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A' O] ( • wts SUt/i Che takt % Old Towns & New Domains ; o«. BIRMINGHAM AND CANADA REVISITED. A. J. DU FFI E LD, Late FelLv} of the Royal Colonial Institute, Author of "Emigrant, wl.om I have Met ;•• " Peru in the Guano Arc ;" " De Bur!a. y De \ was ; One of the Authors of •' Masston : A Story of these Modem Days, ' &c., &c. • There be four thin, -s -u-hich are little upon the earth, but they are exceedin- wise '.-the ants arc a fe.ple not strong, yet they prepare their meat in thl summer; the conies arc but a feeble folk, yet make thev their houses in the rocks the locusts haze :,o kin-, yet go they forth all of them by bauds; the .pilir taketh hold with her hands, amiis in kingi palaces:'— V&qw. xxx. 24-28 EonDon: EDWARD STANFORD, 55, Charing Cross. W.C. 1880. fc n US CONTENTS. PART I.— NEEDLI Dedication . Suppose all the Colonists came 1 Living Ki)i>,tles of IJritish Indust Companions in Travel J'irsl-class Tali^ in a Tliial-class Our Spoilt Vines The Conmiunion of liooks . Looks not Playthinp;s . The !• irst Teetotalers . Arrive at llirminj^liam . Victims of the Mean Rich . The Delights of Nail-making A Kindly Suggestion . Slaying the Sun In Dudley Pestilence and Destruciion . A House of Clixl to Let The Plague of Smoke The Church of Birmingham Sixty Thousand Poor A Domestic Swamp . . The Mean Kicli . . A Misguiding Star . . The Church Shut Up Gentlemen and Ihittuns . Three Spotted ^laps . • AVhy Trade is Mean . . The Yoke that is Easy , Wanted a Moral Funk , PART II.— THE TREAS A Parable in Murder . A "Self-made Man" A Mysterious Link . , ack ry Carr URE OF S MISERY. A^ AN rAoi V 3 5 7 9 II 13 IS 17 19 21 23. 25 27 29 3' 33 J3 39 41 43 45 47 49 53 55 57 59 6i 63 CIENT IIOU ^ 65 67 69 COMENTS, The Canadinn School A Splendid Man-(irowiiip Cuuiury The Right Thing to he Done The Earthly Parachsc GaUons of Wine for Tenncnce A Possible Evolution The Contagion of Coaipclition Log Rolling at Washington Hell upon Earth Experience, Sweet and 1 Jitter Churches of Living Stones Adventure with a Great Dog Rose Marigold . No Need to Perish A Magnificent Young Doctor Canadian Cheer What IJrought You Ileie? . Science zvrj/^f Humbug . A Man from Masston Fallen among Thieves Dressing and Keeping Hope, the Best of Physic . 71 7;> 75 76 70 81 «3 85 s; 91 9>' 95 97 99 lOI 105 III "i 115 PART HL— RETURN OF THE SPIES. Montreal and Ottawa , Twenty I?ushels per Acre . The Dairy m pie Farms . Winnipeg .... Pembina District. . • Canada-Pacilic Railway . The North West. Toronto and Guelph . . Gait, IJlandford, and Paris . Exporting Cattle to England Nova Scotia Ontario and Emigration A General Statement Much pleased with Canada . Spies of the Spies A Far-seeing Policy Needed Testimony .... 117 119 121 • -> 125 127 129 131 133 135 137 139 141 M3 144 »4S '4/ DEDICATION To every man who considereth the poor, I dedicate this small book on the great subject of needless misery. Y(;ur name is held in honour; it is mentioned with blessing in the oldest and best books of the world ; your number no man can tell; you are found in all ranks and conditions — ar-' confined to no place, no creed ; and it is a great happiness to me to be able to contribute the smallest help as a guide to your merciful thoughts, or be a spur to the sides of your charitable intent. I had first designed to make this book an offering to the Right Hon. JoHNT Bright, one of the members for Birmingham, not because I hold that Right Hon. Gentleman to be responsible for any of the shocking disclosures its pages contain, but in order that these may be exposed to the light of day — or at least to the gas- light of Parliament ; for surely if they be once made known they will speedily cease to exist, and thus very direful consequences be averted not only from a great town, but from the nation which is deeply concerned in their existence. But I rel'nquished my in- tention of dedicating the book to Mr. Bright, because it was represented to me by a wise friend, who knows by experience much of the baleful effects of party politics, that to dedicate this book to a leading member of the House of Commons, who is also a Cabinet Minister, would be to give it a political colour which does not belong to it, and, perhaps deprive it of the influence it is designed to exert. I therefore dedicate the work to you who fl DEDICA TION. give yourselves to the poor, not with llic object of diverting your attention, but of widening it, to induce you if possible to extend your views on the subject of our great and noble Colonies ; to add to your knowledge the things which are going on there — to im- press upon you with new emphasis the fact tiiat the sjjirit of co- operation is abroad — that it is a good spirit, and should be i)Ut to the utmost trial, for it might prove to be, under another name, that sweet spirit that binds earth to heaven, and man to man, by means of the strong though invisible cords of love, ' which men in ancient times were not ashamed to speak. By co-operation J .!o i.ot mean the setting up of a great shop by the help of capital, to enable a clerk in the Colonial Office to buy a finger ring for jQio for which he would have paid J[^\^ in Bond Street, or a box of cigars for thirty shillings which would have cost him ^2> i°s. in Piccadilly — I call that by cjuite another name. The co-operation which I invite is that of the strong with the weak, the wise with the simple, the noble with the naked and friendless — in short, the co-operation of the head with the hands and feet. That this exists to a large extent is happily true ; if it did not, we should be dull and miserable indeed. But it exists more in theory than in practice, and the lime has come when we may hope that the extent of our practice shall outstrip that of our theory. I do not mean by that to say that I expect the Minister of State for the Colonies, or any of his subordinates, to go down to the country and enlighten the people on the soil, the climate, and abounding produce of the Dominion of Canada, New Zealand, and the Australias — I do not even expect these great ofticials to have any knowledge at all on any such practical and momentous matters ; but I do expect to rouse a better spirit, and one that shall move the whole nation to more quick and sterling deeds, and stir it up to a better faith than that which makes a god of mere money, or even of gunpowder. I think if the capitalists, the great tradesmen, and the retired ^f^^'^r'' "*ih-''— -»?' ■■ DEDICA TION. \ weillliy inhabitants of our large towns, were to buy farms or vine- yards in Guuida to plant and cultivate, and not to trafllc in or speculate with, so that when their own market-place became full of idle labourers they could have a real workhouse to which to send them, it would be an expansion of the co-operative movement worthy of our time, and a right and noble use to which to put one great portion of the public domain. I, foi one, am not sorry that many of these Christian capitalists have burnt their fingers who lent many millions of good money to such a nation as Peru, a people whom they knew beforehand pre- ferred to sell their duni; to our farmers rather than cultivate their own soil ; even to Guatemala, to the luxurious Khedive, and to his luxurious and indolent master — in short, to anybody who had the semblance of a pawn to offer them, and all the while neglected their own brothers, their own children, whose labour beneath our own Union Jack in Canada and the Australias is infinitely a safer and sweeter investment, and one capable of yielding a tenfold finer return. They did this, we know, in much ignorance, if tl. / did it for greed ; and therefore with more light and better knowledge we have every right to hope for better things to come. Again ; there is surely no nation of the earth so great as ours in works of charity and mercy. We beat all the nations — ancient or modern — in the matter of hospitals, reformatories, lunatic asylums, workhouses, and prisons, but we do not come up to the least of them in matters of emigration and colonization. AVhen the Christian Spaniard arrived in America he found it well-peopled, and the fairest portion of it was a garden full of trees and fruits, and beautiful birds and animals, living peaceful lives for the most part. The Government of the Children of the Sun steadily looked after all matters con- nected with emigration, commigration, and the cultivation of the soil. Idleness was punished as a crime, the land brought forth abundantly, the people multiplied and loved to labour, and the VUl DEDICA TION. record of their labours is one of the most pleasant and yet the saddest that can be read. It is pleasant because of the happy freedom the people enjoyed ; it is most sad because the gardes they planted has been trampled into mud by the Christian money- worshippers, who loved gold rather than God, and much preferred to gratify their lusts than seek His glory. And if we allow our people to die in courts and alleys and Pudding-Bags at the end of a life of mere needless misery, when they might have enjoyed life, and made belief in immortality natural, easy, and ennobling, then we shall be no better than were those bloody-minded Spaniards who murdered the Incas, turned their fields into dunghills, and left behind them a name as infamous as that of Turk or Jew. You, therefore, who delight in doing good, and to whom life would be lasting misery if you could not breathe the air which comes from the Mount of Olives, be no longer content with the day of small things ; think that a man is of more value than many pigs, although there are at this hour as many as forty millions of these useful and necessary animals in Canada and the United States, representing an aggregate capital of twenty-three million pounds sterling. Think, also, that good and delightful a thing as coffee is, as a refreshing and exhilarating beverage, that a Christian man is of more value than many bags of coffee — yea, of all the coffee produced last year in the world, and the quantity amounted to many more millions of pounds weight than could be believed if stated. I mention pigs and coffee, because ham and bacon to eat, and coffee to drink, make up a vast trade out of which a great army of our fellow Christians amass large fortunes every year. These commodities sliould be placed within the reach of the poor at merciful charges, nor do I think it would be be- neath yoT notice to open little shops everywhere, and sell penny- worth oi ihese pleasant kinds of food and drink to all who should com I iy. Nor ^ht you to stop there; but of the shop at which yo'i DEDICATION. might sell cheap and wholesome food, make also a club for buying land in Canada and the other British colonies. There are, as you well know, in England plenty of goose clubs, portrait clubs, book clubs, clothing clubs, Sunday trip clubs, building clubs, and many other clubs. Why should there not be freehold land clubs, pastoral clubs, vineyard clubs, and orange and grape growing clubs ? When I was in Birmingham last year, there were more than two hundred children — all boys — fresh and healthy, in the work- house school, and there were as many girls in another school under the same roof. Had these lads been learning field work or prepared for farming operations, or had any gracious evidence been forthcoming that there was in Birmingham any knowledge of such a place as Canada to which these youngsters could be sent — not as convicts, but as suckers, to be planted on better soil than our own — there would be some solid ground for lifting up our hearts. I know, of course, that Mr. Middlemore has more than one home in Canada for receiving the criminal orphans of whom he has made himself the father, but I strongly object to our continuing to look upon Canada merely as the receptacle of the harvest of our juvenile reformatories, good as it may be, or as a producer of cheese and ham to enable fat people to grow still fatter. How many more hundreds of healthy lads there are in Birmingham besides those in the workhouse whose proper place Is on the farm I do not know, or how many there may be in Dudley ; one thing I know, that during my visit to the last- mentioned town, there were five hundred able-bodied paupers receiving four shillings a-week each for breaking stones; that they were at tliat time on the very verge of rebellion ; that the more daring of their numbers used *' very impudent language " to the Poor Law Guardians ; and that the pitiful misery which that state of things represents was of a threatening type, and need never have come to pass. (See the Wulverhampioti Chronicle^ June 4'h, 1S79.) S DEDICA TION, This suggests to you the greater work at which you should aim. It is not too much for your strength ; on the contrary, it will tax it less than a great deal of the evangelical labour to which at present you devote yourselves, and which, alas ! is often very ill requited. You can buy an acre of fine freehold land for four shillings in Canada. It is an easy thing to turn it into a garden. For twenty pounds you can, therefore, get one hundred acres, which may be immediately turned into a cornfield. There is no earthly reason why every English parish should not have its hundreds of acres of cornfields in Canada, to which it might send its workhouse children, its able-bodied idlers, and those who, if not early enlisted in the service of the good master, speedily enter another service, degrading to them, and very costly to all peaceable and in- dustrious neighbours. There are plenty of practical people to help you, whose busi- ness it is to look after emigrant ships, railway journeys, and the legal conveying of land. There are Christian people in Canada who would be delighted to join hands with you in your work. In brief, you can change the face of our land. You can chase away its needless misery; you can stop the complaining in our streets ; you may say that no man shall perish for lack of bread, and be obeyed ; you may resolve that this kingdom shall increase in health, wealth, and godliness, and live to see it done. I am, with profound regard and admiration, Your faithful, humble Servant, Savile Club, 15, Savile Row, W. A. J. DUFFIELD. P.S. — I have submitted the first three chapters of this little book to one who, while I am delighted to call him a personal wmm DEDICA TION. friend, is also one of the chiefest friends of whom the town of Birmingham can boast. He points out to me that Priestley, at page 40, is not decomposing air, but discovering oxygen. That the burying ground of St. Bartholomew, on the same page, is now changed into a flower garden ; and that Aston Hall, at page 54, is only as old as James I. " I have," says my friend, " read it all with great interest and general approval." Another correspondent, whose gracious tenderness is not equal to the strength of his language, says, "If all your other statements about Birmingham are on a par with those concerning the Church, you will, I should think, come to taste of no little needless misery yourself, at the hands of your critics. Why, these four years now, we have had an annual offertory for building St. Alban's. At the first, in 1877, there was given more than ^^512 ; at the second, ;!{J55i ; at the third, jQz^oo"] ; and at the fourth, on June 20th of this year, ;£^,o^']. Put that in your pipe and smoke it," adds my im- petuous friend. Instead of which, however, I will give it a per- manent place on this page ; and ask if, after all, we may hope that the great Camel Question is now going to be soUed, and Birming- ham, so famous in pins, be able to make a needle through whose eye a richly laden camel shall find it easy to go ? It would be a great comfort to many disconsolate friends of mine if that could be done to the perfect satisfaction of judge and jury. I may say that since this liUle work was written, I have received much corroborative evidence of the statements which it contains, and that the Needless Misery I have described is in nothing diminished, but much rather continues to grow. I will only add the following from the Staf/ordJiire Advertiser^ July loth, 1880: "A terrible picture was disclosed at the last meeting of the Dudley Board of Guardians, by Mr. Walton, a guardian representing Tipton. In that township large numbers of people are, it is stated, ' actually starving,' and able-bodied men willing and anxious to work, are unable to obtain employment. The T xu DEDJCA TlOiW district overseer went the other day to a property-owner for rates, and found the ratepayer, a woman, in extreme poverty and semi- nudity, her receipts from rent being w/7, and the property mortgaged for its full value. The poor woman's daughter was so badly oflF for clothes, that she was absolutely unpresentable, and had to be kept upstairs. Scarcity of employment among a community ready to undertake the most menial class of work, is a certain forerunner of want. Yet in this same neighbourhood there is a vast aroounl of useful work which ought to be accomplished. There are hundreds of acres of waste and desolate land, which might be transformed from ugliness and barrenness into beauty and fertility. Such a work would yield a valuable return. The difficulty is, who shall undertake it ? The Board of Guardians, in their official capacity, have no power to do so. The matter is one for private enterprise, and we do not despair of its accomplishment." A. J. D. :\V OLD TOWNS AND NEW DOMAINS. D. PART I.— NEEDLESS MISERY. CHAPTER L 1^ That much unnecessary wretchedness is to be found with little seeking few will deny, while some will surely admit that it is as easy for sorrow to increase as for weeds to grow in a garden ; nor does it require much thought to perceive that to pluck up sorrow, even as to pluck up hurtful things from the soil, requires care as well as cunning. Set an unlessoned child to weed a bed of flowers, the labour will prove to be as valuable as that of the idle man who is satisfied with clamming weeping eyes with a couple of sovereigns, and who has a firm conviction that a permanent pain can be cured by the ministry of a cheque. Sovereigns and cheques do relieve uoJiiy suffering for a time, just as flower beds, for a day, will look cleaner that have been fettled by childish fingers; but after a night of warm showers, the weeds appear sometimes stronger than ever : and not unseldom, by not going to the root of human woe, in our attempts to remove it we have strangely added to its fixedness and strength. Some time ago my own distress took me to the Australasian Colonies. I had lost my health in one part of the world, and was ■compelled to seek it another. I spent more than a year in Vic- toria, New South Wales, Tasmania, and New Zealand, and had NEEDLESS AflSERY. I f opportunity for seeing illimitable rolling grass plains, with their millions of sheep ; many hundreds of vineyards ; gardens, and homesteads without number ; great farms ; gold fields ; delightful little villages ; wretched big towns ; forlorn woods, waiting for the music of the axe to wake them into brightness ; slow rivers full of snags ; and over all a sky, sweet and tender when not needed for ripening fruit and corn, and that was never sullied either with " Black volumes of ccntaglous stink and smoke," or yellow fog. Next to some of the large towns, where the inveterately lazy would settle down into permanent pauperism, the only repulsive sight that meets the eye in those vast pastoral kingdoms is i gold field, where everytliing is in disorder, from man down to the mur- dered landscape ; and a deserted gold field is not only a picture of misery, it is misery in the light of a beautiful sun, which is of no use, except to make more painfully obvious the hideous visage of that part of the earth, which has been outraged by her impious sons. It was my lot, also, to partake of the unstinted hospitality of the people of those colonies, not only in the towns, but alike among the gum trees. The orange groves of the Paramatta will never be effaced from my memory. I can still see in my mind's eye the hills and dales of New Zealand — which I found to be much like old Scotland, or as much like as a real uncorrupted Scotch woman is like to a corruptible Scotch man ; and when I am weary of the persistent mud and useless rain of London, and the still more weary and never fagging misery which is confined to no special locality, that springs from lack of elbow room — moral, religious, and physical — I turn my eyes back to a time when I first made the acquaintance of some of those English people who, not to speak in a figure, were bom again at the feet of the Old World. Since living among those of these sunny lands, I have made the acquaintance of older British settlers in the lands of the silver snow. I passed more than a year in the 1 SUPPOSE ALL THE COLONISTS CAME BACK. th their :ns, and elightful ; for the s full of eded for vith tely lazy repulsive is 1 gold the mui- a picture I is of no visage of impious spitality ut alike atta will mind's id to be fiTupted when I on, and :onfined room — a time I English at the sunny [tiers in in the West of Canada, and on the North and Southern shores of Lake Superior ; and last of all, and least of all, I have gone through some travail in South America, as well as