EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT AT TORONTO—CANADIAN ARGUMENTS AGAINST COMMON
SCHOOLS—A CANADIAN’S OPINION ON SECULAR SCHOOLS IN ENGLAND—HOW THE
CANADIAN’S OBJECTIONS ARE MET IN THE UNITED STATES—UPPER CANADIANS
NOT YET A PEOPLE—ADVANTAGES POSSESSED BY UPPER CANADA—SERVICE AT THE
ROMANIST AND ANGLICAN CATHEDRALS—UNMANNERLY BEHAVIOUR PERMITTED ON
CANADIAN RAILWAYS—BADNESS OF THEIR CARRIAGES—WHY CANADA IS NOT ‘THE
LAND OF FREEDOM’—YANKEE SMARTNESS IN TRAIN-DRIVING—PICTURESQUENESS OF
VERMONT—TRAVELLING ON AMERICAN RAILWAYS NOT FATIGUING.
[Sidenote: _Educational Department at Toronto._]
At Toronto I was taken over the educational department for Upper
Canada. It is very ambitiously housed, and combines so many objects,
namely a general library, a collection and depôt of school-books and of
school apparatus, galleries of art, chiefly for copies of celebrated
pictures and pieces of sculpture, and normal schools, that I spent two
hours in going through it. On my making some observation on the cost of
the building, and of its contents, I was told that it might appear that
too much had been spent on the department, but that it had designedly
been carried out on this scale, and the building made imposing, and the
galleries added, in order to give dignity and elevation to the idea of
education in the minds of the people. A hope had been entertained that
if the normal schools were brought under the same roof, a better class
of young persons would offer themselves for the position of teachers:
this hope had not been disappointed.
The arguments and facts which are in favour of the Canadian Common
School system are to be heard at the department, the officers of which
appeared to be able and zealous men. The system, however, has been very
far from securing that unanimity which to the south of the great lakes
exists on the subject of common schools. I will state this difference
of opinion, and some of its causes, in the words of one of the leading
men in the province, used in conversation with me on the subject. He
said, ‘that throughout Upper Canada their common schools had quite
failed in winning anything at all like general approval. The Grand Jury
of Toronto have for several years past made a presentment against the
system, hanging the expression of their dissatisfaction on the peg of
their visitation and inspection of the jail. Their dissatisfaction is
shared very largely by the upper class, who pay a heavy tax for the
schools, and yet find that those for whose benefit and elevation they
were willing to be taxed do not send their children to the schools; but
that, instead of this, the well-to-do tradesmen who could very well
afford to pay for their children’s education are now provided with it,
almost gratuitously, at the expense of the community.
‘Some towns in Upper Canada, as for instance Hamilton, have all along
refused to establish common schools.
[Sidenote: _A Canadian on Common Schools._]
‘Another difficulty about the system, besides its injustice, and its
failure in its true object, is that it extinguishes private schools.
When all the schools become of one kind, competition in excellence
ceases, and everyone is content with a low standard of mediocrity.
Every master knows that, so long as he is not more inefficient than his
neighbours, his position is safe; and that his salary, which is all
that he at last cares about, will be paid him.
‘The local superintendents, who are almost universally clergymen, have
other things to attend to, and carry out their inspection in the most
perfunctory manner.
‘A cause that is doing much harm to the schools is, that everything
connected with them is rapidly falling into the hands of the
politicians. No party can now afford to forego an opportunity for
strengthening itself by electing, or procuring the election, of party
men as managers; and these again, for the same reasons, are guided in
the selection of teachers by party considerations. It is coming to
this, that no one who has to do with the management, supervision, or
teaching of schools, will be the fittest person for what he has to do,
except by accident.’
This gentleman had studied the subject of education, as well in
England as in his own country, and he gave me some of the opinions
he had formed on the religious part of the question, or rather as to
how he conceived the proposal for secular schools would affect the
Established Church, in the following words. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘the
Church will lose nothing by the absence of a Church character in the
schools. I never met with a clergyman in the old country, whether it
was an archbishop or the incumbent of a small rural parish, to whom I
put the question, who felt sure that the Church gained by the schools
being in the hands of the clergy. No one will say that this attaches
the children, when they are grown up, to the Church. For my own part,
I feel sure that a system which would rigidly exclude both all Church
and all denominational teaching would be a gain to the Church. This
is necessarily true, if under the present system Church schools do
less to indoctrinate those brought up in them with Churchism, than the
denominational schools do to indoctrinate those brought up in them
with dissent. My conclusion is, that if I were an English Churchman, I
should not vote against the plan which would supplement your existing
system with secular schools. It would do you no harm, and would give
you many intelligent members.’
