Ireland, so today is the Province of Ontario and the country to the west
of it draining old England. It is related that one little English
village--Dove Holes is its name and it is situate in Derbyshire--has
been sadly depleted in just this fashion. Eight years ago and it
boasted a population of 1250 persons. Today 500 of that number are in
America--a new village of their own right in the city of Toronto, if you
please--and Dove Holes awaits another Goldsmith to sing of its saddened
charms. One resident came, the others followed in his trail to a land
that spelled both opportunity and elbow-room. Your real Englishman of
so-called middle class, even gentlemen of the profession or service in
His Majesty's arms, seem to have one consuming passion. It is to cross
Canada and live and die in the little West Coast city of Victoria.
Victoria stands on Vancouver island and they have begun to call
Vancouver island, "Little England." In its warm, moist climate, almost
in its very conformation, it is a replica of the motherland of an
Englishman's ideal; a motherland with everything annoying, from
hooliganism to suffragettes, removed.
But Victoria is across a broad continent as well as a broad sea, and so
your thrifty emigrant from an English town picks Toronto as the city of
his adoption. Winnipeg he deems too American; Montreal, with her
damnable French blood showing even in the street-signs and the
car-placards, quite out of the question. But Toronto does appeal to him
and so he comes straight to her. There are whole sections of the town
that are beginning to look as if they might have been stolen from
Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool--even London itself. The little
red-brick houses with their neat, small windows are as distinctively
British as the capped and aproned house-maids upon the street. In the
States it takes a mighty battle to make a maid wear uniform upon the
street. In Toronto it is not even a question for argument. The negro
servant, so common to all of us, is unknown. The service of the better
grade of Toronto houses is today carefully fashioned upon the British
model--even to meal hours and the time-honored English dishes upon the
table. And in less aristocratic streets of the town one may see a
distinctively British institution, taken root and apparently come to
stay. It is known as a "fish and chip shop" and it retails fried fish
and potato chips, already cooked and greasy enough to be endearing to
the cockney heart.
* * * * *
Remember also that the city upon the north shore of Lake Ontario is an
industrial center of great importance. You cannot measure the tonnage of
Toronto harbor as you measured the harbor of Cleveland--alongside of the
greatest ports of the world--for Ontario is the lonely sister of the
five Lakes. No busy commercial fleet treks up and down her lanes. But
Toronto is a railroad center of increasing importance; they are still
multiplying the lines out from her terminals and, as we have just
intimated, she is a great and growing manufacturing community. Her
industrial enterprises have been hungry for skilled and intelligent men.
They have gradually drafted their ranks from the less-paid trades of the
town. Into these places have come the men from the English towns. The
street cars are manned by men of delightful cockney accent, they drive
the broad flat "lourries," as an Englishman likes to call a dray, they
fit well into every work that requires brawn and endurance rather than a
high degree of intellectual effort.
Just how this invasion will affect the Toronto of tomorrow no one seems
willing to prophesy. The men from Glasgow and from Manchester are used
to municipal street railroads and such schemes and the New England
town-meeting ideas, which were the products of Anglo-Saxon spirit, come
home to rest in English hearts. The street railroad system of Toronto
may groan under its burden--it is paying over a million dollars this
year to the city and is constantly threatened with extinction as a
private corporation. But the Englishman of that city merely grunts at
the bargains it offers--six tickets for a quarter; eight in rush-hours,
ten for school children and seven for Sabbath riding, all at the same
price--and wonders "why the nawsty trams canna' do better by a codger
that's workin' like a navvie all the day?"
Toronto will see that they do better--that is her vision into the
future. But just how the new blood is to infuse into some of the Puritan
ideas of the town--there is another question. Here is a single one of
the new puzzling points--the temperance problem. It was not so very long
ago that Canada's chief claim for fame rested in the excellence of her
whiskey--and that despite the fact that the Canadian climate is
ill-adapted to whiskey drinking. The twelfth of July--which you will
probably recall as the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne--used to
be marked by famous fights, which invariably had marine foundations in
Canadian rye. However, during the past quarter of a century, the
temperance movement has waxed strong throughout Ontario. Many cities
have become "dry" and it is possible that Toronto herself might have
been without saloons today--if it had not been for the English invasion.