the North ; in the West Indies ; and the Islands of the Pacific Sea. One of the idle thoughts which now and again I allow to play with my fancy is, What a wonderful revolution would speedily take place in England, if all the English people who have gone out of her during the past five-and-twenty years to build homes in Canada, and other parts of North America, the Australias and New Zealand, were to take it into their n/inds to come back and settle in Ireland, Scotland, Yorkshire, Devon- shire, and on that stretch of a hundred miles of grass lands which lies between London and Birmingham. The national pulse would beat much quicker, the number of the daily news- papers would increase, and the writing in their columns would be greatly changed. Instead of learned sermons on politics, and short essays on the weather, and biographies in leading articles, we should have news — and what news ! Rather would it be to the great newspaper preachers wonder- working miracles, than mere earthly tidings. All the able-lx died paupers in the metropolis, for one thing, would probably be compelled to go and work in the vineyards and orange-graves, and on the great farms and rivers which roll and run u;jder the feet of Europe. Birmingham and Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, the denizens of the in- fernal Black Country — infernal because made black by lawl<:.ss traders in the piety and helplessness of the English poor- would for a time smell strongly with the left-off clothing of paupers lying about until someone could be found to burn it. What else might happen in the way of lay miracles may be left to each man's imagination, who is acquainted with the tor- ment at present endured by hundreds of thousands of healthy English people on account of the enforced idleness which they^ 1 NEEDLESS MISER Y. are compelled to undergo. It is almost certain that if to-morrow one million people from the Antipodes and Canada were to come to England for the purpose of hiring half a million of able-bodied men to go out there and dig and delve, and clear, and build, and plant, and shepherd, and prepare for the recep- tion of half a million of proper women, to follow after the men a year later, a very remarkable change would come over this country ; perhaps also over the face of Europe ; perhaps also over the face of Asia, and over the ever black and shining face of Africa. The miracle of the pool at Bethesda would be nothing to it ; that of feeding five thousand out of five loaves and a few little fishes would be swallowed up in forgetfulness. W .ter would again be turned into wine, the lame would walk, and the dead would be raised to life again, with nobody to be surprised at it except a few comfortable newspaper editors, who, perhaps, would die of vexation at being worried by so much news. The thing is easier than it looks. Not so very long ago there were no orange groves on what is now called the Paramatta river, once a mere solitary creek of brackish water. Within the memory of men still living, there were more sinful wretches in the guise of English convicts on the banks of that creek than there were gold-orbed oranges. Five-and-twenty years ago, the river Yarra- Yarra, at Melbourne, crept idly to the sea through a tangled mesh of hurtful plants and haggard gum trees — which was sluggish with dead fish and vegetable slime. It now goes tripping by hundreds of delightful gardens, and as many good houses, made merry by parents and children, who make home musical all day long, and whose cares and sorrows are not for the stifling fog poisons which bow down and kill, but only for the necessary breezes that occa- sionally rise into temporary storms, and which give health and strength to those who must endure them. In short, there is no river and no site of town or village, or church or chapel, in all LIVING EPISTLES OF BRITISH INDUSTRY. )morrow were to lillion of nd clear, le recep- the men over this laps also ning face vould be ire loaves etfulness. uld walk, obody to r editors, ^d by so ago there tta river, memory guise of re were ler Yarra- ed mesh Ish with undreds erry by |ong, and s which at occa- Ith and ;re is no lei, in all the best parts of the Australias, which, a generation ago, was not the abode of opossums and gum trees, and mere kangaroos, or dingoes ; snakes, or dirty-nosed negroes, incapable of receiving the English rule. Men who now hold many thousands of acres of arable land or pastoral, in Victoria and New Zealand, who also grow much corn, and wine, and wool 3 others, who occupy land as proprietors in New South Wales, or are stock and flock masters in Tasmania and elsewhere, sugar-growers in Queensland, and great farmers in Canada, began life in England, Ireland, and Scotland as lowly shepherds, field labourers, hedgers and ditchers, hewers of wood and drawers of water. I have dined like a prince in the hordes of men in Australia and North America, who are the living epistles of British industry, courage, perseverance, skill, and noble piety, which may be known and read of all men — without the aid of spectacles ; dined, I say, of all the great dishes which make up a modern dinner, beginning with game-soup, and fish ; going through a course of frog fricassees, and most strange and wondrous entrees, followed by beef, mutton, and lamb, winding up with partridge and other winged delicacies ; drinking wines, and eating fruits, not to mention the vegetables and salads, all of which were produced on the estate of a man who, forty years ago, earned but eighteen-pence a day as a shepherd in Scotland. I know a man, once a miner, also in Scotland, who earned less than eighteen-pence a day, who was turned out of his place because he would not doff his bonnet when he went to get his wage, who is now living in North America, with half-a-million of dollars in safe keeping. But the time would fail me to tell of the people I have met who have been changed out of dumb driven cattle into living men and women, simply by going through the healthful process of labouring in vineyards, where they received fair wage, paid not with grudging and unkindness, but with love and good grace. NEEDLESS AflSERY. Of course I have seen much idleness, and crime, and there- fore drunkenness and poverty, diseases, sundry kinds of violent deaths, madness, and the sum of human folly in its most awful forms, in these fair lands — all the more foul for the fair sun in whose light they arc done and suffered ; and you may also see there the beggar on horseback, riding to the devil as palpably as you may see John Gilpin riding through the turn- pike, with the geese of the village stretching out their necks in wonder and alarm for the fearful pace at which he goes; also the political impostor — the braggart drone of the hive — and otlier drones of still more hateful shape. They are all there, in full unmitigated ugliness of form. But remember, they went out from us, or rather we sent them thither; they are not natural products of those countries. They are, however, speedily dying out, and nothing more need be said of what is a nuisance alike to gods and men. Idle as the fancy may be of all the English colonists returning home to settle on such land as they could find, the fancy may yet sugo^est to someone in authority that the time may come, and that sooner than is thought for, when railway companies will not be the only bodies capable of moving the I^cgislature to grant private bills, not for completing the carrying system, but for quite other purposes. There are in various parts of this kingdom many quiet men, who not only do not believe that the workhouse is a prop to the Queen's throne, but who hate with a perfect hatred any such notion, and hold it as a detestable thing, repugnant to the spirit of this ancient kingdom ; while there are some who go the length of openly saying that if the throne is in need of any such hold, stay, or support, as that of the work- house, then the throne may perish : but this kingdom shall still stand, and the workhouse, with its debasement and its degrading tendencies, shall be demolished, and its name changed to play- house, the house of rest, or some other name appropriate to the d thcre- ■ violent St awful r sun in »ay also levil as lie turn- r necks le goes; hive — .11 there, ey went are not speedily misance eturning may yet ne, and will not grant but for ingdom khouse perfect thing, ere are rone is 1 work- all still jrading play- to the COMPAMONS IN TRAVEL f new uses to which it shall be put, and for ever kept. We may have to set up work-fields, not to make bricks, or out of which to peared, ditor, I lar that lo, 25, duty of impost It was a lovely day — one of the few that made up the year's summer ; and, in what to me seemed an awful solitude, I walked on by myself from Rowley Regis to Dudley, meeting on the road three people in a distance of three miles. I think my original object of going to Dudley was once more to look at the old castle which is there, and which I had not seen for fifty years, or since I was a boy — rather, I should say, the ancient ruins of the castle. And perhaps I longed for the sight because the ruins of to-day which met my eyes at every turn had become loathsome to my soul — chiefly the ruins of men and women, scattered here and there among the vasty ruins of the earth. On reaching the Dudley Colliery, which is close to the side of the Rowley Lower Road, I climbed to the top of the waste heaps, formed by a hundred thousand tons of refuse which had been thrown out of coal pits. It was certainly a pleasant, at any rate an instructive sight, to see the slopes of some of these great mounds covered with grasses, and decked with chickweed and buttercups, whilst a plentiful crop of dock and thistle crowned the heights, as if Nature, ashamed of the doings of her lord, like a pitiful servant would hide from view his excesses of the previous night. But if weeds will grow in situations so unpromising, there is some hope that the ruined landscape which here stretches as far as eye can reach may be restored ; and those gold buttercups, and this silvery chickweed, prove a kindly suggestion of our mother for the consideration of her prodigal children. "That Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all nations." "The earth alone was given unto wise men." " Let the people praise Thee, O God, yea, let all the people praise Thee. Then shall the earth yield her increase, and God, even our own God, shall give us His blessing." " I Wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of 38 NEEDLESS MISERY. witty inventions; and I was, while as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of tlie world." "For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear : For a servant when he reigneth, and a fool when he is full of meat \ for an odious woman when she is married, and am handmaid when she is heir to her mis- tress." " There are four things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise ; the ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer. The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks. The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands. The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in king's palaces." Let no one suppose that I do not know what I am about because I have here strung together these sayings from an ancient and venerated BooL I like old books — the older the better ; and if children find pleasure in stringing daises, and older people corals and pearls, why should not I be allowed to string together beautiful words if I get the same delight from doing so ? " The rain is over and gone ; the flowers appear on the earth ; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land ; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smelL Arise, ray love, my fair one, and come away." But in good sooth I was all alone, as I said, strolling along an unoccupied highway — a perfect cornice to whac was once the glorious walls of a beautiful house, now changed by the greed and malignity of fools full of meat into a dungeon reaking with •< Contagious stink and smoke." And while thus strolling by myself, I collected together all the say- ings that I could remember to have read in the Book of Job, the SLA VfXG THE SLuV. 29 had not >f the dust [ for four neth, and nan when > her mis- earth, but itrong, yet are but a he locusts rhe spider am about m ancient jtter ; and IX people together he earth; :e of the jreen figs, \.rise, ray along an )nce the reed and 1 the say- Job, the Psalms, and other books concerning the earth. No, not all ; only the few which I have quoted above. Also, I have not forgotten about "Daniel Deronda" and the Jews, a book which I once found very tiresome, but which has since become of the very greatest interest to me — especially after my ride to Birmingham, and my walks through the Black Country of England. My stroll along that road came to an end at a place called Dixon's Green, where I climbed to a height called Kate's Hill, from which there comes into view what might be called in modern jargon " an arrangement in black." Through the troubled light of the day it was easy to count more than a hundred and fifty tall chimneys, from each of which there issued a sooty python of enormous bigness, which began to wind its way to the sky, and these black squadrons meeting together, set themselves in battle array against the wearied sun and slew him. My thoughts were turned from this conflict to a comely woman, who came hurrying down the hill. She had on her head what seemed to be a coal-scuttle, covered with showy calico, and resting on each shoulder was another coal-scuttle of nearly the same size. When we met, I perceived that under each of the two smaller coal- scuttles was a tiny human face, about the size of a kitten's ; on which I exclaimed, in a cheerful tone of voice, intending it to lead to an exchange of sympathy — "Twins?" ** Yes," was the reply ] but it went through me like a knife — it was as shrill and loud as a railway whistle suddenly let off, and for the life of me I could not escape the conviction that she was hasting to throw those two little coal-scuttles and their contents into the contiguous coal-pit. At last I descended to the foot of Kate's Hill, which faces the town of Dudley, and overlooks the ruins of Dudley Castle, glad to sit down for a little rest, even though it were on the earth, there made black with wasted energy. The place where I sat commanded St^^^ffimW-'^f^- 30 NEEDLESS MISERY, also a view of a new forest of chimneys, all busy in belching their foul smoke in the face of the pure sky. There is at the present time an outcry against the men who make colossal fortunes by the sale of gin and beer, and the traffic is said to be infamous. If it be as infamous as trading in domestic fuel — the fuel of the English poor — selling that at the rate of 165-., 20^"., and 28J. a ton which can be sold still at great profit for half the money, then the infamy of gin and beer-selling must be very great. It is a public disgrace, the magnitude of which may be the reason why it has received no attention from our moralists, parliamentary and other. As I sat down I pulled out my ample note book — not to sketch the ruins of Dudley Castle, there were other ruins closer at hand, but to record some of the things of which I am now to tell. When I began to write there came a man on crutches, having only one leg and one eye, and sat beside me ; he was joined by another who had lost an arm ; then came a third, who, to all out- ward seeming was whole, whose face was as pale as death, but whose dark eyes were as deep as wells, and wondrous clear ; he had hurt his spine. Finally came a fourth, a sandy-haired, well-fed, clean, roistering sort of fellow, with only one leg; also he had lost some of his fingers — there was hardly timber enough in the whole four to make a perfect man. They were not beggars — at least they did not beg of me. After asking them a hundred questions, which were answered with singular clearness, I proceeded to tell them stories of mining operations which I had seen with my own eyes in various parts of the world, and of some terrible accidents, notably of the one at which I was present at Majalcamarca in the Andes, where thirteen men were buried alive, and remained so buried for twelve days, without light, or water, with scarcely any air, and no food excepting a few magical green leaves and a little alkali stuff, made from burning the twigs of a certain shrub, the virtue ot which I described at length. How eagerly the poor fell ani thi IN DUDLEY. 31 :hing their men who the traffic domestic e rate of eat profit iling must of which from our to sketch • at hand, tell. s, having joined by all out- eath, but lear; he well-fed, had lost le whole jast they IS, which ell them wn eyes x:idents, a in the lined so :ely any a little rub, the e poor fellows listened to ray tales, and how they forgot, for the space of an hour, all their woes, was ample wage to me for the service I did them. " How much do miners earn a day here ? " was one of my questions. " 2S. ()dr " And how much coal will one man send up to grass in a day?" "Oh, some days nothing; but next day a matter of 20 tons." " You could always be sure of each man sending up 30 tons a week ? " '' Oh dear, yes." After much more questioning, a curious and almost inex- plicable fancy came into my head. It might be called an inward voice, and it said distinctly — " Go now and see the places where these men live." I rose up from my seat ; I shook hands with them all. I did not give them any coppers. I asked from them the way into the thickest part of the town, where the very poor people lived. I followed their instructions, which were as easy to follow as an ordnance map, and in ten minutes I found myself in Birmingham Street, Dudley. In this street are to be found nests of houses called courts, but which the people, by a more significant name, call " Pudding Bags." There is only one entrance to each, which is always narrow and filthy, and sometimes a passage of several yards in length. I visited the Pudding Bags No. i and 2. I am ashamed to say that on going inside, I lost the mastery of my senses, and beat a hasty retreat, without making any other note than that the places were simply inexpressibly filthy, the stench overpowering, and the rents of the houses per week ranged from 2s. to 5^. id. each. Annoyeil for the weakness of my nerves, or the unnecessary 3« NEEDLESS MISERY, ; I activity of my nose, I lit a pipe, and smoked some delicious tobacco. Then I proceeded to Guest's Fold. Den, would be a much more fitting name. It is composed of sixteen houses, and for the use of these there is one place, which I cannot describe, for I have never seen anything like it. The word opposite to Guest's Fold in my note book is " beastly," but that is indefinite ; the only truly beastly sight I ever saw in my life, was that of a mob of some thirty enormous alligators, skulk- ing in the sun, with their filthy yellow mouths wide open, on the north side of the Magdalena river, which empties itself into the Caribbean sea : and no doubt there is some resemblance between the two sights, except that in the case of the alligators, their victims generally come to them, and in the case of contagion — the typhus and typhoid of Guest's Fold — it will go out and catch its victim — which no doubt will be offered on the altar of mystery to avarice and greed. The rents in Guest's Fold are is. and 2s. a week each house ; and I must beg pardon for not making a larger report of these eligible tenements, because I am not accus- tomed to the filth and foulness of Dudley. On coming out of this chosen court, my eye caught a placard in type so large as to make any man run who read it. It was signed " Daniel Timmins," and announced " that scarlet fever had been increasing for some weeks past, and that the disease is very catching." While I was writing in Guest's Court, in the presence of many- haggard women, the secretions of my salivary glands became copious, and I spat much upon the ground. On which a sarcastic sister exclaimed : " Ah ! Everybody spits when they comes up here." I was very sorry, but I could not help it. Another asked me — " Are you the inspector, Sir ? " To which I replied, in severe tones, PESTILENCE AND DESTRUCTION. 33 many jcame lich a lasked kevere " No ; I am looking after the inspector," which seemed to pacify her. On turning out of this dreadful place, I came upon the Old Church, under the wall of which, and in front of a Eank, is a pump, and on the wall is this notice : " The water from this pump is unfit for drinking or for domestic purposes " — and yet the handles were not chained, and many peoi)le in Dudley can neither read nor write. No. 6 Pudding Bag, in Stafford Street, is a jumble of thirty-six houses, with precisely the same alligators lying in wait as in Guest's Fold. The rents are 2^-., and 2S. 6d. a-week each house ; there were one or two little garden plots, all in rags and tatters, with much decomposed vegetable matter lying about, making a very pitiful sight. In Wolverhampton Street, I found many sturdy little gardens at the back of numerous houses, which in summer will doubtless put on a painted pomp, beautilul to behold, of blossom, and fruit, and ample leaf. But during the wet time of my visit they were all draggle- tailed, presenting a picture of sloppy desolation, capable of breed- ing sundry diseases, and causing divers kinds of death. Then I went to Cad's Lane, close by. Cad's Lane also has its courts. In No. I, the rents are ^s. ^d. a-week. Here is a well, which smells as strong but not as sweet as hartshorn. " You do not drink this water ? " I demanded. "No, Sir," was the candid reply of a pale woman; "we have to steal our water when we want any. This is only top water." She meant that it ran off the surface of the unpaved yard, which v/as soaking with filth. Here the office was called a "petty," and this as well as those of Court No. i were also monsters of filth. Court No. 2 is partly dismantled, but, not- withstanding this, and its two loathsome offices — horrible and infamous — people were living there at the rent of i^. 