[Sidenote: _Canadians not yet a People._]
The way in which my Canadian friend’s opinions about common schools
differed from those held everywhere in the United States, supplies
a means for measuring the social and moral differences of the two
peoples. Not one of the above objections, whatever weight it may
have in Canada, has any weight at all in the United States. There
the first thing thought about is making the schools as suitable as
possible for all classes, and this object is very largely attained,
so that the upper class need not, and do not, hold themselves aloof
from them. There, too, instead of noting with feelings and expressions
of discontent that a great number of the lower class in the towns do
not resort to the schools, great efforts are made to bring them in,
by varying, and adapting to their wants and habits, the character of
the schools, as is done at Boston and New York, and by getting as
many people as possible to become volunteer workers in the effort
to persuade such parents to send their children. I was, while at
Washington, very much struck and interested by the account Mr. Barnard,
the Commissioner of Education, gave me of the way in which this had
been effected. And then, as to the deadness and inefficiency which show
themselves in the public schools in Canada, as soon as competition with
private schools ceases, an American public and American parents would
not tolerate anything of the kind. And the American teachers themselves
are so energetic and ambitious, that they would be the last in the
community to succumb to such influences. The inefficient inspection the
Canadian objectors complain of is a great evil, but is very far from
being an irremediable one.
The fact is, that the inhabitants of Upper Canada are not yet a people.
They are Englishmen, Scotchmen, or Irishmen, just as if they were still
in the old country; and what would not have suited them there, they
think will not suit them where they are. Unlike their neighbours, they
are not possessed with the idea, that if they will only give themselves
the trouble to attempt it, they can make anything bear its proper
fruit. The American is the hardest worker in the world, never sparing
himself, but always toiling on, in the faith that he will soon be able
to bring all things right; and he generally succeeds in doing so. These
are not yet the characteristics of the inhabitants of Upper Canada.
In Canada there is the stage, and there are the materials for a great
nation. Its towns are more solidly built than those of the same size
in the States, possibly on account of the greater severity of the
climate. The country is generally fertile. It is also very varied, full
of lakes, and streams, and forests. It abounds in mineral wealth and
in agricultural produce. Notwithstanding its seven months’ winter, it
is capable of ripening maize and maturing tobacco; and even, to speak
of small things, through the medium of its peas, a crop which can
rarely be grown profitably to the south of the lakes, it supplies no
inconsiderable part of what is used for coffee among its neighbours.
That product, however, of Canada, which most attracts the attention of
the traveller, and is likely to make the strongest impression upon him,
is the complexion of the Canadian ladies. It gives you more of the idea
of transparency, otherwise you might have thought that it was of pearl.
On a Sunday, while at Montreal, in my way to the Episcopal cathedral of
Christ’s Church, I allowed time for witnessing the celebration of High
Mass at the church or cathedral annexed to the Jesuits’ College. As I
left the building the thought in my mind was, ‘I should like to ask the
priests who have just been officiating, if they have, or can imagine,
any reasons for believing that this service is either acceptable to God
or edifying to man?’ In the English cathedral the service was very well
and impressively read by an elderly clergyman; but the young clergyman
who afterwards occupied the pulpit was far too minutely acquainted
with all that passes in the mind of the Almighty. No man could be so
fully acquainted with what passes in the mind of his most familiar
friend—hardly with what passes in his own mind.
[Sidenote: _Canadian Railways._]
One who has just come from the States may compare the manners and
customs of the American travelling public with those of the Canadian.
The former are very much in advance of the latter. The Canadian
conductor, unlike his brother officer to the south, appears to make no
attempt to keep things and persons in order for the general advantage.
