feelings of gratitude that I rise to ask you to accept my
acknowledgments and thanks for this evening's entertainment. The
reception the Princess and I have met with in Victoria, and throughout
British Columbia, will long live in our memory as one of the brightest
episodes of a time which has been made delightful to us by the
heartfelt loyalty of the people of our Canadian provinces. Nowhere has
the contentment insured by British institutions been more strongly
expressed than on these beautiful shores of the Pacific. I am rejoiced
to observe signs that the days are now passed when we had to look upon
this community as one too remote and too sundered from the rest to
share to the full the rapid increase of prosperity which has been so
remarkable since the Union. Attracted at first by the capricious
temptations of the gold mines, your valleys were inundated by a large
population. It was not to be anticipated that this could last, and
although population declined with the temporary decrease of mining, it
is evident that the period of depression in this, as in every other
matter, has been passed. (Applause.) I have everywhere seen signs that
a more stable, and therefore more satisfactory, emigration has set in.
Victoria has made of late a decided start. I visited with much pleasure
many of the factories which witness to this, and I hope before I leave
to have made a still more exhaustive examination of the establishments
which are rapidly rising among you. That the wares produced by these
are appreciated beyond the limits of the city is very evident
throughout the Province, where cleanliness is insured by Victoria soap,
and comfort, or at least contentment and consolation, by Kurtz's
Victoria cigars. (Loud laughter and applause.) No words can be too
strong to express the charm of this delightful land, where a climate
softer and more constant than that of the south of England ensures at
all times of the year a full enjoyment of the wonderful loveliness of
nature around you. There is no doubt that any Canadian who visits this
island and the mainland shores and sees the happiness of the people,
the forest laden coast, the tranquil gulfs and glorious mountains, can
but congratulate himself that his country possesses scenes of such
perfect beauty. (Applause.) We who have been much touched by the warmth
of your welcome will, I am sure, sympathise with the desire which will
be felt by every travelled Canadian in the future, that every alternate
year at least the Dominion Parliament should meet at New Westminster,
Nanaimo, or in Victoria. (Laughter and applause.) Where men seem to
live with such comfort, regret will inevitably arise that you have as
yet so few to share your good fortune. Though your contribution to the
revenue is at least a million dollars, there are only twenty thousand
white men over the three hundred and fifty thousand square miles of
Province. Various causes, the most formidable of these being physical,
have hitherto contributed to this. The physical difficulties,
tremendous as they are, are being rapidly conquered There is no cause
why any of a different character should not be surmounted with an equal
success. What is wanted to effect this object is only cordial
co-operation with the central Government. (Cheers.) There was perhaps a
time when the Governor-General would not have been regarded, in his
official capacity at all events, with as much favour as I flatter
myself may now be the case. (Applause.) No wonder that the feeling is
changed, now that the circumstances are better understood, for I
challenge any one to mention any example in which a government, ruling
over a comparatively small population of four and a half millions, has
ever done as much as has the Canadian Government to insure for its
furthest Provinces the railway communication which is an essential for
the development of the resources of the land. (Cheering.) Mr. Francis
[1] will back me, I am certain, when I say that the United States, with
a population of fifteen or twenty millions, when California was first
settled in 1849, did not push the railway through to the Pacific Coast
in the vigorous manner in which the Canadian Government is now doing.
(Loud cheers.) I have full confidence that you will see that policy of
enterprise and of justice nobly carried out. Early promises, if made
too hastily, showed that if there was profound ignorance of the physical
geography of your country, there was at all events profound goodwill.
Later events have proved that in spite of all obstacles "where there
is a will there is a way." Pride in national feeling has made the country
strain every nerve to bind still further with the sentiment of
confidence the unity of the Confederation. (Applause.) Where is now the
old talk which we used to hear from a few of the faint-hearted of a
change in destiny or of annexation? (Cheers.) It does not exist. To be
sure, here I have heard some vague terror expressed, but it is a terror
which I have heard expressed among our friends on the American Pacific
Slope also, and it is to the effect that annexation must soon take place
to the Celestial Empire. (Great laughter.) Well, gentlemen, I fully
sympathise with this fear. None of us like to die before our time, but
I will suggest to you, from the healthy signs and vitality I see around
me, that your time has not yet come. Your object now is to live, and
for that purpose to get your enterprises and your railways as part of
your assets. (Applause.) The rest will follow in time, but at the
present moment we must concern ourselves with practical politics. Let
us look beyond this Island and beyond even those difficult mountains,
and see what our neighbours and friends to the south of us are about.