For your Englishman regards his beer as food--"skittles and beer" is
something more than merely proverbial--and he must have it. He looks
complacently upon the stern Sabbath in Toronto--Sunday in an English
city is rarely a hilarious occasion--but he must have his beer. Up to
the present time he has had it.
But these problems are slight compared with the problem of assimilation
of alien tongues and races, such as has come to New York within the past
two decades. The Englishman is but a cousin to the Canadian after all,
and he shows that by the enthusiasm with which he enters into her
politics. He entered into Mr. Taft's pet reciprocity plan with an
enthusiasm of a distinct sort. With all of his anti-American and
pro-British ideas he leaped upon it. And when he had accomplished his
own part in throttling that idea he exulted. Whether he will exult as
much a dozen years hence over the defeat of reciprocity is an open
question. But the part that the transplanted Englishman in Canada played
in that defeat is unquestioned, just as the part he is playing in
providing her with useless Dreadnoughts for the defense of other lands
is undisputed.[H] The Englishman is no small factor in Canadian
politics; he is a very great factor in the political situation in the
city of Toronto.
[H] This plan is temporarily blocked in Canada, whose
enthusiasm for Dreadnoughts seems to be waning. E. H.
Lest you should be bored by the politics of another land, turn your
attention to the way the Toronto people live. They have formal
entertainments a-plenty--dinners, balls, receptions--a great new castle
is being built on the edge of Rosedale for a gubernatorial residence and
presumably for the formal housing of royalty which often comes down from
Ottawa. There are theaters and good restaurants, and no matter what you
may say about her winters, the Canadian summers are delightful. For
those who must go, there are the Muskoka Lakes within easy reach,
Georgian bay and the untrod wildernesses beyond. But if we lived in
Toronto, we think we should stay at home and enjoy that wonderful lake.
There are yacht-clubs a-plenty alongside it, bathing beaches, sailing,
canoeing--the opportunity for variety of sport is wide. In the milder
seasons of the year there is golf and baseball, football, or even
cricket, and in the wintertime tobogganing and snowshoeing and
iceboating. No wonder that the cheeks of the Toronto girls are pink with
good health.
In the autumn there is the big fair--officially the Canadian National
Exhibition--which has grown from a very modest beginning into a real
institution. Last year nearly a million persons entered its gates,
there were more than a hundred thousand admissions upon a single very
big day. Delegations of folk came from as far distant as
Australia--there were special excursion rates from all but three of the
United States. It is not only a big fair but a great fair, still growing
larger with each annual exhibition. Toronto folk are immensely proud of
it and give to it loyalty and support. And the Canadian government is
not above gaining a political opportunity from it. We remember one
autumn at Toronto three or four years ago seeing a great electric sign
poised upon one of the main buildings. It was a moving sign and the
genius of the electrician had made the semblance of a waving British
banner. Underneath in fixed and glowing letters you might read:
ONE FLAG, ONE KING, ONE NATION
* * * * *
To see Toronto as a British city, however, you must go to her in May--at
the time of her spring races. The fair is very much like any of the
great fairs in the United States. The race-meet is distinctly different.
In the United States horse-racing has fallen into ill-repute, and most
of the famous tracks around our larger cities have been cut up into
building lots. The sport with us was commercialized, ruined, and then
practically forbidden. In Canada they have been wiser, although the
tendency to make the sport entirely professional and so not sport at all
has begun to show itself even over there. But in Toronto they go to
horse-races for the love of horse-racing, and not in the hopes of making
a living without working for it.
The great spring race-meet is the gallop for the King's Guineas. It is
at the Woodbine and in addition to being the oldest racing fixture in
America it is also just such a day for Canada as Derby Day is for
England. If you go to Toronto for Plate Day--as they call that great
race-day--you will be wise to have your hotel accommodations engaged
well in advance. You will find Plate Day to be the Saturday before the
twenty-fourth of May. And, lest you should have forgotten the
significance of the twenty-fourth of May, permit us to remind you that
for sixty-four long years loyal Canada celebrated that day as the
Queen's birthday. And it is today, perhaps, the most tender tribute that
the Canadians can render Victoria--their adherence to her birthday as
the greatest of their national holidays.
