N.W. Rowell: Ontario Nationalist 9781487579326

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N. W. ROWELL: ONTARIO NATIONALIST

MARGARET PRANG

N. W. Rowell: Ontario nationalist

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto and Buffalo

© University of Toronto Press 1975 Toronto and Buffalo Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Prang,~. E. N. W. Rowell, Ontario nationalist Includes bibliographical references and index I. Rowell , Newton Wesley , 1867-1941 73-89843 Law 340' .092'4 [B] ISBN 0-8o20-5300-9 ISBN 978-1-4875-8056-8 (paper)

Contents

Acknowledgments / ix PART ONE

I

Methodists and reformers / 3 2

The young Toronto lawyer/ 17 3 Liberalism in East York/ 35 4

Shaping Canada's century/ 47

5 Higher criticism and Canada's destiny/ 70 PART TWO

6

A Liberal Moses/ 91

7

Leader of the opposition/ 1o6 8

Abolish-the-bar/

126

9

Ontario and Quebec at war/ 145 IO

Democracy versus militarism/ I 58 II

The full current of the world's life/ 174 12

The larger citizenship/

191

13

Saving civilization at the polls/ 21 I PART THREE

14 The organization of victory/ 23 I 15 The coronation of democracy/ 253 16

The new order/ 270 17 Recrimination and reform/ 289 18

No light in the window/ 3 IO 19

An honourable discharge/ 332

Contents vii PART FOUR

20 Canada in the League of Nations/ 349 21

Canada, the Empire, and the new internationalism/ 369 22

An observer of King Liberalism/ 387 23 A new church and a new commonwealth/ 402 24

Cleaning up the Liberals / 421 25

The pinnacle of the legal profession/ 440 26 A darkening world/ 46o 27 The chief justice/ 479 Notes/ 499 Index/ 541

Acknowledgments

Over the years in which I have been interested in the subject of this book I have incurred many debts . Professors A.R.M. Lower and F .H . Underhill stimulated my interest in the relationship between Methodism and liberalism, and Professor D.G. Creighton provided sympathetic and critical direction of a thesis on aspects of Rowell's political career. For their understanding and patient interest in an enterprise they would have liked to see completed much sooner, I wish to express my gratitude to N.W. Rowell' s daughter, Mrs H .R. Jackman , and to Mr Jackman, of Toronto. In addition to giving me unrestricted use of the substantial collection of family letters and diaries in their possession, without which it would have been impossible to write a biography, they were always willing to answer requests for information while refraining from any attempt to influence my interpretation of events or persons. It was my good fortune to talk with the late Mrs Rowell over a period of several years and to form a first-hand impression of the qualities which assured her an important place in this book. I profited also from discussions with Mr Frederick N .A. Rowell of Vancouver, Mr H.E. Langford and Mr Peter Wright of Toronto, and Mr R.M. Fowler of Montreal. Lady Lynn Bagnall, who, as Miss Madge Edgar, was N. W. Rowell's secretary in the twenties, provided valuable impressions of his habits of work, while the late Rev. Dr R.P. Bowles was a helpful source of information concerning his religious and educational interests. My thanks are due to Mr Henry Borden and Professor Craig Brown for permission to quote from the diaries of Sir Robert Borden, and to the executors of the estate of Sir Edmund Walker for allowing me to consult the Walker papers. Most of my other obligations are indicated in the footnotes; not the least of them is to the staff of the Public Archives of Canada.

x N.W. Rowell: Ontario Nationalist I am grateful to Dean Emeritus F.H. Soward of the University of British Columbia for his critical scrutiny of matters both of fact and interpretation in the manuscript, to my colleagues Margaret Ormsby and Charles Humphries, and my friends Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook for their willingness to discuss the work at various stages and for their careful criticisms. It is a pleasure to record that I am among the many Canadian historians who have benefited from the interest and encouragement of Francess Halpenny, formerly managing editor of the University of Toronto Press and now dean of the Faculty of Library Science at the University ofToronto. To the executive editor of the Press, M. Jean Houston, and to Larry MacDonald of the Editorial Department, my thanks for their informed and patient assistance. The University of British Columbia gave me a year's leave of absence to work on the book and a grant from its research fund to aid in preparing the manuscript for publication. The book has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Social Science Research Council of Canada, using funds provided by the Canada Council, and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Toronto Press. MP