Anybody, however rough (and many Canadian travellers are in winter very
rough indeed, perhaps because they are lumberers out for a holiday),
is allowed to take his seat in the ladies’ carriage. The shaggiest and
most unmannerly fellows, sometimes with short pipes in their mouths,
and in their shirt sleeves, are permitted to perambulate the train,
staring everybody in the face; I suppose merely to show that they are
lords of the situation. But what I found the most annoying of all was,
that I hardly ever left my seat for a few moments without finding on
my return that some one had pushed my luggage and rug on one side, and
taken possession of my place. This I believe to be a practice quite
unheard of in the United States; at all events, I never noticed an
instance of it. The only case of drunkenness I ever saw in any railway
car was on the Grand Trunk line of Canada: it was that of a dirty,
uncombed rough, who was uproariously tipsy; but neither conductor nor
anyone else took any notice of him.
Again; the worst carriages in the States are better than those on
the great Canadian lines. All the former have good springs; but the
Canadians are too strongly protectionist to tolerate American cars on
their lines, and their own native cars have, as far as my experience
goes, no springs at all. A Canadian assured me that there had once been
a time when they had had springs, but that they had now stiffened or
worn out, or in some way or other gone to the bad. The effect is that
there is an incessant short, sharp, rattling jar, which becomes very
distressing. Their home-made carriages must also be very deficient in
strength, or else their rails must be most alarmingly out of order; for
in one day I counted about a dozen wrecks of trains lying by the side
of the road. This is not encouraging as one goes along and sees (the
ground being everywhere covered with snow) nothing else but overturned
and smashed-up cars.
Still, we must remember that in the great bridge over the St. Lawrence,
at Montreal, they have one of the grandest railway works in the world.
It seems to be about a mile and a half long, and carries the train over
the rapids of the St. Lawrence through a series of tubes supported by
massive stone piers.
On crossing this bridge, on my return to the States, I left behind me
on the west bank more than two feet of snow. In some places the fences
were entirely buried. On the eastern side, however, of the river the
snow was much thinner, and in less than two hours we were passing over
a country from which it had almost disappeared. This was not lost on a
voluble little Irishwoman, the chief talker in a party of Irish whom
she had been endeavouring to persuade to leave Canada and settle in
the States. ‘You see for yourselves,’ she said, pointing out to them
how much less snow there was than what they had left two hours ago in
Canada, ‘you see for yourselves that this is the land of freedom; for
here, if a body has no shoes, she can go without them: but in Canada it
is entirely too cold: faith, then, this is the land of freedom.’
[Sidenote: _American Railway Travelling._]
For the first sixty miles of this journey we remained in the execrable
carriages of the Grand Trunk of Canada Company, and in the hands of
their officials, whose way of doing things leaves on the mind the
feeling that their object is to show how what ought to be done may be
neglected. The instant the Yankees took charge of the train everything
changed, as if by magic. You could feel at any moment that the train
was being driven against time, and not allowed to go anyhow. The
smartness with which the driver brought it into the stations, and took
it out, never waiting one instant longer than was necessary for giving
up the mail-bags, or whatever it might be the conductor had to do,
showed the value he attached to the passengers’ time, and to his own
reputation for punctuality. I believe there were times when we were not
stopped for more than thirty seconds. In a long day’s journey, to feel
that the train is handled in this way has quite an exhilirating effect.
All day long we were winding our way among the hills of Vermont, which
rose above the valleys to a height of six or seven hundred feet. Every
valley had its stream. The land appeared generally to be poor; but, as
is usual in such cases, it was very picturesque.
I tried sometimes to make out why it is that five hundred miles by
railway in America do not fatigue one so much as fifty in this country.
More than once in America I travelled upwards of a thousand miles at a
single stretch, but never on any occasion, in a tour of eight thousand
miles by railway, did I feel, either during a journey or after it,
anything like fatigue or discomfort, or have any sensation to remind
me that I had travelled a single mile. The only explanation I could
hit upon was that on English and European railways you are shut up in
a little box, in which you cannot move about, and in which there are
incessant draughts from a door and window on each side of you. The
result is, that your feet instantly get cold, and cold feet affect the
whole system disagreeably. In American cars, however, from the way
in which the floors are fastened, and from there being no side doors
at all, one’s feet, with rare exceptions, even when the thermometer
outside is below zero, are as far from being chilled as they would be
in one’s own house. Of course the American cars have also a stove at
each end.