If you are wise and wish to see the English aspect of Toronto, you will
reserve your accommodations at a certain old hotel near the lakefront
which is the most intensely British thing that will open to a stranger
within the town. Within its dining-room the lion and the unicorn still
support the crown, and the old ladies who are ushered to their seats
wear white caps and gently pat their flowing black skirts. The accents
of the employés are wonderfully British, and if you ask for pens you
will surely get "nibs." The old house has an air, which the English
would spell "demeanour," and incidentally it has a wonderful faculty of
hospitality.
From it you will drive out to the track, and if you elect you can find
seats upon a tally-ho, drawn by four or six horses, properly prancing,
just as they prance in old sporting-prints. Of course, there are
ungainly motor-cars, like those in which the country folk explore
Broadway, New York, but you will surely cling to the tally-ho. And if
your tally-ho be halted in the long and dusty procession to the track to
let a coach go flying by, if that coach be gay in gilt and color,
white-horsed, postilioned, if rumor whispers loudly, "It's the
Connaughts--the Governor-General, you know," you will forget for that
moment your socialistic and republican ideas, and strain your old eyes
for a single fleeting glimpse of bowing royalty.
For royalty drives to Plate Day just as royalty drives to Ascot. Its
box, its manners and its footmen are hardly less impressive. And in the
train of royalty comes the best of Toronto, not the worst. Finely
dressed women, jurists, doctors, bankers--the list is a long, long one.
And in their train in turn the artisans. The plumber who tinkers with
the pipes in your hotel in the morning has a dollar up on the "plate,"
so has the porter who handles your trunk, so have three-quarters of the
trolley-car men of the town--and yet they are not gamblers. The "tout"
who used to be a disagreeable and painfully evident feature of New York
racing is missing. So are the professional gamblers, the betting being
on the _pari-mutuel_ system. And the man who loses his dollar because he
failed to pick the winning horse feels that he has lost it in a
patriotic cause. It should be worth a miserable dollar to see royalty
come to the races in a coach.
* * * * *
From Toronto we will go to her staunch French rival, Montreal. If we are
in the midsummer season we may go upon a very comfortable steamer, down
the lonely Ontario and through the beauties of the Thousand Islands. And
at all seasons we will find the railroad ride from Toronto filled with
interest, with glimpses of lake and river, with the character of the
country gradually changing, the severe Protestant churches giving way to
great tin-roofed Roman churches, holding their crosses on high and
gathering around their gray-stone walls the houses of their little
flocks.
21
WHERE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MEET
Our hotel faces a little open square and in the springtime of the year,
when the trees are barely budding, we can still see the sober gray-stone
houses on the far side of the square, each with its brightly colored
green blinds. At one is the "Dentiste," at another the "Avocat," a third
has descended to a _pension_ with its "Chamber d'Louer." There are shiny
brass signs on the front of each of these three old houses, and every
morning at seven-thirty o'clock three trim little French Canadian maids
attack the signs vigorously with their wiping cloths. Then we know that
it is time to get up. By the same fashion we should be shaved and ready
for our marmalade and bacon and eggs as the regal carrier of the King's
mail trots down the steps of the French consulate and rings at the area
door of the neighboring "Conservatoire Musicale." In a very little time
that row of houses across the Place Viger Gardens has become a factor in
our very lives. It is the starting-point of our days.