1 Methodists and reformers

Joseph Rowell's decision in 1842 to leave 'The Breakings' near Carlisle, Cumberlandshire, was not easily made. The small farm in the valley formed by the Black and White Lyne Rivers furnished a modest living for himself and his wife, Mary, and for his aging parents, and he was able to add to his income by shoemaking. At the age of thirty-four he was highly respected in the district, especially by his fellow Wesleyans, among whom he had served as a lay preacher ever since his conversion to Methodism from the Church of England when he was twenty. Unfortunately, none of these assets could ensure anything but a doubtful future for his growing family. On the land or in the factories of the expanding industrial towns his children faced a life of hard toil and slender reward. Emigration to North America seemed to provide the only escape, as it did for so many inhabitants of the disappearing small farms of the north of England. An older brother, John, had already visited Canada West and returned with a favourable account of the progress of friends recently settled there. Thus encouraged, their own small savings augmented by borrowing from friends in the Wesleyan congregation in the neighbouring town of Brampton, Joseph and Mary Rowell began their preparations for the journey to Canada. With their several children, and in the company of two other families whom they knew well, they sailed from Liverpool on 7 July 1842. The 1200-ton Leander was vastly superior in size and amenities to the sailing vessels which carried most British immigrants to North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to the relatively good living conditions there was little sickness and only one death during the trip, but for all that the eight-week voyage to New York had its difficulties in becalmings, water shortages, and storms. Joseph Rowell 'often thought we would all be lost but the

4 N. W. Rowell: Ontario Nationalist lord delivered us and Brought us safe to Land. ' 1 A lesser trial was the conduct of the Irish immigrants who accounted for most of the ship's 265 passengers. Their 'very bad order,' the fighting which broke out among them 'every Sunday but one,' and their 'dancing [and] playing on the flute and the teamberean' distressed the quieter English travellers . 2 The Rowells and their friends could ill afford to linger over the sights of New York. Within two hours of clearing customs they were on their way up the Hudson River by steamboat. The heavy traffic of barges and boats on the river, the good crops, the abundant food, the public buildings and solid brick houses of the state capital at Albany, all offered encouraging testimony to the prosperity of the descendants of earlier settlers in America. The party stopped at Albany for a few days at the home of a friend from Brampton while the men did farm work to replenish their finances a little, and then moved on by passenger tow-boat through the Erie and Oswego Canals and thence by steamboat across Lake Ontario to Toronto. Joseph Rowell had no difficulty in securing day labour with a local builder and he soon had his family settled in a room on King Street, rented for two dollars a month. The new arrivals were well pleased with Toronto, not least because of their frequent encounters in the street or at church with friends and neighbours from home. But it was never Rowell's intention to stay in the city, and when he received a message from a friend that a mutual acquaintance near London needed assistance on his farm he decided to take the job. Once again the family was on the move, this time a hundred miles by wagon along the Dundas Road to London township . After helping to bring in the harvest and having found a steady demand for his services as a shoemaker, Joseph Rowell concluded, after less than two months in Canada, that he liked 'America as well as I Expected for ther is two Chances for one for a man getting along heer to what there is at home for Living is verrey Chep heer. ' 3 The next year when he purchased a farm on the fourteenth concession of London township near Arva (then known as St John's), about six miles from London, Joseph Rowell was establishing himself in a part of Canada West that had moved beyond the roughest of pioneer days . Farm life was still hard, but the fruits of one's labour were reasonably certain. As a local preacher Rowell quickly made many friends among the Methodists in the district, and with the support of his new acquaintances and some old friends from England he soon took the lead in organizing one of the first temperance societies in the county. After fifteen years at Arva, when their children were grown, Mary Rowell died. Two years later, in 186o, Joseph Rowell married Nancy Green, the eldest daughter of Edward and Mary Green, whose family of ten helped to swell the Methodist congregation at Arva. Nancy Green was twenty years younger than her fifty-year-old husband and bore him three daughters and two sons.' The fourth child, and second son, born on 1 November 1867, was baptised with the names of the founder of Methodism and of

