THE CITY OF WHEAT--WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
I
We had a hint of what the Western welcome was going to be like from the
Winnipeg papers that were handed to us with our cantaloupe at breakfast
on Tuesday, September 9th.
They were concerning themselves brightly and strenuously with the
details of the visit that day, and were also offering real Western
advice on the etiquette of clothes.
"SILK LIDS AND STRIPED PANTS FOR THE BIG DAY"
formed the main headline, taking the place of space usually given to
Baseball reports or other vital news. And pen pictures of Western
thrill were given of leading men chasing in and out of the stores of
the town in an attempt to buy a "Silk Lid" (a top hat) in order to be
fit to figure at receptions.
The writer had even broken into verse to describe the emotions of the
occasion. Despairing of prose he wrote:
Get out the old silk bonnet,
Iron a new shine on it.
Just pretend your long-tailed coat does not seem queer,
For we'll be all proper
As a crossing "copper"
When the Prince of Wales is here.
The Ladies' Page also caught the infection. It crossed its page with a
wail:
"GIRLS! OH, GIRLS! SILVER SLIPPERS CANNOT BE HAD!"
and it went on for columns to tell how silver slippers were the only
kind the Prince would look at. He had chosen all partners at all balls
in all towns by the simple method of looking for silver slippers. The
case of those without silver slippers was hopeless. The maidens of
Winnipeg well knew this. There had been a silver slipper battue
through all the stores, and all had gone--it was, so one felt from the
article, a crisis for all those who had been slow.
A rival paper somewhat calmed the anxious citizens by stating that the
Silk Lid and the Striped Pants were not necessities, and that the
Prince himself did not favour formal dress--a fact, for indeed, he
preferred himself the informality of a grey lounge suit always, when
not wearing uniform, and did not even trouble to change for dinner
unless attending a function. The paper also hinted that he had eyes
for other things in partners besides silver slippers.
These papers gave us an indication that not only would "Winnipeg be
polished to the heels of its shoes" at the coming of the Prince, but to
continue the metaphor, it would be enthusiastic to well above its
hat-band. And it was.
II
Certainly Winnipeg's welcome did not stop at the huge mass of
heels--high as well as low--that carried it out to look at the Prince
on his arrival. It mounted well up to the heart and to the head as he
left the wide-open space in front of the C.P.R. station, and, with a
brave escort of red-tuniced "Mounties," swung into the old pioneer
trail--only it is called Main Street now--toward the Town Hall.
The exceedingly broad street was lined with immense crowds, that, on
the whole, kept their ranks like a London rather than a Canadian throng
for at least two hundred yards.
Then this imported docility gave way, and the press of people became
entirely Canadian. The essential spirit of the Canadian, like that of
the citizen of another country, is that "he will be there." Or perhaps
I should say he "will be _right_ there." Anyhow, there he was as close
to the Prince as he could get without actually climbing into the
carriage that was slowing down before the dais among trees in the
garden before the City Hall.
In a minute where there had been a broad open space lined with neat
policemen, there was a swamping mass of Canadians of all ages, and the
Prince was entirely hemmed in. In fact only a free fight of the most
amiable kind got him out of the carriage and on to the dais. The
Marine orderlies, and others of the suite, joined in an attempt to
press the throng back. They could accomplish nothing until the
"Mounties" came to their aid, forced a passage with their horses, and
so permitted the Prince to mount the dais and hear the Mayor say what
the crowd had been explaining for the past ten minutes, that is, how
glad Winnipeg was to see him.
It was the usual function, but varied a little. Winnipeg has not
always been happy in the matter of its water supply, and the day and
the Prince came together to inaugurate a new era. It was accomplished
in the modern manner. The Prince pressed a button on the platform and
water-gates on Shoal Lake outside the city swung open. In a minute or
two a dry fountain in the gardens before the Prince threw up a jet of
water. The new water had come to Winnipeg.
Through big crowds on the sidewalks he passed through an avenue of
fine, tall and modern stores, along Broadway, where the tram-tracks
fringed with grass and trees run down the centre of a wide boulevard
that is edged with lawns and trees, and so to the new Parliament
Buildings.
Here there was a vivid and shining scene before the great white curtain
of a classic building not yet finished.
In the wide forecourt was a mass of children bearing flags, and up the
great flight of steps leading to the impressive Corinthian porch was a
bank of people, jewelled with flags and vivid in gay dresses. Against
the sharp white mass of the building this living, thrilling bed of
humanity made an unforgettable picture.
