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BY  WILFRED  CAMPBELL

AUTHOR OF “THE CANADIAN LAKE REGION,” ETC.

PERHAPS the strongest influence in the forcing of the democratic movement of the nineteenth century was that of the press. As the years have passed this influence has grown and grown until it sometimes threatens to destroy itself.

The history of Canadian journalism is like that of any other vocation or business, a picture of succeeding successes and failures, with the number of the failures greatly in the majority. All the time, newspapers and periodicals are being brought into existence only to live a few months or years and then disappear into the limbo of all forgotten things.

It is quite a surprise to the historian to be confronted with the long-forgotten names of many defunct newspapers that saw the light in Toronto, Montreal, and other Canadian cities and towns, flickered during a little journalistic span, and then sputtered out.

Some of these papers proved to be of little account, and soon passed, like their promoters, into that oblivion which is the obvious doom of all mediocrity. But some there were of a more than common origin and individuality, and though they eventually went their way, or merged into other journalistic ventures, they had a strong influence in their time, and stood for something more than a mere financial or other personal ambition.

One of the most interesting periods of our journalistic history was that extending from 1837 to 1867, a formative and perilous period between the Mackenzie Rebellion and Confederation. Just because it was an intermediary period, it has been regarded wrongfully as a time of little interest, and is, therefore, not much dealt with by the historian.

The foundation or gradual development of great historical newspapers, like The Gazette, Montreal, or The Globe, Toronto, while of deep interest, is not within the scope of this paper, which seeks rather to bring back to remembrance some old, now long-forgotten journalists and journals which were prominent during the period referred to.

That was the era which included the union of the two old Canadas, Upper and Lower, in a political harness, which was ever at the straining point. It was a period when the capital and seat of executive and legislative government was gipsylike—ever on the move, with those consequent local jealousies inherent in the system and the race and other animosities of the yoked but not united Provinces. It was also a period of crude legislation and crude legislators, when the name Canada was restricted to the two Provinces; and the rest was maritime, and undiscovered British North America. It was a period when many of the inhabitants were British-born, and fresh from the long-tried institutions and well-balanced culture of the Motherland; so that it is easy to understand that in what we would regard as a pioneer condition there were many fine spirits of culture, refinement, and ability who essayed to solve the pioneer problems and bring the ideals of old tradition and precedent to bear upon the social and political difficulties of the young colony.

It was, if not the supreme age, a ripe and favourable period of the university and culture, and emerging out of the days of the Reform Bill in England and the Rebellion in Canada, a decade of triumph and hope for the democracy. Science on both continents was beginning to preen its platinum pinions of exact, though not heavenward flight. It was in many senses a period of hope and development for the new world.

It was quite natural that many of the newcomers should be university men and writers of ability—clever and oftentimes keen observers of their new environment, and, above all else, race-bred politicians.

It was a day of newspaper controversy and the now rare and much-sought-for pamphlet; and back of these scribes and literary pamphleteers were the editors and leaders of the dominant rival parties of that time.

Among the several groups of literary statesmen and editors whose writings and editorial pages influenced the period no names are more interesting than those of Hugh Scobie, J. Sheridan Hogan, John Lowe, and Brown Chamberlain, a slight sketch of whose careers and the affairs they took part in will be the subject of this paper.

None of these men could be called a shining success, as the very material gilt-edged judgment of to-day would estimate them. None of them died rich. One of them only (Chamberlain) was ultimately decorated with a C.M.G.

But they were men of considerable influence and importance in their day, when the Confederation was yet in the melting-pot, and after; and the student who glimpses history beneath the superficies of the mere political statement and the carefully worded state document, and reaches the private opinion and hidden passion and motive which underlie all great and little movements, will find that these men were very close to the centre of influence behind the scenes of the political drama. They were all men, as their careers show, who did more for their country than it ever did for them, willing and indefatigable pioneers in many movements for the benefit of the country.

But to the reader and student each man’s separate career will be found to be interesting. One of them (Scobie) died in 1853. Hogan was murdered six years later. Chamberlain died in the nineties of the last century, as Queen’s Printer of Canada; and Lowe lingered on the stage in retirement until the autumn of last year, when he died in the ninetieth year of his age—a disappointed and ill-used man. Another remarkable fact concerning these four men—all Canadian journalists, editors, and newspaper proprietors in their day—was that one was a Scotsman, the second an Irishman, the third an Englishman, and the fourth of old American loyalist extraction.

