Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Ouellet, Fernand

French

RICHARD G. HARRIS. - The Seigneurial System in Early Canada, a Geographical Study.

Johnson, J. K.

140 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY 
slower transition, still based on both. To both Soboul and Labrousse Mousnier 
replied that the classification by orders before the eighteenth century was no 
juridical mask but a social reality, which became an unreal and outmoded 
mask by the social revolution bringing in the class system which preceded the 
political Revolution. Perhaps a little more sociology might have persuaded all 
three that they were dealing with the familiar sociological distinction between 
class and status, between the objective economic stratification by size and 
source of income and the subjective stratification by rank, prestige and esteem 
which is the often belated or outmoded reflection of the first. But Mousnier's 
point remains, that different societies are, as far as their own conscious order-
ing of themselves is concerned, based on different principles of stratification, 
and if the historian treats them on another principle, imported from his own 
society, he misleads himself and fails to understand his subject. It is here 
that social history scores over sociology, in the extended experience of diverse 
societies different from his own which it offers to the scholar. What do they 
know of England who only England - or France, or Canada - know ? 
Yet a reading of the proceedings of a conference of this kind, however 
successful, raises a wicked thought of how sociology may score over social 
history, or any other scholastic discipline. For every discipline, not to say the 
university profession itself, has its sociology. Indeed, a university "subject", 
viewed sociologically, is a group of interacting people with a determinate 
ordering of rank, prestige and influence. Viewed from the outside, as one 
inevitably views a foreign national group, however close the subject, one 
recognizes all the familiar types of academic personality and modes of behav-
iour : the arrogant dogmatism of the doyens of the profession, the competitive 
sycophancy of the middle ranks, the apologetic timidity of the juniors. For 
all their virtuosity and brilliance, the conceit and condescension of French 
academics towards their assumed inferiors has to be read to be believed. One 
need look little further for the causes of the recent student unrest in French 
universities. 
• • • 
HAROLD PERKIN, 
University of Lancaster . 
W. L. MORTON (ed.). The Shiel,d of Achilles: Aspects of Canada in 
the Victorian Age. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968. 333 pp. 
Professor Morton explains in his preface that the publication of this 
collection of thirteen essays was undertaken at the suggestion of one of the 
contributors, Mr. Lawrence S. Fallis, Jr. It might be expected therefore that 
Mr. Fallis' paper, which promises "a scholarly reconnaissance in force into the 
vast terra incognita of nineteenth-century Canadian thought", should set the 
COMPTES RENDUS 141 
general tone of the book. This expectation is, unhappily, fulfilled. Both 
Mr. Fallis' "The Idea of Progress in the Province of Canada" and the book 
as a whole look promising, but are in fact distinctly disappointing. 
Mr. Fallis purports to show that nineteenth century Canadians shared with 
their contemporaries elsewhere "a structure of ideas, opinions, beliefs and 
expectations which it is convenient to label the 'idea of progress'", an idea 
which was "at bottom", "a philosophy of history". The reader is unlikely to 
be convinced that Mr. Fallis has proven his case, which rests largely on the 
observation that Canadians were aware that their province was growing in 
over-all wealth, in population and in the advance of settlement. "The land 
that was once a wilderness had yielded its harvest of wheat and timber to the 
labour of the pioneer." Relying for the most part on selections from the mass 
of pamphlet literature produced in Canada in the nineteenth century, he succeeds 
in showing that Canadians were mostly optimistic about the future, that they 
believed they were making much material and some moral progress; but, t~e 
fulminations of a John Sheridan Hogan notwithstanding, he presents no real 
evidence that they assumed themselves to be a part of an inevitable, on-going, 
universal historical movement. Indeed, although Mr. Fallis finds "an almost 
total absence of a literature of pessimism" it is questionable whether any such 
belief was really justified. The period he has chosen for study (1840-1870) 
began with and was punctuated by periods of economic depression, with 
enough attendant failures of banks, railways and other businesses to provide 
an antidote to blind faith in endless progress. And if, as Mr. Fallis asserts, 
Canadians borrowed some of their assumptions about progress from the United 
States, they also during these years continued to compare themselves unfavour-
ably with their more prosperous neighbours; and they had a further potent 
motive for refusing to abandon themselves entirely to "the idea of progress", 