The ceremony in the spacious entrance hall was also full of the
movement and colour of life. In the massive square hall stairs spring
upward to the gallery on which the Prince stood. On the level of each
floor galleries were cut out of the solid stone of the walls. Crowded
in these galleries were men and women, who looked down the shaft of
this austere chamber upon a grouping of people about the foot of the
cold, white ascending stairs. The strong, clear light added to the
dramatic dignity of the scene.
The groups moved up the white stairs slowly between the ranks of
Highlanders, whose uniforms took on a vividity in the clarified light.
The Prince in Guard's uniform, with his suite in blue and gold and
khaki and red behind him, stood on the big white stage of the
stair-head to receive them. It was a scene that had all the tone and
all the circumstances of an Eastern levee.
But it was a levee with a fleck of humour, also.
As he turned to leave, the Prince noticed beside him a handsome
armchair upholstered in royal blue. It was a strange, lonely chair in
that desert of gallery and standing humanity. It was a chair that
needed explaining.
In characteristic fashion the Prince bent down to it to find an
explanation. The crowd, knowing all about that chair and understanding
his puzzlement, began to laugh. It laughed outright and with
sympathetic humour when, abruptly handing his Guards' cap to one of his
staff, he solemnly sat down in it for a second instead of going his way.
The chair was the chair his father and grandfather had sat in when they
came to Winnipeg. Silver medallions on it gave testimony to facts.
The Prince had not time to adopt a fully considered sitting, but he was
not going to leave the building until he, too, had registered his claim
to it.
In the big Campus that fronts the University of Manitoba, and ranked by
thousands in a hollow square, were the veterans in khaki and civies who
had fought as comrades of the Prince in the war. To these he went next.
It was a lengthy ceremony, for there were many to inspect. There were
Canadian Highlanders and riflemen in the square, as well as veterans
dating back to the time of the North-West Rebellion of '85. And there
was also the regimental goat of the 5th West Canadians, a big, husky
fellow, who endeavoured to take control of the ceremony with his horns,
as befitted a veteran who sported four service chevrons and a wound
stripe.
Here, too, the crowd was the most stirring and remarkable feature of
the ceremony. It began with an almost European placidity of decorum,
standing quietly behind the wooden railing on three sides of the
Campus, and as quietly filling the seats in and about the glowingly
draped grand stand before the University building. As the ceremony
proceeded, however, the crowd behind the stand pressed forward, getting
out on to the field. Soldiers linked arms to keep it back, soldiers
with bayonets were drawn from the ranks of veterans to give additional
weight, wise men mounted the stand and strove to stem the forward
pressure with logic. But that crowd was filled with much the same
spirit that made the sea so difficult a thing to reason with in King
Canute's day. Neither soldiers nor words of the wise could check it.
It flowed forward into the Campus, a sea of men and women, shop girls
not caring a fig if they _were_ "late back" and had a half-day docked,
children who swarmed amid Olympian legs, babies in mothers' arms, whose
presence in that crush was a matter of real terror to us less hardened
British--an impetuous mass of young and old, masculine and feminine
life that cared nothing for hard elbows and torn clothes as long as it
got close to the Prince.
Before the inspection was finished, before the Prince could get back to
the stand to present medals, the Campus was no longer a hollow square,
it was a packed throng.
And the crowd, having won this vantage, took matters into its own hands
until, indeed, its ardour began to verge on the dangerous.
As the Prince left the field the great crowd swept after him, until the
whole mass was jammed tight against the iron railings at the entrance
of the Campus. The Prince was in the heart of this throng surrounded
by police who strove to force a way out for him. The crowd fought as
heartily to get at him. There was a wild moment when the throng
charged forward and crashed the iron railings down with their weight
and force.
There were cries of "Shoulder him! Shoulder the boy!" and a rush was
made towards him. The police had a hard struggle to keep the people
back, and, as it was, it was only the swift withdrawal of the Prince
from the scene that averted trouble; for in a crowd that had got
slightly out of hand in its enthusiasm, the presence of so many
children and women seemed to spell calamity.
This splendid ardour is more remarkable, since, only a few months
before, Winnipeg had been the scene of an outburst which its citizens
describe as nothing else but Bolshevik.
That outcrop of active discontent--which, by the way, was germinated in
part by Englishmen--had a loud and ugly sound, and its clamour seemed
ominous. People asked whether all the West, and indeed, all Canada,
was going to be involved. Was Canada speaking in the accents of revolt?