An army of workmen--exactly double that now employed in this Province--are
driving with a speed that seems wonderful a railway through to the coast.
In another year or two a large traffic, encouraged by the competition in
freights between it, the Central and the Southern Pacific will have been
acquired. You are, by the very nature of things, heavily handicapped
here, and a trade, as you know, once established is not easily rivalled.
Take care that you are in the market for this competition at as early a
day as possible. When you are as rich as California, and have as many
public works as Queensland, it may be time for you to reconsider your
position. There is no reason ultimately to doubt that the population
attracted to you as soon as you have a line through the mountains,
will be the population which we most desire to have--a people like
that of the old Imperial Islands, drawn from the strongest races of
northern Europe,--one that with English, American, Irish, German,
French and Scandinavian blood shall be a worthy son of the old Mother
of Nations. (Loud applause.) Only last week, in seven days, no less
than 900 people came to San Francisco by the overland route from the
East. Your case will be the same if with "a strong pull and a pull
altogether" you get your public works completed. I have spoken of
your being pretty heavily handicapped. In saying this, I refer to the
agricultural capabilities of the Province alone. Of course you have
nothing like the available land that the central Provinces possess,
yet it seems to me you have enough for all the men who are likely to
come to you for the next few years as farmers or owners of small ranches.
(Applause.) The climate of the interior for at least one hundred
miles north of the boundary line has a far shorter winter than that
of most of Alberta or Arthabaska. Losses of crops from early frosts
or of cattle from severe weather are unknown to the settlers of your
upper valleys. In these--and I wish there were more of these
valleys--all garden produce and small fruits can be cultivated with
the greatest success. For men possessing from £200 to £600 a year,
I can conceive no more attractive occupation than the care of cattle
or a cereal farm within your borders. (Loud applause.) Wherever there
is open land, the wheat crops rival the best grown elsewhere, while
there is nowhere any dearth of ample provision of fuel and lumber for
the winter. (Renewed applause.) As you get your colonisation roads
pushed and the dykes along the Fraser River built, you will have a
larger available acreage, for there are quiet straths and valleys
hidden away among the rich forests which would provide comfortable
farms. As in the north-west last year, so this year I have taken
down the evidence of settlers, and this has been wonderfully
favourable. To say the truth, I was rather hunting for grumblers, and
found only one! He was a young man of super-sensitiveness from one of
our comfortable Ontario cities, and he said he could not bear this
country. Anxious to come at the truth, and desiring to search to the
bottom of things, we pressed him as to the reason. "Did he know of any
cases of misery? Had he found starving settlers?" The reply was
re-assuring, for he said, "No; but I don't like it. Nobody in this country
walks; everybody rides!" (Laughter.) You will be happy to hear that he
is going back to Ontario. Let me now allude, in a very few words, to
those points which may be mentioned as giving you exceptional
advantages. If you are handicapped in the matter of land in comparison
with the Provinces of the Plains, you are certainly not so with regard
to climate. (Cheering.) Agreeable as I think the steady and dry cold of
an Eastern winter, yet there are very many who would undoubtedly prefer
the temperature enjoyed by those who live west of the mountains. Even
where it is coldest, spring comes in February, and the country is so
divided into districts of greater dryness or greater moisture, that a
