Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Graeme Mackreth and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by the Canadian Institute for Historical
Microreproductions (www.canadiana.org))
CANADA
AND
THE CANADIANS.
BY
SIR RICHARD HENRY BONNYCASTLE, KT.,
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL ROYAL ENGINEERS AND MILITIA OF CANADA WEST.
NEW EDITION.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
HENRY COLBURN, PUBLISHER,
GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1849.
F. Shoberl, Jnr. Printer to H.R.H Prince Albert, Rupert Street.
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
CHAPTER I.
Emigrants And Immigration Page 1
CHAPTER II.
The Emigrant and his Prospects 46
CHAPTER III.
A Journey to the Westward 90
CHAPTER IV.
The French Canadian 127
CHAPTER V.
Penetanguishene--The Nipissang Cannibals, and a
Friendly Brother in the Wilderness 146
CHAPTER VI.
Barrie and Big Trees--A new Capital of a new District--Nature's
Canal--The Devil's Elbow--Macadamization and Mud--Richmond Hill
without the Lass--The Rebellion and the Radicals--Blue Hill and
Bricks 172
CHAPTER. VII.
Toronto and the Transit--The Ice and its innovations--Siege
and Storm of a Fortalice by the Ice-king--Newark, or Niagara--Flags,
big and little--Views of American and of English Institutions--Blacklegs
and Races--Colonial high life--Youth very young 195
CHAPTER VIII.
The old Canadian Coach--Jonathan and John Bull passengers--"That
Gentleman"--Beautiful River, beautiful drive--Brock's
Monument--Queenston--Bar and Pulpit--Trotting horse Railroad--Awful
accident--The Falls once more--Speculation--Water
Privilege--Barbarism--Museum--Loafers--Tulip-trees--Rattlesnakes--The
Burning Spring--Setting fire to Niagara--A charitable Woman--The Nigger's
Parrot--John Bull is a Yankee--Political Courtship--Lundy's Lane
Heroine--Welland Canal 217
CHAPTER IX.
The Great Fresh-water Seas of Canada 266
CANADA
AND
THE CANADIANS.
CHAPTER I.
Emigrants and Immigration.
Very surprising it seems to assert that the Mother Country knows very
little about the finest colony which she possesses--and that an
enlightened people emigrate from sober, speculative England, sedate and
calculating Scotland, and trusting, unreflective Ireland, absolutely and
wholly ignorant of the total change of life to which they must
necessarily submit in their adopted home.
I recollect an old story, that an old gunner, in an old-fashioned,
three-cornered cocked hat, who was my favourite playfellow as a child,
used to tell about the way in which recruits were obtained for the Royal
Artillery.
The recruiting sergeant was in those days dressed much finer than any
field-marshal of this degenerate, railway era; in fact, the Horse Guards
always turned out to the sergeant-major of the Royal Military Academy of
Woolwich, when that functionary went periodically to the Golden Cross,
Charing Cross, to receive and escort the young gentlemen cadets from
Marlow College, who were abandoning the red coat and drill of the
foot-soldier to become neophytes in the art and mystery of great gunnery
and sapping.
"The way they recruited was thus," said the bombadier. "The gallant
sergeant, bedizened in copper lace from the crown of his head to the
sole of his foot, and with a swagger which no modern drum-major has ever
presumed to attempt, addressed a crowd of country bumpkins.
"'Don't listen to those gentlemen in red; their sarvice is one which no
man who has brains will ever think of--footing it over the univarsal
world; they have usually been called by us the flatfoots. They uses the
musquet only, and have hands like feet, and feet like fireshovels.
"'Mind me, gentlemen, the royal regiment of the Royal Artillery is a
sarvice which no gentleman need be ashamed of.
"'We fights with real powder and ball, the flatfoots fights with
bird-shot. We knows the perry-ferry of the circumference of a round
shot. Did you ever see a mortar? Did you ever see a shell? I will answer
for it you never did, except the poticary's mortar, and the shell that
mortar so often renders necessary.
"'Now, gentlemen, at the imperial city of Woolwich, in the Royal
Arsenal, you may, if you join the Royal Artillery, you may see shells in
earnest. Did you ever see a balloon? Yes! Then the shells there are
bigger than balloons, and are the largest hollow shot ever made--the
French has nothing like them.
"'And the way we uses them! We fires them out of the mortars into the
enemy's towns, and stuffs them full of red sogers. Well, they bursts,
and out comes the flatfoots, opens the gates, and lets the Royal
Artillery in; and then every man fills his sack with silver, and gold,
and precious stones, after a leetle scrimmaging.
"'Come along with me, my boys, and every one of you shall have a coat
like mine, which was made out of the plunder; and you shall have a horse
to ride, and a carriage behind it; and you shall see the glorious city
of Woolwich, where the streets are paved with penny loaves, and drink is
to be had for asking.'"
