GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL
Just as a man who knows mountains can in a little time describe the
character of a mountain that is new to him, so a man who knows the
country in general will soon find himself becoming acquainted with
new country. It is not so with cities. Only a long residence in it
will reveal the character of a city. I suppose that is because man
is more subtle than nature. A clay land is always a clay land; it
produces the same crops, the same weeds, the same men. But who will
undertake to say what a city on a clay land produces? Only the man
who has long been familiar with the particular city, and he probably
will not even be aware that it stands on clay.
This is preparatory to saying that being a stranger to Montreal, I
did not find out much about it in the few days I was there, and I
will not pretend that I did. It is, I suppose, architecturally, far
the most beautiful city in {67} the Dominion, and indeed in the
Western Hemisphere, and for that very reason appears less strange to
European eyes than most other Canadian towns. I would not suggest
that all European towns are architecturally beautiful, or that
Montreal is anything but Canadian inwardly. Superficially it looks
like some fine French town. It also smells French.
'But them thereon didst only breathe
And sentst it back to me,
Since when it blows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee.'
Thus England might address France on the subject of Montreal, though
indeed France did more than breathe on Montreal. I would not be
taken to suggest that the smell is a malodorous one--merely French.
You get just that smell in summer in any French town from Rouen to
Marseilles, and it is probably due to nothing but the sun being at
the right temperature to bring out the mingled scent of omelettes and
road grit, cigarettes, _apéritifs_, and washing in sufficient
strength to attract the sensitive British nose. As for Montreal's
French appearance--the city is by all accounts strictly divided into
a French East-end and an English West-end, St. Laurent being the
dividing line. But when I passed west of {68} St. Laurent, and
hundreds of French men and French women and French children continued
to file past me, and I asked my way many times in English and was not
understood, I began to doubt the reality of that dividing line. It
seems a pity that there should be one, but there is of course, and it
runs through Canada as well as Montreal. Race and religion and
language combine to keep that line marked out, and it only becomes
faint in business quarters.
The time has gone by for great commercial undertakings to be
conducted by means of gesticulations or by the aid of an interpreter.
Master and man must speak the same language, at any rate outwardly.
Therefore all clerks learn English, which is also American; and I
take it that statistics, if they were kept, would show many more
French Canadians speaking English every year--whatever they may be
thinking.
So commerce, long the butt of moralists, takes its part among the
moral influences of the world. Already writers like Mr. Angell have
begun to assure us that it alone--by reason of its enormous and
far-reaching interests--can keep international war at a distance:
here is an example of how it {69} increases peace within a nation.
In the end, perhaps, Mammon himself may appear, purged of his
grossness upon the canonical list--St. Mammon!
Montreal has, so I am told, sixty-four millionaires--real, not dollar
millionaires; self-made, not descended millionaires; strenuous, not
idle millionaires. Most of them live in Sherbrooke Street, or near
it, on the way up to the Mountain. It is a fine wide road with an
extraordinary variety of houses in it. You cannot point to any one
house and say this is the sort of house a millionaire builds, for the
next one is quite different, and so is the next and the next. It is
natural that Canadians should be more original in their
house-building than our millionaires. They are more original men
altogether. They have made their money in a more original way, and
when they have made it, they have to think out original methods of
spending it--unlike ours, who find the etiquette of it all ready made
for them, and a practised set of people who want nothing more than to
be able to help millionaires scatter their money in the only correct
and fashionable way. You have to think everything out for yourself
in Canada, even to the spending of your money. That is, if you have
the money in large quantities. {70} For the ordinary person the
inherent slipperiness of the dollar suffices, and he will find that
it will circulate itself without his worrying. The diversity of
house-building, such as may be found in Sherbrooke Street, should
give encouragement to Canadian architects, but does, as a matter of
fact, let in the American architects as well. I could not feel that
they had altogether succeeded in this street--certainly not half so
well as they have succeeded in some of the business buildings,
especially the interior of the Bank of Montreal--but that is not
surprising. Architects must have their motives, and the reasons that
went to the building of some of the stately private houses of Europe
have ceased to exist now. The most that a man can demand from his
house--certainly in Canada--is that it shall be luxurious. Nobody is
going to keep retainers there. The three hundred servants even that
went to make up the household of an Elizabethan nobleman could not be
had in Canada either for love or money. Those three hundred serve in
the bank or the shops--not in the houses--and it is there that the
big man works also. Slowly we come to the right proportions of
things; nor am I suggesting that the private houses of the Canadian
millionaires are in the {71} least lacking in size. They are as
large as they need be, if not larger; and where they did not
altogether succeed was, I thought, in the attempt made with some of
them to achieve importance by rococo effects. The road itself,
curiously enough, was rather bad and rutty; I began to think, seeing
it, that there is some strange influence at work in French Canada
which prevents a road from ever being first-rate. It may be that
since roads there are only needed in summer, for a half year instead
of a whole one, the care and affection we lavish upon them is not
necessary. The good snow comes and turns Sherbrooke Street into a
sleigh-bearing thoroughfare only comparable with those of St.