8d. a-week. " People living there ? " Rather let us say the pestilence that walketh in darkness, and the destruction that wasteth at noon- >^«?w:''r,w 34 NEEDLESS MISERY. (lay ; the sorrows which demand drink ; ihe misery which leads to despair, or to drunkenness; to theft, to murder, and dis- graceful sudden death. The wonder to mc is that the fools who arc full of meat who live in that neighbourhood; do not perceive the risk they run of dying accursed deaths— for surely it is a curse to die before there is any imperious call of Nature for us to do so. Another horrible wonderment of mine is, that there are so {q\\ reasonable people who find pleasure in comforting and soothing their poor enslaved neighbours — who are kept in misery and iron by a tyranny more dreadful than we read of in any old romance, and in finding some joy and bright life in the giving of joy and brightness to those who are incapable of helping themselves. If we can still bear to hear the name of God, what in His name is the great source of happiness to the rich who live in state in the gardens of that ancient town — walled in so high that not even the dogs of Dives can, if they would, go to lick the sores of Lazarus who is lying outside ? What is the joy of the church vvhose spires and towers there mingle with the chimneys that belch their contagious smoke and stink in the face of the sky ? In what does the English nobleman, who takes his title from this ancient place, find his most sacred-treasured and joyous pastime ? The ambition of the mean rich is, as we know, to heap up riches at the cost of honour, of decency, and of common human love. But what a cost it is ? Neither the groans of hell, nor the sweet sounds of heaven — at least such of them as reach our ears — are equal to answer the question. What may be the purpose of the noble rich, if any such there be, in that region, I will defy any one to discover by any of the simple means within reach of a man who has travelled much over the face of the world, and learnt how to scan its features ii A HOUSE OF GOD TO LET. 3S leads d dis- Lt who run of J there orrible people islaved y more finding ness to in His ( live in so high lick the towers tagious nis title ed and leap up human lell, nor ach our ch there y of the ich over What connection is there between tlie Old Church at Rowley Regis, and the women nail and rivet-makers who toil beneath its shadow ? God only knows. So far as I could make out, that unsacred edifice served neither for rest from labour, nor shelter from storm. It was shut up ; and to the eye that could see it, there was a writing in black, in each window — " TO LET. Apply within."< It will be asked : How do you make out that the misery of Dudley Tipton, Bilston, Smcthwick, Rowley Regis, Wednesbury, Willenhall, Wolverhampton, Scdgley, and the whole district which forms the contagious smoke and stink region is needless ? I answer, because it can be mitigated at once, and ultimately removed altogether, and how this may be done I shall show in another place further on. Lord Derby has recently advised, in a not sufficiently explicit way, that the working classes who are out of work should emigrate. It is sound advice; as sound as the doctor's, who says, "take some physic," to a sick man. But what kind of physic? And what kind of man should emigrate to the Canadas and the Australias ? I did not see a single man in that day's work through which I passed in Dudley, that was eligible for the Colonial vineyard — Not one. They would be all out of place there — or what is called " in the way." Therefore, the produce of the Colonies must be brought to these poor — and that not by the mean rich, who should not be allowed to have a finger in that pie, but by the noble rich, who shall declare that there shall be no more trafficking for merciless profit in the people's food, the people's fuel, and the people's drink. God was not ashamed to feed His people when they were El a..;.jac.j.. \2^:.i^^, -Sm^>ii&,:LM^dMSE^ 36 NEEDLE SS MISER V. in the wiUlcrness; and there has before now existed on the face of the earth a race of wisely-governed folk, who made it a criminal ofHence for a private man to be found selling for gain the necessaries of life. Let us imitate God ; or, if that example be beyond our powers, then the Incas — one of whose kingly titles was that of Lovers of the Poor; one of whose laws punished idleness as a crime j and who knew and practised the wisdom of the Almighty, who has said that much food is in the tillage of the poor, and that the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just. But before resolving on any conclusions, let us extend our knowledge, and instead of being content with knowing a few paltry facts about such a beggarly hole as Dudley, let us take a much more prolonged stroll through the great town of Birmingham. '^H'l'ifliiiiik: CHAPTER II. Having travelled the best part of 200 miles through the streets of this mit^hty parliamentary borough, it may be assumed that I am ac(|uainted with its external appearance, and can so set forth its outward show as to enable those who read to perceive some- what of its inward spirit, as well as t!ie quality of the government which controls and regulates its public life. I have visited all its churches and chapels, its children's schools and its playhouses, many of its hotels and beer-houses, hospitals, libraries, asylums for the deaf and dumb, the blind, the halt and maimed, many hundreds of its workshops, and private dwellings by the thousand. Nor have I failed to keep watch over the teeming masses of all sorts and conditions of men whom I met, or who floated past me as if borne upon a stream. Nor have I omitted to note the number of tall chimneys which start up from the earth in all directions within a circumference of thirty miles, and connect themselves with heaven by an endless chain of black smoke. I have visited the sweet villages and the ever-green fields which lie witliin three, four, and five miles of the great town, and taken knowledge of the 10,000 villas, terraces, places, mounts, holms, parks, roads, and detached and half-detached mansions of Edgbaston, Harbourne, King's Heath, Mosely, Erdington, Selly Oak, Yardly, Handsworth, Aston, and others. East and west, south and south-west, south-east and north-east^ there are dwellings fit for princes, standing in ornamental grounds, iringed with trees and flowers, and inhabited by more than 30,000 Christian people. These things, by themselves, would w'W»W!:-**M--W«r-;rl*!l*t 38 NEEDLESS MISERY. entitle Birmingham to be called great ; but it has other claims to greatness. The people who live in it number nigh upon 400,000, and the number who died in it, and were buried last year, exceeded 10,000 ; while among its necessary institutions is one where live 3,000 of its helpless, friendless, fallen and dying poor. This institution, by a strange irony, is called the Workhouse. The poor rate for this vast town amounted to more than ^182,600 for the year ending Michaelmas, 1S7S; and as if still resolved on asserting its claim to greatness, it is its boast that up to December, 1S77, it had constructed 130 miles of sewers, of owning 151 miles of streets and forty miles of charming suburban roads, and of using in a year, merely for the laying of dust and flushing of sewers, a great many more than 22,000,000 gallons of water, and of lighting up these streets and roads with nearly 6,000 lamps, at a yearly cost of ^2 los. for each lamp. Nor is this all; it is spending a m ' m sterling in widening some of its central streets, pulling uown others, and building greater. Last year it collected 1,31 3,390 pails of the excreta of 200,000 of its people ; and how much that operation cost no human tongue may tell. But without controversy, Birmingham is a great town. Still, for all its 6,000 lamps, it is a town ill-lighted. Not that the sun does not shine above it as much as it does on Sutton, or Selly Oak, or any of the other numerous bright places where the flowers bloom, and the fields and trees are always green. But there is an army of 100,000 strong engaged for each of the six working days out of seven in throwing coal at the sun. The pieces of coal are very small — indeed, it is the finest form of division that coal can be separated into — in comm.on parlance it is called smoke, but it is high time that another and more severely accurate word were used, which may, at one and the same moment, not only show the misery and darkness, but the pro- digal waste which goes on all the live-long year in this mighty THE PLAGUE OF SMOKE. 39 town. Durinf^ twenty-one days of my travail up and down )>s streets and lanes, three days of sunshine were vouchsafed to Birmingham, the others were days of gloom and black rain ; and even on those sunny days the smoke clouds kept up a threatening look, which made all creation pale with appre- hension. There are people of no scientific knowledge, who believe that the smoke in the sky has something to do with the earth being flooded with the persistent down-pour of rain, which, when it sets in, makes the lown uncommonly dark. All objects which meet the eye are in appearance as if seen through windows covered with mud and soot. The faces of the people become white, the floors of the streets are black as pitch, and frequently the sky cannot be seen. The principal streets are never dirty except when it rains, and when it does rain the Regent Street of Birmingham is filthy with a foul blackness, sad- dening to behold, ov.-ing much to the wood pavement — the dirtiest pavement ever invented by a people who trade in highways. And v/hile it cannot be gainsayed that the main streets are, for the most part, kept admirably clean, yet there comes on the mind of a visitor open to receive impressions, a suspicion that somehow, against its own will, and in spite of great precaution, if a bright day should be given to the place, a black cloud will not fail to float over it before night-fall, bringing with it sadness and pollu- tion : and it is so. Only let a gentle wind set in from a certain quarter, it will bring under its wings a mighty volume of smoke and spread a veil four miles wide and a hundred feet thick between town and sky, as dark as night, and as foul as soot can make it. It is true that the Corporation is prompt in putting down this smoke nuisance within the limits of its own jurisdiction, and its Medical Officer last year issued no less than 12,000 notices for the abatement of smoke nuisances. But the Corporation has no control over Smethwick, and other smoke-producing localities which hem it in ; and this plague of smoke may be looked upon as 40 NEEDLESS MISERY. the Nemesis of its own evil days, before Smethwick had a name when, in defiance of all law and grace, Birmingham made smoke to its heart's content, which may be said to be a fair illustration of the saying, " Whatsoever a man soweth that also shall he reap." Another suspicion which creeps into the mind of one accustomed to walk about with his eyes not quite in the ends of the earth, is, that the town has some sort of spite against the Church, and that this was not always the case. There is only one Church in Birmingham which stands out free and bold from beer-shops, pawn-shops, and shops where something can be pawned much more portable than finger-r. ^gs and watches, stores, clubs, fire and life oflfices, and oflficial buildings — this is the Old Church, recently renewed. It springs very low from the Bull Ring, but its fine spire gives to it an imposing, yet graceful stature ; it is a noble monument of the piety of the town. But the town has had little rnercy on St. Philip's, which it has dwarfed by Hotels, Clubs, Banks, and other places devoted to Mammon. Christ Church, from one point of view, is blotted out of existence by the Greek Town Hall, and the Italian Municipal Palace which tower above it ; while the arch-heretic Priestley, excellent in a marble suit, is for ever busy with a burning-glass, experimenting on the decomposition of air, right in front and under the Church's nose. St. Peter's, overcome by butcher-shops, gin palaces, and other halls of lucre, looks in its tribulation more like a frowning jail than a house of prayer. St. Bartholomew's, in shape like a barn, surmounted by a poor little turret, which carries four faces of a clock that refuses to tell the time, is sur- rounded by a vast burying-ground full of grave stones, not one of which stands upright, and all carry the appearance of motionless intoxication. St. Mary's, another brick structure, sullen and silent, in the midst of a drunken mockery of Stonehenge, has also a desolate appearance, for it stands in the middle of a circus of shops where guns and pistols are made as well as other things, THE CHURCH OF BIRMINGHAM. 41 the gin more whose fronts are adorned with signs inscribed with letters in burnished gold. St. Jude's is not worth mentioning, for it can hardly be distinguished from the common necessary houses which jostle it on all sides. On Sundays, the inside of these Churches corresponds with the outside as seen on the ordinary week days, the decay, the decrepitude, the uncommon sadness, and the ever constant imbecility of the exterior obviously springing from with- in. Certainly, the outside painfully represents all that is inside. But for the help derived from the Metropolitan charities, some of the churches in Birmingham would probably be shut up. The collections made in sixteen of these churches for the " work of Church Extension" in the town, amounted to no more than ;^2i6 3^-. ^d. last year. Not much public enthusiasm for the Church can be said to exist in Birmingham ; and the Church's influence in this vast town would seem to be very small. There appear to be few questions involving the welfare of the com- munity, on which the Church and those who differ from her in form and Government can agree to act together, to the un- deniable disadvantage of those for whose special comfort, pro- tection, and quiet, the Church is supposed to exist ; and certainly if the Church be found in the same deplorable state of dilapida- tion in all the other large towns at home as it is in Birmingham, it might give rise to some sharp inquiry in the interest of the nation. This, I think, is a very serious business — and it became doubly serious to me when I began to inqul. e into the public lives and doctrine of the Rectors, Vicars, Incumbents, and Curates to whom have been committed the cure of souls, in our great pin-making, brass-founding, electro-plating, button-spinning town. Many of these holy men, I know, sigh and cry over the world- liness and general ungodliness of the place ; and although it is true that their congregations contain many men who only consider the poor as their prey, yet I am far from saying that these hypocrites are the outcome of the sighing and crying 42 NEEDLESS MISERY. of these holy men. I only state the fact as being within my own personal knowledge, that the most deadly enemies of religion — the persistent destroyers of the poor — are generally found among the most devout of these congregations. It is an awful charge to make, and were it not generally admitted to be true by those who are most concerned in it, it would be gross impertinence in me to make a statement that touches so nearly the character of many respectable men. But if the houses of God are shut in, and otherwise occupy a crampt existence, there are many thousands of houses in which live the industrious poor that are shut out from the cleansing airs of heaven, and pent up in corruption and rottenness, that may make this town great in other things than those named above, in spite of the new red sandstone on which it stands, and the pail system recently adopted. I do not think that I found any of the courts, alleys, Pudding- Bags, and back yards of Birmingham, so hateful in their foulness as those I have already mentioned in Dudley : far from it ; yet what I am going to say about them is sufficiently serious. You shall walk up and down the two sides of a street which contains 300 houses, and pass by 200 other houses, and never see one of them ! In this, and many another like street, there will be twenty- eight Courts, or Pudding Bags. The entrance to each Pudding Bag is seldom or never wider than one of the ordinary doors of the front houses in the street — through a passage ten yards, and sometimes fifteen yards long, which is often more foul than an old chimney; a gutter generally runs on each side, and is often full of filthy matters. This passage conducts to two, sometimes to twenty houses, where there will be, perhaps, two ash-pits and half-a-dozen offices ; but the number of the Litter varies much in different localities. There is seldom more than one urinal for the men, which is SIXTY THOUSAXD POOR. 43 always in a foul state, and a scandal and bitter complaint of the decent women whose daily life is spent within its reach. Many of the houses in these Pudding Bags have cellars, but none have back doors, or back windows. The floors of the cellars are often covered with strong-smelling water, which has oozed through their walls. I have been down many, and seen a state of things that would disgrace any Eastern town, and which sooner or later, if not remedied, will sweep those who live hard by into a shameful grave. It is true, that last year the Corporation whitewashed more than 5,000 privies and some 3,500 passages, and its Minister ol Health reported on 1,257 ash-pits and privies requiring repairs, and 1,447 privies requiring re-construction, to say nothing 01 the accumulation of 1,000 deposits of ofiensive matters, • 621 back yards requiring paving, of some 2,000 filthy houses which required cleansing, of 1,500 defective drains lequiring to be clearea oi obstruction, of 5,000 privies requiring to be cleansed, 1,000 houses disinfected, where "zymotic diseases" had occurred, and 538 foul and detective urinals, to which, if we add 1,934 nuisances remaining on the books December 31st, 187S, while one may admire the sanitary work accomplished in the town last year, it cannot be denied that much remains to be done to make it clean, and keep it in moderate health. I might have counted the exact number of Pudding Bags there are in Birmingham, had it not quite escaped my attention to do so at the time when I first began to wend my way through its many miles of densely-peopled streets. There are certainly not less than 2,500 Pudding Bags, and the working poor who live in and near them cannot number less than 60,000. In many of the cellars of tliese houses the people keep poultry. I perceive from the Inspector's report, that as many as 432 of such houses were reported upon last year. In others, all the cats of the 44 NEEDLESS MISERY. court have free course, and the smell they make is loathsome and contagious, as is well-known. In others, ihe rats in the cellars are as numerous as the sparrows on the house tops ; while in not a {qw I found rags and bones, and other refuse ; the dead leaves of tea, charged with another element than that of nitrogen ; potato peelings, peelings of cucumbers, lettuce leaves, the ends and skins of onions, and bits of cabbages, the decomposition of which breeds death. The whitewash on the walls and ceilings of other cellars was fat with fever ; and in some cases the fungi which sprouted in the corners had a very unwholesome appearance. It will cause no wonder in any mind to be told that often the stench drives people out of the Pudding Bag into the street for f ,ii air, or into the beer-shop to imbibe something to cheer them up " Let the poor man drink and forget his sorrows ; " and any who would hinder the poor from drinking an exhilarating beverage under such conditions would certainly not be wise. It is not un- likely that the front houses in a street containing thirty of these Pudding Bags would vote for the total abolition of the beer-shops close by ; but it would be much more humane, first, to let the fresh air have free play in poor people's dwellings, to replace foul wells with fresh fountains of pure water, and before depriving men and women of their beer, who are in low spirits through being possessed of the unclean spirit which changes their blood into mud, to do something quite different.