So it is with nine-tenths of the emigrants to Canada in these
enlightened days; so it is with the emigrants from old England, and from
troubled Ireland, to the free and astonishing Union of the States of
America and Texas, that conjoint luminary of the new go-ahead world of
the West.
Dissatisfied with home, with visionary ideas of El Dorados, or starving
amidst plenty, the poorer classes obtain no correct information. Beset
generally with agents of companies, with agents of private enterprise,
with reckless adventurers, with ignorant priests, or missionaries of the
lowest stamp, with political agitators, and with miserable traitors to
the land of their birth and breeding, the poor emigrant starts from the
interior, where his ideas have never expanded beyond the weaver's loom
or factory labour, the plough or the spade, the hod, the plane, or the
trowel, and hastens with his wife and children to the nearest sea-port.
There he finds no friend to receive and guide him, but rapacious agents
ready to take every advantage of his ignorance, with an eye to his
scanty purse. A host of captains, mates, and sailors, eager to make up
so many heads for the voyage, pack them aboard like sheep, and cross the
Atlantic, either to New York or to Quebec, just as they have been able
to entice a cargo to either port. Then come the horrors of a long voyage
and short provisions, and high prices for stale salt junk and biscuit;
and, at the end, if illness has been on board, the quarantine, that most
dreadful visitation of all--for hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
From the first discovery of America, there has been a tendency to
exaggeration about the resources and capabilities of that country--a
magniloquence on its natural productions, which can be best exemplified
by referring the reader to the fac-simile of the one in Sir Walter
Raleigh's work on Guiana,[1] now in the British Museum. Shakespeare had,
no doubt, read Raleigh's fanciful description of "the men whose heads do
grow beneath their shoulders," &c.; for he was thirty-four years of age
when this print was published, only seventeen years before his death.
[Footnote 1: Brevis et admiranda descriptio REGNI GVIANAE, AVRI
abundantissimi, in AMERICA, sev novo orbe, sub linea AEquinoctilia siti:
quod nuper admodum, Annis nimirum 1594, 1595, et 1596 per generosum
Dominum Dr. GVALTHERVM RALEGH Equitem Anglum detectum est: paulo post
jussa ejus duobus libellis comprehensa. Ex quibus JODOCVS HONDIVS
TABVLAM Geographicam adornavit, addita explicatione Belgico sermone
scripta: Nunc vero in Latinum sermonem translata, et ex variis
authoribus hinc inde declarata. Noribergae. Impensis LEVINI HULSII.
M.D.XCIX.]
So expansive a mind as Raleigh's undoubtedly was, was not free from that
universal credulity which still reigns in the breasts of all men
respecting matters with which they are not personally acquainted; and
the glowing descriptions of Columbus and his followers respecting the
rich Cathay and the Spice Islands of the Indies have had so permanent a
hold upon the imagination, that even the best educated amongst us have,
in their youth, galloped over Pampas, in search of visionary
_Uspallatas_. Nor is it yet quite clear that the golden city of El
Dorado is wholly fabulous, the region in which it was said to exist not
having yet been penetrated by Science; but it soon will be, for a
steamboat is to ply up the Maranon, and Peru and Europe are to be
brought in contact, although the voyage down that mighty flood has
hitherto been a labour of several months.
The poor emigrant, for we must return to him, lands at New York. Sharks
beset him in every direction, boarding-houses and grogshops open their
doors, and he is frequently obliged, from the loss of all his
hard-earned money, to work out his existence either in that exclusively
mercantile emporium, or to labour on any canal or railroad to which his
kind new friends may think proper, or most advantageous to themselves,
to send him. If he escapes all these snares for the unwary, the chances
are that, fancying himself now as great a man as the Duke of Leinster,
O'Connell, the Lord Mayor of London, or the Provost of Edinburgh, free
and unshackled, gloriously free, he becomes entangled with a host of
land-jobbers, and walks off to the weary West, there to encounter a life
of unremitting toil in the solitary forests, with an occasional visit
from the ague, or the milk-fever, which so debilitates his frame, that,
during the remainder of his wretched existence, he can expect but little
enjoyment of the manorial rights appendant to a hundred acres of wild
land.
Let no emigrant embark for the United States unless he has a kind friend
to guide and receive him there, and to point out to him the good and the
evil; for the native race look upon all foreigners with a jealous eye,
and particularly upon the Irish.
The Germans make the best settlers in that country, perhaps because, not
speaking English, they cannot be so easily imposed upon by the crimps,
and also because they seldom emigrate before they have arranged with
their friends in America respecting the lands which they are to occupy.
A society of British philanthropists has been established at New York to
direct British emigrants in their ultimate views; but it may well be
imagined that these gentlemen, who are chiefly engaged in trade, cannot
descend to understand fully, or are constant witnesses of, the low
tricks which are practised to seduce the unwary ones.
The emigrant to Canada is somewhat differently situated.
