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.
Behold us again in Toronto at Macdonald's Hotel; and, as we shall have
to visit this rising city frequently, we shall say very little more
about it at present, but embark as speedily as possible on board the
Transit, and steam over to Niagara.
The Transit, a celebrated packet, now getting old, and commanded by a
son of its well-known owner, Captain Richardson, starts always in summer
at eight a.m. punctually, and makes her voyage by half-past eleven, at
which hour, on the 5th day of July, we once more touched the shore of
Newark, or Niagara Town, at the Dock Company's wharf, which we found had
been greatly damaged in the spring of the year by a most extraordinary
ice phenomenon.
At the breaking-up of the frost, the ice in the river Niagara, which
came down the river, packed near its mouth, and dammed it up so high at
Queenston, seven miles above and close to the narrows, that the upper
surface of the fields of ice was thirty feet above the level of the
river, there a quarter of a mile broad or more. The consequence was,
that every wharf and every building under this level was destroyed and
crushed. Every edifice on the banks, and among others a strong stone
barrack, full of soldiers, was stormed by the frost-king, during the
darkness of an awful night, and the front wall fairly breached and borne
down by the advancing masses of ice. The soldiers had barely time to
escape from the crashing and rending walls; and their cooking-house, a
detached building, some yards from the barrack and higher up the bank,
was turned over, as if it had been a small boat.
In the memory of man, such a scene had never occurred before, and
probably never will again; and I have been told, by those who beheld it,
that a more solemn display of natural power and irresistible might has
seldom been witnessed than that of the gradual grinding, heaving passage
of one great floe, or field, of thick-ribbed ice over the other, until
that summit was gained which could not be exceeded.
Then came the disruption, the roar, the rush, the fury, the foam, the
groaning thunder, and the river flood; the plunge and the struggle
between the solid and the liquid waters.
Truly, the thundering water was well named by the Indian of old--NE AW
GAR AW is very Greek sounding.
Newark, or, as it is now called, Niagara, but, as it should be named,
Simcoe, is still a pretty, well laid-out town; and, although it has
scarcely had a new house built in it for many years past, is on the
whole a very respectable place, and the capital of the district of
Niagara, celebrated for its apple, peach, and cherry orchards.
It has a good-looking church, and the living is a rectory. A Roman
Catholic church stands close to the English, and a handsome Scots church
is at the other end of the town. There is an ugly jail and Court-House
about a mile in the country, and an excellent market, where every thing
is cheap and good.
Barracks for the Royal Canadian Rifle regiment stand on a large plain.
Old Fort George, the scene of former battling, is in total ruin; and
Fort Mississagua, with its square tower, looks frowningly at Fort
Niagara, on the American side of the estuary of the Great River. I never
see these rival batteries, for it is too magniloquent to style them
fortresses, but they picture to my mind England and the United States.
Mississagua looks careless and confident, with a little bit of a
flag--the flag, however, of a thousand years, displayed, only on
Sundays and holidays, on a staff which looks something like that which
the king-making Warwick tied his heraldic bear to.
The antiquity and warlike renown of England sit equally and visibly
impressed on the crest of the miserable Mississagua as on that of
Gibraltar.
Fort Niagara, an old French Indian stockade, modernized by the American
engineers from time to time, half-lighthouse, half-fortification,
glaring with whitewashed walls, that may be seen almost at Toronto, with
a flag-staff towering to the skies, and a flag which would cover the
deck of a first-rate, displayed from morn to night, speaks of the new
nation, whose pretensions must ever be put in plain view, and constantly
tell the tale that America is a second edition of the best work of
English industry and of British valour--a second edition interwoven,
however, with foreign matter, with French _fierte_ without French
_politesse_, with German mysticism without German learning, with the
restless and rabid democracy of the whole world without the salutary
check of venerable laws, and with that strange mixture of freedom and
slavery, of tolerance and intolerance, which distinguishes America of
the nineteenth century.
But it is, nevertheless, a most extraordinary spectacle, to contemplate
the rise and progress of the union in so short a period since the
declaration of independence.
An Irish gentleman, apparently a clergyman, last year favoured the
public with the result of an extensive tour in Canada and the United
States, in "Letters from America."
He starts in his preface with these remarkable expressions, which must
be well considered and analyzed, because they are the deliberate
convictions of an observant and well-informed man, who had, moreover,
singular opportunities of reflecting upon the people he had so long
travelled amongst.