* Many of these Pudding Bags are not * I am speaking as an old traveller, whose life has been spared more than once by the ministry of wine and brandy, administered by friends in the desert or in the backwoods, under circumstances of great danger, and when much exertion had brought on sheer exhaustion, from which I could easily have died. I am convinced that a vast amount of drunkenness in Birmingham springs from misery. I think it is very likely to be true, that if many people did not get drunk, or had the means of being momentarily cheered up by a pot of beer, that they would commit dreadful crimes. I know, indeed, that much crime is in the drinking of intoxicating liquors, but I am quite sure that few people are aware how much of some kind of crime is prevented by the same A DOMESTIC SWAMP. 45 paved, and the black damp, to say nothing of unnamcable messes which sink into the soil, yield a harvest of tribulation and disaster incredible ; in others, if Sam Weller's double-million magnifying gas-microscope were to be held over the green slime which rests there, the sight might, perhaps, quicken the religious people of the town, who are fond of squabbling over old wives' fables, to forget their differences, and do something in a " cause " which, undeniably, will one of these days produce an effect in which they will be fatally concerned. They would see in that magnified green slime a swamp equal to any on the Gold Coast, the Chagres River, or other ditches of tropical America, where the yellow fever is made; but it may be added, without jest, that these fervent people, " having only eyes, you see, their wision's limited." In these Pudding Bags there is never any lamp. Out of the 6,000 lamps which light up the outside of the borough, not one is ever seen inside a Pudding Bag ; and the necessary things to be done by the poor who live there must be done in the dark. If there were a light, certain habits and customs would be harm- less. As it is, many of these poor first become disorderly, and end not unfrequently in becoming an intolerable nuisance to be ever endured by the long-suffering and such as have no friends. It is true that this is not a religious or political question ; but for all, it cannot be denied that it is one of vital consequence. It is not of much use to call for Eau de Cologne for yourself, or Irish blackguard for the Pudding Bags. There is only one remedy that will suffice : lime-washing is good, and sanitary inspectors are good j but the same thing which has been done for New Street, Moor Street, and other streets, and will yet be done for more means. I am not an advocate of drink — let each man be master of his pleasure, and not its slave. I am only anxious that it should be borne in mind that, under certain conditions, there may be an infinitely worse evil than having a beer-house at the comer of a street which is full of nothing but lamentation and woe. 4C NEEDLESS MISERY. of tlie central important streets of the town must be done for each of those Pudding Bags — the entrance to them must be widened by a couple of houses in the main street being pulled down, which stand in front of each Pudding Bag ; and human dwellings at present buried must be brought to the light of heaven, and swept each moment with fresh and purifying breezes. When that is done there will be no more pestiferous ash-pits and cellars ; privies overflowing with contagion ; urinals that stifle the women who are compelled to live near them; and morasses that kill off little children. Of course, it will be a costly proceeding, but by no means so costly as the recent making of Corporation and other streets, or the restoring of the old church, and the building of other churches for which no one seems to have very great regard. It will surely not be so dear as buying every year ten thousand cofiins, and keeping three or four thousand folk in the Workhouse, and twice as many elsewhere. That the death-rate of Birmingham should stand at 26.0 in a thousand is unnecessary ; for the same rate in the immense parish of Edgbaston — a highly cultivated part of the borough — is 14.0 in a thousand. It is not a matter of gardens and trees, cultivated flowers, or Eau de Cologne — it is a matter of fresh air and cleanli- ness ; and with these in abundance, the industrial poor can live as long, if not longer, than the idle rich. It has become a political axiom among one school of politician that the great towns of England govern England. If that saying be true, — and not a mere fond wish — so far as the contribution of Birmingham to that government is concerned, it is certainly not encouraging. If what has been said already be true concern- ing the way of life of sixty thousand inhabitants, who are com- mitted to the protection of this government, it might be thought by some worth consideration whether the influence of this gieat town in the government of England is at present as desirable as it should be. THE ME AX RICH. 47 It has perhaps been a matter too little regarded by some earnest and enthusiastic Members of Parliament, that the industrial poor of many of the large towns stand greatly in need of protection. Learned editors forget this matter also ; so likewise do those wlio are called ministers of religion — the advocates of Total Absti- nence from beer and other laboriously idle people, who never make any honey themselves, but wlio live on the general store. These poor need protection against the greed and avarice of the mean rich — the ignorant, selfish beer-monger, coal-monger, the mongers of American bacon and cheese, as well as English beef and mutton — and the mongers of religion — and other things which are only made to sell. It would really appear that few people know anything of the industrial poor of this great and mighty town, the constancy of their service, or their illimitable patience. Thousands of rich charitable men and women who go among them, apparently know little or nothing of their wonderful skill and endurance, the unique intelligence which can only come from handicraft, the germs of the fine arts which are to be found in hundreds of very small and poor houses \ and as for the pure faith, the charity, and trust to be found among this hard-working, humble class, they believe as much in that as they believe in the Thirty-nine Articles. Of their shrewdness and knowledge, their sense of justice, tl;e well-to-do rich pious pushing people who govern them know as much as they know of the despair and anguish, the misery and pain, the undying shame and suffering which only the poor can, and do minister to and relieve. Among the educated artisans of Birmingham, the skilled workmen, all in short who care to buy and are able to read the newspapers, there is a plentiful amount of ambition, fire, dash, a determination to get on — and many get on in a marvellous way, honourably and nobly in the case of not a few, who have ennobled commerce, and added lustre to the arts by their courage, their undaunted industry, and their passionate !«;^si ,'J?^i»mf^'SSl^,!iM^^^fSfh!^*~:,^lii^ 48 NEEDLESS MISER V. thirst for fame. David Cox is one of the brightest examples of these. These need no protection of any kind. But those who elbow their way through the world do not outnumber the meek and lowly who perish not only for lack of knowledge, but for lack of protection from the human wolves who prey upon them, and the crows who pick their brains, who have to huddle for shelter in Pudding Bags, and whose existence is only thought of when the Registrar-General issues his annual report. It is true that the mean rich think of these poor very often after a fashion, but never to their profit. They think that 60,000 pennies made as a profit out of so many three-pennyworths of gin, if spent every day of the year, will amount to ninety thousand bounds [;i£^9o,ooo], and if a like profit be obtained from each poor toiler out of so many pounds of cheese, bacon, and other necessaries, to say nothing of fuel, bread, rent, and clothes, then the 60,000 poor, with only pence to spend, may be the source of colossal fortunes to the gorgeous mongers of these indispensable com- modities. It is against these mean rich that the helpless poor need the strong shield of the noble rich — their succour and protection \ also against those who despoil them of the fruits of their labour. There are many mongers of human industry in Birmingham called factors — not the men who are engaged in the useful and necessary work of distributing over the face of the globe the countless articles which the workshops produce — but an irregular army of human sharks and pirates, Spanish and other foreign Jews of the baser sort, as well as others, who are full of tricks and treacheries, who live by lying and cheating, who degrade the workman's work, and through it in time the workman himself. The swarms of this class of fallen man who infest Birmingham are almost as great a plague-spot as its very need tion; their A MISGUIDIXG STAR, 49 ham iseful lobe an other ; full who the man ■.s its I LL Pudding Bags. Their guiding star is this : " Riches are acquired by purchasing the labour of others ; he who buys the labour of a hundred people, may acquire ten times as much as by his own ; but he who can manage to steal this labour will become twenty times richer in half the time." In some of the ill-governed republics of that part of the world which most abounds in natural riches, it has been the practice for a few unscrupulous men, at certain critical times, to buy up the army by means of tempting advances in hard cash. Government has thus become next to impossible ; and for the past fifty years anarchy has reigned there, to the discomfort of some, the loss of others, and the absolute degradation of the great majority of the people on whom the prosperity of those States depends. In plain words, it is the practice of a vice called in homely language, Selfishness ; and it cannot be denied that in Birmingham the operation of the same mean vice exists to an extent hardly recognized by any class whatsoever, and among those who are most unconscious of it will probably be found some who rule the town, as well as some who, from greed and a love of ease, keep aloof from sharing the responsibility of having anything to do with that government. I am speaking of the outside of things for the most part. All along I have been occupied with purely practical grievances capable of remedy. I know, indeed, that much of what I write is of the greatest interest to Christian priests and politicians. I am neither the one nor the other ; I am simply, or for the most part, a reporter of things which cannot be gainsaid ; what relation these things bear to this or that mode of government, I leave for discussion. But if a well-known author — a greatly respected clergyman of the Church of England, and Hulsean lecturer for the year 1878 — finds it necessary to combat an objection made as to Christ's Kingdom being a failure, there can be no harm in my pointing out a glaring piece of evidence which strengthens £ MMUili iiiiiiMiiiiiiiiiili liiiiiSi JO NEEDLESS MISERY, the infidel's belief; if I do this with the sure conviction that the evidence can be justly weighed, to suppress that evidence would, in my humble o[)inion, be blameworthy in the highest degree. If the same learned and earnest author says : * " The self-seeking, the avarice, the truculcnce of the Ciuirch has too often created a profound distrust in men ; that the weak and oppressed looked to her as an ally — but found alas ! but too fre(iuently a tyrant;" and if he says of his order " that it has been selfish, worldly, oppressive ; supple-kneed to the wealthy, and iron-hearted to the weak," some thanks ought to be given to me for proving the assertion to be true — not in a general sense, but in a specific and clearly pointed-out instance. To return for a moment to what I have already hinted at, I believe that it would not be difficult to show that the great majority of the mean rich in Birmingham and the Black Country who have become rich, and who continue to grind the face of the poor, are professed fol- lowers of Christ, members of Christian churches — are deacons, wardens, and even officers of still higher grade. Indeed, I will be still more bold, and say that but for the position which many of these persons occupy in the Church, their opportunities for becoming sinfully rich 'vould not have been so great and com- manding as they have proved to be. I do not make this state- ment out of mere lightnesi of heart, but for a sufficient reason which I will make plain further on. Let us now proceed to possess ourselves of a few more facts on which there is no disagreement. * T/!C Witness rf the Heart to Christ : being the Ilulscan Lectures preached before the University of Cambridge, 1878, by the Rev. W. Boyd Carpenter, Chaplain to the Queen. S.P.C.K. Page 45. CHArTER III. I TOOK some pains to ascertain from reliable sources some ac- count of the distress which prevailed in Birmingham during the late winter, when it and all the other large towns suffered from unusiial depression in trade, as well as from an uncommonly in- clement season. It appears that more than 108,500 families stood in need of relief during the whole period of the strain, and that 500,000 individual cases were dealt with in this great town. The sum collected was ;,£'io,24o (ten thousand two hundred and forty pounds), of which some ^^9,500 was paid out in relief. A balance was left which has since been divided among the medical charities. But the permanent pauperism of the town has been in- creased ; whilst the workhouse, the lunatic asylum, containing at present 623 patients, the tramp wards, and the out-door poor, giving a united total of 8,833 persons, show an increase in each amounting to a total of 729 over the returns of the previous year. The people in Her Majesty's jail, I regret to say, I had no means of finding out, for while a Borough Magistrate can send as many people there as his duties demand of him, he cannot now afford the means to any curious or other persons of discovering for themselves what is going on inside. It is, however, un- questionable that considering the destitution which exists in the town the amount of crime is exceedingly low. There are, now and again, of course, crimes of no ordinary brutality reported, some of whose features may be described as a combination of cowardice and cruelty seldom heard of; but all things considered, crimes of violence do not characterise the working classes of .- v.-j..;!;-...^.....:).-.. _;:,■;>..>'. li:-^ J„>;.^i:^:.x^ 52 NEEDLESS MISERY. Birmingham, while the loss of property in the borough for a period extending over four months arising out of burglaries, felonies, and larcenies, amounted to no more than ;/^3.62 2, of which ;^2,463 was recovered. It is impossible to walk through the streets, and not be struck with the un- common beauty of many of the yourg people of the gentler sex, the manifest intelligence of vast numbers, and the com- parative politeness of nearly all. People of the farming class — the kitchen gardeners from the country, and others who attend market on Thursdays, do not compare well Vv'ith the artisans or labouring class of the town. Nor is this to be wondered at; miserable and hateful as the condition of the town Pudding Bags undoubtedly is, yet the hovels of some of the agricultural poor, a few miles outside, are no better than pig-styes, while many of the Tvretched men and women who come bringing things to sell, or are in charge of pigs, sheep, and calves, garden-stuff, and watercresses, must either be lost to all sense of shame, or steeped in the cruellest poverty to be made willing to stand in public to be gazed at by all the world. I saw women in an advanced stage of pregnancy, whose battered and discoloured eyes, teeth- less mouths, and ragged clothes, were in painful contrast to the flowers and vegetables they were offering for sale. What added to the prevailing misery, was a black sky, and a cold drizzle of rain. One market-day morning, after spending an hour among these market folk, being wearied and wet, I sought refuge in St. Martin's Church, close by, and if it might be, a little rest in looking at its carvings and stained glass, and the effigies of grand old people which I knew were lying on their backs inside in a permanent attitude of prayer, in hearing the organ play a soothing strain, or in sitting still to allow some change to come over my thoughts which might have altered their sombre complexion. But the place was shut up as close as H.M. Prison, and having as big a lock on its front door ! It was this which sent me to visit THE CHURCH SHUT UP, S3 for a ;:;laries, "3^622, ) walk e un- gentler I corn- class — attend sans or red at; *udding cultural e many lings to uff, and steeped public ivanced teeth- to the idded to of rain, g these Martin's ig at its \ people rmanent train, or thoughts But the living as to visit all the other Churches in the heart of the town, and I found each and all of them as close and silent as a grave with a stone slab on the top of it, surrounded with iron spikes, and bearing the general appearance of being useless, and good neither for shcller from storm, nor rest from weariness. Think of that one fact, O indolent reader. It is one of those facts that almost thinks for itself j and if you thoughtfully entertain it but for a little space, it is wonderful how many other thoughts of no slight importance will speedily cluster around it. Thirty large houses of God barred and bolted, as if they were so many houses of a paltry lord of the manor who had shut up the manor house and gone abroad, and put the key in his pocket. What are these shut up Churches but so many crying witnesses to the fact that Churches are not now built as holy shrines to God, but as platforms for religious talkers ?* What are they, I ask, these empty Churches, but mere trappings of a base public life ? To me they seemed nothing better than the Sunday clothes of the man who sands his sugar and damps his tobacco on week days, and goes to Church on Sunday, mainly for the purpose of being helped to forget that he ever did anything so wicked. There never was any religion as that of Christ, so congenial to our highest instincts ; so persuasive, so ennobling, so universally acceptable to rich and poor, so worthy of the intellect, so con- sistent and uncompromising in its rules for advancing moral excellence. JMen could not, would not. turn from it if it was properly brought home to them ; if it was not tendered to them with some admixture of earth about it, exciting their suspicions and robbing it of its heavenly fragrance.f But what may we expect men to do on days of keen blasts * Mr. Boyd Ca'-penter, p. 13. t Ffoulkes' "Divisions of Christendom," quoted by Mr. Boyd Carpenter, p. 17. 54 NEEDLESS MISERY. and cold driving rain, or heavy summer heats, when they go to the Church for protection and succour, and find the door locked? Having found all the Churches in Birmingham close shut, I wended my way to a delightful old house which stands in one of the People's Parks, in the village of Aston, three miles from St. Martin's Church, and there spent a showery day to my great profit. Here were stately trees to look up at and lift the eye from the too busy world ; beds of charming flowers sending forth sweet odours, abundance of grass for children to roll about upon ; a clear sky, sweet fresh air, and a magnificent old Hall, over the fire-place of which I read the following inscription cut in Chris- tian letters. If service be thy meane to thrive Thou must therein remaine Both silent, faithful, just and true Content *o take sonic paine. If love of virLue may allure, Or hope of worldly gaine If fear of Go I may thee procure, To serve do not disdain. Now the sight of this old place, as ancient as the Earls of Mercia, to whom the land on which it stands once belonged, which is connected with one of the most interesting family histories in the kingdom, revived in me many reflections, which had passed through my mind on my way from the sullen, in- hospitable Churches to this lovely retreat. My visit to Aston Park, will rem.ain among the brightest memories I carried away from Birmingham ; and I could not help thinking, as I mixed with the crowds of people who v.'ere enjoy- ing themselves on the green, of the days long passed and gone, when the industrious English poor played games with one another, not once or twice a year ; but on the evening of every day, the gentry taking part in the sports or looking on for pure amusement and delight. Now, there is a painful separation between the two classes, the GENTLEMEN AND BUTTONS. 