man can always choose whether to have a rainfall small or great. I hope
I am not wearying you in dwelling on these points, for my only excuse
in making these observations is, that I have learnt that the interior
is to many on the island as much a _terra incognita_ as it was to
me. I can partly understand this after seeing the beautifully
engineered road which was constructed by Mr. Trutch, for although I am
assured it is as safe as a church--(laughter)--I can very well
understand that it is pleasanter for many of the ladies to remain in
this beautiful island than to admire the grandeur of the scenery in the
gorges. As you have adopted protection in your politics, perhaps it
would not be presumptuous in me to suggest that you should adopt
protection also in regard to your precipices--(great laughter)--and
that should the waggon road be continued in use, a few Douglas firs
might be sacrificed to make even more perfect that excellent road in
providing protection at the sides. Besides the climate, which is so
greatly in your favour, you have another great advantage in the
tractability and good conduct of the Indian population. (Applause.) I
believe I have seen the Indians of almost every tribe throughout the
Dominion, and nowhere can you find any who are so trustworthy in regard
to conduct--(hear, hear)--so willing to assist the white settlers by
their labour, so independent and anxious to learn the secret of the
white man's power. (Applause.) Where elsewhere constant demands are met
for assistance; your Indians have never asked for any, for in the
interviews given to the Chiefs their whole desire seemed to be for
schools and schoolmasters, and in reply to questions as to whether they
would assist themselves in securing such institutions, they invariably
replied that they would be glad to pay for them. (Loud applause.) It is
certainly much to be desired that some of the funds apportioned for
Indian purposes, be given to provide them fully with schools in which
Industrial Education may form an important item. (Hear, hear.) But we
must not do injustice to the wilder tribes. Their case is totally
different from that of your Indians. The buffalo was everything to the
nomad. It gave him house, fuel, clothes, and thread. The disappearance
of this animal left him starving. Here, on the contrary, the advent of
the white men has never diminished the food supply of the native. He
has game in abundance, for the deer are as numerous now as they ever
have been. He has more fish than he knows what to do with, and the
lessons in farming that you have taught him have given him a source of
food supply of which he was previously ignorant. Throughout the
interior it will probably pay well in the future to have flocks of
sheep. The demand for wool and woollen goods will always be very large
among the people now crowding in such numbers to those regions which
our official world as yet calls the North-West, but which is the
North-East and East to you. There is no reason why British Columbia
should not be for this portion of our territory what California is to the
States in the supply afforded of fruits. (Hear, hear.) The perfection
attained by small fruits is unrivalled, and it is only with the
Peninsula of Ontario that you would have to compete for the supplies of
grapes, peaches, pears, apples, cherries, plums, apricots, and currants.
Every stick in these wonderful forests which so amply and generously
clothe the Sierras from the Cascade range to the distant Rocky
mountains, will be of value as communication opens up. The great arch
of timber lands beginning on the west of Lake Manitoba, circles round
to Edmonton and comes down along the mountains so as to include the
whole of your Province. Poplar alone for many years must be the staple
wood of the lands to the south of the Saskatchewan, and your great
opportunity lies in this, that you can give the settlers of the whole
of that region as much of the finest timber in the world as they can
desire, while cordwood cargoes will compete with the coal of Alberta.