Well, on September 9th, there arose another sound in Winnipeg, and it
was but part of a wave of sound that had been travelling westward for
more than a month. It was, I think, a most significant sound. It was
the sound of majorities expressing themselves.
It was not a few shouting revolt. It was the many shouting its
affection and loyalty for tried democratic ideals.
When minorities raise their voices our ears are dinned by the shouting
and we imagine it is a whole people speaking. We forget those who sit
silent at home, not joining in the storm. The silent mass of the
majority is overlooked because it finds so few opportunities for
self-expression. Only such a visit as this of the Prince gives them a
chance.
It seemed to me that this display of affection had a human rather than
a political significance. It impressed me not as an affair of parties,
but as the fundamental, human desire of the great mass of ordinary
workaday people to show their appreciation for stable and democratic
ideals which the peculiarly democratic individuality of the Prince
represents.
III
Winnipeg is a town with a vital spirit. It has a large air. There is
something in its spaciousness that tells of the great grain plains at
the threshold of which it stands. It is the "Chicago of Canada," and
hub of a world of grain, Queen City in the Kingdom of Bakers' Flour.
And it is mightily conscious of its high office.
It springs upward out of the flat and brooding prairies, where the
Assiniboine and the strong Red River strike together--the old "Forks"
of the pioneer days. It sits where the old trails of the pathfinder
and the fur trader join, and its very streets grew up about those
trails.
From the piles of pelts dumped by Indians and hunters outside the old
Hudson Bay stockade at Fort Garry, and the sacks of raw grain that the
old prairie schooners brought in, Winnipeg of today has grown up.
And it has grown up with the astonishing, swift maturity of the West.
Fifty years ago there was not even a village. Forty years ago it was a
mere spot on the world map, put there only to indicate the locality of
Louis Kiel's Red River Rebellion, and Wolseley's march to Fort Garry,
as its name was. In 1881 it became just Winnipeg, a townlet with less
than 8,000 souls in it. Today it ranks with the greatest commercial
cities in Canada, and its greatness can be felt in the tingling energy
of its streets.
The wonder of that swift growth is a thing that can be brought directly
home. I stood on the station with a man old but still active, and he
said to me:
"Do you see that block of buildings over there? I had the piece of
ground on which it was built. I sold it for a hundred dollars, it was
prairie then. It's worth many thousands now. And that piece where
that big factory stands, that was mine. I let that go for under three
hundred, and the present owners bought in the end for twenty and more
times that sum. Oh, we were all foolish then, how could we tell that
Winnipeg was going to grow? It was a 'back-block' town, shacks along a
dusty track. And the railway hadn't come. A three-story wooden house,
that was a marvel to be sure; now we have skyscrapers."
And fast though Winnipeg has grown, or because she has grown at such a
pace, one can still see the traces and feel the spirit of the old
spacious days in her streets. They are long streets and so planned
that they seem to have been built by men who knew that there were no
limits on the immense plains, and so broad that one knows that the
designers had been conscious that there was no need to pinch the
sidewalks and carriage-ways with all the prairie at the back of them.
Along these sumptuous avenues there still remain many of the low-built
and casual houses that men put up in the early days, and it is these
standing beside the modernity of the business buildings, soaring
sky-high, the massive grain elevators and the big brisk mills that give
the city its curious blending of pioneer days and thrusting,
twentieth-century virility.
It is a town like no other that we had visited, and where one had the
feeling that up-to-date card-indexing systems were being worked by men
in the woolly riding chaps of old plainsmen.
In the people of the streets one experienced the same curious sense of
"difference." In splendid boulevards such as Main, and Portage, which
turns from it, there are stores worthy of New York and London in size,
smartness and glowing attraction. And the women crowds that make these
streets busy are as crisply dressed in modern fashions as any on the
Continent, but there is a definite individuality in the air of the men.
Canadian men dress with a conspicuous indifference. They wear anything
from overalls and broad-banded sweaters to lounge suits that ever seem
ill-fitting. In Winnipeg there is the same disregard for personal
appearance plus a hat with a higher crown. As we went West the crown
of the soft hat climbed higher, and the brim became both wider and more
curly.
There is, too, on the sidewalks of Winnipeg the conglomeration of races
that go to feed the West. The city is the great emigrant centre that
serves the farmers, the fruit-growers of the Rockies, the ranchmen in
the foothills, and even the industries on the Pacific Slopes.