Petersburg. The ruts are drifted up and vanish--why bother about
them? It is a good enough explanation. If another is needed, it may
be that there is money to be made--by those in charge of the keeping
up of the roads--by the simple method of not keeping them up.
Montreal has slums as well as Sherbrooke Street, which seems to show
that sixty-four millionaires are no real guarantee of a city's
perfectness. I heard about those slums from the editor of one of
Montreal's leading newspapers. The subject arose out of a question
{72} I put him as to whether he could tell me the difference between
Conservatives and Liberals in Canada. Some people maintain that the
difference even in England is so slight as to be unreal. To a
Canadian who is not much of a politician (but is, of course, either a
Liberal or a Conservative), the question amounts to being a catch
question. He has to think for a long time before he answers. This
editor, who was a Liberal, took it quite coolly.
'Oh,' he said, 'Liberals here are very much like Liberals in the old
country; we stand for Social Reform and the interests of the People.'
Then he told me about the slums in Montreal. But for these I should
have felt doubtful about the parallel, even though it was drawn by so
eminent an authority as the editor of a newspaper. For, naturally,
at present in most parts of Canada there is no People (with our own
English capital P) to stand for, just as there are no peers and no
Constitution. Where there are slums, there may be a People to be
represented. The more is the pity that there should be slums. Why
does Montreal possess them? Largely, I suppose, for the reason that
any very great city possesses them. There are landlords who can make
money out of them, there are people so poor that they will live in
them; {73} and their poverty is accounted for by the fact that cities
draw the destitute as the moon the tides. It seems against reason
that Canada, capable of absorbing hundreds of thousands of
immigrants, calling for them to be absorbed, so long as they are able
men, should have any destitute to be drawn to the cities; but it has
to be remembered that no immigration laws can really prevent a
percentage of incapables arriving. They may not be incapables as
such, but they are incapables on the land, which is indeed in Canada
endlessly absorbent, but absorbent only of those who have in them in
some way the land-spirit. To expect the land to take on hordes of
the city-bred without ever failing is to dream. It would be easier
for the sea to swallow men clothed in cork jackets. Some are bound
to be rejected, and they turn to the cities. But the cities of a New
World cannot absorb indefinite numbers of men; London or Glasgow
cannot. The work is not there for them--not for all of them.
The Canadian winter also has to be remembered as a factor driving men
to cities like Montreal. Even good men on the land cannot always
during the winter obtain work on the farms; or think that the little
they can make there is not worth while. So they, too, make {74} for
the cities, not always to their own improving. This problem of the
Canadian winter is one that has still to be reckoned with, and no
doubt the Canadians will solve it in due course--perhaps by some
extension of the Russian methods whereby the peasant of the summer
becomes the handicraftsman of the winter. It is not the winter
itself that is at fault in Canada, as used to be thought; it is the
method of dealing with it. The Canadian may not mind the hard, cold
months--may even boast of them, but he cannot ignore them. And the
solution of the winter problem seems to be that though Canada is
marked out as an agricultural country, it must also equally become a
manufacturing one, so that men--who cannot hibernate like
dormice--may be able to work the year through. The whitest nation is
that nation whose leisure is got by choice not by compulsion.
There must be local reasons, too, for Montreal slums, but these a
visitor is not happy in describing. Municipal mismanagement is
unfortunately not exclusive to Europe; and my editor gave me examples
of it in Montreal which were impressive without being novel.
He also pointed out that there were forty thousand Jews in Montreal,
as though that {75} might have something to do with her slums.
Others point out that the Catholic Church, which believes that the
poor must be always with us, is supreme in Montreal; poverty and the
faith, they say, go always together. I think it is truest to argue
that, while all these things are in their degree contributory, it is
not fair to fix on any one of them as the chief cause of the ill.
One thing is certain. Montreal's slums are not typical of Canada,
but of a great city. No great city has as yet found itself
completely, and the greater it is, the less soluble are its problems
of poverty. It may be that they can be resolved only by the great
cities ceasing to exist in the form we know them.