(Loud cheers.) Coming down in our survey to the coast we come upon
ground familiar to you all, and you all know how large a trade already
exists with China and Australia in wood, and how capable of almost
indefinite expansion is this commerce. Your forests are hardly tapped,
and there are plenty more logs, like one I saw cut the other day at
Burrard Inlet, of forty inches square and ninety and one hundred feet
in length, down to sticks which could be used as props for mines or as
cordwood for fuel. The business which has assumed such large
proportions along the Pacific shore of the canning of salmon, great as
it is, is as yet almost in its infancy, for there is many a river
swarming with fish from the time of the first run of salmon in spring
to the last run of other varieties in the autumn, on which many a
cannery is sure to be established. Last, but certainly not least in the
list of your resources, comes your mineral and chiefly your coal
treasure. (Applause.) The coal from the Nanaimo mines now leads the
market at San Francisco. Nowhere else in these countries is such coal
to be found, and it is now being worked with an energy which bids fair
to make Nanaimo one of the chief mining stations on the continent. It
is of incalculable importance not only to this Province of the Dominion,
but also to the interests of the Empire, that our fleets and mercantile
marine as well as the continental markets should be supplied from this
source. (Hear, hear, and cheers.) Where you have so good a list of
resources it may be almost superfluous to add another, but I would
strongly advise you to cultivate the attractions held out to the
travelling public by the magnificence of your scenery. (Cheers.) Let
this country become what Switzerland is for Europe in the matter of
good roads to places which may be famed for their beauty, and let good
and clean hotels attract the tourist to visit your grand valleys and
marvellous mountain ranges. Choose some district, and there are many
from which you can choose, where trout and salmon abound, and where
sport may be found among the deer and with the wild fowl. Select some
portion of your territory where pines and firs shroud in their greatest
richness the giant slopes, and swarm upwards to glacier, snow field,
and craggy peak, and where in the autumn the maples seem as though they
wished to mimic in hanging gardens the glowing tints of the lava that
must have streamed down the precipices of these old volcanoes. (Loud
cheering.) Wherever you find these beauties in greatest perfection, and
where the river torrents urge their currents most impetuously through
the Alpine gorges, there I would counsel you to set apart a region
which shall be kept as a national park. In doing so you can follow the
example of our southern friends,--an example which, I am sure Mr.
Francis will agree with me, we cannot do better than imitate, and you
would secure that they who make the round trip from New York or
Montreal shall return from San Francisco, or come thence _via_ the
Canadian Pacific Railroad. (Loud and continued applause.) I thought it
might interest you, gentlemen, this evening to hear the last news
regarding that Railway, and therefore I should like to read to you a
letter received only a day or two ago from the engineer in chief, Major
Rogers. You will see he speaks hopefully and assuringly:
"I have found the desired pass through the Selkirks, it lying about
twenty miles east of the forks of the Ille-cille-want and about two
miles north of the main east branch of the same. Its elevation above
sea level is about 4500 feet, or about 1000 feet lower than the pass
across the Rockies. The formation of the country, from the summits of
the Selkirks to the Columbia river, has been much misrepresented.
Instead of the solid mass of mountain, as reported, there are two large
valleys lying within these limits. The Beaver river, which empties into
the Columbia river about twenty miles below the Black-berry (or Howse
Pass route), rises south of the fifty-first parallel (I have not seen
its source, but have seen its valley for that distance), and the
Spellamacheen runs nearly parallel with the Beaver but in an opposite
direction, and lies between the Beaver and the Columbia. I have great
hope of being able to take with me this fall the results of a
preliminary survey of this route. It necessarily involves heavy work,
as must any short line across the mountains, a condition which will be
readily accepted in consideration of the material shortening of the
route."
This is the last news, and I hope we shall hear of its full
corroboration before long. I beg, gentlemen, to thank you once more for
your exceeding kindness, and for all the kindness shown us since our
arrival. I have always been a firm friend of British Columbia, and I
hope before I leave the country to see still greater progress made
towards meeting your wishes.
[1] The United States Consul.
At a meeting of the National Rifle Association, held at Ottawa, 8th
March 1883, His Excellency, spoke as follows:--
I believe all who value those qualities which lead to good
rifle-shooting--steadiness and sobriety--and this means every family in
the country, the father and mother, as well as the young men belonging
to it, should give their ten cents or twenty-five cents, as they can
afford it, to swell the funds of the association. As this association
thus encourages personal, as well as a military training, it merits the
support of all classes. We know that the amount of personal training
that is required produces a love of temperance among those who attend
the meetings of the association, and we know that by the military
training given, a military sentiment is developed, which makes men at
least not averse to discipline in moderation. It has been said by my
predecessor, and I agree with the remark, that Canada is certainly the
most democratic country upon the North American continent, but we know
that although everybody may have been born equal, yet that equality
suddenly and mysteriously disappears as soon as the schoolboy goes upon
the school bench, or the rifleman goes upon the rifle ground. The
militiamen of Canada show that a democratic people do not tolerate
unearned superiority, but recognise the superiority given by training.
