MONTREAL: QUEBEC
I
Montreal was not actually in the schedule. In the program of the
Prince's tour it was put down as the last place he should visit. This,
in a sense, was fitting. It was proper that the greatest city in
Canada should wind up the visit in a befitting week.
All the same, as the Prince himself said, he could not possibly start
for the West without making at least a call on Montreal, so he rounded
off his travels among the big cities of the Canadian East by spending
the inside of a day there.
I wonder whether there was ever an inside of a day so crowded? I was
present when Manchester rushed President Wilson through a headlong
morning of events, and the Manchester effort was pedestrian beside
Montreal's. Even the Prince, who himself can put any amount of vigour
into life, must have found nothing in his experience to equal a
non-stop series of ceremonies carried on, at times, at a pace of
forty-miles an hour.
That is what happened. Montreal was given about four hours of the
Prince. Montreal is a progressive city; it has an up-to-date and
"Do-It-Now" sense. Confronted at very short notice with those four
hours, it promptly set itself to make the most of them. It packed
about four days' program into them.
It managed this, of course, by using motor-cars. The whole of the
American Continent, I have come to see, has a motor-car method of
thinking out and accomplishing things. Montreal certainly has.
Montreal met the Prince in an automobile mood, whipped him from the
train and entertained him on the top gear for every moment of his stay.
II
He arrived at the handsome Windsor Station of the C.P.R. on the morning
of Tuesday, September 2nd, and was at once taken to a big, grey motor.
His guide, the Mayor of the city, then began to show him how time could
be annihilated and days compressed into hours.
In those few hours he was shown not a section of the great commercial
city, not merely the City Hall, and a street or two, and a place
wherein to lunch. He was shown all Montreal. He was shown the city of
Montreal and the suburbs of Montreal, and verily I believe he was shown
every man, woman, and certainly every child of flag-wagging age, in
Montreal.
And when he had seen the high, fine business blocks of Montreal, and
the pretty residential districts, where the well-designed homes seem to
stand on terrace over terrace of the smoothest, greenest grass, he was
shown the country-side about Montreal, the comely little habitant
parishes and holiday places that make outlying Montreal, and the
convents and the colleges where Montreal educates itself, the
Universities where that education is rounded off, and the long, wide,
straight speedways over which Montreal citizens get the best out of
their motor-car moments--and he was shown how it was done.
And after showing him the rivers that make the hilly country about
Montreal beautiful, and the little pocket villages, he was swung back
out of the green of the summer country and shown more business blocks,
and just a hint of the great wharves and docks that fringe the St.
Lawrence and give the city its great industrial power and fame. Then
when they had shown him all the things that man usually sees only after
weeks of tenacious exploration, they spun him up a corkscrew drive that
goes first among charming houses, then among beautiful deep trees and
grass, and sat him down in a glowing pavilion on the top of this hill,
Mount Royal--the Montreal that gives the city its name--and gave him
lunch.
There, as he ate, he looked down over one of the great views of the
world. Below him was the splendid vista of a splendid city; the mass
of tall offices, factories and the high fret of derricks and elevators
along the quays that covered the site of the Indian lodges of Hochelaga
that Jacques Cartier first found; the mass of spires from a thousand
churches, the swelling domes and hipped roofs of basilica and college
that had grown up from the old religious outpost, the nucleus of
Christianity in the wilds that was to convert the wilds, the Ville
Marie de Montreal that Maisonneuve had founded nearly three centuries
ago.
And beyond this swinging breadth of city that was modernity, as well as
history, the Prince saw the grey, misty bosom of the St. Lawrence,
winding broad and significant beneath the distant hills.
III
Truly it had been a mighty day, worthy of a mighty city. And a day not
merely big in achievement, but big in meaning also. In his drive the
Prince had covered no less than thirty-six miles in and about the city,
and on practically the whole of that great sweep there had been crowds,
and at times big crowds, all friendly and with an enthusiasm that was
French as well as Canadian.
There were naturally tracts of road in the country where people did not
gather in force, but almost everywhere there were some. Sometimes it
was a family gathered by a pretty house draped with flags. Sometimes
it was a village, making up with the flags in their hands for the
hanging flags short notice had prevented their sporting.
On an open stretch of road the Prince would come abreast of a convent
in the fields. By the fence of the convent all the little girls would
be ranked, dressed, sometimes, in national ribbons, and anyhow carrying
flags, and with them would be the nuns. Or if the convent was not a
teaching order, the nuns would be by themselves, forming a delightful
picture of quiet respect on the porch or along the garden wall.
Boys' schools had the inmates gathered at the road-edge in jolly mobs,
though some of these had a semi-military dignity, because of the quaint
and kepi-ed uniform of the school, that made the boys look like cadets
out of a picture by Detaille.
The seminaries had their flocks of black fledglings drawn up under the
professor-priests, and the sober black of these embryo priests had not
the slightest restriction on their enthusiasm.
There were crowds everywhere on that extraordinary ride, but it was in
Montreal itself that the throngs reached immense proportions. From the
first moment of arrival, when the Prince in mufti rode out from under
the clangour of "God Bless the Prince of Wales" played on the bells of
St. George's Church, that hob-nobs with the station, crowds were thick
about the route. As he swung from Dominion Square (in which the
station stands) into the Regent Street of Montreal, St. Catherine
Street, crowds of employes crowded the windows of the big and fine
stores, and added their welcome to the mass on the sidewalks.