In the morning, when the marmalade and the bacon and eggs are finished,
we step out into the Gardens for the first breath of crisp fresh air of
the north. There is a line of wonderful cabs waiting at its edge, and a
prompt driver steps forward from each to solicit our patronage. The cab
system of Montreal is indeed wonderful--it first shows to the stranger
within that city's gates its remarkable continental character. For you
seemingly can ride and ride and ride--and then some more--and the cabby
tips his hat at a quarter or a half a dollar. He has an engaging way of
smiling at you at the end of the trip, and leaving it to you as to what
he gets. You can trust to the Montreal cabby's sense of fairness and he
seems to feel that he can trust to yours. But that is not all quite as
altruistic as it may seem at first glance. Back of the cabby's smile is
the unsmiling, sober sense of justice always existent in a British city,
and it is that which really keeps the Montreal cab service as efficient
as it really is, as cheap and as accessible. For at every one of the
almost innumerable open squares of the city, are the cab-stands, the
long line of patiently waiting carriages, and the little kiosk from
which they can be summoned. It is all quite simple and complete and an
ideal toward which metropolitan New York may be aspiring but has never
reached.
* * * * *
On sunny mornings we scorn the cabs and stroll across the Gardens.
Sometimes we drop for a moment on one of the clumsily comfortable
benches under the shade of the Canadian maples, and glance at the
morning paper--a ponderous sheet much given to the news of Ottawa and
London, discoursing upon the work of two Parliaments, but only granting
grudging paragraphs to the news of a home-land, scarce sixty miles
distant. That is British policy, the straining policy of trying to make
a unified nation of lands separated from one another by broad seas. That
England has done it so well is the marvel of strangers who enter her
dominions. Montreal is loyal to her mother land, despite some local
influences which we shall see in a moment. A surprising number of her
citizens go back and forth to the little island that governs her, once
or twice or three times a year. There are thousands of business men in
the metropolis of Canada who know Pall Mall or Piccadilly far more
intimately than either Wall street or Times square--and New York is
but a night's ride from Montreal. So much can carefully directed
sentiment accomplish.
The paths that lead from the Gardens are varied and fascinating. One
stretches up a broad and sober street to Ste. Catherine's, the great
shopping promenade of the town, where the girls are all bound west
toward the big shops that stretch from Phillips to Dominion
squares--another at the opposite direction three blocks to the south and
the harbor-front, a wonderful place now in a chaos of transformation
that is going to make Montreal the most efficient port in the world. We
can remember the water-front of the old town as it first confronted us a
quarter of a century ago, after a long all-day trip down the rapids of
the upper St. Lawrence--back of the gay shipping a long stretch of sober
gray limestone buildings, accented by numerous domes, the joy of every
British architect, the long straight front of Bonsecours market, the
little spire of Bonsecours church, and the two great towers of Notre
Dame rising above it all. There was a curving wall of stone along the
quay street and it all seemed quite like the geography pictures of
Liverpool, or was it Marseilles?
[Illustration: A church parade in the streets of Montreal]
Nowadays that quiet prospect is gone. A great waterside elevator of
concrete rises almost two hundred and fifty feet into the air from the
quay street; there are other elevators nearly as large and nearly as
sky-scraping, a variety of grim and covered piers and the man from a
boat amidstream hardly catches even a glimpse of Notre Dame or
Bonsecours. And Montreal gave up her glimpses of the river that she
loves so passionately, not without a note of regret; the market-men
gently protested that they could no longer sit on the portico of the
Bonsecours and see the brisk activity of the harbor. But Montreal
realizes the importance of her harbor to her. She is a thousand miles
inland from "blue water" and for five months of the year her great
strength giving river is tightly frozen; despite these obstacles she has
come within the past year to be the most efficient port in the world,
and among twelve or fourteen of the greatest. And commercial power is a
laurel branch to any British city.
There are other paths that lead from Place Viger Gardens--that lead on
and on and to no place in particular, but all of them are filled with
constant interest. The side streets of Montreal are fascinating. Their
newer architecture is apt to be fantastic, ofttimes incongruous, but
there are still many graystone houses in that simple British style that
is still found throughout the older Canada, all the way from Halifax to
the Detroit river. There are the inevitable maple trees along the curbs
that make Montreal more of a garden city than unobservant travelers are
apt to fancy it. And then there are the institutions, wide-spreading and
many-winged fellows, crowned with the inevitable domes and shielded from
the vulgarity of street traffic by high-capped walls. These walls are
distinctive of Montreal. Often uncompromising, save where some gentle
vine runs riot upon their lintels and laughs at their austerity, they
are broken here and there and again by tightly shut doors, doors that
open only to give forth on rare occasions; to let a somber file of nuns
or double one of cheaply uniformed children pass out into a sordid and
sin-filled world, and then close quickly once again lest some of its
contaminations might penetrate the gentle and unworldly place. And near
these great institutions are the inevitable churches, giant
affairs--parish churches still dominating the sky-line of a town which
is just now beginning to dabble in American skyscrapers, and standing
ever watchful, like a mother hen brooding and protecting her chicks.