The Irish come out in shiploads every season, and generally very
indifferently provided and without any definite object; nay, to such an
extent is this carried, that hundreds of young females venture out every
year by themselves, to better their condition, which betterment usually
ends in their reaching as far inland as Toronto, where, or at other
ports on the lakes, they engage themselves as domestics.
When we consider that nearly 25,000 emigrants leave the Mother Country
every year for Canada alone, how important is it that they should be
informed of every particular likely to increase their comforts and to
conduce to their well-being! This kind of service can be but partially
rendered by the present publication, which, being intended for the
general reader, cannot be given in a form likely to reach the class of
emigrants who usually proceed to America otherwise than through the
advice which the reader may, whenever it is in his power, kindly bestow
upon them. But it will, I am persuaded, be extensively useful in that
way, and also to the settler with a small capital who can afford to
consult it.
Learned dissertations upon colonization are useful only to the
politician, and so much venality has prevailed among those who have
thrust themselves forward in the cause of Canadian settlement, that the
public become a little alarmed when they hear of a work expressly
designed for the emigrant.
The very best informed at home, and the _haute noblesse_, have been
repeatedly taken in. Dinnerings and lionizing have been the order of the
day for persons, who, in the colony, cut a very inferior figure. But
this is natural, and in the end usually does no harm. It is natural that
the colonist, who is a _rara avis_ in England, should be considered a
very extraordinary personage among men who seek for novelty in any
shape; because those who lavish favours upon him at one time and eschew
his presence afterwards are usually ignorant of the very history of
which he is the type. It is like the standing joke of sending out
water-casks for the men-of-war built on the fresh-water seas of Canada,
for there are plenty of rich folks at home who want only to be filled.
The different sorts of people who emigrate from _home_ to the United
States or Canada, may be classed under several heads, like the
travellers of Sterne.
First, the inquisitive and restless, who leave a goodly inheritance or
occupation behind them, because they have heard that Tom Smith or Mister
Mac Grogan, very ordinary folks anywhere, have made a rapid fortune,
which is indeed sometimes the case in the United States, though rather
rare there for old countrymen, and is still more rare and unlikely in
Canada, where large fortunes may be said to be unknown quantities.
Settlers of this class usually fall to the ground very soon--if they
settle in Canada, they become Radicals; if they return from the States,
they become Tories.
The next class are your would-be aristocratic settlers, younger sons of
younger sons, cousins of cousins, Union Barons, nephews' nephews of a
Lord Mayor, or unprovided heirs in posse.
These fancy they confer a sort of honour by selecting the colony as
their final resting-place, and that a governor and his ministers have
nothing in the world to think about but how they can provide for such
important units. Hence they frequently end by placing themselves in
direct opposition to the powers that be, or take very unwillingly to the
labours of a farmer's life. Many of them, when they find that pretension
is laughed at, particularly if no talents accompany it, which is rarely
or ever the case, for talent is modest and retiring in its essential
nature, turn out violent Republicans or Radicals of the most furious
calibre; but the more modest portion work heartily at their farms, and
frequently succeed.
Another class is your private gentlemen's sons and decent young farmers
from England, Ireland, or Scotland, who think before they leap, have
connexions already established in Canada, and small capitals to
commence with. These are the really valuable settlers: they go to
Canada for land and living; and eschew the land and liberty system of
the neighbouring nation. Wherever they settle, the country flourishes
and becomes a second Britain in appearance, as may be observed in the
London and western districts.
It does not require a very lengthened acquaintance with Canada to form
observations upon the characters of the _immigrants_, as the Webster
style of Dr. Johnson will have the word to be.
The English franklin and the English peasant who come here usually weigh
their allegiance a little before they make up their minds; but, if they
have been persuaded that Queen Victoria's reign is a "_baneful
domination_," they either go to the United States at once, or to those
portions of Canada where sympathy with the Stars and Stripes is the
order of the day.[2]
[Footnote 2: That is, to those portions of the London and western
district where American settlers abound, who have so generously repaid
the fostering care which Governor Simcoe originally extended to them.
One of those rabid folks indebted to the British government, who kept an
inn, padlocked his pumps lately when a regiment was marching through
Woodstock in hot dusty weather, that the soldiers might not slake their
thirst.]
If they be Scotch Radicals, the most uncompromising and the most bitter
of all politicians, they seek Canada only with the ultimate hope of
revolutionizing it.
But the latter are more than balanced by the respectable Scotch, who
emigrate occasionally upon the same principles which actuate the
respectable portion of the English emigrants, and by the hardy
Highlanders already settled in various parts of the colony, whose
proverbial loyalty is proof against the arts of the demagogue.
The great mass of emigrants may however be said to come from Ireland,
and to consist of mechanics of the most inferior class, and of
labourers. These are all impressed with the most absurd notions of the
riches of America, and on landing at Quebec often refuse high wages with
contempt, to seek the Cathay of their excited imaginations westward.
If they be Orangemen, they defy the Pope and the devil as heartily in
Canada as in Londonderry, and are loyal to the backbone.