Meanwhile it looks as though the welfare of employees is not being
neglected by the leading directors of industry. Take, for example,
the Angus Shops, which are larger than any other engineering shops in
the world. Here are built these huge houses of cranks and pistons,
the railway engines of the Canadian Pacific, that hustle one from end
to end of the Dominion; here also are turned out all else that
appertains to the biggest railway company in existence. In these
shops a system has been introduced which might be called a
Bourneville system, only Canadianised. The management {76} refers to
it as Welfare Work, and it consists mainly in certain methods whereby
the men can obtain good food--while they are working--at low prices,
apprentices are helped to an education, the cost of 'holiday homes'
is defrayed, and so on. Very sensibly the management admits the
system to be a part of a business plan, which it finds remunerative.
The idea that beneficence plays a leading part in it is almost
scouted; indeed it would not be easy to persuade Canadian working-men
that their bosses were doing things from charity. I went over the
shops, and found them built on a vast and airy scale. Not being an
engineering sort of person, I usually feel, when I invade a machinery
place, like some unfortunate beetle that has strayed into a beehive,
and may at any moment be attacked by the busy and alarming creatures
that are buzzing about there. As I watched the huge engines, swung
like bags of feathers from the roof, some black demon would heave
showers of sparks at me, and when I started back, another would come
raiding out with red-hot tongs. I admired respectfully. But I am
one of those who can enjoy my honey just as much without knowing just
how it was made. Still, here was a big bit of Montreal, and what
miles of French houses {77} with green shutters one drove past to get
to it!
It would be absurd to suggest that poverty or slums are conspicuous
things in Montreal. The average tourist will see none of them, but
only many beautiful things--from the Bank of Montreal to the
Cathedral, from the Lachine Rapids to the Mountain. I will not
describe shooting the Rapids, it has been so often done. I wish I
could describe the view from the Mountain. It is the most beautiful
view of a city that can be seen. Marseilles from her hill is
beautiful, so is Paris from Champigny. From neither of these, nor
from any hill that I know of, is there so complete a view of so fair
a city. The Mountain is wooded, and through the arches of the trees
you gain a score of changing outlooks; but from the edge you see all
Montreal--houses and streets and spires, each roof and gate, each
chimney and window--so it seems. And beyond, the great river, and
beyond, and on every side--Canada. If there were a mountain above
Oxford, something like this might be seen.
It was up this wooded steep to Fletcher's field, where an altar had
been set up, that the great Eucharistic procession of 1910 wound its
way. I was in Montreal just before this event, {78} for which the
Montrealers had spent months preparing, and I realised a little why
Montreal hopes some day to be the New Rome. The whole city was in a
fervour of enthusiasm. A society had been formed for the special
purpose of growing flowers to line the way along which the
Cardinal-legate would walk, and gifts of money for the same purpose
had been received from every part of Canada. The papers, of course,
were full of every detail about Church dignitaries arriving or about
to arrive. Nor were the shops behindhand. 'Eucharistic Congress!
House decoration at moderate prices' was everywhere placarded; and
papal flags and papal arms were to be had cheap. There were Congress
sales, too, and you could buy Congress 'creations' from the
dressmakers, Congress hats from the milliners, Congress boots from
the bootmakers.
On the day that Cardinal Vannutelli arrived, in a dismal and violent
downpour of rain, all Montreal in macintoshes was to be seen dashing
for the Bonsecours wharf to offer its respectful greetings to the
papal legate.
Will the Montrealers' dream of providing the New Rome ever be
achieved? Who can say? Rome, though Italians may become subversive
of the faith, will perhaps stand for ever. If it {79} ceased, as the
centre of the Catholic faith, Montreal might certainly claim to take
its place. It is already the centre of French-Canadian Catholicism;
it might become the religious centre of Canada. There is no
certainty that Catholicism will persist in Canada only among the
French Canadians. It seems equally possible that Rome will prevail
among non-French Canadians. Both in Canada and the States her
strides forward have been enormous--comparable perhaps only to the
steps taken in other directions by Free Thought in Europe. Is it
that Catholicism makes peculiar appeal in a new country, or that in
these new countries the propagation of the faith has been great and
unceasing? These are debatable questions (though undebatable, I
think, is the statement that in the New World Rome has a marvellous
history of things attempted splendidly and achieved without
reproach). I will not debate, then, but rather return to the
Mountain and ask you to picture the great Eucharistic procession
moving slowly up to it--up to the altar built there in the open,
under the high and clear Canadian skies--all the inhabitants of a
mighty city moving with it, till the city itself is left behind and
all that is low and earthly left for the moment {80} with it. Then
you will have in your mind one picture of Montreal at least not
unworthy of it. It will be a picture of Montreal at its best and
highest--a city of the faithful--near to their Mountain.
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