These chance paths often lead to other squares than the Gardens of the
Place Viger--squares which in spring and in summer are bright green
carpets spread in little open places in the heart and length and
breadth of the city, and which are surrounded by more of the solid
graystone houses with the green blinds. When we go from Montreal we
shall remember it as a symphony of gray and green--remember it thus
forever and a day.
But best of all we like the path that leads from the Place Viger west
through the very heart of the old city and then by strange zig-zags,
through the banking center, Victoria square, Beaver Hall Hill and smart
Ste. Catherine's to Dominion square and the inevitable afternoon tea of
the British end of the town. We turn from our hotel and the great new
railroad terminal that it shelters, twist through a narrow
street--picturesquely named the Champ d'Mars--and follow it to the plain
and big City Hall and Court House. They are uninteresting to us, but
across the busy way of Notre Dame street stands the Chateau de Ramezay,
a long, low, whitewashed building, which has had its part in the making
of Montreal. This stoutly built old house was built in 1705 by Claude de
Ramezay, Governor of Montreal, and was occupied by him for twenty years
while he planned his campaigns against both English and Indians. Then
for a time it was the headquarters of the India company's trade in furs,
and for a far longer time after 1759 the home of a succession of British
governors. Americans find their keenest interest in the Chateau de
Ramezay, in the fact that it was in its long rambling low-ceilinged
rooms that Benjamin Franklin set up his printing-press, away back during
the days of the first unpleasantness between England and this country.
After that, all was history, the Chateau was again the Government House
of the old Canada--until Ottawa and the new Dominion came into
existence. Nowadays, it faces one of the busiest streets of a busy
city--and is not of it. It is like a sleeping man by the roadside, who,
if he might awake once more, could spin at length the romances of other
days and other men.
Beyond the Chateau de Ramezay is a broad and open market street that
stretches from the inevitable Nelson monument, that is part and pride of
every considerable British city, down to that same water-front, just now
in process of transformation. Sometimes on a Tuesday or a Friday morning
we have come to the place early enough to see the open-air market of
Montreal, one of the heritages of past to present that seems little
disturbed with the coming and the passing of the years. Shrewd shoppers
coming out of the solid stone mass of the Bonsecours pause beside the
wagons that are backed along the broad-flagged sidewalks. The country
roundabout Montreal must be filled with fat farms. One look at the
wagons tells of low moist acres that have not yet lost their fertility.
And sometimes the market women bring to the open square hats of their
own crude weaving, or little carved crosses, or even bunches of delicate
wild-flowers and sell them for the big round Canadian pennies. There is
hardly any barterable article too humble for this market-place, and with
it all the clatter of small sharp pleasant talk between a race of small,
sharp, pleasant folk.
From the market-place leading out from before the ugly City Hall and the
uninteresting Court House, our best walk leads west through Notre Dame
street up to the nearby Place d'Armes. It is a very old street of a very
old city and even if the history of the town did not tell us that some
of the old houses, staunch fellows every one of them, high-roofed and
dormered, with their graystone walls four and five feet thick and as
rough and rugged as the times for which they were built, would convince
us, of themselves. They are fast going, these old fellows, for Montreal
has entered upon boom times with the multiplication of transcontinental
railroads across Canada. But it seems but yesterday that they could
point to us in the Place d'Armes the very house in which lived LaMothe
Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, nearby the house of Sieur Duluth.
Montreal seems almost to have been the mother of a continent.
* * * * *