If they are Repealers, they come here sure of immediate wealth, to kick
up a deuce of a row, for two shillings and sixpence currency is paid for
a day's labour, which two shillings and sixpence was a hopeless week's
fortune in Ireland; and yet the Catholic Irish who have been long
settled in the country are by no means the worst subjects in this
Trans-Atlantic realm, as I can personally testify, having had the
command of large bodies of them during the border troubles of 1837-8.
They are all loyal and true.
In the event of a war, the Catholic Irish, to a man--and what a
formidable body it is in Canada and the United States!--will be on the
side of England. O'Connell has prophesied rightly there, for it is not
in human nature to forget the wrongs which the Catholics have suffered
for the past ten years in a country professing universal freedom and
toleration.
The Americans of the better classes with whom I have conversed admit
this, but their dislike of the Irish is rooted and general among all the
native race; and they fear as well as mistrust them, because, in many of
the largest cities, New York for one, the Irish predominate.
The Americans say, and so do the Canadians, that, for some years back,
since the repeal agitation at home, a few very ignorant and very
turbulent priests, of the lowest grade, have found their way across the
Atlantic. I have travelled all over Canada, and lived many years in the
country, and have been thrown among all classes, from my having been
connected with the militia. I never saw but one specimen of Irish
hedge-priest, and therefore do not credit the assertion; this one came
out last year, and a more furious bigot or a more republican ultra I
never met with, at the same time that he was as ignorant as could be
conceived.
Such has not hitherto been the case with the Catholic priesthood of the
Canadas. The French Canadian clergy are a body of pious, exemplary men,
not perhaps shining in the galaxy of science, but unobtrusive,
gentlemanly, and an honour to the _soutane_ and _chasuble_.
The priests from Ireland are not numerous, for the Irish chapels were,
till very lately, generally presided over by Scotch missionaries; and I
can safely say that, whether Irish or Scotch, the Catholic priesthood of
Western Canada will not yield the palm to their Franco-Canadian brethren
of the cross, and that loyalty is deeply inculcated by them. I have long
and personally known and admired the late Bishop Mac Donell; a worthier
or a better man never existed. The highest and the lowest alike loved
him.
I saw him bending under the weight of years, passed in his ministry and
in the defence of his adopted country, just before he left Canada, to
lay his bones in his natal soil, preside over the ceremony of placing
the first stone of the Catholic seminary, for which he had given the
ground and funds to the utmost of his ability.
He was a large, venerable-looking man, unwieldy from the infirmities of
age and a life of toil and trouble; and the affecting and touching
portion of the scene before us was to see him supported on his right and
left by the arms of a Presbyterian colonel and a colonel of the Church
of England.
This is true Christianity, true charity--peace be to his soul!--
His successor was a Canadian, equally free from pretension and bigotry;
and he was succeeded by an Irishman, whose mission is to heal the wounds
of party and strife. He is living and in office; I cannot, therefore,
speak of him; but, differing as an Englishman so widely as I do in
religious tenets from his, I can freely assert that, if clergymen of
every denomination pursued the same course of brotherly love that he
does, we should hear no more of the fierce and undying contention about
subjects which should be covered with the veil of benevolence and
humility.
You cannot force a man to think as you do, to draw him into what you
conceive to be the true path; mildness and conciliation are much more
likely to effect your object than the Emperor of China's yellow stick.
The days of the Inquisition, of Judge Jefferies, and of Claverhouse, are
happily gone by; and the artillery of man's wrath now vents its harmless
thunders much in the same way as the thunders of the Vatican, or the
recent fulmination of the Archbishop of Paris against the author of the
Wandering Jew; that is to say, with a great deal of noise, but without
much damnifying any one, as the public soon formed a true judgment of M.
Sue and of the tendency of his works.
On the other hand, how horrible it is, and what a fearful view of frail
human nature is opened for a searching mind to observe that a man, who
professes to have abandoned the pleasures of existence, to have broken
through the very first law of nature, to have separated himself from his
kind, and to have assumed perfection and infallibility, the attributes
of his Creator, devoting the altar at which he serves to the wicked
purposes of arraying man against man, and of embruing the hands held up
before him at prayer in the blood of his fellow-mortals!
But such is the inevitable tendency of the system of "I am better than
thou," whether it be practised by a Catholic priest of the hedge-school,
by a fanatic bawler about new light, or by a fierce and uncompromising
churchman. Faith, hope, and charity, are alike misinterpreted and
misunderstood. Faith with these consists in blind or hypocritical
devotion to their peculiar opinions and dogmas; hope is limited to the
narrowest circle of ideas; and charity, Divine charity, exists not; for
even the very relics, the mouldering bones of the defunct, are not
allowed to rest side by side; and as to those differing in the slightest
degree from them, to them charity extends not, however pious, however
sincere, or however excellent they may be.