He says that "In energy, perseverance, enterprise, sagacity, activity,
and varied resources" the Americans infinitely surpass the British;
that he never met with "a stupid American." That our "American children"
surpass us not only in our good, but "in our evil peculiarities." This I
cannot understand; for, surely, if we have _peculiarities_, which there
is no denying, they must by all the rules of logic be limited to
ourselves.
But the writer observes, in a paragraph too long for quotation, that
they exceed us in materialism and in utilitarianism; that we, a nation
of shopkeepers, as Napoleon styled the English, were outdone in the
worship of Mammon by them; that we have rejected too much the higher
branches of art and science, and the cultivation of the aesthetic
faculty--what an abominable word aesthetic is! it always puts me in mind
of asthmatic, for it is broken-winded learning.
"Is it not common," says he, "in modern England to reject authorities
both in Church and State, to look with contempt on the humbler and more
peculiarly christian virtues of contentment and submission, and to
cultivate the intellectual at the expense of the moral part of our
nature? If these and other dangerous tendencies of a similar nature are
at work among ourselves, as they undoubtedly are, it is useful and
interesting to observe them in fuller operation and more unchecked
luxuriance in America."
Now, it is very satisfactory, that the Americans, a race of yesterday,
who have had no opportunity as yet of coping with the deep research and
master-minds of Europe, should in half a century have leaped into such a
position in the civilized world as to have exceeded the Englishman in
all the most useful relations of life, as well as in all its darker and
more dangerous features; very satisfactory indeed that the mixed race
peopling the United States should be better and worse than that nation
to which the world, by universal consent, has yielded the palm of
superiority in all the arts and in all the sciences of modern
acquirement.
Wherein do the Americans exceed the sons of Britain? In history, in
policy, in poetry, in mathematics, in music, in painting, or in any of
the gifts of the Muses? Are they more renowned in the dreadful art of
war? or in the mild virtues of peace? Is the fame of America a wonder
and a terror to the four quarters of the globe?--We may fearlessly reply
in the negative. The outer barbarian knows the American but as another
kind of Englishman. It will yet take him some centuries to distinguish
between the original and the offspring.
It is, in short, as untenable as an axiom in policy or history, that the
American exceeds the Briton in the development of mind, as it is that
the American exceeds the Briton in the development of the baser
qualities of our nature.
When the insatiate thirst for dollars, dollars, dollars, has subsided,
then the American may justly rear his head as an aspirant for historic
fame. His land has never yet produced a Shakespeare, a Johnson, a
Milton, a Spenser, a Newton, a Bacon, a Locke, a Coke, or a Rennie. The
utmost America has yet achieved is a very faint imitation of the least
renowned of our great writers, Walter Scott.
In diplomacy I deny also the palm. For although India is a case in
point, like as Texas, yet even there we have never first planted a
population with the express purpose of ejecting the lawful government,
but have conquered where conquest was not only hailed by the enslaved
people but was a positive benefit, by the introduction of mild and
equitable laws instead of brutal and bloody despotisms. We have not
snatched from a weak republic, whose principles had been expressly
formed on our own model, that which poverty alone obliged it to
relinquish. If the writer, who appears to be an excellent man and a good
christian, had lived for several years on the borders of the eagerly
desired Canada, I very much doubt whether he would have seen such a
_couleur de rose_ in the transactions of the mighty commonwealth, where
the rulers are the ruled, and where education, intellect, integrity,
innocence, and wealth must all alike bow before the Juggernaut of an
unattainable perfection of equality.
If Bill Johnson, the mail robber and smuggler, is as good as William
Pitt or any other William of superior mind, why then the sooner the
millennium of democracy arrives the better. It is unfortunate for the
present generation--what it will be for the next no man can pretend to
say--that this debasing principle is gaining ground not only in Canada
but in England. A reflecting mind has no objection to the creed that all
men were created equal; but history, sacred and profane, plainly shows
that mind as well as matter is afterwards, for the wisest of purposes,
very differently developed.
