2997 becoming modern, 1885–1915 mainly english bo

1. 2997 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
mainly English-born Torontonians making a living as
commercial artists, had begun travelling north into
the Georgian Bay and Algonquin wildernesses as early
as 1911. This group captured the iconographic essence
of wilderness Canada: a bleak and sombre but none-
theless curiously beautiful landscape of Jack pines,
rock outcroppings, and storm-driven lakes, totally
uninhabited by people.
Other Identities
We can easily make too much of the political and
religious arena. The elaboration of competing and
occasionally incompatible identities by and for its cit-
izens characterized the Victorian Age. As well as their
national and provincial loyalties, most Canadians had
firm allegiances to their ethnic origins, whether these
were French Canadian, Acadian, or British. French
Canada further elaborated its cultural identity in this
period, and the Acadians began self-consciously to
develop one. As for those people whose origins were
in the British Isles, they simultaneously thought of
themselves as British as well as Welsh, Scottish, Irish,
or English. Indeed, British Canadians may well have
thought of themselves as more British (as opposed to
Welsh or Scottish) than did their compatriots at home.
The state did not weigh heavily on the daily lives of
most Canadians in this era, although the administrative
state had begun its development before Confederation.

2. “Odabin Cottage,” the summer house of Charles Howard Millar,
the local postmaster, Drummondville, Quebec, c. 1903.
Canadians’
fascination with the summer cottage had already taken hold
before 1914. Except for some ostentatious present-day
“cottages” on
some lakes, this cottage of more than a century ago is little
different from those that Canadians rush to in the summer
months
today. Such cottages are perhaps most notable for how they
blend into—as opposed to stand out from—the surrounding
natural
environment, in this case even with the decking built around
small trees. © McCord Museum.
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300 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Taxation had not yet become ubiquitous and occurred
mainly as tariffs and duties. Moreover, the state—as
represented by province, nation, or city—did not nor-
mally provide social benefits or solace when people got
sick, lost jobs, retired, or died. For some, politics and gov-
ernment were a source of employment or patronage. For
most Canadians, however, government had very little to
do with their lives. For many people, political allegiance
to the state was therefore not as important as loyalty to
the caring institutions: family, ethnic group, religion,
and fraternal organization. Churches and religion were
most important. Canada was a Christian country and
few of its citizens openly defied Christian norms and
values. By the 1880s the mobility of many Canadians

3. contributed to the tendency to belong to a good many
other voluntary organizations beyond the church. In an
earlier period, voluntary organizations supplemented
or provided municipal services such as water, light,
fire, and libraries as well as charity. By the 1880s some
organizations had begun providing entertainment and
companionship for their members.
Technically independent of the churches, but closely
connected in overlapping membership and social goals,
were reform organizations like the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union. Letitia Youmans (1827–96), a pub-
lic school teacher and Sunday school teacher in the
Methodist Church, founded the first Canadian local
of the WCTU in December 1874 in Picton, Ontario.
The WCTU spread rapidly across Canada in the 1880s,
preaching that alcohol abuse was responsible for many
of the social problems of contemporary Canada and
campaigning for public prohibition of the sale of alco-
holic beverages. Most of its membership came from the
middle class, and much of its literature was directed
at demonstrating that poverty and family problems
among the lower orders could be reduced, if not elim-
inated, by cutting off the availability of alcohol to the
male breadwinner.
Canadians of the time tended to associate
Orangeism with political matters—organizing parades
on 12 July, opposing Roman Catholics, objecting to the
1870 execution of Thomas Scott—and with the Irish.
Nevertheless, the Orange Order’s real importance and
influence continued to rest on the twin facts that its
membership united British Protestants of all origins
and that it served as a focal point on the local level for
social intercourse and conviviality. As a “secret” society,

4. it had elaborate initiation rites and a ritual that appealed
to men who spent most of their lives in drudgery or
dull routine. Lodges provided a variety of services for
members, including an elaborate funeral. But if local
fraternity was the key to Orangeism’s success, its public
influence was enormous. In 1885 John A. Macdonald’s
government would prefer to risk alienating Quebec by
executing Louis Riel than alienating Orange Ontario by
sparing him.
The Orange Order was not the only fraternal organ-
ization that grew and flourished in Canada. Because
most of these societies were semi-secret, with rites based
on Freemasonry, they appealed mainly to Protestants.
The Masons themselves expanded enormously during
the mid-nineteenth century. They were joined by a num-
ber of other orders, such as the Independent Order of
Oddfellows (founded in England in 1813 and brought
to Canada by 1845), the Independent Order of Foresters
(founded in the United States in 1874 and brought to
Canada in 1881), and the order of the Knights of Pythias
(founded in Washington, DC, in the early 1860s and
brought to Canada in 1870). The Knights of Labor was
an all-embracing labour organization that owed much
to the lodges. Fellowship and mutual support were the
keys to the success of all of these societies. Their success
led to the formation in 1882 of the Knights of Columbus
as a similar fraternal benefit society for Roman Catholic
men, although the first chapters in Canada were prob-
ably not founded until the early 1890s. While few of these
societies admitted women directly, most had adjunct or
parallel organizations for women. By the 1880s many
Canadians belonged to one or more of these societies.
Membership offered a means of social introduction into
a new community, provided status and entertainment to
members, and increasingly supplied assurance of assist-