The people of England are very little aware how widely Roman Catholicism
extends in the United States and in Canada. From accurate returns, it
has been ascertained that in the United States there were last year
1,500,000, with 21 bishops, 675 churches, 592 mission stations, and 572
priests otherwise employed in teaching and travelling; 22 colleges or
ecclesiastical establishments, 23 literary institutions, 53 female
schools or convents for instruction, 84 charitable hospitals and
institutions, and 220 young students, preparing for the ministry; whilst
we learn, from the Annals of the Propaganda, that 1,130,000 francs were
appropriated, in May 1845, to the missions of America, or about L47,000
annually, of which the share for the United States, including Texas, was
771,164 francs, or about L32,000 in round numbers.
Then again, the greater portion of the Indian tribes in the north-west
and west, excepting near the Rocky Mountains or beyond them, are Roman
Catholics; and their numbers are very great, and all in deep hatred,
dislike, and enmity, to the Big Knives.
More than half a million of the Lower Canadians are also of the same
persuasion, and their church in Upper Canada is large and increasing by
every shipload from Ireland. Even in Oregon, a Catholic bishop has just
been appointed.
It is more than probable, that in and around the United States three
millions of Roman Catholic men are ever ready to advance the standard of
their faith; whilst Mexico, weak as it is, offers another Catholic
barrier to exclusive tenets of liberty, both of conscience and of
person.
It is surprising how very easily the emigrants are misled, and how
simply they fancy that, once on the shores of the New World, Fortune
must smile upon them.
There is a British society, as I have already stated, for mutual
protection, established at New York; and the government have agents of
the first respectability at Quebec, at Montreal, and at Kingston. But
the poorer classes, as well as those whose knowledge of life has been
limited, are sadly defrauded and deluded.
At a recent meeting of the Welsh Society at New York, facts were stated,
showing the depravity and audacity of the crimps at Liverpool and New
York. The President of the Society said that, owing to the nefarious
practices against emigrants, the Germans first, then the Irish, after
that the Welsh, and lastly the English residents of the city had taken
the matter in hand by the formation of Protective Societies.
The president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick observed that in
Liverpool the poor emigrants were fleeced without mercy; and he gave as
one instance a fact that, by the representations of a packet agent, a
large number of emigrants were induced to embark on board a packet
without the necessary supply of provisions, being assured that for their
passage-money they would be supplied by the captain--an arrangement of
which the captain was wholly ignorant.
The president of the Welsh Society exhibited sixty dollars of trash in
bills of the Globe Bank, that had been palmed off upon an unsuspecting
Welshman by some rascal in Liverpool, in exchange for his hoarded gold,
and declared that this was only one of a series of like villanies
constantly occurring.
The ex-president of the St. George's Society, Mr. Fowler, mentioned a
curious circumstance connected with the history of New York. He said
that he remembered the city when it contained only fifty thousand
inhabitants, and not one paved side walk, excepting in Dock Street. Now
it had a population of nearly 400,000, and had so changed, that he could
no longer identify the localities of his youthful days.
Who, he asked, had done this? The emigrant! and it was protection they
needed, not charity. He should have added, that the great mass of the
emigrants who have made New York the mighty city it now is, were Irish,
and that the native Americans have banded themselves in another form of
protection against their increasing influence.
The republican notions which the greater portion of the lower classes
emigrating from the old country have been drilled into, lead them to
believe that in the United States all men are equal, and that thus they
have a splendid vault to make from poverty to wealth, an easy spring
from a state of dependency to one of vast importance and consideration.
The simple axiom of republicanism, that a ploughman is as good as a
president, or a quarryman as an emperor, is taken firm hold of in any
other sense than the right one. What sensible man ever doubted that we
were all created in the same mould, and after the same image; but is
there a well educated sane mind in America, believing that a perfect
equality in all things, in goods and chattels, in agrarian rights and in
education, is, or ever will be, practicable in this naughty world?
Has nature formed all men with the same capacities, and can they be so
exactly educated that all shall be equally fit to govern?
The converse is true. Nature makes genius, and not genius nature. How
rarely she yields a Shakespeare!--There has been but one Homer, one
Virgil, since the creation. There was never a second Moses, nor have
Solomon's wisdom and glory ever again been attainable.
Look at the rulers of the earth, from the patriarchs to the present day,
how few have been pre-eminent! Even in the earliest periods, when the
age of man reached to ten times its present span, the wonderful sacred
writ records Tubal-Cain, the first artificer, and Jubal, the lyrist, as
most extraordinary men; and with what care are Aholiab and Bezabel,
cunning in all sorts of craft, and Hiram, the artificer of Tyre,
recorded! Hiram, the king, great as he undoubtedly was, was secondary in
Solomon's eyes to the widow's son.
These men, says the holy record, were gifted expressly for their
peculiar mission; and so are all men, to whom the Inscrutable has been
pleased to assign extraordinary talent.
Caesar, the conqueror, Napoleon, his imitator, and Nelson, and
Wellington, are they on a par with the rabble of New York? Procul, O,
procul este profani!