Does the meanest white American, the sweeper of Broadway, if there be
such a citizen, believe in this perfection of equality amongst men as a
fundamental axiom of the rights of man? Place a black sweeper of
crossings in juxtaposition, and the question will very soon solve
itself. Why, the free and enlightened citizens will not even permit
their black or coloured brethren to worship their common Creator in the
same pew with themselves--it is horror, it is degradation! And yet
there is a universal outcry about sacred liberty and equality all over
the Union. The angels weep to witness the tricks of men placed in a
little brief authority. Can such a state of things last as that, where
the Irish labourer is treated as an inferior being in the scale of
creation, and the Negro, or the offspring of the Negro and the white, is
branded with the stigma of servile? It cannot--it will not. Either let
democracy assume its true and legitimate features, or let it cease--for
the re-action will be a fearful one, as dread and as horribly diabolical
as that which the folly of the aristocracy of old France brought on that
devoted land.
I have said, and I repeat it, that a residence on the borders of Canada
and the United States for some time will cure a reflecting mind of many
long cherished notions concerning the relative merits of a limited
monarchy and of a crude democracy.
The man who views the border people of the United States with calm
observation will soon come to the conclusion that a state of
government, if it may be so called, where the commonest ruffian asserts
privileges which the most educated and refined mind never dreams of, is
not an enviable order of things.
In the first fury of a war with England, who were the promoters? the mob
on the borders. Who hoped for a new sympathy demonstration, in order to
annex Canada? the people of the Western States, who, far removed from
the possibility of invasion, valiantly resolve to carry fire and sword
among their unoffending brethren.
The intelligence and the wealth of the United States are passive; they
are physically weak, and therefore succumb to the dictation of the rude
masses. And what keeps up this singular action, but the
constantly-recurring elections, the incessant balloting and voting, the
necessity which every man feels hourly of saving his substance or his
life from the devouring rapacity of those who think that all should be
equal!
If the government, acutely sensible that war is an evil which must
cripple its resources, is unwilling to engage in it, both from principle
and from patriotism, it must yield if the mob wills it, or forfeit the
sweets of office and of power. Hence, few men enter upon the cares of
public life in the States now-a-days who are of that frame of mind which
considers personal expediency as worthy of deep reflection. What would
Washington have said to such a system?
The batteries or fortalices of Niagara and of Mississagua have led to a
digression quite unintentional and unforeseen, which must terminate for
the present with a different view from that of the author of the Letters
above-mentioned: and let us hope fervently that the New World has not
yet arrived at such a consummation as that of surpassing the vices and
crimes of the Old, as we are certain it has not yet achieved such a
moral victory as that of outrunning it in the race of scientific or
mechanic fame. England is no more in her dotage than America is in her
nonage. The former, without vanity or want of verity be it spoken, is
as pre-eminent as the latter is honestly and creditably aspiring.
The writer above quoted says their ships sail better, and are manned
with fewer hands. We grant that no nation excels the United States in
ship-building, and that they build vessels expressly for sailing; but
for one English ship lost on the ocean, there are three of the venturous
Americans; for one steam-vessel that explodes, and hurls its hundreds to
destruction, in England or Canada, there are twenty Americans.
In England, the cautious, the slow and the sure plan prevails; in
America, the go-ahead, reckless, dollar-making principle prevails; and
so it is through every other concern of life. A hundred ways of
worshipping the Creator, after the christian form, exist in America,
where half a dozen suffice in England.
Time is money in America; the meals are hurried over, relaxations
necessary to the enjoyment of existence forbidden--and what for? to
make money. To what end? to spend it faster than it is made, and then to
begin again. You have only a faint shadow of the immense wealth realized
in England by that of the merchant or the shopkeeper in the States.
Capital there is constantly in a rapid consumption; and as the people
engaged in the feverish excitement of acquiring it are in the latter
country, from their habits, shortlived, so the opposite fact exhibits
itself in England. There are no Rothschilds, no railway kings in
America. Time and the man will not admit of it. John Jacob Astor is an
exception to this fact.
On landing at Niagara, the difference of climate between it and Toronto
is at once perceived. Here you are on sandy, there on clayey soil. Here
all is heat, there moisture. I tried hard for several seasons to bring
the peach to perfection at Toronto, only thirty-six miles from Niagara,
without success; at Niagara it grows freely, and almost spontaneously,
as well as the quince. The fields and the gardens of Niagara are a
fortnight or more in advance of those of Toronto. Strange that the
passage of the westerly winds across Ontario should make such a
difference!
