A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC
Quebec city is full of charms and memories. I am no lover of cities
when they have grown so great that no one knows any longer what site
they were built on, or what sort of a country is buried beneath them.
Their streets may teem with people and their buildings be very
splendid, but if they have shut off the landscape altogether I cannot
admire them. Quebec will never be one of those cities, however great
she may grow. Quebec stands on a hill, and just as a city on a hill
cannot be hid, so too it cannot hide from those who live in it the
country round, nor even the country it stands on. Always there will
be in Quebec a sense of steepness. The cliffs still climb even where
they are crowded with houses. And the air that reaches Quebec is the
air of the hills. Always too--from Dufferin Terrace at least--there
will be visible the sweep of the St. Lawrence, the dark crawl to the
north-east {27} of the Laurentian Mountains, and the clear and
immensely lofty Canadian skies.
I spent the whole of my first day in Quebec on Dufferin Terrace,
except for that journey down to the docks. Once I was on the
terrace, I forgot how bad the roads had been. You might drive a
thousand miles through stones and mud, and forget them all the moment
you set foot on Dufferin Terrace. Everything you see from it is
beautiful, from the Château Frontenac behind--surely the most
picturesque and most picturesquely situated hotel in the world--to
the wind on the river below. Most beautiful of all the things I saw
was the moon starting to rise behind Port Levis. It started in the
trees, and at first I thought it was a forest fire. There was
nothing but red flame that spread and spread among the trees at
first. Suddenly it shot up into a round ball of glowing orange, so
that I knew it was the moon long before it turned silver, high up,
and made a glimmering pathway across the river.
During this moonrise the band was playing on the terrace, and all
Quebec was strolling up and down or standing listening to the music,
as is its custom on summer evenings. The scene on the terrace has
often enough been described--with its mingling of many {28} types,
American tourists and Dominican friars, habitants from far villages,
and business men from the centre of things, archbishops and Members
of Parliament, and ships' stewards and commercial travellers, and
freshly arrived immigrants and old market women. The fair Quebeckers
love the terrace as much as their men folk, and I saw several pretty
faces among them and many pretty figures. They know how to walk,
these French Canadian ladies, and also how to dress--the latter an
art which has still to be achieved by the women of the West.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, QUEBEC, FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS.]
The terrace besides being gay is very friendly too. My two
companions of the voyage had gone on that morning, being in a hurry
to reach the prairie; but I found several new friends on the terrace
in the course of the day. One was a young working man from England,
who had brought his child on to the terrace to play when I first met
him. He was so well-dressed and prosperous looking that I should
never have guessed he was only a shoe-leather cutter, as he told me
he was. But then he had been out in Quebec for five years, and he
was making twenty-five dollars a week instead of the thirty-two
shillings a week he used to make in Nottingham at the same trade. He
said he {29} had been sorry to leave England, but you were more of a
man in Canada. There were not twenty men after one job--that was the
difference. Consequently, if your boss offered to give you any dirt,
you could tell him to go to Hell. I suppose we should have counted
him a wicked and dangerous Socialist in England, but there is no
doubt that he is a typical Canadian citizen, and the kind of man they
want there. Another acquaintance I picked up was a commercial
traveller from Toronto--a stout tubby energetic man, who asked me,
almost with tears in his eyes, why England would not give up Free
Trade and study Canadian needs? He was particularly keen on English
manufacturers studying Canadian needs, and he put the matter in quite
a novel light as far as I was concerned. His argument was that we
made things in England too well. What was the use, he demanded, of
making good durable things when Canadians did not want them? It only
meant that the States jumped in with inferior goods more suited to
the moment. He assured me that Canada was a new country, and
Canadians did not want to buy things that would last hundreds of
years. Take furniture, machinery, anything--Canadians only wanted
stuff that {30} would last them a year or two, after which they could
scrap it and get something new. That kept the money in circulation.
Anyway, he insisted, a thing was no good if it was better than what a
customer required. I had not thought of things in that way before,
and it was interesting to hear him.
My third acquaintance was a member of the Quebec Parliament, who
started to chat quite informally, and having ascertained that I was
fresh from the old country took me to his house, that I might drink
Scotch whisky, and be informed that French Canadians loved the King
and hated the Boer War. I think when a French Canadian does not know
you well, he will always make these two admissions--but not any
more--lest you should be unsympathetic or he should give himself away.
That is why, since the position of French Canadians in Canadian
politics will some day be of the greatest importance, we ought all to
be thankful for the existence of Mr. Bourassa. Mr. Bourassa is
represented--by his opponents--as the violent leader of a small
faction of French Canadians, as a trial to moderate men of all sorts,
including the majority of his own French-Canadian fellow-citizens.
All this is very true. In Canadian politics, as they stand {31} at
present, Mr. Bourassa stands for just that and very little more.
Politically he is an extremist and a nuisance. But disregarding for
a moment immediate practical politics, Mr. Bourassa stands for much
more than that--stands indeed for the real essence of French Canada.
He is the French Canadian in action, shouting on the house-tops what
most of them prefer to dream of by the fire-side, insisting upon
bringing forward ideas which the others would leave to be brought
forward by chance or in the lapse of time.