Pure democracy is an utter and unattainable impossibility; nature has
effectually barred against it. The only thing in the course of a life of
more than half a century that has ever puzzled me about it is, that the
Catholic clergy should, in so many parts of the world, have lent it a
helping hand. The ministers of a creed essentially aristocratic,
essentially the pillars of the divine right of kings, have they ever
been in earnest about the matter? Perhaps not!
If that giant of modern Ireland, the pacificator citizen king, succeeded
in separating the island from Great Britain, would he, on attaining the
throne, or the dictatorship, or the presidency, or whatever it might be,
for the nonce, desire pure democracy? _Je crois que non_, because, if he
did, he would reign about one clear week afterwards.
Look at the United States, see how each successive president is bowed
down before the Moloch altar; he must worship the democratic Baal, if he
desires to be elected, or re-elected. It is not the intellect, or the
wealth of the Union that rules. Already they seriously canvass in the
Empire State perfect equality in worldly substance, and the division of
the lands into small portions, sufficient to afford the means of
respectable existence to every citizen. It is, perhaps, fortunate that
very few of the office-holders have much substance to spare under these
circumstances; but, if the President, Vice-President, and the
Secretaries of State, are to live upon an acre or two of land for the
rest of their lives, Spartan broth will be indeed a rich diet to theirs.
When the sympathizers invaded Canada, in 1838-1839, the lands of the
Canadians were thus parcelled out amongst them, as the reward of their
extremely patriotic services, but in slices of one hundred, instead of
one or two, acres.
But, notwithstanding all this ultra-democracy, there is at present a
sufficient counterbalance in the sense of the people, to prevent any
very serious consequences; and the Irish, from having had their religion
trampled upon, and themselves despised, would be very likely to run
counter to native feeling.
If any country in the whole civilized world exhibits the inequality of
classes more forcibly than another, it is the country which has lately
annexed Texas, and which aims at annexing all the New World.
There is a more marked line drawn between wealth and pretension on the
one hand, poverty and impertinent assumption on the other, than in the
dominions of the Czar. Birth, place, power, are all duly honoured, and
that sometimes to a degree which would astonish a British nobleman,
accustomed all his life to high society. I remember once travelling in a
canal boat, the most abominable of all conveyances, resembling Noah's
ark in more particulars than its shape, that I was accosted, in the
Northern States too, and near the borders, where equality and liberty
reign paramount, by a long slab-sided fellow-passenger, who, I thought,
was going to ask me to pay his passage, his appearance was so shabby,
with the following questions:
"Where are you from? are you a Livingstone?" I told him, for I like to
converse with characters, that I was from Canada. "What's your name?" he
asked. I satisfied him. He examined me from head to foot with attention,
and, as he was an elderly man, I stood the gaze most valiantly. "Well,"
he said, "I thought you were a Livingstone; you have got small ears, and
small feet and hands, and that, all the world over, is the sign of
gentle blood."
He was afterwards very civil; and, upon inquiring of the skipper of the
boat who he was, I found that my friend was a man of large fortune, who
lived somewhere near Utica, on an estate of his own.
This was before the sympathy troubles, and I can back it with another
story or two to amuse the reader.
Some years ago, when it was the fashion in Canada for British officers
always to travel in uniform, I went to Buffalo, the great city of
Buffalo on lake Erie, in the Thames steamer, commanded by my good
friend, Captain Van Allen, and the first British Canadian steamboat
that ever entered that harbour. We went in gallantly, with the flag
flying that "has braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze." I
think the majority of the population must have lined the wharfs to see
us come in. They rent the welkin with welcomes, and, among other
demonstrations, cast up their caps, and cried with might and main--"Long
live George the Third!"--Our gracious monarch had for years before bid
this world good night, but that was nothing; the good folks of Buffalo
had not perhaps quite forgotten that they were once, long before their
city was a city, subjects of King George.
I and another officer in uniform were received with all honours, and
escorted to the Eagle hotel, where we were treated sumptuously, and had
to run the gauntlet of handshaking to great extent. A respectable
gentleman, about forty, some seven years older than myself, stuck close
to me all the while. I thought he admired the British undress uniform,
but he only wanted to ask questions, and, after sundry answers, he
inquired my name, which being courteously communicated, he said, "Well,
I am glad, that's a fact, that I have seen you, for many is the whipping
I have had for your book of Algebra." Now I never was capable of
committing such an unheard-of enormity as being the cause of
flagellation to any man by simple or quadratic equations; and it must
have been the binomial theorem which had tickled his catastrophe, for it
was my father's treatise which had penetrated into the new world of
Buffalonian education.
It is a pity, is it not, gentle reader, that such feelings do not now
exist?
Nevertheless, even now, the designation of a British officer is a
passport in any part of the United States. The custom-house receives it
with courtesy and good-will; society is gratified by attentions received
from a British officer; and it is coupled with the feelings which the
habits and conduct of a gentleman engender throughout Christendom.