Niagara is a grand racing-stand, where all the loafers of the
neighbouring republic congregate in the autumn; I was unfortunately
present at the last races, and never desire to repeat my visit at that
season. Blacklegs and whitelegs prevail; and the next morning the course
was strewed with the bodies of drunken vagabonds. It appears to me very
strange that the gentry of the neighbourhood suffer a very small modicum
of ephemeral newspaper notoriety to get the better of their good sense.
The patronage of such a racecourse as that of Niagara, so far from being
an honour, is the reverse. It is too near the frontier to be even
decently respectable; nor is the course itself a good one, for the sand
is too deep. Many a young gentleman of Toronto, who thinks that he
copies the aristocracy of England by patronizing the turf, finds out to
his own loss and sorrow that it would have been much better to have had
his racing qualifications exhibited nearer his own door; and there
cannot possibly be a greater colonial mistake committed than to fancy
that grooms, stable-boys, and blacklegs, are now the advisers and
companions of our juvenile nobility.--That day has passed!
It is very unfortunate that very false ideas exist in some of the
colonies of the manners and customs of high life in England. The
grown-up people often fancy that cold reserve, and an assumption of
great state, indicate high birth and breeding. The younger branches seem
frequently to think that there is no such thing at home as the period of
adolescence; consequently, you often see a pert young master deliver his
unasked opinion and behave before his seniors and superiors as though he
wanted to intimate that he was wiser in his generation than they.
In crossing to Niagara, we had a specimen of the precocious colonist of
1845. The table of the captain of the boat, like that of his respected
father, was good and decorously conducted, and there were several ladies
and some most respectable travelled Americans at dinner. A very young
gentleman, who boasted how much he had lost at the races, how much they
had gambled, and how much they drank of champagne the night
before--champagne, by the by, is thought a very aristocratic drink among
psuedo-great men, although it is common as ditch-water in the United
States--engrossed the whole conversation of the dinner-table, picked his
teeth, took up the room of two, called the waiter fifty times, and ended
by ordering the cheese to be placed on the table before the pies and
puddings were removed. The company present rose before the dessert
appeared, thoroughly disgusted; and I afterwards saw this would-be man
peeping into the windows of the ladies'-cabin, and performing a thousand
other antic tricks, cigar in mouth, for which he would in England have
met with his deserts.
The precociousness of Transatlantic children is not confined to the
United States--it is equally and unpleasantly visible in Canada.
The Americans who travel, I can safely say, are not guilty of these
monstrous absurdities. I have crossed the Atlantic more than once with
boys of from seventeen to twenty, who have left college to make the
grand tour, without ever observing any thing to find fault with. The
American youth is observant, and soon discovers that attempting to do
the character of men before his time in the society of English strangers
invariably lowers instead of raising an interest.
There is a good caricature of this in an American book, I forget its
title, written some time ago, to show the simplicity, gullibility, and
vindictivness of our Trollopean travellers. It is a boy of sixteen, or
thereabouts, cigar in the corner of his mouth, hat cocked on three
curls, and all the modern etceteras of a complete youth, saying to his
father, "Here, take my boots, old fellow, and clean them." The father
looks a little amazed, upon which the manikin ejaculates, "Why don't you
take them? what's the use of having a father?"
There will be a railway smash in this, as well as in the locomotive
mania. Republicanism towards elders and parents is unnatural; the child
and the man were not born equal.
I remember reading in a voluminous account of the terrors of the French
revolution a remarkable passage:--servants denounced masters, debtors
denounced creditors, women denounced husbands, children denounced
parents, youth denounced protecting age; gratitude was unknown; a favour
conferred led to the guillotine: but never, never in that awful period,
in that reign of the vilest passions of our nature over reason, was
there one instance, one single instance, of a parent denouncing its
child.
It is not a good sign when extreme youth pretends to have discovered the
true laws of the universe, when the son is wiser than the father, or
when immature reason usurps the functions of the ripened faculties.
I have put this together because I hear hourly parents deprecating the
system of education in the greatest city of Western Canada; because I
hear and see children of fourteen swaggering about the streets with all
the consequence of unfledged men, smoking cigars, frequenting
tavern-bars and billiard-rooms, and no doubt led by such unbridled
license into deeper mysteries and excesses; because I hear clergymen
lament that boys of that age lose their health by excesses too difficult
of belief to fancy true. Surely a salutary check in time may be applied
to such an evil.
But liberty and equality, as I said before, are extending on both sides
of the Atlantic: and in their train come these evils, simply because
liberty and equality are as much misunderstood as real republicanism and
limited monarchy are.