55 rich and the poor are as much divided from each other as smoke and typhus are divided from Edgbaston and IJordesley. " It does not appear that Birmingliam from its first formation to the present day was ever the habitation of a gentleman — the lords of the manor excepted. But if there be no originals there are many striking likenesses. The smoke of Birmingham has been very propitious to their growth, but not to their maturity. Gentlemen as well as buttons have been stamped there : but like buttons when finished are moved off. I have known the man of opulence direct his gilt chariot out of Birmingham, who first approached her an helpless orphan in rags." These striking words of Hutton, the historian of the town, were written a hundred years ago, and are as true to-day as they were then. All the gentry live apart. Edgbaston is their Goshen, where it is always day, when the day in the town is turned into night ; and what Edgbaston has done for the lord of the Edgbaston land Birmingham has done for those who have built upon it, and made it worth a hundredfold what it was while the lord was yet a child. All that the lord of this manor does for the town which has made him great is to live away from it ; and those who keep up the regal state of his rent-roll follow his ways. It is a surprising example of what "combination" can accomplish in a town of 400,000 people who are all intelligent, and given to labour ; nor is it unlikely that in the processes of the suns Edgbaston may be made to do a little more for Birmingham, if it only be in bearing a portion of that heavy burden which is called by the name of Taxes. Combination has been carried to a great pitch by these toy-making people, and the toy-shop of Europe may yet give to it many valuable lessons as well as toys. "Toys," by the way, must not be understood to be dolls and spring-heel jacks and other children's playthings^ but steel toys, as curling-irons, handy sugar-knippers, beef-steak tongs, nut- crackers, steels for striking fire from flints, plyers, turnscrews, and 56 NEEDLESS MISERY. kickshaws — and these are called toys to distinguish them from things of greater magnitude and weight, made from steel. We must look a little further into this matter of combination. Com- bination before now has led to much disaster, especially to those who were most concerned in its existence — it may possibly come to be believed that combination is a vast good if wisely directed, as it may be a vast ill for many — even for the most, if it be left to those who are the strongest to make the most of it. Let us go back a little. Although the town has not only a modem appearance, but likewise the appearance of being newly built, yet it is of great antiquity, and even in Leland's time it is spoken of for its beauty, and the excellence of its market. He adds : ** There be many smithes in the town that used to make knives and all manner of cutting tools, and many loriners that make bittes, and a great many naylors, so that a great part of the town is maintained by smithes who have their iron and coal out of Staftbrdshire." And what was the case in the reign of Henry VHI., remains true of our own time : *' there be many smithes in the town ;" but what is no longer true is that there is a " pretty street " and much "beautie in Brumwycham." That " beautie" has been taken away; it is no longer associated with man's labour, but is a commodity to be bought, and he will possess most of it who has most money. This is a great change ; but there are other changes worthy of consideration, and which give to a contemplative mind much food for healthy speculation Not only is the natural beauty of the field a commodity as sale- able in the Birmingham market as any artificial produce, — even so is the fresh air and the dappled sky. There is nothing new in this ; for fresh an, and freedom from contagion, as well as a clear sky and sweet water, the fruit and flowers of the earth, and the sweet ministrations of colour are, all the world o er, almost always bought by the highest bidder, and he who has no money II i a THREE SPOTTED MAPS. 57 must be content with looking at these things as poor children are in beholding their favourite toys in the shop windows. But what is new in Birmingham in this matter is that the thing is so apparent, it is evident to the meanest capacity; the omnibus which carries you through the region where men and women die at the rate of 26.0 in a thousand, will for an extra penny of fare take you on into that other region where the death-rate is just about one-half less. There are no fields more beautiful in the world than those in which live some dealers in other people's bread and cheese, say a mile from the Bull Ring ; there are, let us hope, few more filthy skies and polluted dwellings under which some steel-toy makers die hard by. You may no more be able to put up a brass furnace, or any other factory for making foul air in Edgbaston, than you may hope to angle in a ditch and catch brook trout. This no doubt is as it should be. It is also thought by some to be equal to a divine institution that the honour of holding this manor, should belong to one person who will let you live there on payment of a yearly acknowledgement in hard cash, for the favour conferred. That magnificent house decked round about with trees and flowering shrubs, does not belong to Mr. R. W. Warner, the rich brassfounder, who lives sumptuously in it on the sweat of Tom Tappit* the striker, but to one who never was in trade and never will be. This is an immense advantage to all classes, and what is more, almost all men are agreed that it is so. Connected with this most touching and absorbing subject, and as if designed to make matters clear, there has lately been made in this town — famous for its inventiveness — a series of three maps, each of which is a story in itself. One is a Measle Map, showing the localities where that poor plague raged in the town. While the parishes or districts of Sl Mary's, Duddeston, Nechells, and St. Bartholomew's and others, appear to have had a " Masston : A Story of these Modern Days." 58 NEEDLESS MISERY. pretty general irruption of measles, there is only one single red spot for Edgbaston, representing one case of measles. The Scarlet-Fever Chart, however, is much more startling, the blood-red dots which seem to make the white sheet on which the map is printed all aflame, cover the entire face of the town, while in Edgbaston there is a decided coolness between the spaces of the two and three cases which are duly noted. More striking still is the Drinking Map. You cannot see the streets for gin shops and taverns, the entire surface of the town is covered by a swarm of black and red spots. This of course is owing to the spots — for the better convenience of seeing — not being drawn to the same scale as the width of the streets, but the instructive part of this strange spotted map, is, that there are only three spots for the whole of Edgbaston. If there be any drunken- ness in that Heaven-protected suburb, it is kept from the public gaze. How far the scarlet fever and the measle spots are con- nected with the gin and beer spots, is not necessary to state precisely, but to an observer seeing these three maps spread out before him for the first time, there would seem to be a very start- ling connection indeed. One of these days it is more than likely that anodier map of the same instructive nature, as these measle, fever, and gin charts, will likewise be produced, showing the distri- bution of the tax burdens which the citizens have to bear, who bear the heat and burden of securing constant beauty and immunity from contagion to Edgbaston. Some people think that there is nothing more easy than to be able to set the poor on the rich — it is as easy, in short, they sa}-, as setting two strange dogs to fight in the streets. A practical experience of many years of both classes will show that this is a mistake, founded on lack of knowledge. There is no hostility between the industrious poor and the never-toiling wealthy — at least, there is not that amount of hatred and enmity between them as the disparity of the circumstances in which they live would ».7/r TRADE IS MEAN, 59 seem to suggest to a stranger or a person of shallow mind. This disparity, however, is so great and startling in many cases that one may be pardoned not only for noticing it, but for trying; to turn it to some profit : especially as on a little inquiry it is found not only to be a question of great national importance, but one capable of giving to the curious much that is interesting and allur- ing in the form of a mental occupation, not altogether foreign to the most elevating pastime that can ei.gage a man's mind. One fact connected with the rapid growth of the modern suburban mansion is, that it springs nearly always from traft'icking in the people's food, the people's drink, and domestic fuel ; at least it is so in Birming- ham and the district of which it may be said to be the capital. The splendour of your cheesemonger eclipses that in which lives the manufacturer of tools, or the grower of corn and grass ; and more fortunes have been made out of selling tea, chocolate, coffee, and bacon, beer and bread, coal, and other necessaries than out of making steel toys or edge-tools, or e^en coffin fur- niture, although the latter has contributed to a ridiculous extent in the making of not a few Dirmingham people rich. This is worth more than a passing thought, more especially as the people who have become rich on cheese and fish, are not generally of noble instincts, or aspirations; on the contrary, they have the reputation of being mean. There was a time when the purveying of the necessaries of life occupied the attention of our law-makers ; and many persons in this district who had become enormously opulent by undertaking to provide food for their work-people, were forbidden to do so under pains and penalties. There was in the beginning no harm in this method of the master providing his servant with provisions in exchange for his labour, but its tendencies were of a hardening nature, and the greater the facihties for becoming rapidly rich, the greater the danger a man ran of becoming unjust and mean of spirit. By the time the infamous truck system was exposed to the 6o NEEDLESS MISERY. indignation of the whole kingdom, there had grown up a dreadful mode of trading, which still exists, but under another name ; and it may yet come to pass, that what was done to liberate the work- man from the fiendish exactions of his cruel-hearted master, will have to be done to liberate a vast number of evil-minded men from having anything to do with the carriage and distribution over the face of the industrial world of the necessaries of life. The unnecessary misery, the almost incalculable amount of needless crime, the needless sadness and sickness which spring from privation and poverty and the modern way of grinding the face of the labouring poor by the mean rich, are as plain to be seen in this great town as the nose on a man's face. Of course this is a reform we do not expect to see done by Parliaments, but we may yet expect to see it done by a people who can make measle maps, and map out scarlet fever and drunkenness. This town has always been famous for in- telligence ; it is likewise noted for a rare ability of organiza- tion. Here was begun the first political union — the institu- tion of reformatories and building societies ; and here was like- wise started the first practical organization* for giving life to the English Church in England, although it has succeeded in doing so liltle for itself; it instituted Hospital Sunday; and besides these, there have gone forth from the town many an idea of a practical kind connected with the well-being of man that is cheering to think of by those who are compelled to denounce a great deal in it that is worthy of blame, and not a little to which must be meted out much sharp rebuke. The misery which I have depicted in the foregoing pages I declare to be needless, and that alone makes it a duty for those who know it to be so to labour for its removal. Much of this m.isery can be remedied by those who, in a measure, are * The Guild of St. Alban. THE YOKE THAT IS EASY. 6i Ireadful ; and it e work- ter, will eJ men ribution of life, ount of 1 spring grinding as plain ee done ne by a et fever J for in- )rganiza- institu- as like- life to eded in ; and lany an of man lied to xnd not pages 3r those uch of ire, are responsible for it, having their eyes opened to their di^y, and the danger which must follow a prolonged neglect of it, while much, if not all, can be made impossible by foresight and rule. If out of the 60,000 poor whose cases I have described not one man is fit, from purely physical causes, to emigrate to Canada or the Australias, then some means must be employed to bring the products of these teeming countries within reach. These means are simple and easy, as simple and easy as bringing coal and other domestic fuel a distance of seven miles and selling it, not in order to make a pile of lucre, but mainly for love, at merciful charges, and getting marvel- lously rich by the transaction. As easy as settling the rent of pews in churches and chapels ; much easier than converting the Jews to Christ, sending missionaries — great and important labours, no doubt, all of them — to China, or the Holy Scriptures to the Sublime Porte. Indeed, it is as easy to bring the sweet and wholesome food stuffs of Canada to Bir- mingham and every other large town in our kingdom, and sell them at reasonable prices, as it is to cover the face of the blue sky with black smoke, or to convert a brook of pure water into a stream of contagion. I have on a previous page accused many of my fellow- Christians of being mixed up in the continuous habit of spoil- ing the poor. I repeat the charge. Far be it from me to say that the Christian cheesemonger, who rigs the market of the poor, or he who to raise the price of the people's fuel, and put much money in his purse by the trans- action, buys up all the coals he can lay his hands on, really know the full moral guilt of their works. I know that many of these men are punctual at early Celebration ; that they would rather die than be found questioning one of the articles of the Church's Faith, and who, I believe would lay down their heads on the 62 NEEDLESS MISERY. executioner's block in defence of certain doctrines, who roll in luxury and wealth, "made" by the use of modern means in the money market, the lard and mutton market, and tlio markets of cotton and corn and American beef. But I also know that these pious men are not aware of the evil they do, and what they say is quite true, that if they did not buy and sell and get gain in these things someom else would who are less charitable than they. I firmly bi that hun- dreds of our enormously rich men, who build ci ..cues, endow bishoprics, and teach in the Sunday-school, are utterly ignorant of the laws they break every day of their lives, and that this ignorance is not always wilful. I am morally certain, from long observation of a large circle of rich Christians who are friends of mine, that they are the victims of bastard virtues, and the amount of salvation yet remaining to be wrought among the religious rich is as great as any to be achieved among the helpless poor. I should be inclined to fancy that one way of bringing the mean rich into the fold would be by the shej:)herds of the flock taking the sale of turnips into their own hands. The sheep have grown scabby through lack of wholesome food. This lack is artificial ; it need not exist. In plain English, the trade in corn and beef, cheese and bacon, coal and beer, has impoverished Lazarus and made the life of Dives perilous, and if this trade cannot be purged of its evil, the sooner it is abolished the better. As Christ did not disdain to attend to the bodily needs of His disciples, as well as the beggars who hobbled after Him, surely Plis ministers ought not to be ashamed to mul- tiply the loaves and fishes for those who are perishing for lack of both. The organizations of the Church are admirably adapted for the distribution of the common necessaries of life, for develop- WANTED A MORAL FUNK. 63 ing that kind and form of co-operation which is destined eitlicr to abolish hucksters or to raise the tone of their morals. There is abundance of Christian ham, cheese, butter, beef, bread- stuffs, and wholesome drinking stuffs in America to be had for little price, and if these are sold in Birmingham and Dudley at unmerciful charges, and many people die, and others live to grow rich in consequence of the extortion they practise on the slain, then these are murders, and the hell which aw^ats the rich hucksters who slew Lazarus will, I trust, be brought home to them who professed to preach, but did not, the salvation of liim, of Whom it is said He knows each sparrovv that is sold in the market-place, and marks its fall. There was a time when the apostles and ministers of the Church very properly refused to serve tables. But the times have changed ; and if God was not ashamed to spread a table in the wilderness for His people, neither should any of His servants be. My own conviction is, that the Church or Con- gregation — the priest, parson, bishop, or what responsible person or party soever — that may establish a moral funk* in those who make enormous profits out of the sale of corn and oil and wine, will have begun a new and a very gracious reformation in England. It is constantly reported how great are becoming the har- vests in Canada and other parts of North America, of every- thing which constitutes the people's food ; and the plenty goes on increasing every year, I myself can bear witness to that fact. And yet prices remain the same in England, mainly because of these markets being rigged by Christian men. I have previously remarked that crimes of violence are not * Funk, to stink, a word, says I.yc, familiar in tlie University of Oxford — to be in a funk. "Be beat all to funks juliat is till they slink again." See RicharUion. 64 Ni:/:i)I.ESS AriSKRY. so conimon in Birmingham as might be inferred from the amount of destitution anil misery which prevail there. I do not say that drinking beer or gin — and the amount of these liquors drunk every day in the town is very startling — I do not say that this practice of much drinking has any connection with the absence of violent crimes ; it may be so. Her Majesty's puisne judges arc frequently reminding us at assizea of the intimate connection of crime with drunkenness — which no reason- able man will dispute, but how much of the more dx'^ .dful forms of crime is kept under by means of beer, we shall never know, but we may conjecture — and the subject is one that should not be hastily dismissed. Still, one morning during my stay in Birmingham, a horrible and cowardly crime was committed, of which I w'U now tell ; what lesson it contains, or what inference may be drawn from it, I leave to ot'icrs to determine for themselves. I do not tell it for the horror it will excite, but for the parable which it holds. Two miserable young people, a man and a woman, spent a wretched day in each other's company. The man had grown tired of his sinful connection with the woman, having a wife living at the time ; and he wanted to shake off an intimacy that had become irksome to him ; he had sucked the orange, and would throw away the gold-coloured skin which had once held so much sweetness for him. On the day in question, the poor girl had a suspicion that the man intended to kill her, and she clung to him through that weary day in much tenderness. They walked from one public-house to another, drinking at all of them ; she trying to smooth his darkness, he growing more frowning and implacable. Late in the night they called at their last drinking place, where they happened to be known ; there the miserable wretched coward took some gin, and at the same time stole a knife which by accident was left lying on a table. Then the unhappy pair left the A P ARABLE IN MCRDFM. 65 itimacy )range, Id once lestion, to kill much Inother, |rkness, night )pened some xident ;ft the house ; and at midnight wended their steps in the direction of the Hirmingham Canal. The poor woman was probably inca- pable of knowing or jud:^ing in what fatal direction the man was leading her. They gained the towing-pa 1 close to the public highway and near the bridge. Then the poor muddled fool cut the girl's throat ; afterwards he i)ushed her into the canal, but she was not dead ; slie was yet able to draw herself to the side, and was in the act of getting out, when lie kicked her back again, and she was drowned. Such was his own confes- sion. The body was found ; the miserable man gave himself up to the policeman whom he accidentally ran against on the bridge, whom he begged to hand-cuff him. " Put them on me," he said, meaning the manacles, ** I did it. I pushed her in." Such were his words to the constable. A few days afterwards, I went with a great crowd of poor people to her burying. And, after waiting tlic law's delay, a few months later the man was hanged at \Varwick, but to his burying I believe no one willingly went. Since I left Birmingham and wrote thus far, I have been often haunted by the vision of that poor girl with her bleeding throat, her heavy wet garments weighing her down, struggling for life, and while in the very act of saving herself, receiving a kick in the face, and then life becoming worthless to her, sink- ing into the arms of death with a smile ; nor am I sure that this murder and how it was brought about, has not a much deeper significance than appears on the first reading of it, while of its parallel I think I need not speak more particularly. P PART II.