the danger, to use a pregnant phrase of John A. Macdonald's, "that we might 
drift by degrees into the American system", a danger sufficient to give all but 
a few Canadians pause. 
Mr. Fallis does believe that Canadians lived in fear of the United States 
but he believes this to have been a fear of military invasion, a fear so constant 
and so strong that it prompted Canadians to try to conceal their very presence 
on the continent. He provides no evidence to support this surprising view of 
an age in which (to cite only one area of Canadian-American relations) the 
"harvest of wheat and timber" depended, with or without Reciprocity, on a 
keen American interest in Canadian affairs. 
Mr. Fallis' essay, which appears at the midway point in the book, the first 
essay, Professor French's "The Evangelical Creed in Canada", and the last, 
Professor Morton's "Victorian Canada", all take a "tentative" approach to 
their subjects. This, they tell us in effect, is what we shall likely find out 
when we have done the necessary research. Essays of this type are of course 
142 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY 
often of much use, by pointing out areas of study which may prove fruitful; 
but would it not have been more useful actually to have done the research ? 
To have examined in detail a manageable aspect of the age? This at any 
rate has been the method of most of the other authors of the book, and while 
the results obtained have not always been satisfactory, at least two essays are 
of exceptional quality : S. F. Wise's "God's Peculiar Peoples" and Philippe 
Sylvain's "Liberalisme et ultramontainisme au Canada fran~ais". Both Wise 
and Sylvain have used new source materials to much profit, both place their 
studies firmly in a world setting, both provide thoughtful and wholly fascinating 
glimpses of one type of clerical mind at work (and in Professor Sylvain's case 
of the anticlerical mind as well). Read separately, these two essays are 
evocative and absorbing; read together, they complement and illuminate each 
other. Mr. Wise is also, by a considerable margin, the most readable of the 
thirteen authors. 
Professor Sylvain's long essay is one of three in the book published in 
French. The others are by two of his colleagues at Universite Laval; and both 
of these explore unfamiliar topics with some success, though Pierre Savard · 
has difficulty in making much of his subject, French immigration to Canada, 
of which there was so little, or of the influence on it of successive French: 
Consuls, which appears to have been even less. On the other hand, Alexandre 
Vattemare, the subject of Claude Galarneau's brief paper, undoubtedly did; 
during his short stay in Canada in 1840·1841, exert an influence which helped 
to bring about a species of "Rapprochement des 'Races' et des Classes au 
Canada"; but one suspects that M. Galarneau, in wishing to do justice to 
Vattemare, does him a little more than justice. A real "rapprochement" was . 
scarcely to be created so easily or in so brief a time. 
Jacques Monet attempts to document another kind of "rapprochement'', 
between French-Canadians of the 1840's and the British Crown, which he 
argues was created in large part by the actions of two of the first four governors 
of the Province of Canada. Professor Monet is an engaging writer, but his 
thesis is (at least) debatable, and his search for explanations for the success 
of his heroes, Bagot and Elgin, and for the failure of Sydenham and Metcalfe, 
leads him at times onto some questionable ground. Bagot and Elgin had 
initial advantages because they were "born aristocrats, descended from kings 
and knights whose names shine down through mediaeval mists". True enough 
for Elgin certainly, and Bagot came from an ancient family, but the actual 
Bagot peerage only went back sixty years to Sir Charles' grandfather. 
Sydenham and Metcalfe were sick. Was Bagot in rude health ? Metcalfe was 
"trained to autocracy'', yet his conduct in Jamaica, at a time, immediately 
after emancipation, when the difficulties of office were no less formidable than 
those in the Province of Canada, had been anything but autocratic. Sydenham 
and Metcalfe did not demonstrate "ability in French", yet Sydenham at least 
COMPTES RENDUS 143 
was an accomplished linguist, fluent not only in French but in several other 
languages as well. These are perhaps minor quibbles, but they tend to create 
doubt about an argument which needs all the support it can get. 
Among the other essays that of L. F. S. Upton is probably the most 
ambitious. He sets out to trace the development of "the idea of Confederation" 
and to explore its implications, from a starting point in 1754 to its materializa-
tion in 1867. His conclusion, that by 1858 British North Americans were 
not only familiar, but over famiUar with the various confederation schemes, 
and that !bis familiarity produced a consensus which "froze" thinking about 
union at 1867, is open to considerable doubt. If Professor Upton is right it is 
hard to explain (for example) the lack of knowledge which caused Macdonald 
to complain frequently in private that almost none of his colleagues "had the 