The strongest spirit, and the leader, and in many senses the father of this group was Hugh Scobie, who in his day and time was a force and influence in the affairs of Upper Canada. Had he not died while yet a young man in his forty-second year there is no saying what he might not have accomplished.

Hugh Scobie was the second son of Captain James Scobie, of Ardvare, in Sutherlandshire, and came of a stock which was of the best blood of Northern Scotland. His father, Captain Scobie, originally an ensign in the 93rd Highlanders, was a retired captain in full pay of the Royal Veteran Battalion. He was accidentally drowned while crossing a loch in Assynt when on the eve of his departure for Upper Canada, where he intended to settle with his family. Soon after his death in March of 1833, his five sons and two daughters emigrated to Upper Canada, where the Canadian Government, on the recommendation of the War Office, allowed the same remission upon the price of lands purchased by them as would have been granted to their father as a retired officer. In a letter now in my possession, from Mrs. Scobie, of Keoldale, to her husband’s (Major Scobie’s) niece, Mrs. Mackay of Pictou, she refers to the departure of the young Scobies for Canada, as follows:

“I should have mentioned in my last letter to Mr. Mackay that Captain James Scobie’s family have all gone to Canada. They sailed from Greenoch 30th of March, so that I trust they are ere now at their desired haven. They are a promising lot of young creatures. The lads are Kenneth, Hugh, Alexander, Mackay, and James; the girls, Alexie and Margaret.”

Kenneth and James, the eldest and youngest, according to a later letter from Keoldale, written in 1834, died soon after their arrival in Canada. Hugh, the second, is one of the group considered in this sketch.

He was born on the 29th of April, 1811, at Fort George, in Inverness, where his father was evidently stationed, and received his education at the Academy at Tain, a classical school for gentlemen’s sons at that time well known in the north of Scotland. He then went to Edinburgh and commenced the study of the law in the offices of Messrs. Gordon and Stuart, writers to the Signet. But upon his father’s death abandoned this intention. The year after his arrival in Upper Canada, Scobie settled on a farm in the township of West Gwillimbury—where he lived until 1838.

In that year he removed to Toronto and founded The British Colonist, which was destined to become in many senses the most distinctive and important journal at that time in the Upper Province. This paper, whose first two numbers bore the name of The Scotsman, was at first a weekly, then a tri-weekly, and finally a daily.

From the very first Scobie became a leader, and threw himself heart and soul into the struggle for the rights of the Church of Scotland in Canada. It was in the interests of this struggle that The Colonist was first founded. In its initial number, published on February 1st, 1838, appear the letters of the Honourable William Morris in his controversy with Bishop Strachan and Archdeacon Bethune.

As long as the battle of the Clergy Reserves continued, this paper was the principal organ in the van of the fight on behalf of the rights of the Canadian Scottish Church. But as soon as that question was settled The British Colonist ceased to be a church organ, or organ of any party, and Mr. Scobie assumed the position, rare in those days, of an independent journalist, and ever and consistently maintained this character to the end of his life. Having, though a plain unassuming man, in his veins the blood of the best Scottish gentry, with those old traditions of personal honour and faithful service to the state, he was a man of an independent ideal, as stern and rugged as his native mountains of Assynt. Born of a race of fighters and men who would be freemen, he was the first in Upper Canada to maintain a high-class, independent journal in a period when such a paper was considered impossible and when every engine of corruption was used by all parties to crush him. In spite of all opposition he seemed to glory in being independent.

Scobie was a native of that portion of Scotland from which came the families of Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir Oliver Mowat, and many others of our Canadian pioneers of Empire. His was a different nature from that of either George Brown or John Alexander Macdonald, the latter a young local lawyer of the Bay of Quinte district, who about this time had settled in Kingston, and in 1847 entered public life as a member of Parliament, and succeeded Sir Allan McNab, another prominent Scottish-Canadian as leader, and founded the new Liberal-Conservative party.