At New York, I visited every place worth seeing; and, although
disliking gambling, races, and debating societies, _a outrance_, I was
determined to judge for myself of New York, of life in New York.
On one occasion, I was at a meeting of the turf in an hotel after the
races, where violent discussions and heavy champagning were going on. I
was then (it was in 1837) a major in the army, and was introduced to one
or two prominent men in the room as a British officer who had been to
see the racecourse; this caused a general stir, and the champagne flew
about like----I am at a loss for a simile; and the health of Queen
Victoria was drunk with three times three.
On board a packet returning from England, we had several of the leading
characters of the United States as passengers. A very silly and
troublesome democrat, of the Loco-foco school, from Philadelphia, made
himself conspicuous always after dinner, when we sat, according to
English fashion, at a dessert, by his vituperations against monarchy and
an exhibition of his excessive love for everything American. The
gentlemen above alluded to, men who had travelled over Europe, whose
education and manners made them that which a true gentleman is all over
the world, were disgusted, and, to punish his impertinence, proposed
that a weekly paper should be written by the cabin passengers, in which
the occurrences of each day should be noted and commented upon, and that
poetry, tales, and essays, should form part of its matter.
They agreed to discuss the relative points and bearings of monarchy and
democracy; they to depute one of their number to be the champion of
monarchy; and we to chuse the champion of democracy from amongst the
English passengers.
Two drawings were fixed up at each end of the table after dinner; one,
representing a crowned Plum-pudding; and the other, Liberty and
Equality, by the well-known sign. The blustering animal was soon
effectually silenced; a host of first-rate talent levelled a constant
battery at his rude and uncultivated mind.
I shall never forget this voyage, and I hope the talent-gifted Canadian
lawyer who threw down the gauntlet of Republicanism, and who has since
risen to the highest honours of his profession which the Queen can
bestow, has preserved copies of the Saturday's Gazette of The Mediator
American Packet-ship.
The mention of this vessel puts me in mind of one more American
anecdote, and I must tell it, for I have a good deal of dry work before
me.
Crossing the Atlantic once in an American vessel, we met another
American ship, of the same size, and passed very close. Our captain
displayed the stars and stripes in true ship-shape cordial greeting.
Brother Jonathan took no notice of this sea civility, and passed on;
upon which the skipper, after taking a long look at him with his
spy-glass, broke out in a passion, "What!" said he, "you won't show your
b--d bunting, your old stripy rag? Now, I guess, if he had been a
Britisher, instead of a d--d Yankee, he would not have been ashamed of
his flag; he would have acted like a gentleman. Phew!" and he whistled,
and then chewed his cigar viciously, quite unconscious that I was
enjoying the scene.
But, if it be possible that one peculiar portion of the old countrymen
are more disliked or despised than another in any country under the sun,
connected by such ties as the United States are with Britain, there can
be no doubt that the condition of the Jews under King John, as far as
hatred and unexpressed contumelious feeling goes, was preferable to the
feeling which native Americans, of the ultra Loco-foco or ultra-federal
breed, entertain towards the labouring Catholic Irish, and would, if
they could with safety, vent upon them in dreadful visitation. They
would exterminate them, if they dared.
To account for such a feeling, it must be observed that a large portion
of these ignorant and misguided men have brought much of this animosity
upon themselves; for, continuing in the New World that barbarous
tendency to demolish all systems and all laws opposed to their limited
notions of right and wrong, and, whilst their senseless feuds among
themselves harass society, they eagerly seek occasions for that restless
political excitement to which they are accustomed in their own unhappy
and regretted country.
A body of these hewers of wood and drawers of water, who, when not
excited, are the most innocent and harmless people in the world--easily
led, but never to be driven--get employed on a canal or great public
work; and, no sooner do they settle down upon wages which must appear
like a dream to them, than some old feud between Cork and Connaught,
some ancient quarrel of the Capulets and Montagues of low life, is
recollected, or a chant of the Boyne water is heard, and to it they go
pell-mell, cracking one another's heads and disturbing a peaceful
neighbourhood with their insane broils.
Or, should a devil, in the shape of an adviser, appear among them, and
persuade these excitable folks that they may obtain higher wages by
forcing their own terms, bludgeons and bullets are resorted to, in order
to compel compliance, and incendiarism and murder follow, until a
military force is called out to quell the riots.
The scenes of this kind in Canada, where vast sums are annually expended
on the public works, have been frightful; and such has been the terror
which these lawless hordes have inspired, that timid people have quitted
their properties and fled out of the reach of the moral pestilence; nay,
it has been carried so far, that a Scotch regiment has been marked on
account of its having been accidentally on duty in putting down a canal
riot; and, wherever its station has afterwards been cast, the vengeance
of these people has followed it.
At Montreal, the elections have been disgraced by bodies of these
canallers having been employed to intimidate and overawe voters; and,
were it not that a large military force is always at hand there, no
election could be made of a member, whose seat would be the unbiassed
and free choice of his constituents.