I cannot let this opportunity pass without saying a last word as to the
point of view from which I regard the importance of militia training in
Canada. It is more perhaps from the point of view of an Imperial
officer than from that of a man temporarily holding a Canadian civil
appointment. There is a certain amount of feeling in this country that
our whole militia force is a mere matter of fuss and feathers, of
"playing at soldiers" in fact. I think that is always a most
unfortunate feeling, because I cannot say how anxiously in the old
country those steps are watched by which Canadians perfect themselves
for purposes of self-defence. Englishmen know that in case of any
trouble arising, which I hope not to see, and do not believe we shall
see, they are bound and pledged to come to your assistance. The
question must necessarily be asked, With what army are they to operate?
with one that will be of real assistance, or with one that will have no
more cohesion than that which fell under the organised blows of the
Prussian army before Orleans? I can always point to the efforts made in
Canada before my time to have an organised system of military training.
I can point to the grants given by the Government for the encouragement
of individual and regimental proficiency in rifle shooting. I can point
also to the military schools for the militia which are being founded,
and to the steps which are to be taken that officers shall always have
some training received from those schools before they undertake the
responsibility of leading their fellow-citizens in the ranks. I can
point also to that splendid institution, the Military College at
Kingston, and I can certainly say to the old country people, that
should any misfortune arise that should compel us to operate together,
they will in time find in Canada officers who will be perfectly able
and ready to lead men, who from their physical powers and from their
military sentiments and from their hardihood are likely, under proper
training and guidance, to form some of the best troops in the world.
(Loud cheers.)
At the Second Meeting of the Royal Society, at Ottawa, May 1883, the
Governor-General said:--
Mr. President, Mr. Vice-President, and Members of the Royal Society of
Canada,--When we met last year, and formally inaugurated a society for
the encouragement of literature and science in Canada, an experiment
was tried. As with all experiments, its possible success was questioned
by some who feared that the elements necessary for such an organisation
were lacking. Our meeting of this year assumes a character which an
inaugural assembly could not possess. The position we took in asserting
that the time had come for the institution of such a union of the
scientific and literary men of this country has been established as
good, not only by the honourable name accorded to us by Her Majesty, a
designation never lightly granted, but also by that without which we
could not stand, namely, the public favour extended to our efforts.
Parliament has recognised the earnest purpose and happy co-operation
with which you have met and worked in unison, knowing that the talents
exhibited are not those of gold and silver only, and has stamped with
its approbation your designs by voting a sum of money, which in part
will defray the expense of printing your transactions. And here, in
speaking of this as a business meeting, I would venture to remind you,
and all friends of this society throughout the country, that the $5000
annually voted by the House of Commons will go but a very short way in
preparing a publication which shall fully represent Canada to the
foreign scientific bodies of the world. We have only to look to the
Federal and State Legislatures of America to see what vast sums are
annually expended in the States for scientific research. We see there
also how the proceeds of noble endowments are annually utilised for the
free dissemination of knowledge. It is, therefore, not to be supposed
that the comparatively small parallel assistance provided by any
Government can absolve wealthy individuals from the patriotic duty of
bequeathing or of giving to such a national society the funds, without
which it cannot usefully exist. You will forgive me, as one who may be
supposed to have a certain amount of the traditional economical
prudence of his countrymen, for mentioning one other matter on which,
at all events, in the meantime, a saving can be effected. While it is
necessary to have accurate and finely executed engravings of beautiful
drawings for the illustration of scientific papers, it is necessary
that the printing of the transactions should occasion as little cost as
possible; and I believe you will find it advisable for the present that
each paper shall be printed only in that language in which its author
has communicated it to the society. Your position is rather a peculiar
one, for although you work for the benefit of the public, it is not to
be expected that the public can understand all you say when your speech
is of science in consultation with each other. The public will
therefore, I trust, be in the position of those who are willing to pay
their physicians when they meet in consultation, without insisting that
every word the doctors say to each other shall be repeated in the
hearing of all men. When funds increase, it seems to me that the
economy it will probably now be necessary to exercise in regard to this
may be discarded.