5. ance in times of economic or emotional crisis.
Culture
In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, most Canadians
continued to amuse themselves at home by making
music and playing numerous parlour games. Outside
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3017 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
the home, the amateur tradition remained strong. In
most fields of artistic endeavour, Britain and the United
States remained the dominant influences. Perhaps
the outstanding original achievements in Canadian
cultural production in this period occurred in fiction.
Three developments stand out. One was the creation of
the Canadian social novel. A second was the rise of a
major figure in Canadian humour to carry on the ear-
lier tradition of Haliburton and McCulloch. The third
development, related to the previous two, was the emer-
gence of several Canadian authors as international
bestsellers. Some of these authors were women. All the
successful authors were at their best in writing about
the values of rural and small-town Canada at the end of
the nineteenth century.
The best example of the social novel—also a novel
of ideas—was The Imperialist by Sara Jeannette Duncan
(1862–1912). Duncan had been born in Brantford and
educated at the Toronto Normal School. She then
became a pioneering female journalist, working for a
long list of newspapers in the United States and Canada.
In 1888 she and a female friend began a trip around

6. the world, which she subsequently fictionalized. In
1904 she produced The Imperialist, a novel intended to
describe the Imperial Question from the vantage point
of the “average Canadian of the average small town . . .
whose views in the end [counted] for more than the
opinions of the political leaders” (quoted in Klinck,
1965: 316). Duncan drew on her childhood experiences
in Brantford to describe conditions in Elgin, a “thriv-
ing manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute,
eleven churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for
the deaf and dumb, to say nothing of a fire department
unsurpassed for organization and achievement in the
Province of Ontario” (Duncan, 1971 [1904]: 25). The
opening chapter began with an account of the celebra-
tions in Elgin on 24 May, the Queen’s Birthday. Duncan
interwove the issue of imperialism with the social
values of late Victorian Canada. For her protagonist,
young politician Lorne Murchison, Canada’s continu-
ation as a British nation was of moral rather than stra-
tegic importance.
Duncan was perhaps the first Canadian writer to rec-
ognize the literary potential of small-town Canada, espe-
cially for satirical purposes, but she was not the greatest.
Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) had been born in England,
but grew up on a farm near Lake Simcoe. Educated at
Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto, and the
University of Chicago, Leacock published a successful
college textbook, Elements of Political Science, in 1906. He
produced his first volume of humorous sketches, Literary
Lapses, in 1910, and two years later published Sunshine
Sketches of a Little Town. This was an affectionate satirical
look at life in Mariposa, a fictionalized version of Orillia,
the nearest town to his boyhood home. Leacock per-
fectly captured the hypocrisy, materialism, and inflated

7. notions of importance possessed by Mariposa’s residents.
He followed this triumph with a much more savage sat-
ire of a North American city, obviously the Montreal in
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) sold the rights to her
highly successful novel Anne of Green Gables to an American
publisher for $500. Anne has gone on to become a mythic
Canadian heroine, equally popular in Japan as in Canada
itself. Public Archives and Records Office of Prince Edward
Island. Lucy Maud Montgomery 3110-1.
901491_07_Ch07.indd 301 12/16/15 12:33 PM
302 A History of the Canadian Peoples
which he lived and taught (at McGill University). The
work was entitled Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
(1914). In this book, which he pretended to set somewhere
in the United States, Leacock began the transference of
his satire from Canada to North America. He moved on
from these early works to produce a volume of humorous
sketches virtually every year, increasingly set in an inter -
national milieu. His books were very popular in Britain
and the United States. Many critics feel that Leacock’s
best work was his early Canadian satire, in which he
scourged Canadian pretensions.
Duncan and Leacock both achieved international
reputations as writers of fiction, and they were joined by
several other Canadians in the years between 1900 and
1914. One was the Presbyterian clergyman Charles W.
Gordon (1860–1937), who under the pseudonym “Ralph
Connor” was probably the best-selling writer in English