slightest idea of constitution making". Professor Upton assumes that because 
so many proposals had been put forward they must have had a cumulative 
effect. He seems to assume also that an intellectual connecting line can be 
drawn through all these plans, which is clearly not the case. Professor Upton's 
paper contains a useful chronological checklist of plans for union but perhaps 
its real usefulness is as a warning : that attempts to find, in this or any other 
"intellectual" area of Canadian history, a body of coherent, connected, formal 
thought is apt to produce results which are partial, misleading and, very 
likely, dull. 
Probably no one is going to quarrel very much with the findings of 
Anthony Rasporich, based on his examination of "Imperial Sentiment in the 
Province of Canada during the Crimean War", which amount to the fact that 
Canadian support was solidly on the British and French side. Still it is 
regrettable that he found it necessary to make his point at such unnecessary 
length and in such unnecessarily awkward prose. Jean Usher also takes a 
considerable time to make her point about William Duncan of Metlakatla (that 
his approach to native peoples did not represent any daring innovation in 
technique) , a point which many Canadian historians may find somewhat 
peripheral to their work. Finally, the papers submitted by Alan Gowans and 
R. H. Hubbard, which do possess the merit of brevity, are otherwise undistin-
guished. Both begin well but Dr. Hubbard's "Viceregal Influences on Canadian 
Society" lapses rapidly into mere anecdote; and Professor Gowans, having put 
forward his intriguing thesis - that High Victorian architecture perfectly 
expressed the Canadian cultural climate of the 1860's and 1870's - perversely 
refuses to explain why he thinks this is so, on the ground that it is all in 
his books. 
Professor Morton, whose contribution to the book is twofold, is more 
successful as essayist than as editor. "Victorian Canada" is obviously a 
subject too large for the twenty pages he has allowed himself, and his essay 
becomes rather breathless simply in trying to touch on all the topics raised by 
144 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY 
his collaborators. He does at times, however, evoke social pictures which have 
the feel of authenticity. He sets down as well a whole range of concepts which 
he sees as the dominant ideas of the Victorian Age, all of which are provocative, 
all worth study in real depth, worth refining and qualifying and thinking about 
until we really do "begin to see what past Canadians really thought and were". 
Except for the initial task of soliciting contributions to the book, the only 
discernible sign that Professor Morton has "edited" it at all is the annoying 
division of Professor Sylvain's essay into two parts. More guidance was clearly 
called for. A number of the essays might have been severely criticized on 
historical, literary and logical grounds and returned to their authors for 
rewriting and re·thinking, before publication. Less serious but no less irritating 
is the extraordinary number of factual, grammatical and typographical errors 
which abound in the book. Even if Professor Morton's editorial duties did 
not include elementary proofreading for typist's and printer's errors (they 
obviously did not since his own essay is the worst offender in this respect), he 
ought to have forestalled a number of howlers of the undergraduate sort, 
including the invention of some historical figures previously unknown to students 
of Canadian biography, such as Professor Upton's composite Earl Grey "who 
accompanied his father·in-law, Lord Durham in 1838", "Sir" Alexander 
Mackenzie (the Prime Minister) gratuitously knighted by Dr. Hubbard, and 
Professor Morton's own contribution to the ranks of the petite noblesse, the 
Knight of Labour. The book, in sum, appears to have been put together 
carelessly and in haste. 
An editor's lot is frequently not a happy one. Anyone who has attempted 
a similar task will sympathize with Professor Morton's statement that "it was 
necessary to proceed with such authors as had time to prepare a contribution". 
Yet one cannot help wondering if something of more value might not have 
been possible given more time and more care. Clearly, we are not going to 
find out what we "really thought and were" quickly or easily, but only by 
long and patient sifting of many kinds of evidence. With some exceptions, 
this sort of careful, thoughtful work is not apparent in The Shield of Achilles. 
One can only hope that this book is not an accurate reflection of the present 
level of studies in the intellectual and social history of Canada. One can only 
hope, to borrow a last inelegant phrase from one of the book's authors, that 
"nothing could be more farther from the truth". 
J. K. JOHNSON, 
Carleton University. 


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RICHARD G. HARRIS. - The Seigneurial System in Early Canada, a Geographical Study.

W. L. MORTON (ed.). The Shield of Achilles: Aspects of Canada in the Victorian Age.

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