Methodists and reformers 5 one of his most illustrious successors, Robert Newton, a Wesleyan preacher popular in the north of England in the two decades before Joseph Rowell's emigration to Canada. When Newton Wesley Rowell was a few months old his grandfather, Edward Wilkins Green of nearby Pine Grove Farm, died. Their grandfather's death had important consequences in the lives of the young Rowells for their widowed grandmother now invited their father to take over the running of Pine Grove Fann. When Joseph and Nancy Rowell agreed to move to the farm on 'the Proof Line' their children were brought into a closer relationship with some deeply rooted Canadian traditions than they would otherwise have enjoyed. Edward Wilkins Green came to Canada in 1818 with his father, a Quaker surveyor from County Down in the north of Ireland, and purchased a partially cleared farm in London Township in 1824. Within a decade Pine Grove Farm was famous in the western section of the province for its progressive agricultural methods, and visitors from miles around came to see its fine fruits and grains.4 By the time of Edward Green's death the resources of the district had been well exploited and Pine Grove Fann had lost its agricultural pre-eminence, but it still had other attractions. It was a comfortable home and boasted a library impressive by the standards of Middlesex County . Most valuable of all, perhaps, was the reputation of the senior member of the household, Mrs Green, as an intelligent and lively conversationalist on a wide variety of topics. 5 The animated discussions of religion and politics in which she often engaged with visitors to the farm and with other members of the family were an education for her grandchildren. Mary Green had vivid memories of politics in Upper Canada. Her father, Henry Coyne, was an Irish immigrant whose inn on the Talbot Road south of London was a rallying point for agitation against the autocratic methods of the 'Lake Erie baron,• Colonel Thomas Talbot. Her mother, Ann Gardiner Coyne, also came of a family of early Reformers and was herself an expert in dealing with the. 'old Colonel,' while her uncle, Thomas Gardiner, was a vigorous opponent of Colonel Talbot in the London District Council. 6 Although they belonged to the British Wesleyans, the Greens and the Gardiners, like all Upper Canadian Methodists, had to struggle for freedom from the social disabilities imposed by the dominantly Anglican ruling group in its self-interested zeal to save the colony from the republican influences infiltrating the colony through the many Methodists whose origins were in the United States. Mary Green's own wedding ceremony had been performed by a Church of England clergyman because the Methodist preachers of the day were denied the legal right to solemnize marriages. When she moved from the Talbot settlement as a bride to Arva in 1824 there was already a growing Reform movement in London township. By the summer of 1837, when the more radical Reformers had become rather vociferous, London township was the scene of

6 N.W. Rowell: Ontario Nationalist several political scuffles as Tory and Orange elements in the neighbourhood tried to break up meetings of the Reformers. 7 Although the London area was a Reform stronghold, the failure of the Duncombe uprising of December 1837, which was to have been a major action in the greater Mackenzie rebellion planned for that year, was proof that the majority were reformers, not revolutionaries. Newton Rowell's great-grandfather, Henry Coyne, was typical of Middlesex Reformers. He resisted constituted authority by every peaceful means, but when rebellion broke out he provided supplies to the volunteer troops raised to restore order. 8 The naturally conservative sentiments of most British Wesleyans were correctly expressed by Egerton Ryerson's break with William Lyon Mackenzie; the moderate reformism of Robert Baldwin was legitimate protest, but rebellion was unthinkable. The Coynes and the Greens could rejoice when Baldwin's patience and theirs was rewarded by the granting of responsible government. They observed disapprovingly the upheavals of 1849 over the Rebellion Losses Bill when there was fighting in the streets of London; the Tories burned Francis Hincks and Louis Lafontaine in effigy, and the Reformers retaliated with similar treatment of Sir Allan MacNab. A few months later the Queen's faithful subjects in Middlesex County were chagrined when a Tory gang cut down the decorative arches erected on the outskirts of London in honour of the visit of the governor general, Lord Elgin, whose signature of the Rebellion Losses Bill had put the final seal on responsible government. But, in the en