— THK TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. CHAPTER I. A LITTLE whi'.e ago I passed a few weeks in an old house, which stands in the very heart of Spain. Three centuries past it was the home of one of the renowned hidalgos of Castile. It is still in admirable preservation, and with no outward signs of decay. All the rooms are spacious and lofty, and the staircase wide enough and easy enough for twenty men to walk up abreast. It took me all the time I spent there to find out the chief excel- lencies contained in that noble old mansion, and had I remained till now I should not have discovered them all. Something new turned up every day. There were quaint pieces of furniture, old folios bound in vellum and gold, old pictures, old pieces of painted leather, old carvings, ancient manuscripts in tatters, and ancient pieces of armour covered with rust, with many other things, and all in such admired disorder that it would have taken years to find out and know them well, to say nothing of the men servants and maid servants who waited on me, laughed at my questions, and made me laugh in my turn at them for their simple ways and speech. But this house is not the house of treasure of which it is my purpose to tell — it is only its epitome. I am to speak of Canada, not of Spain ; the land of realities, not of romance ; of constant work, not of constant indolence. But in good sooth that ancient Spanish house much resembles what 1 found Canada to be — namely, the guardian of a valuable collection of old N , which ; it was t is still decay. 56 wide ast. It f excel- mained ig new re, old Ipainted lancient jgs, and to find Ints and ins, and s and Ivhich it [peak of ice ; of [l sooth ICanada lof old A ''SELF-MADE MAN.'' 67 things, good men and women, curious customs, and odd opinions, ill assorted, it is true, and stored away here and there, which to know well would require much time and patient waiting. As in the old Spanish house, so in Canada, I daily came on something new. The more I moved about, and the more people came into view, all the more did 1 like to linger in that new land filled with old memories, and old-fashioned folk, who had been made young by new endeavour. "Yonder," said a friend to me, who was on a certain occa- sion driving me to see some natural salt wells, "Yonder lives one of our self-made men." The house pointed out did not appear to me to belong to the ordinary self-made man. It was surrounded by one of the brightest and best gardens I had seen in that district, which is rightly called the Garden of Canada. Not far from it was Natawasauga Bay, which stretches into and forms part of the waters of Georgian Bay. Now, there is never any difficulty in making your way into a Canadian house, provided your entrance be marked with good will and courtesy ; so my frend and I found easy access to the pleasant and substantial dwelling of the Canadian self-made man. I was not anxious to make his acquaintance — preferring to remain outside and look at things, which, although not self-made, were beautiful and of infinite value. But my friend, who was great on all matters pertaining to common salt, and had, in fact, come to consult with the self-made one about some salt wells, of which he was the owner, insisted on my going into the house with him, and in I went. I expected to find the self-made a ponderous, square- shouldered man, of heavy jaw, high cheek bones, a long chin, small eyes, who had forgotten to get a forehead in the process of his creation, and who, if he had ever been endowed with any of the simpler graces which help to make up human character, had ob^'terated them all in making himself anew. 03 Tin: TREASURE OF AX AXCIEXT HOUSE. The moment I saw him I enjcyed an agreeable surprise. He was still young, well built, with a good Enj^lisii face, a rich voice, a clear eye, an uncringing gait, and fresh and open in every look and gesture. He received us in a quiet, but thoroughly frank and easy manner ; he took us into his private room, which was well littered with books and papers ; he went himself to the pantry, and brought out wine and other things, which he set before us with that sweet politeness which can only proceed from kindness of heart. This natural behaviour of the self-made, whom I shall call Job Spring, showed itself in other ways than by supplying us with refreshments. He took us round his garden, introduced us to the pigs, the poultry and the dogs, and explained the improv- ments which were of his own planning, together with certain projects for making his homestead as famous as it deserved to be. After a while my friend interposed, and said that as he had come to see the salt wells, he would like to be shown the way to them. On which Mr. Spring called to a serving man who was there, and said to him, " Take this gentleman to the springs ; show him everything ; tell him all you know; and be back in an hour whether the gentleman returns with you or not." Then turning to me, he said, " Do you wish to go with your friend, or will you remain here ? I shall be glad of a talk about the old country." There was a mixture of peremptoriness and kindness in his tone and manner, that was pleasant to see and to hear, and I answered that I should prefer to remain and give him such home news as I could, if it would please him. " I shall be more than pleased," he said ; " I shall be very grateful." No sooner had the others left us, and gone in the direction of the salt property, and we were alone, than a strange feeling took possession of me. It was a troublesome, half-awakened I c A MYSTERIOUS LIXK. 69 consciousness that I had met this man before, and known him under some conditions that were not of the pleasantest kind. This feeling, or what I might call mental spasm, did not last more than a second, nor did it again return, until, after awhile, it came back attended with a few veritable facts which made me speculate, as I had often done before, and still oftener since on the mysterious manner in which the lives of some men seem to be linked together. From the garden we strolled back into the little room where we had been received, and after slmtting the door, but before taking a seat, I was asked in a quiet, untroubled voice. " Do you know London, and the country round about — I mean in the direction of Surrey ? " Now it was to Surrey, while Job and I were together in the garden, that my thoughts had suddenly flown. Quick as lightning the whole truth flashed across my mind, and I knew the man's early history, although as T have said, I had never before seen him, or heard his name, nor had he said more words than I have here set down concerning him- self which could have given me the least hint of who he was, where he had come from, or what had been the course of his life. It was not until my friend had left us for the salt pits that this secret communion between my own spirit and that of the unknown man before me had begun ; and it continued to increase in pleasantness after the first moment of uncertainty had passed away. I discovered that he did not care about mere newspaper tidings from England j his wants were deeper, and we fell into a vein of homely talk chiefly about ourselves. I even got the length of calling him by his Christian name. I had risen from my seat, and was walking about the room talking to Job all the time, and now and then looking at the j^oodly row of books on the shelves. The first book I picked out contained a name, the sight of which sent a thrill of plea- -^.M*i ^->m m .M: : 70 THE TREASURE OF AN AXCIEXT HOUSE. sure to my heart. The name belonged to a relative of mine, and which if I could publish here would send a like thrill of pleasure through all who read these words. Job saw me take out this book, and saw me restore it to its place again. Then turning my back to him, and going to look through the window in order to hide what he must have discovered in my face had he caught sight of it, I said to him, in a cheerful voice : "Job, they call you a self-made man; how do you like it ?" " Like it ? " he replied ; " it is one of the worst names a man can go by. I have often tried to stop it, but it is of no use ; the people here are so accustomed to it." " UTiat arrogance and pride there is about it. Talk of self- conceit, this is the conceit of the devil," I said. "Do you not think this evil phrase to be a real Yankee product of Yankee independence and bluster, and springs from their money-making republicanism ? " " I think," answered Job, with much seriousness, and as if he were pained by my alluding to Americans in terms which he considered to be intended for an insult or a sneer, *•' I think that the phrase a 'self-made man' was at first a mere idle word — and it is so still, in many cases — used thoughtlessly, and seldom or never intended to bear the meaning you would put upon it." " Then why should it offend you ? " I inquired, " when it is applied to yourself ? " "Well, you see, it depends upon how people are brought up. In this country," he continued, "a man is taught very early to rely upon himself; the children are much smarter than our children are at home. I have seen young lads do things which, for intelligence and courage, would put a whole English village to the blush, including both the parson and the squire." " "What do you mean by being brought up differently?" "Well," said Job, in thoughtful earnestness, "I mean chiefly THE CAXADIAN SCHOOL. 71 the way that sacred things are taught to them. From their very earliest days, English children — at least the children at Plomeof the class to which I belong — are made to feel that they are nothing else but prisoners : the earth their prison, the great Father their jailor, and his Son the one who comes and persuades the Father to be kind to them, and let the little jail birds go free; these terrible symbols of an intellectual religion stick in the child's mnd \ they haunt it, anc fill it with images of terror, or with notions as tantalising as lighted lamps hung over your wheels wl.en driving through clean darkness ; such imaginings make the chid timid, and very pliable to the first powerful influence which comes upon it." Job's sentences were very nearly missing fire, so he pulled up in this rhetorical fashion — " Whereas," he went on, ** in the children's schools here, while they are taught much that is like this, it is not all like it, there is something else besides ; they learn much of natural objects ; they get ideas ; they get abundance of fresh air " — " They get, in short," I struck in, " a variety of moral and mental food. But do you mean to say that the English child is taught the fear of God in some way that it hurts its moral nature ; and that this is not the case with the American child ? " " Yes," he said, " I do mean to say it, and I say more, that this over-much talk about the Almighty, dressing him in black like an undertaker, surrounding him — not with the charm of mystery, but with its jargon — stifles in the child all power to reach after Him, except as a being who can do anyihing and everything He likes : and, although they soon discover that He never does inter- fere with them in the way they have been led to expect, yet they get the notion that He is as changeable, and as full of interference as their own parents." "Job, you are an atheist," I said, with as much grim humour as I could throw into my voice, putting a bold, unaltered face 72 THE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. upon the whole matter, hoping to divert his iJioughts from what 1 knew to be at that time directing and colouring them. Job, however, went on unmoved, and proceeded as follows : — " I think I can safely say that no man has tried more than I have to help poor fellows who left the old country and came oat here to this Canada 'to better their condition,' as they w^re told they would, but which they never did and never will, because they never had anything to better. They are not men at all — except in shape, and not much of men in that ; they have the brains of birds or rabbits, who build their nests and make t'leir holes, as they did at the creation ; and if you insist on their being men, and learning different ways, and obeying a different mister to what they have been accustomed, they simply back, and jib, and go and get drunk, and enter the hard and active service of Satan, because, indeed, they are not strong enough, and were never taught to fight in the active service of God." To which I replied : "Job, all this is very dreadful ; and I am beginning ^o suspect you are a Ranter, a Republican, or, as I said just now, an atheist, and let me tell you I ought to know what that is, for I think I have known more men of the clerical pro- fession than any man who has lived for sixty years in various parts of the Christian world." But Job apparently did not hear my remarks; he was like a hound on the scent, and not to be diverted from the pursuit by the babbling of a shallow brook. " I mean, of course," he proceeded, " the untaught, ill-fed poor; the beings who cannot think, nor even see anything but the food they eat; or smell anything but what they give off in sweat; or feel anything but what they wear to hide them from the cold, and who are as much good in a country like this as a wheelbarrow is for helping a man over ten miles of soft snow ten feet thick." And all this ignorance, imbecility, and stereotyped or wooden notions which belong to the poor emigrant classes who leave England for Canada, he traced to the defective training, or no A SP LEX DID MAN-GROWING COUNTRY. 73 what al pro- arious ot hear to be |)k. poor; e food eat ; or d, and narrow Ick." ooden leave or no training, which they had received, as well as to a certain religious cramming which, he said, stifled them in childhood. The impression which Job Spring's conversation proiluced on me, and which deepened at every turn, was that Canada was a splendid man-growing country. It had certainly produced Job Spring, and I think that if some of the Englishmen whom I know in various parts of South America, in India, in Africa, and the Spanish Main, even in Australia, had selected Canada as the field of their future lives and labours, instead of going to the bad, as many of them have gone, they would have strengthened the good that was in them, and reaped the very opposite kind of harvest to that which they have garnered, and might now be living on corn instead of having to feed for the rest of their lives on husks, in the company of swine. If Job had been left to himself when a boy in England, he would have added to the number of its permanent criminal population ; but being taken in hand at the right time — supplied with the physic appropriate to his malady — in other words, made to labour with his hands, taught to plough, and sow, and reap, in short, the very things in which he was able to achieve success — he became, as he now is, one of the most perfect men I have ever met. To Job every new day seemed to be an addition to his personal pleasures, and he convinced me that he went to bed for the express purpose, and with the fixed faith of rising to a better day than he had as yet seen. " Job," I said to him, as the above passed through my mind, *' what splendid health you have." "AVell, you see," he answered, with an easy smile, which I verily believe had in it the slightest curve of a sneer, " I have no debts, except one that I can never pay. I have no fears, no anxiety, except such as now and then come to make me ashamed of the manner in which I have wasted much time. But," he added, with a curious dash of suspicion in his eyes as he 74 THE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. looked at me, " do you think good lieallh comes from being well off?" I replied that I had a sneaking sort of belief that good health was much mixed up with, and was a good deal dependent upon, good conduct and perhaps right thinking. " It has, I think, more to do with right doing," said Job ; "and as for opportunities of doing right being so few, I can't agree with those who so complain. It is not my experience. I know that the more right things a man does the more he can do, and the easier can he do them ; and one of the most mischievous errors ever taught in book or pulpit is, that it is easier or pleasanter for a man to do wrong than right." This is not a tithe of what my friend said on this subject, but I forget the rest, for I am ashamed to say, that good as Job's preaching was, I was getting rather tired of it ; and in order to get him to talk more ot Canada, I changed the topic by remarking, " I wish we could get into the right way of thinking about this emigration business, which everybody dis- cusses with as much levity as if it were a revelation from heaven, and which apparently no one understands in a thorough and perfect way." I was the more anxious to hear what Job had to say on this momentous matter, because I was sure that he had given to it a portion of his own healthy thoughts. "What a spectacle of shame it is," I remarked, "to see so many beggars and thieving tramps not only in Canada, but through all the Eastern States of America. How does it come about ? " " There are faults on both sides," said Job, with great prompt- ness and moderation ; " it is a long story, and an awkward business to discuss. There is no use in going back, or quarrelling ; if tlmre were, a few Cabinet Ministers would have to be dug up and be hanged, as well as innumerable jobbers in land, X ^^^m^Mr THE RIGHT TIIIXG TO BE DONE. 75 and not a few local jobbers in colonial politics," but, continucfl Job in his dogmatic fashion, " I am myself a living example of THE RIGHT THING TO un DONE. The exactly right and appropriate thing to be done with me was done ; had I been sent from the old country to Canada without first being taught to do the things I had to do ; or had I come here without guide or friend to receive me, I should even now be a beggar, or a thief, or at best a mere s})linter in the bucket, instead of one of the staves which compose it." *' Or one of the hoops which bind it together," I said. " A steady stream of emigration has set in from England to Canada," Job continued, " which nobody can stop, and which nobody ought to try to stop, but it might and should ba regulated ; it might and should be a blessing to both countries. There arc a good many people in England who are worth a matter of ;^5,ooo sterling, and all that they can make tliis sum to yield will be J[^2^o a-year, or ;^'3oo a-year at the most, and with this the man has several children to educate and provide for; rent to pay — sometimes the devil to pay besides, who is a very expensive and peremptory party to deal with. These men would flourish in Canada, and Canada would flourish the more their number increased ; and what is more, they would be of greater use to England in Canada than they are at present by remaining at home." " How do you make that out ? " I inquired. '' Easy enough," was the answer. " These people so long as they stop at home, merely live from hand to mouth. Every year they buy fewer things, for their purchasing powers are diminished every year by such expensive luxuries, as, among other things, fantastically educated children ; but once out here, their ability to buy would only be limited by their ability to consume, which I assure you grows amazingly. That is one class of men who ought to be encouraged to emigrate to Canada ; the others are those 76 THE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. wlio should be compelled to do so, and by a Jieurty co-operation, this would be easy enou|^h." *' How compelled?" 1 inquired, with much amazement. "Just as some folk from being cold are compelled to work to get themselves warm; or as the epicure is now and then compelled to take a blue pill to aid his digestive organs ; or like the people of the highways and hedges, who were, on a certain occasion, compelled to come in to a wedding feast." *' Do you mean that you would have the Colonial Secretary of State go tramping up and down the kingdom, beating up recruits for the Colonies ? " " Tlure are plenty of officers of the kingdom already to do that, if they would only do their work," said Job. " The British Colonies ought to have been held out to the British workman as prizes to win and rewards to earn, and as places of distinction for which all were to contend ; and this idea is fast making its way among the people, who know that by thrift, uprightness, and the practice of other virtues, there is a career open lo ihem in the Colonies equal to that which made many obscure men famous in England 300 years ago. Unluckily for us, the first use that we made of one of the most splendid of our new domains was to transport there our desperate criminals, instead of honest, in- dustrious men. These latter, when British Capital became devoted to manufactures, and machinery displaced operatives, and operatives became herded in great shops, and labour became more and more divided, we then proceeded to do the enormous wrong of building for them great houses of state, called work- houses, keeping them and encouraging them in i lioness by out- door relief, and even indoor protection, clothing tl ' m, and teach- ing their children at the expense of those who si:ii had work to do, and could get paid for it. Again, the w nd ' emigrant,' which should suggest ideas sparkling with health, Me, and pros- perity, has been debased, and degraded into low 1. .lings by its THE EARTHLY PARADISE. 