That was the period of the formation of two great political parties, which were to strive with each other for the formation of the destinies of the greater Canada yet unborn—and amid the struggles of a formative period, The British Colonist held its own way and proved a great influence amid the sharp strife of opposite and bitterly militant ideals.

One of the things that Scobie accomplished was to gather about him as writers a group of young and ambitious men, some of whom afterwards became statesmen and editors and close confidants of the political controllers of Canada.

Chief among these were the other three of the quartette, the subjects of this essay—Hogan, Chamberlain, and Lowe.

In Scobie’s fight for the rights of the Church of Scotland in Canada his chief opponent was Bishop Strachan, the great educationist, divine, and statesman. But it is to the credit of both men that through all the years of bitter sectarian party strife they retained a mutual respect, and it is pleasing to know that during Scobie’s last illness the Bishop visited him to express his sympathy.

It may be interesting to many Canadians to learn that Hugh Scobie had to do with the foundation of what is now called the Liberal-Conservative party, and that the very name itself originated in his journal. In the editorial in the first number of The Colonist, then called The Scotsman, and published on the first of February, 1838, Scobie writes: “We are neither Tory on the one hand, nor Radical on the other; but wish to love and honour our Queen.” The editorial referring to his death in December, 1853, says: “His politics, to use his own term, were Liberal-Conservative. By this he meant Conservatism in so far as concerned the observance of sound constitutional maxims, and progressive in so far as the needs of this rapidly-rising colony demanded.”

While he was, as shown, a pioneer in the shaping of the foundation principles of what afterwards became a great party, Hugh Scobie was more. He was one of the closest students of municipal life and law, and he did much to encourage the development of the municipality as it was in Ontario up to the last twenty years, until the unhealthy growth of our cities and the resultant decline of the democracy killed what is called public opinion.

Scobie was also a publisher, and his famous almanac in its day contained enough municipal law and other practical information regarding the country to furnish the average public man with a liberal education.

His Municipal Manual was also an important work on municipal law. In addition to all this he raised the standard of journalism in the Province to a high plane, and made the better-class newspapers which followed, possible, as many of his correspondents and editorial writers became later editors and publishers of prominent newspapers in Montreal and Toronto.

He also took a deep interest in the cause of education, and was a prominent member of the Board of Education for Canada West.

One is tempted to write at greater length concerning this strong and individual man, who played so prominent a part in the upbuilding of the young Province, but space will not permit in so limited an article. Hugh Scobie died on the 3rd of December, 1853, at the early age of forty-two, and his untimely demise was a great loss to the public life of the whole Canadian community. He had married, in 1844, Miss Justina Macleod, daughter of Captain Angus Macleod, of Rosshire, and left one daughter, who married the late Chief Justice Harrison.

We have had of late a plethora of recommendations of certain historical worthies, among them Champlain, for that more enduring fame in tablets and shafts of bronze and stone. But why is it that the worthy memory of such a personality is allowed to lapse and sink into the dust of a shrouding oblivion? Is it true that our several British-Canadian communities are sadly lacking in that proper appreciation of the acts and lives of their own deserving dead, which they often seem over anxious to show to the dead of other and alien communities?

The next in chronological order of this interesting journalistic quartette was the brilliant Irishman who met so sad and tragic an end at a period of life when most men have the zenith of success ahead of them. John Sheridan Hogan was, as his name suggests, a native of Ireland, being born near Dublin about the year 1815. He started his career, however, as a newsboy or what is called a printer’s devil, on the staff of a periodical called The Wesleyan, published at Hamilton, Upper Canada. Becoming a skilled printer, he soon rose to be foreman, and became a contributor. He then studied law, and in 1844 was articled as an attorney and practised at Hamilton until he removed to Toronto. There he reverted to journalism and founded The United Empire, which has been designated a high-church Tory journal, and which was eventually absorbed in The Leader.

For some years Hogan acted as parliamentary correspondent for several journals. But owing to his bitter, unsparing, and daring style made many enemies. This lack of tact in his relations with parties and individuals no doubt helped to spoil his career, though his undoubted brilliancy as a writer must have created jealousy of work which few of his contemporaries could even approach. Hogan was a man of strong individuality, who, like men of his type stood very much alone, and probably because of his strong opinions was of little use to any party or leader as a journalist. In short, unlike many of his fellow-journalists, he himself aspired to be a leader.