Everywhere outside agencies there are great blackboards on which
demands for farm labourers at five dollars a day and other workers are
chalked.
To these agencies flow strange men in blouse-shirts, wearing strange
caps--generally of fur--carrying strange-looking suit-cases and
speaking the strange tongues of far European or Asiatic lands. Chinese
and Japanese (whom the Canadian lumps under the general term
"Orientals"), negroes, a few Indians, and a hotch-potch of races walk
the streets of Winnipeg, and Winnipeg deals with them, houses them,
gives them advice, and distributes them over the wide lands of Canada,
where they will work and working will gradually fuse into the racial
whole that is the Canadian race.
In the hotels, too, one notices that a change is taking place. The
"Oriental"--the Japanese in this case--takes the place of the Canadian
bell-boy and porter, and he takes this place more and more as one goes
West. There are, of course, always Chinese "Chop Suey and Noodles'
Restaurants," as well as Chinese laundries in Canadian towns; we met
them as early as St. John's, Newfoundland; but from Winnipeg to the
Pacific Coast these establishments grow in numbers, until in Vancouver
and Victoria there are big "Oriental" quarters--cities within the
cities that harbour them.
The "Orientals" make good citizens, the Chinese particularly. They are
industrious, clever workers, especially as agriculturists, and they
give no trouble. The great drawback with them is that they do not stay
in the country, but having made their money in Canada, go home to China
to spend it.
Most of the alien element that goes to Canada is of good quality, and
ultimately becomes a very valuable asset. But the problem Canada is
facing is that they are strangers, and, not having been brought up in
the British tradition, they know nothing of it. The tendency of this
influence is to produce a new race to which the ties of sentiment and
blood have little meaning.
It is a problem which Britain must share also, if we do not wish to see
Canada growing up a stranger to us in texture, ideals and thought. It
is not an easy problem. Canada's chief need today is for
agriculturists, yet the workers we wish to retain most in this country
are agriculturists. Canada must have her supply, and if we cannot
afford them, she must take what she can from Eastern Europe, or from
America, and very many American farmers, indeed, are moving up to
Canadian lands.
There is always room in a vast country such as Canada for skilled or
willing workers, and we can send them. But the demand is not great at
present, and will not be great until the agriculturist opens up the
land. And the agriculturist is to come from where?
Certainly it is a matter which calls for a great deal of consideration.
IV
The Prince made the usual round of the usual program during his stay,
but his visit to the Grain Exchange was an item that was unique.
He drove on Wednesday, September 10th, to this dramatic place, where
brokers, apparently in a frenzy, shout and wave their hands, while the
price of grain sinks and rises like a trembling balance at their
gestures and shouts.
The pit at which all these hustling buyers and sellers are gathered has
all the romantic qualities of fiction. It is, as far as I am
concerned, one of the few places that live up to the written pictures
of it, for it gave me the authentic thrill that had come to me when I
first read of the Chicago wheat transactions in Frank Norris's novel,
"The Pit."
The Prince drove to the Grain Exchange and was whirled aloft to the
fourth story of the tall building. He entered a big hall in which
babel with modern improvements and complications reigned.
In the centre of this room was the pit proper. It has nothing of the
Stygian about it. It is a hexagon of shallow steps rising from the
floor, and descending on the inner side.
On these steps was a crowd of super-men with voices of rolled steel.
They called out cabalistic formulae of which the most intelligible to
the layman sounded something like:
"May--eighty-three--quarter."
Cold, high and terrible voices seemed to answer:
"Taken."
Hundreds of voices were doing this, amid a storm of cross shoutings,
and under a cloud of tossing hands, that signalled with fingers or with
papers. Cutting across this whirlpool of noise was the frantic
clicking of telegraph instruments. These tickers were worked by four
emotionless gods sitting high up in a judgment seat over the pit.
They had unerring ears. They caught the separate quotations from the
seething maelstrom of sound beneath them, sifted the completed deal
from the mere speculative offer in uncanny fashion, and with their
unresting fingers ticked the message off on an instrument that carried
it to a platform high up on one of the walls.
On this platform men in shirt-sleeves prowled backwards and
forwards--as the tigers do about feeding time in the Zoo. They, too,
had super-hearing. From little funnels that looked like electric light
shades they caught the tick of the messages, and chalked the figures of
the latest prices as they altered with the dealing on the floor upon a
huge blackboard that made the wall behind them.
At the same time the gods on the rostrum were tapping messages to the
four corners of the world. Even Chicago and Mark Lane altered their
prices as the finger of one of these calm men worked his clicker.