8. between 1899 and the Great War. Born in Glengarry
The Spell of the Yukon
Document
I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.
No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth—and I’m one.
You come to get rich (damned good reason);
You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it’s been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end.
British-born Robert W. Service (1874–1958) was the most
popular poet in Canada at the end of the

9. nineteenth century, best known as the “poet of the Yukon.” His
poem, “The Spell of the Yukon,”
reprinted below, suggests his attraction.
The Chilkoot Pass. This iconic photograph suggests some of the
difficulties gold seekers endured to reach the Yukon. © World
History Archive/Alamy.
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3037 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
County, Canada West, and educated at the University
of Toronto and Edinburgh University, Gordon became
minister of a Presbyterian church in Winnipeg, where
he lived for the remainder of his life. Ralph Connor’s first
three books, published between 1899 and 1902, sold over
five million copies. One of these, Glengarry School Days:
A Story of Early Days in Glengarry (1902), was probably
the best book he ever wrote. Like Duncan and Leacock,
Connor excelled at the evocation of small-town life and
mores, drawing from his personal experiences as a boy. He
was not a great writer but knew how to sustain a narrative
and to frame a moral crisis. Some of his work—including
novels in which clerical examples of muscular Christianity
faced a variety of frontier challenges—obviously struck a
responsive chord in an international audience. Connor’s
heroes triumphed over sin, anarchy, and unregenerate
people by sheer force of character, Christian conviction,
goodness, and even physical strength; they represented
I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;

10. I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.
The summer—no sweeter was ever;
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the farness—
O God! how I’m stuck on it all.
The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.
There’s a land where the mountains are
nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back—and I will.
They’re making my money diminish;

11. I’m sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish
I’ll pike to the Yukon again.
I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;
It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before;
And it’s better than this by a damsite—
So me for the Yukon once more.
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
901491_07_Ch07.indd 303 12/16/15 12:33 PM
304 A History of the Canadian Peoples
A wooden church in the French Gothic style located
on Prince Edward Island, St Mary’s Church in
Indian River was designed by William Critchlow Harris
(1854–1913), perhaps the leading architect in the
Maritime provinces in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Harris was born near Liverpool,
England, and immigrated with his family to the Island

12. in 1856. One of seven children, he attended Prince
of Wales College and spent his life in the Maritimes,
a residential choice that may have cost him the
opportunity to achieve a national or even inter-
national reputation as did his elder brother Robert
Harris, the painter. Harris began designing churches
in 1880, most of them located on PEI or in Nova
Scotia. Although he frequently built with stone, his
most characteristic and iconic churches are, like St
Mary’s, renderings in wood of buildings in the Gothic
style. Indeed, his adaptation of wood to a Victorian
vocabulary was his most original contribution to the
architectural landscape of the region. The buildings
stand out today partly because they are painted in
bright colours. Harris began working in High Victorian
Gothic, but gradually shifted to French Gothic, as
exemplified in St Mary’s. A keen amateur musician,
Harris’s churches were invariably acoustical triumphs,

13. in effect musical instruments rendered as buildings.
This church was decommissioned by 2009 and is
presently used as a concert hall. Harris’s designs were
distinguished by multi-paned pointed-arch Gothic
windows and often by circular side-towers, as well
as clipped gable roofs and bargeboards with drilled
holes as decoration. The tower at Indian River also
contains representations of the 12 apostles, perhaps
a tribute to the Cathedral at Chartres. Harris’s willing-
ness to adapt wood to the Gothic style is an obvious
repurposing of a specific material culture tradition
to Canada. The use of classic architectural forms to
produce distinctively regional churches is a repeated
theme of colonial encounters, but in St Mary’s we see
that trend continuing even after Canada has become
an established nation. That the building now hosts
concerts and other musical events is a holdover from
the interests of its architect, but also an adaptation of

14. the space to present needs.
Material Culture
St Mary’s Church. © Bill Gozansky/Alamy.
St Mary’s Church, Indian River, Prince Edward Island
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3057 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
what his generation saw as the forces of civilization and
progress. Fellow Presbyterian Nellie McClung (1873–1951)
also had great success with similar material, even less art-
fully rendered, in books such as Sowing Seeds in Danny
(1908); her fame was more in the political arena.
A much superior artist was Lucy Maud Montgomery
(1874–1942), whose Anne of Green Gables also first appeared
in 1908. Montgomery’s books lovingly described rural
life and presented some of the standard dilemmas faced
by her readers, ranging from growing up to having to
leave the farm.
Imperialism, Reform,
and Racism
Contemporaries often characterized Canadian political
life in this era in terms of its lack of ideology and its pre-
dilection for what the French observer André Siegfried
called the “question of collective or individual interests
for the candidates to exploit to their own advantage”
(Siegfried, 1907: 142). Lurking only just beneath the sur-