One of his successes which gave him special prominence was the winning of the first prize in an essay competition upon the subject of Canada and its resources.

This competition was organized by the Canadian Committee of the Paris Exhibition, and there were fully nineteen essayists who sent in manuscripts, among them being the Honourable Alexander Morris, who took the second prize. With regard to this competition, Hogan wrote to Lowe, under date the 18th of January, 1855: “I was informed to-day that Keefer is writing for the prize. Respecting his talents I, of course, did not imagine that he was competing. . . . I have now gone so far that I cannot retrace my steps. Having heard of such extraordinary competition I have determined to throw my whole soul into it. . . . I have already completed the introduction, and most of the filling up, and what is by no means common with me, I like the introduction. It is the best thing I have written, and you are aware I took the £200 prize offered by the Duke of Argyle, Buchanan, and Graham, in 1849, for the best essay on Imperial Protection to Colonial Productions. . . . However, if Keefer is competing, it is somewhat different here.” Keefer, now the distinguished Canadian engineer, did not compete. Of Hogan’s essay five thousand copies were issued. Five years prior to this he had contributed able articles, dealing with Canadian affairs, to Blackwood’s Magazine. He also wrote the New Year’s ode for that year (1850) in that magazine.

In 1855 he became the editor of The Colonist, for which paper he had already been a correspondent, and occupied this position for some years, until that journal, which had declined since the death of Hugh Scobie, finally lost favour with the public. Hogan soon after entered the field of active politics, and at the general elections of 1857 he was returned as a member of the Legislative Assembly in the Reform interest. Brilliant as a writer and advocate, and of a strong personality, probably only second to that of D’Arcy McGee, in Canadian politics of his day, Hogan was a man a good deal alone, a free lance as it were, distrusted and eventually opposed by leaders like John A. Macdonald, Draper, and Van Koughnet. Whatever might have been the fate in store for him, it was doomed to be averted; as his life was cut short, like that of Scobie, though in a more tragic manner. One night in December, 1859, he was murdered on the Don bridge, at Toronto. The mystery of his death was never solved. But thus ended the brilliant and meteoric career of one of the ablest and most versatile writers and one of the strongest personalities in the whole history of Canadian politics and journalism.

The third in the group, chronologically, was Brown Chamberlain, a native of the Eastern Townships of Quebec, whose parents removed, in the early years of the nineteenth century, from Lewiston, New York State, near Niagara. While not strictly of United Empire Loyalist stock, Chamberlain came of forbears not unfriendly to monarchy, and that surer, more stable, and conservative government found under the British flag.

He was from his earliest days a student and an ambitious and untiring worker, and early in the fifties we find him, with his friend, and later, brother-in-law and partner, John Lowe, engaged as a contributor to The Colonist, under the editorship of Hugh Scobie. It was here that Chamberlain got his journalistic training, and where he came into close touch with that rising statesman and master-politician, John A. Macdonald.

On November 27th, 1856, Macdonald writes to Chamberlain as follows, and gives an interesting picture of political conditions: “As the Government hope, or rather, I hope, to get the Government to lay down some definite policy with regard to G. T. matters, including the question of removal of books. This policy, once formed, shall be communicated confidentially to you. If you like it, you will support it. If not, why then fire away. . . . I do not hear of any transactions between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Government. I shall make immediate inquiry, and it will take strong reasons to convince me of the propriety of conveying any lands to that corporation.”

Then, in closing, he refers to Sir Allan McNab as “the honourable Baronet,” and then uses the expression, “We are, it seems, to have war to the knife. So let it be.”

Later, Macdonald, with whom Chamberlain evidently was still in close touch, both as an editor and political confidant, writes the latter from Quebec. In this letter, dated 17th October, 1860, he says: “Anxious as I have been to leave the Government for the last three years, I have no personal views and desire only to see a number of respectable men entering into public life. I protest, however, against the assumption that Lower Canada has too much influence. This opinion of Morris’s only shows how the damnable iteration of a lie will influence parties, without reason or the semblance of it. I often hear in Upper Canada the same thing said, and yet when I ask for a single instance of it, no one can state that instance.” Here we get an insight into the inner history of the day, such questions as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Grand Trunk Railway being chief among them.