77 leration, work to tnpcllcd j people iccasion, rctary of recruits ly to do J British kman as stinction g its way ^ and the ni in the .imous in that we s was to )nest, in- became ives, and became normous jd work- by out- d t each- work to : migrant,* md pros- ig3 by its association with the very scum of the people ; and so, what with transportation, and able-bodied paupers, to say nothing of filthy emigrant .sllip^, and wrecks of emigrant ships, pilfering, over-paid, Colonial (iovernment emigration offircrs, land sharks, and money sharpers, tlunisands of good, sound-hearted ICnglish work-folk have been d(.terred from even thinking of emigration ; and they have gone through many years of a cheerless life, its only charm to them being that it was unstained by crime, and that they had never troubled the parish." I asked my friend a hundred questions about a scheme for co- operative fiirming in Canada, also concerning the best way for investing the word emigration with greater attraction, but could get no cut-and-dried answer from him ; he loved to roam among the poetical forms of things, and if I were to give my own candid opinion of his notions regarding emigration, commigration, and emigrants; crime and poverty ; and human happiness and misery in general — especially English human happiness and misery — it would amount to this : that the man, or order of men, who would try to cheer a poor fellow, whose chief aftliction arose from having no work to do, by preaching to him the blessedness of a possible heaven, instead of warming his blood by telling him of the real paradise existing upon earth, and how to reach it, did not know one of the main duties of a preacher, or did not care to exercise the power which had been placed in his hands. It is open to any one to retort upon me that I know little of the functions of the preadier. I admit it with all candour; but if I know nothing of this, I know what it is to hear the first lessons read; and if it is expected of me that I should continue to do this for pastime and not for prac- tical profit, I beg to be excused. It is utterly loathsome to me to hear things read out of the book of Joshua, for example, which are enough to set the heart of a miser on fire, and yet be expected to keep cool. The heroic Joshua IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I i:^ ill 132 IM 22 '^ IAS IIIIIIO 1.8 1.25 1.4 1.6 "^ 6" — ► V] <^ /^ VI cr';^. ' . ''^ ^;. M '/ Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, NY. 14580 (716) 872-4503 i 6^ > 78 7 HE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. and his spies are needed again, in our own day. Even the harlot, it would seem from the second chapter of that ad- mirable history, is capable of being turned to great and noble uses under the inspiration or influence of heroes. Perhaps there never was a more noble coloniser than Joshua. He certainly did things with a very high hand ; but being now a property of the modern priest, reduced to the level of a spiritual type, of course, he is not held up to us for example. This, however, I contend is not the lay, nor the common- sense view of the case. Here my friend, who had been looking after the salt property, returned, and having taken a seat with us in the same room, Job, with the decision which distinguished him, plunged swiftly into the matter, and settled it, in his own way and after his own original fashion. It was his method of dealing with the man of salt that increased my curiosity and interest in his emigration scheme. He began as follows, addressing my companion : " Do you like the property ? " " I do," replied the other, who did not much relish saying so point blank, Scotchman as he was, but could not help himself. " Are you quite satisfied that you can do with it all that you can reasonably expect ? " "Well, Mr. Spring, I v.-ant to know how much money you want for this property ; how you wish the money to be paid, and so forth ; and then you may leave me to form my own opinion as to what I can make by the bargain." " Not so," answered Job. " I have no need to sell, but am much in need of a good neighbour ; and if I coul make up my mind that I should have a good one in you, that would go a great way with me in coming to terms. From this letter you have brought me, I find that you have been a lumberman." " Lumbering is still rtiy business, but I have taken a fancy to GALLONS OF WINE FOR TENPENCE. 79 salt," said the other, who was beginning to feel a little more at ease. " Very well. I don't ask you for any money, but you shall have the salt springs for 85,000 worth of lumber, to be delivered here next fall at current rates, and you sha'l pay me 6 per cent, on all profits you make above 85,000 a year for the next five years. Those are my terms. We need not discuss them, if I have made myself clear ; it would be waste of time for you to try and alter them." " They are clear enough ; but I should like to think them over," replied the man of lumber. *' Take a turn in the garden," said Job, rising and giving the man his hat, who could do nothing else but go out into the garden whether to think over the said terms or not. Then, addressing himself to me, he said, "You did not tell me your name, I think ? Or have I forgotten it?" "Adalid," I answered, unblushingly. He repeated it, and said that it sounded more like a woman's name than a man's. " I did not say Adelaide," quoth I, " but Adalid," giving to it its fall Arabic sound. " Then it is not an English name ? " he said, interrogatively, which I answered in the affirmative. " It came from Spain," I added, " and let me tell you there are many useful lessons to be learned in Spain. For example, the last time I travelled through Castile, I passed by a little farm house by the wayside in the middle of a hot day in August, and my companions and 1 turned in there, and we were kindly entreated by the poor people to whom the house and farm belonged. We six, in the space of two hours, consumed three gallons of wine, a dozen small loaves of fine bread, and several pounds of delicious raisins, such as you never taste out of Spain, and how much, think you, did that elegant wayside repast cost ?* So TIIK TREASURE OF AX AXCIENT HOUSE. " Perhaps ten dollars," was the reply. " It cost exactly ten pcnce^'' I continued, " which uncommer- cial transaction took place near to the village of Calamocha, in the valley of the Jilloca, once one of the most fertile tracts of country in the Peninsula ; but alas ! there are now in that region more ruins than habitable dwellings, and more houses than men." '* How came that about ? " inquired Job, who, like a hungry fish, rose at every strange fly that was cast above him. " It came about," I said, nothing loth to tell, " through a religious difference. That romantic valley, like many another in Spain, now so desolate and dreary to look at, was once alive witli thousands of men, women, and children, by whose constant free labour and skill, the hills and dales gave fragrance to heaven, and health to the earth. But one fine morning — the mornings are always fine out there — all these busy people were turned out neck and crop, bag and baggage, because they could not be made to believe in the Pope, or make believe that Mary, the Jewish Maiden, was the mother of God, and ever since that sublime act of sweeping the Roman Catholic House of Spain clean of heretics, adorning it not with gold, but with the tinsel of commerce, and governing it with an unhappy race of men who have made the earth groan with their crimes, it has become occupied with the worst of evil spirits for which there is now abundance of room, the country, to speak in plain English, has been ever going from bad to worse ; people starve in the midst of plenty ; poorer than poverty-stricken Job, they are as proud as Lucifer, and are more piteously ignorant than the romantic person who ripped up the goose which laid the golden eggs." *' Oh ! ". said Job, " you are speaking of the Moors. I have often read about them, but never till now since you began to speak of them have I ever realized the force or meaning of what I read. What a wonderful thing is sympathy. I shall go A POSSrnLE REVOLUTION. 8i back to my lessons to read and learn again the chapter of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain." " And you may add the Jews," — but wishing to get back to the subject of emigration, which I contend has been robbed of its beauty and clothed with rags, because of the selfishness and greed of respectable money-mongers who have traded on the holy things of our common life, I added, " If you go offering such a premium as that of making English labourers and artizans landed proprietors in Canada, there will be no need of a profligate Duke of Lerma, or an eloquent bachelor of divinity, or crusading bishops, and an imbecile, easily-terrified king to make Devon and Dorset as desolate 'as the Valley of Daroka.'" " There's no such fear, nor are the two cases the same," said Job ; " for the more the colonies have prospered, the more has England prospered ; and if it had not been for her Colonies, there is no telling where England might have been now. Empty back into England at any moment the Canadas, the Australias, and the real English-feeling people now settled in the United States, and you would have a revolution — as great as any of the past, and very different from all of them." " While I admit what you say," I replied, ** that there is no parallel between the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the emigration of skilled and unskilled workmen from the Mother Country to the plantations, yet the same result might follow to England as followed to Spain. If, for example, all the colonies, after receiving the English army of workers which England has trained and taught, and led to victories, in which the whole world has shared, should take it into their heads to impose prohibitive duties on British merchandise, as some of them have done already." " I have no fear/* Job answered, " about what you say of pro- hibitive duties ever coming to anything serious. Here and there you may find a few political philosophers who are to the rest 82 THE TREASURE OF AN AXCIEXT HOUSE. of British colonists what the Irvingites are to the great bulk of r>ritish Christians, but they are too fantastical to do any perma- nent harm."* " Do you think that any wide-spread tendency still exists in Canada to give up the Union Jack for the "Stars and Stripes?" I inquired, ntending to keep up the discussion under a new guise. " Such a tendency exists, but it is not wide-spread," said Job. *' It is confined to men whose existence depends upon competi- tion, who live to keep up the contagion of competition, and who believe competition and nothing else to be the one spirit that rules the universal race, and guides, prompts, and sanctifies its progress. But those men are becoming fewer in number every day, and every day their number will grow less the faster the colonies of Great Britain determine the peculiar character each is going to play in the future." " If you can give me some illustration, easy to comprehend, of what you mean in this matter of competition, I shall be very grateful to you," I said. "There is nothing more easy," replied Job, with alacrity. ** You," he continued, " have lately been residing at Lake Superior. Can you tell me anything about the great copper mines and mills, and smelting houses up there ? " " I can ttU you everything," I answered. "Then tell me," said the domineering Job, "how much copper they produce there in a year ? " * This conversation took place during the time that the Mackenzie Government were in ofVice — more than four years ago. There are two sides to this question of protection. The example of the United States cannot be lightly disregarded, or its policy discussed by having recourse to political superstitions or dogmatic arguments ot' English free-traders, however eminent in authority or practisetl in elocution. By means of protection the Govern- ment of the United States are paying ofT their colossal national debt, and Mr. Sherman, the Secretary to the Treasury, announces a surplus for this year of one hundred millions of dollars. THE CONTAGION OF COMPETITION, 83 much ackenzie wo sides innot l)e polilical eminent Govern- and Mr. year of " Something less than fifteen thousand tons," I replied. "Are you able to say how much copper is lost by being hastily turned to impalpable powder, and so made unsaveable by any known process in producing those fifteen thousand tons?" " I can tell you — and what is more, I am the first who in- vestigated that subject on a scale of operations sufficiently large to make me an authority upon it. I have carefully analysed the waste sands of more than a hundred mines on Lake Superior, which contained the unsaved copper — and can have no hesita- tion in saying, that in producing the fifteen thousand tons from the mines, smelting and sending them to market, more than ten tliousand tons are every year lost in the operation." Here Job, who was sitting in a low arm chair, thrust back his head, thrust forward his legs, thrust his hands into his pockets, opened his eyes, kept looking at me for five minutes, and never said a word during that interval in our conversation. " You are sure of your facts ?" he inquired at last. On which I, who had been often asked the same before by people who are never sure of anything themselves, begged him not to waste time in putting such a question to me. " You have been in Chili, Adalid ? " This was the first time he had called me by that name, to ,vhich I replied by saying that I had; that Chili possessed abundance of copper for all the world for centuries to come ; that it could supply copper to Europe cheaper than Europe could produce it itself, and that what it could do for Europe it could as easily do for the United States and the Canadas as well. " Here, then, you have the simple illustration you ask for of the 'contagious evil of competition,*" said Job, in mournful earnestness. "The Government of the United States, in order to help to become richer certain of its rich men, implicated in the guilt of competing with their betters in the matter of copper, imposed a duty of 2^,d. a pound on copper from Chili ; and now 84 THE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. II their Government compels every citizen of the United States who buys a copper saucepan, tea-kettle, or other vessel made of copper, to pay 2\i\. per pound on ten thousand tons of copper every year; or, to make th problem more simple, to pay that sum for going through the hideous idleness of emptying one hole — the mine — to fill another — the lake — into which the unsaveable copper is thrown. " The loss to the citizens of the United States," he went on to say, " is beyond my power to calculate, for it is not merely the loss of two thousand times ten thousand twopence-halfpennies every year, there is besides the loss to Cousin Jonathan of a market where he could get a better price for some of his own goods than he could get elsewhere, besides many other goods which are not commercial commodities." " And now as you have given me a surprise by your analyses, I will," Job went on to say, " give you one in exchange. I happened to be staying w'Mi an acquaintance in \Vashington at the time the copper tariff bill was passed through Congress. Andrew Johnson was then President. Congress and Senate passed that bill, and the President put his veto upon it. One of the best State papers written by a President for many years in any country was the message which Andrew Johnson sent to the Senate, in which he set forth his reasons for his veto ; but the copper tariff bill was carried in spite of all." " * How,' do you ask ? I will tell you," continued Job. " A gentleman was sent to Washington by the copper masters of Boston And Lake Superior, on what is called a log-rolling and lobbying expedition. He was a copper master himself, and once an officer in the United States Army. To these qualifications he added those of being a hearty toper, and a gamester fond of playing at poker and euchre. He was supplied with sufficient funds to enable him to take expensive rooms, and live in style at one of the chief hotels in Washington. This agent of the copper LOG ROLLING AT WASHINGTON. 85 masters kept open house. Every night there was a great carouse ; every night the game of euchre attracted many Congress men and Senators to the log-roller's rooms. From euchre they got to poker, another highly speculative game of cards, at which you can lose as many dollars in an hour as you could throw into the sea in the same time, if you threw them in by handfuls at a lime. The log-roller was the chief winner. On the day the copper tariff bill came before Congress, he confidentially informed his friends that if they would only vote for that bill he would never ask them to pay what they owed him in that matter of poker; and after that fashion was the copper tariff bill of the United States passed through its Parliament." I did not make any reply to this, but sat dumb and ashamed to open my lips, for Job's story I knew to be true ; and I knew personally the redoubted citizen who figured in that transaction. So I kept peace. What stunned me was that this story had become common, was in everybody's mouth, and the telling it evoked on numerous occasions an outburst of hearty applause, which to me sounded like anthems from the bottomless pit. " I should be very glad, by the way," continued Job, in a new tone, '* if you would give me, for my own information, some account of what you saw in the copper district of Lake Superior." " There is not very much to see," I replied, and begged him to be more specific in his demand. " What is the extent of this copper region, and what is the general appearance of the landscape? How many towns and villages are there, and how do they lojk ? " "If you include iron mining together with the ^er, the mining district on the American side of Lake Superior is in one con inuous line, 6co miles long and 60 miles wide in some parts, in others it is less. From Marquette to Ontonorgan, the last village to the North-west, before reaching Duluth, the distance is between 200 and 300 miles, and all the land between those two THE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. points is highly mctallifcrrus. There arc more than a dozen towns and villages scattered over that space, ami all, with the exception of Marcjuctte, are the most abject-looking and misery- stricken towns I have ever i:cen in any part of the world. The landscape looks like a murdered thing — a ga/.ing-stock for angels and men. You see nothing for miles and mil^s as you travel along in summer-time but signs of violence ; the blackened stumps of great trees which have been burnt down, look like charred corpses. There are also great hills of waste sand, and mountains of broken stonafi ; forsaken mines, surmounted by fragments of machinery, which hang silent in the air, and might have been used for the execution of thieves and murderers. All is like this till you come to Calumet, where you find the largest native copper mine that is known in the world. All the little streams which once ran through the Huron Hills, and carried copi)er in them, would appear to have emptied themselves into what now seems to be an inexhaustible pit of copper, called the Hecla and Calumet mine. Here the town is substantial looking, and even healthy; and carries itself as if it were not to be frightened out of its wits in the night-lime, and scared away before the morning. But all the other places, if, perhaps, we except L'Ance, are beggarly, filthy, and ugly, and, as if they could, would not only steal your purse, but cut your throat into the bargain." " Did you know any of the working people — the miners, for example, in any of those towns?" inquired Job Spring. " I made it my business to know as many as I could in every one of them," I said. "I lived among them, ate and drank with them, and I know more about them than I like to tell." "Give me," said Job, "a general idea of the people; who they were, where they came from, how they looked, and how they lived." "The great majority," I said, " were from Cornwall; there was a good sprinkling of Germans, a few French, not a few but a HELL UPOX EARTH. «7 a dozen with the I misery- d. The >r angels )u travel d stumps charred ountains iients of .ve been like this e copper [IS which in them, seems to Cahiniet healthy; its wits But all ly, filthy, r purse, ners, for in every ank with )le ; who low they liere was w but a good many Iiish, and an odd lot of lk)hemians, Poles, Hunga- rians, and Swedes. They were, for the most part, hard-working, kind-hearted men, and full of sterling character. A good number had saved a little money. The (lermans and French were given to spending their Sundays in shooting little birds or going after deer. The Cornish were, in their general ways, less intelligent, having no chapels, or Sunday-schools, or religious excitement to keep them up to tlieii old standard, and these relapsed into sulki- ness and general