15. face, however, were some serious and profound issues.
First was the so-called Canadian question, which bore in
various ways upon the very future of the new nation. It
often appeared to be a debate between those who sought
to keep Canada within the British Empire and those who
wanted it to assume full sovereignty. Into this discus-
sion other matters merged subtly, including the “race”
question and the reform question. The former involved
the future of French Canada within an evolving Anglo-
American nation. The latter concerned the institution
of political and social change through public policy.
Debate and disagreement over the three loosely linked
issues—imperialism, Anglo–French antagonisms, and
reform—kept political Canada bubbling with scarcely
suppressed excitement from the 1880s to the beginning
of the Great War. Canada’s involvement in the military
conflict of Europe would bring those issues together,
although it would not resolve them.
Imperialism
The period from 1880 to 1914 saw a resurgence of imper -
ial development around the world. The French, the
Germans, even the Americans, took up what Rudyard
Kipling called the “White man’s burden” in underdevel-
oped regions of the world. About the same time, Great
Britain began to shed its “Little England” free trade
sentiments. The world’s shopkeeper discovered that
substantial windfall profits came from exploiting the
economies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, espe-
cially the last. Canada first faced the implications of
the resurgence of Britain’s imperial pretensions in 1884
when the mother country asked it to contribute to an
expedition to relieve General Charles Gordon, besieged
by thousands of Muslim fundamentalists at Khartoum

16. in the Egyptian Sudan. Sir John A. Macdonald’s immedi-
ate response was negative, but he ultimately found it
politic to allow Canadian civilian volunteers to assist
the British army. By the end of the century Joseph
Chamberlain at the Colonial Office in London was
advocating that Britain’s old settlement colonies be
joined together in some political and economic union,
the so-called Imperial Federation.
Encouraged by a new infusion of immigrants from
Britain—nearly half a million between 1870 and 1896
and a million between 1896 and 1914—many anglophone
Canadians began openly advocating Canada’s active
participation in the new British Empire. Their sense of
imperial destiny was not necessarily anti-nationalistic.
They saw no inconsistency between the promotion of
a sense of Canadian unity and a larger British Empire.
“I am an Imperialist,” argued Stephen Leacock in 1907,
“because I will not be a Colonial.” Leacock sought “some-
thing other than mere colonial stagnation, something
sounder than independence, nobler than annexation,
greater in purpose than a Little Canada” (quoted in
Bumsted, 1969, II: 78). Such pan-Britannic national-
ism came to express itself concretely in demands for
Imperial Federation. It was most prevalent in the prov-
ince of Ontario.
Unfortunately for the imperialists, not all Canadians
agreed with their arguments. Several strands of anti-
imperial sentiment had emerged by the turn of the cen-
tury. One strand, most closely identified with the political
journalist Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), insisted that the
geography of North America worked against Canadian
nationalism. Smith advocated Canadian absorption into
the United States. Fear of this development led many
Canadians to oppose a new reciprocity agreement with

17. 901491_07_Ch07.indd 305 12/16/15 12:33 PM
306 A History of the Canadian Peoples
Born in Chatsworth, Ontario, Nellie McClung (née
Mooney) (1873–1951) moved with her family to Manitoba
in 1880. After attending normal school in Winnipeg, she
taught in rural Manitoba for many years. She was active
in temperance work and in suffrage agitation. In 1896 she
married Robert Wesley McClung, a druggist, who prom-
ised, Nellie later reported, that “I would not have to lay
aside my ambitions if I married him.” Her emergence to
prominence began when she entered an American short
story competition in 1902 and was encouraged by an
American publisher to expand the story into the novel
that became Sowing Seeds in Danny, a lighthearted look at
village life on the prairies published in 1908. The book sold
over 100,000 copies, was in its seventeenth edition at the
time her death, and brought her both fame and fortune.
She and her husband moved to Winnipeg with their
four children in 1911, where she helped organize the
Political Equality League in 1912. Frustrated with the
difficulty of arousing male politicians to suffrage reform,
after some humiliating experiences she turned herself
into a first-rate platform speaker. In 1914 she organized
the Mock Parliament of Women, in which women played
all the political roles. McClung herself was Manitoba
Premier Rodmond Roblin, one of the major opponents of
women’s right to vote. McClung and her associates, sup-
porting the Liberal Party, were unable to defeat Roblin’s
government in the 1914 election, but it soon fell under
the weight of a construction scandal. The Liberal govern-

