A CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER OF BRITISH
COLUMBIA AND A BIG FIRE AT VICTORIA
As everybody knows who has been in Canada, there are two hotel
systems in vogue there. By the one system you pay for your room and
board separately, and this is called the European plan. By the other
you take your meals and lodging at a fixed price, and that is called
the American plan.
In much the same way one might say there are two systems of life in
Canada, and indeed elsewhere. By the one you distinguish between
your work and your play, and treat each as a separate item. By the
other you mix the two up, and are apt to consider yourself a
strenuous person. I don't know that it is fair to describe these
respectively as the American and the European system of life; but I
am pretty certain that whether you apply the systems to life or to a
hotel, the results produced by them are not on the whole very
different. {273} Applying them to life, the main distinction seems
to be that the exponents of the strenuous or American method--those
who get their fun out of their work and their holidays out of their
forced travel, or their compulsory rest by doctor's orders--are
frequently led to confuse the appearance of work with the reality,
and to be disentitled to wear that air of superiority which, in the
presence of confessed believers of leisure, they too frequently
assume. For, when all is said and done, leisure is as necessary to
man as work, and everybody takes it, whatever he may think.
Vancouver laughs at Victoria for its dead-aliveness and want of
hustle. Victoria smiles at Vancouver for its restlessness and
superfluity of energy.
Now you see the point of my aphorism. I do not propose to hold the
balance between these distinguished cities. Both have their peculiar
merits; and if Vancouver is likely in years to come to leave Victoria
far behind in the race for industrial supremacy, Victoria is none the
less likely to remain ahead of Vancouver in culture and the arts. At
present I should judge that Victoria is distinctly the steadier city
of the two. Speculation in land is the exception rather than the
rule; prices go {274} up steadily, and the land is bought by
intending residents. At which point I will abandon comparisons,
which are the more absurd because the destinies of the two towns are
so widely different. Vancouver is a great port on the mainland of
Canada, connecting it with Asia, the western States, South America,
and whatever countries will henceforth export merchandise via the
Panama Canal. Victoria is the political capital of British Columbia,
with all the prestige that attaches to such a position and the finest
climate in the Dominion. Not that it is only that. Some of its
inhabitants consider that its prospects are immeasurably superior to
those of Seattle, 'since the riches of Vancouver Island' (I quote
from a local pamphlet), 'in their entirety incomparably more valuable
than the gold-mines of Alaska, are directly tributary to the British
Columbia capital.'
There is a great deal in this, though one has to remember that those
riches will take many years to develop. The drawback to the
immediate development of Vancouver Island is that it is covered with
enormous timber. Reciprocity with the States is likely to give a
fillip to the lumber industry, and the clearing of the land will then
go on far quicker than {275} hitherto. True, lumbermen do not
actually clear the land; they leave the stumps behind them, and all
the poorer trees. But they undoubtedly open the land up. Moreover,
the revival of Esquimalt as a naval base will revive the prestige of
Victoria, and create more work, besides inducing railwaymen to press
on into the island.
I stopped there on my way back, partly to see the town itself, partly
because I wished to see Mr. Richard M'Bride. The town disappointed
me just a little. It commands a magnificent view of the mountains on
the mainland, and the country all round is beautiful. But the villas
and gardens, which one hears so much praised, struck me as a little
commonplace. Perhaps it is that I like a town to be a town and a
garden to be a garden; whereas Victoria is a sort of garden city,
grateful no doubt to those eyes that are accustomed to the
utilitarian towns of the West, but altogether lacking in
architectural fineness. The Parliament Buildings are good, and would
be very good if those responsible for their maintenance would remove
the inscription 'Canada' from across the front of them. In its
coloured lettering it looks like the icing-sugar mottoes you see
inscribed on birthday cakes.
{276}
But let a more enthusiastic pen than mine (again I fall back on that
local pamphlet) describe Victoria as it appears to Victorians.
'If there are sights more beautiful than the Olympian Mountains from
Beacon Hill, or the windings of the Gorge as the waters come in from
the sea between waving battlements of plumy firs, then eyes have not
seen them. If there is a sweeter song than the skylark's matin
melodies high up from Cadboro Bay, then ears have not heard it. If
there be more bewildering loveliness than clusters about the shaded
and flower-gemmed gardens of Victorian homes looking seaward, then
poets have not written it in imperishable numbers, nor minstrels
celebrated it in well-remembered song. If there be a city of dreams,
even the fabled Atlantis of antiquity, or vision of Babylonian towers
set in hanging gardens, and redolent of strange odours of musk and
myrrh, or fairy casements opening out to perilous seas forlorn, then
never one approached in splendour this jewel of all time, ringed by
the azure seas and sentinelled by everlasting hills.... A bird's
song drops like the sudden peal of a bell. Outside are broad
boulevards, grey with powdery macadam, stretching towards the
bustling city; highways of progress and {277} modernity, now scrolled
by the flight of a whizzing automobile, now echoing with the staccato
sound of hurrying hoof-beats. Inside are flowers and brooding
hedges, the sheen of close-cropped grasses and sun-lacquered
tree-trunks--rest, peace, and sweet seclusion.'
