whereabouts of the three-mile limit, the press of both countries echoed the conflict.Congress in 1887 empowered the President to retaliate by excluding Canadian vessels and goods from American ports.Happily this power was not used.
Cleveland and Secretary of State Bayard were genuinely anxious to have the issue settled.A joint commission drew up a well-considered plan, but in the face of a presidential election the Senate gave it short shrift.Fortunately, however, a modus vivendi was arranged by which American vessels were admitted to port privileges on payment of a license.Healing time, a healthful lack of publicity, changing fishing methods, and Canada's abandonment of her old policy of using fishing privileges as a makeweight, gradually eased the friction.
Yet if it was not the fishing question, there was sure to be some other issue--bonding privileges, Canadian Pacific interloping in western rail hauls, tariff rates, or canal tolls-to disturb the peace.Why not seek a remedy once for all, men now began to ask, by ending the unnatural separation between the halves of the continent which God and geography had joined and history and perverse politicians had kept asunder?
The political union of Canada and the United States has always found advocates.In the United States a large proportion, perhaps a majority, of the people have until recently considered that the absorption of Canada into the Republic was its manifest destiny, though there has been little concerted effort to hasten fate.In Canada such course of action has found much less backing.United Empire Loyalist traditions, the ties with Britain constantly renewed by immigration, the dim stirrings of national sentiment, resentment against the trade policy of the United States, have all helped to turn popular sentiment into other channels.Only at two periods, in 1849, and forty years later, has there been any active movement for annexation.
In the late eighties, as in the late forties, commercial depression and racial strife prepared the soil for the seed of annexation.The chief sower in the later period was a brilliant Oxford don, Goldwin Smith, whose sympathy with the cause of the North had brought him to the United States.In 1871, after a brief residence at Cornell, he made his home in Toronto, with high hopes of stimulating the intellectual life and molding the political future of the colony.He so far forsook the strait "Manchester School" of his upbringing as to support Macdonald's campaign for protection in 1878.But that was the limit of his adaptability.To the end he remained out of touch with Canadian feeling.His campaign for annexation, or for the reunion of the English-speaking peoples on this continent, as he preferred to call it, was able and persistent but moved only a narrow circle of readers.It was in vain that he offered the example of Scotland's prosperity after her union with her southern neighbor, or insisted that Canada was cut into four distinct and unrelated sections each of which could find its natural complement only in the territory to the south.Here and there an editor or a minor politician lent some support to his views, but the great mass of the people strongly condemned the movement.There was to be no going back to the parting of the ways: the continent north of Mexico was henceforth to witness two experiments in democracy, not one unwieldy venture.