18. ment of Tobias Crawford soon made Manitoba the first
province in Canada to grant women the right to vote.
Meanwhile, the McClungs had moved to Edmonton,
where Nellie again led the fight for female suffrage. She
was also a strong supporter of the war effort and the Red
Cross. In 1921 she was elected to the Alberta legislature,
where she championed a host of radical measures of
the time, ranging from mothers’ allowances and dower
rights for women to sterilization of the mentally unfit.
She was defeated in 1926 when her temperance stance
became unpopular. Nellie subsequently helped in the
successful fight for Canadian woman senators. The
McClungs moved to Victoria in 1933. In her west coast
years, she became a CBC governor (1936–42), a delegate
to the League of Nations (1938), and an advocate of
divorce reform.
Throughout her life she was an active Methodist
and subsequently a member of the United Church, and
was prominent at the national and international levels
in her church work. Apart from her first novel, none of
her subsequent fiction has withstood the test of time
very well. McClung did better with her autobiograph-
ical memoirs, all of which were highly regarded and
reprinted. Like many early feminists, she was clearly
a figure of her own time. She supported the Great War
with almost bloodthirsty enthusiasm and was an active
advocate of eugenics.
Nellie McClung. CP PHOTO.
Nellie Letitia McClung
Biography

19. 901491_07_Ch07.indd 306 12/16/15 12:33 PM
3077 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915
the United States in 1911. Another strand, led by John
S. Ewart (1849–1933), insisted on Canada’s assumption
of full sovereignty. Ewart argued that “Colony implies
inferiority—inferiority in culture, inferiority in wealth,
inferiority in government, inferiority in foreign rela-
tions, inferiority and subordination” (Ewart, 1908: 6). Yet
another perspective was enunciated by Henri Bourassa
(1868–1912), who advocated a fully articulated bicultural
Canadian nationalism. He wrote, “My native land is all
of Canada, a federation of separate races and autono-
mous provinces. The nation I wish to see grow up is the
Canadian nation, made up of French Canadians and
English Canadians” (quoted in Monière, 1981: 190). The
Bourassa version of nationalism was considerably larger
than the still prevalent traditional nationalism of French
Canada. As the newspaper La Vérité put it in 1904, “what
we want to see flourish is French-Canadian patriotism;
our people are the French-Canadian people; we will
not say that our homeland is limited to the Province of
Quebec, but it is French Canada.”
The most common confrontations over the role of
Canada within the Empire occurred in the context of
imperial defence. At Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebra-
tion in June 1897, Laurier had fended off a regulariz-
ation of colonial contributions to the British military.
The question arose again in July 1899 when the mother
country requested Canadian troops for the forthcom-
ing war in South Africa against the Boers. When the

20. shooting began on 11 October 1899, the popular press
of English Canada responded with enthusiasm to the
idea of an official Canadian contingent. But news-
papers in French Canada opposed involvement. As
La Presse editorialized, “We French Canadians belong
to one country, Canada: Canada is for us the whole
world, but the English Canadians have two countries,
Professor Stephen B. Leacock, Montreal, 1914. Leacock was
both a successful Canadian writer of humorous fiction and a
skilled polemicist on the subject of Imperialism for Canada.
© McCord Museum.
We speak of “our Empire.” Have you ever considered
how little we Canadians count in that Empire, the most
wonderful fabric of human organization that has ever
existed. Of course, as far as land is concerned, and
water, and rocks, and mines, and forests, we occupy
a large portion of the Empire. As to population we are
only seven millions out of over four hundred millions.
As to imperial powers, we have none. The people of
the British Kingdom, forty millions in number, possess
as their sole property the rest of that Empire. Suppose
you except Canada with her seven millions, Australia
with her four millions and a half, New Zealand with one

21. million, and South Africa, with a little over one million
of white people: apart from those semi-free states, the
whole empire of India, the hundreds of Crown colonies,
and those immense protectorates in Africa or Asia, no
On Imperialism and Nationalism
One of the opponents of Canadian imperialism was Henri
Bourassa (1868–1952). In 1912 he
explained his position in an address to the Canadian Club.
Continued...
Contemporary Views
901491_07_Ch07.indd 307 12/16/15 12:33 PM
308 A History of the Canadian Peoples
one here and one across the sea.” The government com-
promised by sending volunteers, nearly 5,000 before
the conflict was over. The defence issue emerged again
in 1909, this time over naval policy. Under imperial
pressure, Canada finally agreed to produce a naval
unit of five cruisers and six destroyers. Both sides
attacked Laurier’s compromise Naval Service Bill of
January 1910. The anglophone Tories insisted it did
not provide enough …