He has been called the Parnell of Canada, but these international
metaphors are generally calculated to mislead. The most that Parnell
ever demanded was Home Rule for Ireland--that small part of Great
Britain, that fraction of the Empire. Mr. Bourassa does not only
want Home Rule for Quebec. He wants it for Canada; only the Canada
he sees thus self-ruling is a Canada permeated by French Canadianism.
If Parnell had wanted Home Rule, so that England, Scotland, and Wales
might be ruled from Dublin, he would have attained to something of
the completeness of Mr. Bourassa's policy. Mr. Bradley, whose book
on _Canada in the Twentieth Century_ is as complete as any one book
on Canada could {32} be, and as up-to-date as any--allowing for the
fact that Canada changes yearly--declared in in it, some years ago,
that the French Canadians realised that for them to populate the
North-West was a dream to be given up. It may be a dream, but I
doubt if it is given up: and the dreams of a population more prolific
than any other on the face of the earth may some day become
realities. What is against these dreams? The influx of English
immigrants? The rush for the land of American farmers? But these
are only temporary obstacles. The Americans may go back again. They
often do. The English immigrants are largely unmarried young men,
and there are no women in the West. They are making ready the land,
but the inheritors of it have yet to appear. It is not strange if
Mr. Bourassa sees those inheritors among his own people--only it is
not yet their time, not for many years yet--not for so many years yet
that it seems almost unpractical and absurd to look forward to it.
Even such a faith as that which Mr. Bourassa has confessed to in
regard to the Eastern provinces--Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick--that 'In fifteen years they will have become French in
language and Roman Catholic in faith,' seems highly unpractical.
{33} Ontario is not likely to become Roman Catholic any faster than
Ulster. But on the other hand it will only increase in its
anti-Frenchness and its anti-Roman Catholicism in so far as it is
upheld and influenced by Imperialism. Imperialism to Mr. Bourassa is
that bogey which goes about linking up all those small
non-conforming, hustling, militant and materialistic communities
which unaided would come into the Catholic French-Canadian fold. It
is that odious system which prevents other nations within the
Empire--such as French Canada--from developing along their own
natural lines. It is something which easily causes Mr. Bourassa to
forget that England and Englishmen--representing a distant
sovereignty which keeps the world's peace--have been a boon and a
blessing to French Canadians rather than otherwise; and causes him to
remember that they may in a moment become an imminent
sovereignty--imposing conscription, war, chapels (things that the
Ontarian takes to like a duck to water) upon the whole Canadian
community. Such impositions would not only strengthen the non-French
Canadians, and ruin the natural progress-to-power of the French
Canadians; but they would topple down like a house of {34} cards
those splendid dreams which might in a French-Canadianised Canada
become realities. What dreams? Rome shifted to Montreal for one,
and the Vatican gardens of the future sweeping down to the St.
Lawrence. The whole vast wealth of the Dominion diverted to the
carrying out of those traditions which are neither French nor English
but Canadian ... started four hundred years before by the captains
and the priests, voyageurs and martyrs, who in an age of unbelief
went forth in response to miraculous signs for the furtherance of the
glory of God.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT.
QUEBEC.]
I said that Quebec was full of memories. It is well to remember that
most of these are French-Canadian memories. The Englishman, at home
or touring, thinks most naturally of Wolfe in connection with Quebec,
and thinks with pride how that fight on the Plains of Abraham marked,
in Major Wood's words, 'three of the mightiest epochs of modern
times--the death of Greater France, the coming of age of Greater
Britain, and the birth of the United States.' The splendid daring
climb of the English army, the romantic fevered valour of its
general, the suddenness and completeness of the reversal of
positions, unite to make us think that never was a more glorious {35}
event, or one better calculated to appeal to men of the New World.
But do not let us forget that for French Canadians--great event as it
was, severing their allegiance to France for ever on the one hand,
leaving them free men as never before on the other--it was only one
event in a new world that was already for them (but not for us) three
hundred years old. 'Here Wolfe fell.' But here also, long before
Wolfe fell, Champlain stood, and French captains led valiant men on
expeditions against strange insidious foes, and the Cross was carried
onwards by the priests, and amid mystic voices and divinations, and
slaughterings and endurances, the faith prevailed and the character
of the people was formed. They have no hankering for France--these
people to whom Wolfe's battle seems but one out of many. France,
they think, has forsaken the Church. But they are French
still--these people--and amazingly conservative in their customs and
their creed. We may tell them that England--which sent out
Wolfe--has given them material prosperity, equality under the law,
the means of justice. They will reply, or rather they will silently
think, and only an occasional Nationalist will dare to say:--
'We owe nothing to Great Britain. England {36} did not take Canada
for love, or to plant the Cross of religion as the French did, but in
order to plant their trading posts and make money.'
Gratitude is not a virtue nations take pride in possessing; they are
indeed seldom nations until they have forgotten to be grateful. I
suppose French Canadians are on their way to forgetting to be
grateful to England for what she did in times past, but it is not
because they have any real quarrel with England, or desire to injure
her. Merely because they feel that from England exudes that
Imperialism which appeals in no way from the past, and menaces, they
think, their future.
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