After this it comes almost as a relief to know from the same pamphlet
that 'the climate of Victoria is best expressed in figures.' There
is a great deal to be said for figures.
There is a very good, small, natural-history museum in a wing
attached to the Parliament Buildings, but it is absurdly small. The
collection of Indian curios is remarkably inadequate, and merely
tempts the visitor to ask when Canadians are going to devote some of
the money they are undoubtedly making to a genuine study and
collection of the remains of their predecessors in the land. Indians
are not dying out as fast as some people suppose; but their crafts
are, and so are their creeds and all that appertains to them. It
would be easy even now to create a magnificent Indian museum, but it
will become less and less easy as the years go by. Relics of Indian
times are constantly being picked up by men travelling in
out-of-the-way parts, or unearthed during railroad and other {278}
excavations, and if it were known that the authorities would be glad
to receive them and would perhaps pay the cost of their carriage to
some centre, there is no doubt that many valuable finds would be
forwarded to them. The making of museums, just like the building of
ships, is a branch of empire work which should not be neglected; and
Victorians are eminently the people to recognise this.
It was in his rooms in Parliament Buildings that Mr. M'Bride
conversed with me on the subject of British Columbia. You hear
people say in Canada, that if ever that astutest of party leaders,
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, goes out of office with his Liberals, Mr.
M'Bride will shortly after become Prime Minister of the Dominion--as
Conservative leader, be it understood. He is not a great orator, and
he has no scheme even for a party millennium. That, however, in
Canada is a strength rather than a weakness. Politicians are not
expected in Canada to bring about the millennium: indeed, so far as I
could make out, the average Canadian is of opinion that when the
millennium comes, it will be noticeable for an absence of
politicians. They have not our reverence for these great men. But
on the other hand, they require from them evidence of qualities which
{279} may or may not be present in our ministers. One is a readiness
to seize opportunity as it comes. Another is, to have a practical
understanding of the ways of finance. Yet a third is, to be in touch
with men and things--the sort of quality we mean, however vaguely,
when we raise the cry of a Cabinet of Business Men. All these
qualities Mr. M'Bride possesses, together with that readiness to seem
agreeable which is almost a necessity to a public man.
Mr. M'Bride confined his conversation with me to British Columbia--a
big enough subject for a short interview. I wished to know if the
survey of the province was being carried out as quickly as possible.
In a vast country like British Columbia, it seems one of the most
important things. The right to acquire land must be made simple and
certain. Mr. M'Bride declared that surveying was going on as fast as
men and money could do it, and referred me to the surveyor-general
for details. I wish I could go further into the subject, but there
is no space for it here. Then we got on to education, and Mr.
M'Bride asked me to assure the working men of England that the
education facilities of British Columbia were as fine as any to be
got anywhere. {280} Perhaps this is so, though I heard some
criticism of the public schools from another eminent Victorian. It
is easier, perhaps, to be enthusiastic than to be unanimous about any
given system of education. To take but one small point, the
co-education of boys and girls is a thing upon which people are not
agreed even in British Columbia.
I was on the steamboat, ready to start for Vancouver, when the great
fire of 1910 broke out in the town. With a considerable wind blowing
it seemed to me not improbable that the whole of Victoria would be
burnt down that night, and I had sufficient of the journalistic
instinct to leave my things to go on by the boat and to go back
myself to watch the blaze. Luckily the wind dropped and the fire was
kept to one quarter, and I rather regretted my haste when I found
myself stranded in Victoria at three o'clock in the morning. Still,
it was worth while to have been there, if only to observe the working
of the Canadian mind in a crisis of this sort. In England you would
have heard ejaculations of horror and much sympathy expressed with
those who were bound to suffer by the fire. The Victorian crowd took
it quite differently. 'This'll create more work,' said one {281} man
fervidly. 'Just what the town needed,' said another enthusiast.
'We'll be able to have a better-looking street there after this.
Those shops weren't good enough.' I even heard some of the men who
had rushed out of their burning offices talking keenly and proudly of
the sort of buildings they'd have to start putting up next day--much
better buildings. Presumably they were insured, but even so men in
the old country would have been a little shocked and perturbed, and
regretful of the old rooms they were accustomed to. I fell asleep,
when I had found a hotel, almost oppressed by the optimism of Canada.
{282}