These letters also reveal the already widening cleavage between the old Tory influences of the past generation, as represented by Sir Allan McNab, and that of the young, progressive Liberal-Conservatives, whose head was that young but already farsighted statesman, Macdonald.

As the latter writes: “It was war to the knife.” But, as we have seen, Macdonald writes four years later, and not this time as the mere Upper Canadian, suspicious of Cartier and the doings of the Lower Province. He now has got a wider perspective; he has outgrown the provincial prejudices and outlook, as shown in his strong reflections on Morris and other Upper Canadians. Here we catch a glimpse of the Sir John A. Macdonald whose ideals and outlook were no narrower than the bounds of the larger Canada, the Dominion or Confederation which he was already dimly dreaming.

It gives us a sight of a new phase of this remarkable man, who has been accused of opportunism. Here we see him indignant and impatient of the mere provincial prejudice, and in this he seems to stand almost alone in an attitude which later was to widen into Imperialism.

Brown Chamberlain was in every sense a staunch Conservative, and in the interests of that party was elected a member of Parliament for Mississquoi county, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. He finally retired from journalism to accept the post of Queen’s Printer for Canada at Ottawa, which he held until his death in the nineties.

Forty years before he and his brother-in-law, John Lowe, had purchased The Montreal Gazette, and for many years were controllers and editors of that influential journal. During this period many important developments in Canadian history occurred, which changed the whole life of the country. The greatest of these was Confederation, which gave the name “Canada” to all British North America, under one vast Federal Government; and in this solution of the national problem both Chamberlain and his partner, John Lowe, bore an important part. As journalists and close friends of Macdonald, Cartier, McGee, and other Federalists, they were from the first in the very closest confidence of the old Canadian leaders, and from time to time enunciated the policy of the promoters of the great scheme in their editorial pages.

John Lowe, Chamberlain’s partner and brother-in-law, was a native of Birkenhead, near Liverpool, and sought his fortune as a youth in Canada at a period when industrious and intellectual pioneers were needed. Like Chamberlain, he took to journalism as a natural vocation, and early became a writer for The Colonist, and a parliamentary correspondent. His career on The Gazette was a long and exceedingly active one. He was a man with a keen instinct for work and business experiments in many directions. But his real vocation was as an untiring servant of the public. There are many letters extant from prominent Canadians addressed to him, both as an editor and in his later official capacity, which prove the confidence placed in his unselfish, untiring energy and ability. Letters from Sir George Cartier show Lowe to have been deep in the latter’s confidence, and reveal the intimate political relations existing between them.

When Lowe, in 1870, retired from The Gazette to enter the service as an important official in the Department of Agriculture, he carried with him this confidence in his trustworthiness and ability into public life. He became for many years the head-centre of the pioneer work in Canadian immigration from Britain and Europe, and there is no doubt that he never received the recognition which his great services, in this and other branches of his Department, merited from an indifferent and thankless country.

Of such fine intellectual and characteristic material were these old worthies of a Canadian period now past and gone. No doubt they had their faults, as all have. But it was their splendid idealism, transmitted into action, which made whatever of good there is in Canada to-day possible.

This little group is but typical of the class of pioneers who, in spite of provincial, racial, and religious barriers, prejudices, and animosities, brought about the Canadian union and expansion which we now inherit.

Is it not meant that here, at the gateways of the present century which, according to our ideals and action or inaction as a whole people is to mean so much for the future weal or woe of Canada and the Empire, we should pause in serious thought as to the road upon which we are travelling, and take, as it were, stock of our ethical and social bank account. We are no more a mere child-community; we are at least a century old, and is it not time that we realized in more than mere contemplation our infinite responsibilities to the present, to the future, and to the past? How better can we spend our time than by now and again recalling in the pages of our leading periodicals and journals the deeds and personality of those strong and conscientious pioneers who blazed the main trails and ventured upon the uncharted seas of our national and Imperial possibilities?

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of Four Early Canadian Journalists, by William Wilfred Campbell.]