When the Prince entered the room the gong sounded to close the market,
and amid a hearty volume of cheering he was introduced to the pit, and
some of its intricacies were explained to him. The gong sounded again,
the market opened, and a storm of shouting broke over him, men making
and accepting deals over his head.
Intrigued by the excitement, he agreed with the broker who had brought
him in, to accept the experience of making a flutter in grain.
Immediately there were yells, "What is he, Bull or Bear?" and the
Prince, thoroughly perplexed, turned to the broker and asked what type
of financial mammal he might be.
He became a Bull and bought.
He did not endeavour to corner wheat in the manner of the heroes of the
stories, for wheat was controlled; he bought, instead, fifty thousand
bushels of oats. A fair deal, and he told those about him with a smile
that he was going to make several thousand dollars out of Winnipeg in a
very few moments.
An onlooker pointed to the blackboard, and cried:
"What about that? Oats are falling."
But the broker was a wise man. He had avoided a royal "crash." He had
already sold at the same price, 83 1/2, and the Prince had accomplished
what is called a "cross trade." That is he had squared the deal and
only lost his commission.
While he stood in that frantic pit of whirling voices something of the
vast transactions of the Grain Exchange was explained to him. It is
the biggest centre for the receipt and sale of wheat directly off the
land in the world. It handles grain by the million bushels. In the
course of a day, so swift and thorough are its transactions, it can
manipulate deals aggregating anything up to 150,000,000 bushels.
When these details had been put before him, the gong was again struck,
and silence came magically.
Unseen by most in that pack of men on the steps the Prince was heard to
say that he had come to the conclusion that to master the intricacies
of the Exchange was a science rather beyond his grasp just then. He
hoped that his trip westward would give him a more intimate knowledge
of the facts about grain, and when he came back, as he hoped he would,
he might have it in him to do something better than a "cross trade."
From the pit the lift took him aloft again to the big sampling and
classifying room on the tenth floor of the building. The long tables
of this room were littered with small bags of grain, and with grain in
piles undergoing tests. The floor was strewn with spilled wheat and
oats and corn. Here he was shown how grain, carried to Winnipeg in the
long trucks, was sampled and brought to this room in bags. Here it was
classified by experts, who, by touch, taste and smell, could gauge its
quality unerringly.
It is the perfection of a system for handling grain in the raw mass.
The buyer never sees the grain he purchases. The classification of the
Exchange is so reliable that he accepts its certificates of quality and
weight and buys on paper alone.
Nor are the dealers ever delayed by this wonderfully working
organization. The Exchange has samplers down on the trucks at the
railway sidings day and night. During the whole twenty-four hours of
the day there are men digging specially constructed scoops that take
samples from every level of the car-loads of grain, putting the grain
into the small bags, and sending them along to the classification
department.
So swiftly is the work done that the train can pull into the immense
range of special yards, such as those the C.P.R. have constructed for
the accommodation of grain, change its engine and crew, and by the time
the change is effected, samples of all the trucks have been taken, and
the train can go on to the great elevators and mills at Fort William
and Port Arthur.
This rapid handling in no way affects the efficiency of the Exchange.
Its decisions are so sure that the grading of the wheat is only
disputed about forty times in the year. This is astonishing when one
realizes the enormous number of samples judged.
In the same way, and in spite of the apparent confusion about the pit
where they take place, the records of the transactions are so exact
that only about once in five thousand is such a record queried.
The Prince was immensely interested in all the practical details of
working which make this handling of grain a living and dramatic thing,
showing, as usual, that active curiosity for workaday facts that is
essential to the make-up of the moderns.
His directness and accessibility made friends for him with these
hard-headed business men as readily as it had made friends with
soldiers and with the mass of people. Winnipeg had already exerted its
Western faculty for affectionate epithets. He had already been dubbed
a "Fine Kiddo," and it was commonplace to hear people say of him, "He's
a regular feller, he'll do." They said these things again in the
Exchange, declaring emphatically he was "sure, a manly-looking chap."
As he left the Exchange the members switched the chaos of the pit into
shouts of a more hearty and powerful volume, and to listen to a crowd
of such fully-seasoned lungs doing their utmost in the confined space
of a building is an awe-inspiring and terrific experience.
The friendliness here was but a "classified sample"--if the Winnipeg
Exchange will permit that expression--of the friendliness in bulk he
found all over Canada, and which he found in the great West, upon which
he was now entering.