It is, however, very fortunate for Canada that these canallers are not
usually inclined to settle, but wander about from work to work, and
generally, in the end, go to the United States. The Irish who settle are
fortunately a different people; and, as they go chiefly into the
backwoods, lead a peaceful and industrious life.
But it is, nevertheless, very amusing, and affords much insight into the
workings of frail human nature to observe the conduct of that portion of
the Irish emigrants who find that they have neither the means of
obtaining land, nor of quitting some large town at which they may
arrive. Their first notion then is to go out to service, which they had
left Ireland to avoid altogether. The father usually becomes a
day-labourer, the sons farm-servants or household servants in the towns,
the daughters cooks, nursery-maids, &c.
When they come to the mistress of a family to hire, they generally sit
down on the nearest chair to the door in the room, and assume a manner
of perfect familiarity, assuring the lady of the house that they never
expected to go out to service in America, but that some family
misfortune has rendered such a step necessary. The lady then, of course,
asks them what branch of household service they can undertake; to which
the invariable reply is, anything--cook or housemaid, child's-maid or
housekeeper, and that indeed they lived in better places at home than
they expect to get in America, such as Lord So-and-so's, or Squire
So-and-so's.
The end of this is obvious; and a lady told me, the other day, she hired
a professed cook, who was very shortly put to the test by a dinner-party
occurring a day or two after she joined the household. Her mistress
ordered dinner; and one joint, or _piece de resistance_, was a fine
fillet of veal. The professed cook, it appeared, laboured under a little
_manque d'usage_ on two delicate points, for she very unexpectedly burst
into her lady's boudoir just as she was dressing for dinner, and
exclaimed, "Mistress, dear, what'll I do with the vail?"--"The veil?"
said the dame, in horror; "what veil?"--"Why, the vail in the pot, marm;
I biled it, and it swelled out so, the divil a get it out can I git it."
So with the farm-servants, they can all do everything; and an Irish
gentleman told me that he lately hired a young man, an emigrant, to
plough for him; and, on asking him if he understood ploughing, the
good-natured Paddy answered, offhand, "Ploughing, is it? I'm the boy for
ploughing."--"Very well, I'm glad of it," said the gentleman, "for you
are a fine, likely young fellow, so I shall hire you." He hired him
accordingly at high wages--ten dollars a month and provisions and
lodging found. The first day he was to work, my friend told him to go
and yoke the oxen. Paddy stared with all his eyes, but said nothing, and
went away. He staid some time, and then returned with a pair of oxen,
which he was driving before him. "Here's the oxen, master!"--"Where are
the yokes, Paddy?"--"The yokes! by the powers, is that what they call
beef in Canady?" Poor Paddy had been a weaver all his live-long days.
The Irish are almost exclusively the servants in most parts of the
northern states and throughout Canada, excepting the French Canadians,
and very attached, faithful servants they frequently are; but notions of
liberty and equality get possession of their phrenological developments,
and they are almost always on the move to better their condition, which
rarely happens as they desire.
Then another crying evil in Canada and in the States is the rage for
dress. An Irish girl no sooner gets a modicum of wages than all her
thoughts are to go to chapel or church as fine or finer than her
mistress. Nearly every servant-girl in the large towns has a _ridicule_
(that must be the proper way of spelling it), a bustle, a parasol, an
expensive shawl, and a silk gown, and fine bonnet, gloves, and a white
pocket-handkerchief. The men are not so aspiring, and usually don on
Sundays a blue coat and brass buttons, white pantaloons, white gloves,
and a good fur cap in winter, or a neat straw hat or brilliant beaver in
summer. The waistcoat is nondescript, but the boots are irreproachable.
A cigar has nearly replaced the pipe in the streets.
I will defy a short-sighted person to distinguish her nursery-maid from
her own sister at a little distance; and, being somewhat afflicted that
way myself, I frequently nod to a well-dressed soubrette, thinking she
is at least a leading member of the aristocracy of the town; and this is
the more amusing, as in all colonial towns and in the _haute societe_ of
the Republic very considerable magnificence is affected, and a rage for
rank and pseudo-importance is not a little the order of the day.
"Nothing," says a distinguished writer upon that most frivolous of all
threadbare subjects, etiquette, "nothing is more decidedly the sign of a
vulgar-born or a vulgar-bred person than to be ready to practise the
art of cutting." I therefore bow to the well-dressed grisettes, upon the
principle of avoiding to be thought vulgar in mixed society by cutting a
lady of tremendous rank; as I would rather take a cook for a Countess,
or a chambermaid for an Honourable, than be guilty of so much rudeness.
You must not smile, gentle reader, and say cooks are often handsomer
than Countesses, or chambermaids prettier than Honourables; I am like
the old man of the Bubbles of Brunnen, insensible to anything but the
beauties of nature. Neither must you think we have no Countesses nor
Honourables in Canada. The former are in truth _rarae aves_, but the
latter--why, every change of ministry creates a batch of them.