Short notice had curtailed decoration, but the enthusiastic employes
(mainly feminine) of one tall store strove to rectify the lack by
arming themselves with flags and stationing themselves at every window.
Balancing perilously, they waited until the Prince came level, and then
set the whole face of the tall building fluttering with Union Jacks.
From these streets, impressive in their sense of vigour and industry,
the procession of cars mounted through the residential quarter to Mount
Royal Park. Here in the presence of a big crowd that surrounded him
and got to close quarters at once, the Prince alighted and stayed a few
minutes at the statue of Georges Etienne Cartier, the father of
Canadian unity, whose centenary was then being celebrated, since the
war forbade rejoicing on the real anniversary in 1914.
Cartier's daughter, Hortense Cartier, was present at this little
ceremony, and she was, as it were, a personal link between her father
and the Prince, who is himself helping to inaugurate a new phase of
unity, that of the Empire.
From this point the Prince's route struck out into the country
districts that I have described, but the crowds had accumulated rather
than diminished when he returned to the streets of the city, about one
o'clock, and he drove through lanes of people so dense that at times
the pace of his car was retarded to a walk.
The crowd was a suggestive one. All ranks and conditions were in
it--and conditions rather than ranks were apparent in the dock-side
area, which is a dingy one for Canada. But in all the crowds the thing
that struck me most was their proportion of children. Montreal seemed
a veritable hive of children. There were thousands and thousands of
them.
The streets were bursting with kiddies. And not merely were there
multitudes of girls and boys of that thoroughly vociferous age of
somewhere under twelve, but there were ranked battalions of boys and
maids, all of an age obviously under twenty.
Quebec is the province of large families. Ten children to a marriage
is a commonplace, and twenty is not a rarity. A man is not thought to
be worth his salt unless he has his quiver full. And the result of
this as I saw it in the streets gives food for thought.
That huge marshalling of the citizens of tomorrow gives one not merely
a sense of Canada's potentiality, but of the potentiality of Quebec in
the future of Canada. With a new race of such a healthy standard
growing up, the future of Montreal has a look of greatness. Montreal
is now the biggest and most vigorous city in Canada, it plays a large
part in the life of Canada. What part will it play tomorrow?
A good as well as great part, surely. Discriminating Canadians tell
you that the French-Canadian makes the best type of citizen. He is
industrious, go-ahead, sane, practical; he is law-abiding and he is
loyal. His history shows that he is loyal; indeed, Canada as it stands
today owes not a little to French-Canadian loyalty and willingness to
take up arms in support of British institutions.
French-Canada took up arms in the Great War to good purpose, sending
40,000 men to the Front, though its good work has been obscured by the
political propaganda made out of the Anti-Conscription campaign. Sober
politicians--by no means on the side of the French-Canadians--told me
that there was rather more smoke in that matter than circumstances
created, and in Britain particularly the business was over-exaggerated.
There was a good deal of politics mixed up in the attitude of Quebec,
"And in any case," said my informant, "Quebec was not the first to
oppose conscription, nor yet the bitterest, though she was, perhaps,
the most candid."
The language difficulty is a difficulty, yet that has been the subject
of exaggeration, also. Those who find it a grave problem seem to be
those who have never come in contact with it, but are anxious about it
at a distance. Those who are in contact with the French-speaking races
say that French and English-speaking peoples get on well on the whole,
and have an esteem for each other that makes nothing of the language
barrier.
Concerning the Roman Catholic Church, which is certainly in a very
powerful position in Quebec, I have heard from non-Catholics quite as
much said in favour of the good it does, as I have heard to the
contrary, so I concluded that on its human side it is as human as any
other concern, doing good and making mistakes in the ordinary human
way. As far as its spiritual side is concerned there is no doubt at
all that it holds its people. Its huge churches are packed with huge
congregations at every service on Sunday.
On the whole, then, I fancy that that part of Canada's future which
lies in the hands of the children of Montreal, and the Province of
Quebec generally, will be for the good of the Dominion. Certainly the
attitude of the people as shown in the packed and ecstatic streets of
Montreal was a very good omen.
The welcome had had its usual effect on the Prince. The formal salute
never had a chance, and from the outset of the ride he had stood up in
his car and waved back in answer to the cheering of the crowd. When
standing for so many miles tired him, he sat high up on the folded
hood, with one of his suite to hold him, and he did not stop waving his
hat. In this way he accomplished the thirty-six miles ride, only
slipping down into his seat as the car mounted the stiff zig-zag that
led up Mount Royal to the luncheon pavilion.
The slowness of this climb was, in a sense, his undoing. As his car
neared the top of the hill, two Montreal flappers, whose extreme youth
was only exceeded by their extreme daring, sprang on to the footboard
and held him up with autograph books. He immediately produced a
fountain pen, and sitting once more on the back of the car, wrote his
name as the car went along, and the young ladies from Montreal clung on
to it.
This delightful act was too much for one of the maidens, for, on
getting her book back, she kissed the Prince impulsively, and then in a
sudden attack of deferred modesty, sprang from the car and ran for her
blushes' sake.
From the luncheon pavilion the Prince was whirled to the Royal train,
and in that, after a recuperative round of golf at a course just
outside Montreal, he set out for the comparative calm of the great West.