National and International

SOCIAL STUDIES 457 tops is said here forthrightly and with interest. Few may be satisfied with everything the author has said, but if at least he makes us think, Mr. Harrison will not have written his book in vain. (R. F. G. SwEET) SOCIAL STUDIES NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL Alexander Brady With Canada's first centenary near its conclusion a spate of books appear on its policies and achievements. To all of them an appropriate introduction is The 0-itical Years: The Union of British Nortl~ America, 18571873 by W. L. Morton (McClelland & Stewart, pp. xii, 322, $8.50), a political history of the ·sixteen years when the federation was being planned and built. In the middle of the 1850's the leaders in British North America, especially in the province of Canada, began to think seriously of consolidating their struggling colonies into a single unit. With the principle of responsible government no longer in dispute, they found themselves confronted with problems that only some form of union could solve. At the same time the authorities at Westminster began to perceive important advantages in merging the different colonies into a larger whole, for only thereby could they achieve effective, mutual self-support and self-defence and relieve the British Treasury. The Crimean War had demonstrated British military weakness, and some politicians read the lesson. In the autumn of 1856 Robert Lowe, then Vice-President of the Board of Trade, discussed with Governor Sir Edmund Head of Canada a possible union of British North America, combined with the. construction of an intercolonial railway and the acquisition of the territories of the Hudson's Bay Company in the northwest . Here were the essentials of a plan that required ten years to realize. At this point Mr. Morton takes up the theme and traces the complicated developments that ultimately resulted in federation. He shows how significant was Canada's initiative. Not until this colony was ready to act was anything done. He describes, in detail, the circumstances leading to the adhesion of the Maritimes and the acquisition of the West, and brings into sharp relief the strongly defined regional and ethnic 458 LE'ITERS IN CANADA: 1965 elements that came to cons.titute the new federal state. On the eve of Confederation, for example, the people of the Maritimes looked outward to the Atlantic rather than inward to the continent. They were still strongly conscious of being united within the broad and flexible framework of the British Empire, citizens of a great world society. Halifax was still a significant base of the Royal Navy, linked .more closely to Portsmouth or Plymouth than to Montreal or New York. Little wonder that Maritimers, at first, felt uneasy at having to tie their fate to that of the Upper Canadians and the French of the Lower St. Lawrence. For them this seemed a retreat from a larger to a smaller world, and bitter was their disillusionment when the new connection failed to bring the promised prosperity. The story in this book has of course been told before. Part of it was covered in Donald Creighton's Road to Confederation, published only a year earlier. But Mr. Morton's work fills its own niche. Based on careful research, it is a fresh and independent appraisal of how the diverse fragments of British North America came together. It is well-organized, clearly and unpretentiously written, and judicious. The proximity of the United States not merely significantly influenced the establi.shment of Canada's federation, but continued to affect profoundly her external affairs from that day to the present. A detailed monograph on some early aspects of Canadian-American relations is Canada's National Policy, 1883- 1900: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press [Toronto: Saunders], pp. xii, 436, $9.00), by Robert Craig Brown. This book is concerned·with the early disputes over the North Atlantic fisheries, the Bering Sea, trade relations, and the Alaska boundary. All of these present a tangled story of politics and diplomacy, irritations and provocations. All reflect the attempt of Canada to pursue a bargaining policy that would protect its integrity as a state and give substance to its sense of...