dulness. A few of their number had, however, become rich, and were very good, kind-h .arted, wise men, accord- ing to their light and opportunities ; but the native-born American was always every way superior to them all. The women fared the worst, and the poor Cornish women worse than any. Many went mad. One poor fellow, whose children were growing apace, who had built himself a very decent home, and earned good wage?, was married to one of these unhappy creatures. She had taken to drink. The stillness of the lake-shore, with its stretch of un- ru filed water, the cloudless sky, the tlowerless earth, the murdered treis, the al>sence of church bells, and of every other familiar thing which belongs to English life, the value of whose ministry is never known till it is lost, bewildered her, and then she lost her senses. She made her man's home a hell upon earth ; she starved his children; she broke his furniture to pieces, and smashed his crockery. At last he left her, then she followed after and found him, but he refused to take her back ; so one day, as she stood moaning in the street, she deliberately stripped herself stark naked and stood before his door until he, for very shame, was compelled to take her in." *• That will do," said Job. " I do not want to hear any more. I had an idea that some such life must be the outcome of passing Acts of Congress by the arts of the gambler. I knew that the worst forms of human misery and degradation are to be found there where competition is the order of the day. I thought I M THE TREASURE OF AN AXCIENT HOUSE, knew the full meaning of the cant phrase, ' protection to native industries ' in our Colonies. I perceive that I had something to learn ; and I thank you for the knowledge you have given me. Here the man who wanted to buy the salt-pits again inter- rupted us by putting his head in at the door and inquiring, *' Is the six per cent, on the five thousand a-ye. to be paid in cash or lumber?" Job replied '.ha^ n that was all he stuck at, he might take his choice. Whei the bargain was struck, and all necessary docu- ments signed, Job asked us to take dinner and remain with him for the niglit, which we did. The dinner to which Job invited us was of an early English type ; I mean that it was not what we now understand by a dinner-party. We began at once ori roast beef, without any prefatory soup, fish, or anything else. But the beef was a marvel of succulrnt tenderness ; so were the vegetables. The fruit pies were delightful, so was the bread, which, somehow, made you believe that it was made by the hand of a woman ; so light was it that it retained the perfume of the wheat from which it was made. Job drank home-brewed ale all throughout dinner, but provided wine for those of weaker stomachs. We were waited on by a maid. The man whose soul was in the salt pits, went early to bed ; and Job and I remained alone till very late before we said good- night, and we talked chiefly about the eternal (Question of emigration. The earnestness with which my host spoke of the ignorance, ineptitude, and stolid idleness of the poor emigrants who were sent out of England to Canada, in the vain hope of bettering their condition, approached to fierceness. "Is it not all their own fault," he continued, in a milder tone, 'as you might see after five minutes' talk with them; at the same time it was easy to find out that tlicy had simply been got rid of for EXPERIRSCE, SWEET ASP lilTTI'.R. «9 the good uf those who remained behind — at least tliey came to think 80 themselves. For they speedily discovered that everything they had been told about Canada they had been told wrong ; their stupid hopes had been raised by pretty pictures, and no pains were taken to help them towards realizing them." " But Job," I struck in, " this matter of the emigration of the poor is still going on ; what would you do to improve things ? You appear to have thought about it, and to have some ex- perience in it. Give us some practical advice without ranting." " Do ? " he exclaimed, " I would begin by undoing." "Oh! you would send us back all the moral cripples — the drunkards, thieves, and thriftless ones. I remember the .Aus- tralians once threatened to transfer back to England all the convicts which she had sent to Van Dieman's Land." " Did they ?" replied Job, with much astonishment. " Well, I do not mean that, nor should we gain much by it. But let me say that before I was allowed to emigrate they first -lut me on to a farm for three years, where I had to work, and to work much harder than I had to do when I first came here. I was then fifteen years old. When I arrived there was a friend to receive me. And then I had to begin to learn things which, if I had not before been taught the way of learning, I should soon have got sick of, thrown them up, and run away perhaps." To me it was very delightful to hear Job thus refer to his early life, and I remarked, " That is the way they began with you ; but how do you propose to begin with those who have been begun with at the wrong end ? " "Oh!" he sighed, "it shames me to think of the horrible crimes, the laziness, the misery and waste of human life always to be found in Kngland which need not be." "Come to the point, Job," I cried out, "and do not go firetting and pining in that painful manner. What would you do, I ask again ? " THE TREASURi: OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. t "There arc so many sides to the question, that it is not quite so easy as choosing a knife to choose which side of the emigration question to provide for first ; but, no doubt, if we can get hold of the master principle, all the rest will follow like a flock of sheep." Here there was a silence, and, to my disgust, it was broken by Job asking, " How many parsons are there in England, do you think?" I was getting somewhat wearied with what seemed to be a mania of his. I believe that Job Spring had not an idea in his head that was not connected with a parson, so I answered with some indifference. '* Oh, as many as jackdaws, I should think — not less than fifty thousand of all kinds." ** A vast population, devoted, for the most part, to the pro- pagation of talk," remarked Job, in a tone that carried no malice, but some evident regret. " Hundreds of thousands of starving men and careworn women consoled by hearing of paradise, who never get the slightest chance of learning how to behave in paradise should they ever get there." "Pray go on," I interposed; "have no care for me, I am accustomed to free speech and thinking." " In this our Canada," continued Job, as quietly as if he were winding a ball of worsted, " there are hundreds of thousands of acres of land waiting to be made into a garden, and yonder in England are hundreds of thousands of labourers standing idle, not earning a penny — many preferring to steal it ; and the preachers of paradise seldom or never open their lips to these idlers to tell them of a vineyard to which they might go, and in which they can work, much less to command or hire them to go to work in it." "What rant and cant is this? " I demanded. " Where have you been ; what company do you keep ? Do you perchance correspond with the author of * Modern Painters?'" is not e of the f we can e a flock oken by , do you seemed I hot an on, so I than fifty the pro- o malice, starving disc, who ^have in ne, I am he were sands of onder in idle, not preachers idlers to lich they to work lere have erchance CHURCHES OF LIVING STONES. 9« "I never heard of the gentleman," Job continued. "You asked me for my ideas, and I am trying to give them to you. If you do not interrupt me, I shall the sooner get through. Now if those shepherds of the sheep were to offer a real paradise to these poor, as they might, not as a boon, but as a joy; an inheritance to improve and beautify — what men, sheep and shepherds, they might become, and what a change would happen in the world I There might be held here in Canada fifty farms of forty acres each, and two of these farms should be six times the size of the others, for larger and more varied work, and where model farming would be carried on. There should be also farms where the untaught labourer would be received on his arrival from England, drilled on it, and kept at his work and prepared for better and higher things. One of the better things would be his own land, on to which he would pass when he had laboured for a period of two years. He would be enrolled in the Dominion Militia at once, and if he stuck to his duty he would receive farm implements, seed, and oxen on easy terms from the General in command, after a certain time, which, as I have said, need not exceed two years, and" *' Hold !" I cried. " Do me the favour to tell me, where are the poor parsons to get the hundred thousand pounds or so with which to start this delightful militant-agricultural man-helping Utopia?" " Get it ! Where do they get their stained glass from ? and their brass filigree and twisted candlesticks, to say nothing of the gilt cocks stuck on spires, which cost hundreds of poands a-piece? Let them build churches of living stones ; they will cost less money, and endure much longer than any that are built of blue stone or Portland. Say we start with a capital of a hundred tliousand pounds, we should have no difficulty in getting it. We could draw up a prospectus that would make men's guineas start out of their pockets like fleas start when the blinds are drawn 99 THE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. and you begin to move. We should not have the least trouble in getting labourers, n getting the farms, in raising corn and beef, potatoes, barley ; and we could become the greatest cheese- mongers that the sun ever shone upon." ''Oh!" he exclaimed in fervent language, "how many hun- dreds of thousands of pounds have been thrown into such quick- sands as the Eliza Mine, oil wells, and schemes of impossible railways, and not a groat into the one only profitable of all investments — namely, that of human industry guided by know- ledge !" " That is an idea which I should think would be able to fight its own way in the world, if it gets a chance," I said. " It is a great idea," said Job, " and like many another of its kind, no one knows who first gave it out. Is it not a thing of marvel that we should have among us so many men of really great intellect, and so few with what may be called great ideas ? If money-making could only for once be connected with a great idea, even money-making might become a means of grace. I could name three men who by themselves could make a sensible im- pression on the food supplies of England — a marked sensible impression on that truly hideous spectacle called able-bodied pauperism — and gain ten times more profit than they gain at present by dealing in other people's money, taking care of it, or doing the easy work of mere pawnbrokers. But they cannot commit them to this, because these men are as innocent of great ideas as a guinea-pig is of a purse. They are, likewise, mighty timid, and also somewhat ashamed of being singular, and so they remain the common-place things they have always been, and always will be " " What ! " he exclaimed, sharply, but without anger, " have you gone to sleep ? " " I am very sorry, my dear Job, but you do preach with great power." ADVENTURE WITH A GREAT DOG. 93 )uble in id beef, cheese- ny hun- 1 quick- possible 2 of all ^ know- to fight er of its thing of lly great jas ? If eat idea, I could ible im- sensible e-bodied gain at re of it, y cannot 3cent of likewise, singular, always (( have ith great " Well, well ; let us go to bed now." The joyous sun of an early autumnal morning in Canada does its best to rouse any one out of bed who has the least taste for enjoying the charms of a new-born day. At an early hour, I was awakened by the sun coming into my room like a turbulent friend in search of a companion, whose advances admit of no denial. I got up at once, opened the window, and received a breath of air as delicious to breathe as it is to eat ripe fruit freshly gathered. I then proceeded to make use of a tub of water and an enormous sponge which had been placed in my room by the thoughtful master of the house. While I was in the midst of my ablutions, a thundering attack was made upon my room door, which hastened my movements. " Come in," I was at last in a proper condition to sing out ; but as no one came in, and the noise being repeated, I half opened the door to see who my visitor might be, when, to my great surprise, and altogether against my will, the door was pushed open, and in bounced a Newfoundland dog about the size of one of the lions in Trafalgar Square. " Holloa ! " I cried, in as cheery and confident a voice as were possible to me, and the great beast bounded over the tub of water, and at once turned round and fa:ed me, lying down on his stomach ; he then stretched out his two forepaws, opened his mouth, rolled out his bright red tongue, and began beating the floor with his tail as if he were threshing wheat, and expected to be paid for it. I was as polite to that dog as if he were a man of superior intelligence, who had come to confer on me some favour. Each garment I took up and put on suggested some remark, which I addressed to the dog in the most musical tones I could throw into my voice. I called him in a familiar way all the endearing names I could think of. If I could have turned all the money I had in my pocket into bread I should have done so at once, and in the most playful manner thrown it into the yawning jaws which lay 94 THE TREASURE OF AN AXCIEXT HOUSE. open before me. At last I was dressed, which Newfoundland seemed to know quite as well as I did. " Come on," I cried to the great fascinating beast, making a dash at the door, and as if we had known each other all our lives. To ray intense relief, the enormous brute bounded out of the room, down stairs, and through the front door, which stood wide open, on to the grass plot, and once there he gave a bark which sliook the dew-drops from the trees. Of course I followed him, and I was no sooner outside the house than he scampered off to a remote part of the garden, I meekly going after him, evidently much to Hector's pleasure — Hector was his name. As I turned the corner of the house, Hector, watchin my approacli, prostrated himself on the gravel walk in front of a garden-house, some dis- tance off, opened his great jaws, pat out his great tongue, and began beating the ground with his great tail, as he had beaten the carpet in my room. Up I went to the summer-house, as Hector of course expected, and there I found Job Spring, dressed for the day, seated inside, sm.oking a pipe and reading. " Good morning : how did you sleep ? Vou like dogs, I see," was the greeting I received. And I had to confess that I did like dogs, but was not quite sure if I liked being taken into custody by one of Hector's size. As I was quite sure that Hector was listening to all I said, and understanding it, I was very guarded in my remarks. I learnt that Job had sent the dog to call me, who instructed the creature to bring me to the garden-house, and very faithfully had the dog done his master's will. Here there came into our shady retreat a dairy-maid carrying a large white jug of milk. The appearance of this girl, the way she came in, and the curtsey she made when she went out, made as much impression on my mind as anything else I had seen in that house. It was the only curtsey I had ever seen a woman give to a m.m in the whole of the New "World, and I ndland .king a r lives, of the id wide : which :d him, off to a ,'idently turned 3strated me dis- ue, and beaten 3use, as dressed , I see," 01 quite s size. I said, structed aithfully carrying girl, the 'ent out, e I had • seen a 1, and I ROSE MARIGOLD. 95 could not help reflecting how mucli the New World had lost by allowing that act of grace and worship to fall into disuetudc. Probably, if the Job Springs were more numerous, there would be more women to make curtseys. " Did you notice the servant who brought us the milk ? " inquired Job, in cheerful seriousness. I told him that it was a habit of mine always to notice a man's servants, — and sometimes I preferred the servants to the man. " You," ray host continued, " wish to have a plan or idea for conducting emigration. There is no plan to be had for individual cases. Every individual case requires a plan of its own. This servant, whose name is Rose Marigold, was dairy-maid at home to a man whose name or calling I will not name. All I will say of liim is that, without being a scoundrel, he wrought the social ruin of that girl ; had she remained in the old country she would have certainly added to its evil and shame, but her master put an advertisement in a London paper, which quite by accident caught my eye, and it moved my heart. I answered it. Rose has now been my servant these five years. She is a jewel. That little fellow, whom you see toddling across the lawn yonder, is her boy, and he will become a Canadian farmer. He might have died in a ditch, and his mother on the gallows ; but God is merciful to all who hope and trust in Him." I was greatly affected, and will not trust myself to write all I know of Rose Marigold, or the passionate feelings wliich flooded my heart on hearing all that Job Spring told me of her. The attachment of my generous host to Canada as a place to live in was as plain to be seen as the blue sky which stretched above us. It coloured his conversation ; it never left him ; and in some form or other it was constantly coming up. I started a new subject, and talked of getting more capital into Canada, as a means of increasing the floating capital of the world. "There is, for that matter," he said, "money enough in the 96 THE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. land if il were made the best use of ; but as that is not the case, we must turn for more to the capitalists of the country which sends us the greatest number of emigrants. There is nothing I should like so much as to have a congregation of British capitalists to preach to for a few weeks. I would make an impression of a very novel sort. I could make known some useful facts. I happen to know of at least a dozen strong, hearty, honest young fellows in dif- ferent parts who own as many farms. They have brought them- selves into straits by being in too great a hurry. Each has a family growing up, and expenses are increasing a little faster than the profits. They are good farmers, steady, industrious, and intelligent ; but they are too poor to make the most of their farms. They are all in debt, and their debts are owed to the worst of all creditors — namely, a limited liability Banking Com- pany, which has no soul to be saved, no heart to feel, and no bodily part that is appropriate for kicking. Now, by the judicious expenditure of money on these dozen farms, each could be made to employ from ten to fifteen additional labourers, and the united product of these farms in one year would excite wonder and astonishment. I would induce my capitalists to invest their money in these farms. I would show that as a safe investment they would make more profit than by lending their money to the safest foreign power that has never repudiated its debts, and that they could have in addition to that profit, much pleasure — and also some control over the manner in which their money would be used." "My dear fellow," I said, interrupting him, "you must not dream of providing the British capitalist with absolutely safe in- vestments; if you did, you would spoil him of one of his greatest amusements. Speculation is as much a necessity to your profes- sional capitalist as drinking is to your poor ignorant labourer, or gambling is to him for whom there no longer remains a pleasure from which the bloom has not been taken, or a single NO NEED TO PERISH. 97 ise,we nds us lid like preach f novel ) know in dif- t them- L family :r than IS, and >f their to the g Com- and no idicious e made ; united ler and 3t their estment to the nd that -e — and ^ would ust not safe in- greatest profes- ibourer, lains a a single sacred thing which has not lost its power and influence over his heart and mind." " Why," exclaimed Job, with much genuine surprise, " what more speculative thing in the world is there than farming ? What 'vithbugs in the potatoes, bugs in peaches, wheat bugs, grape bugs, slugs, grasshoppers, wind, no wind, rain, now too much now too little, a man may find quite enough to speculate upon." I enjoyed a hearty laugh at my friend's simplicity. I did all I could to undeceive him both in vindicating the ways of men made of money, and pointing out the confusion of ideas he was in on the right a man has to do with his own as he likes, together with the duty that he owes to the intelligence of the world. We were sorry to part, Job pressed me with great earnestness and affection to remain with him for a week ; but the cares of this world forced me away from further communion with one of the stoutest-hearted men it has been my lot in life to know and love. As my friend and I drove away from the house, I said to him : " You told me that Mr. Spring was one of your self-made men." "So he is," eplied my companion. To which I answered that Mr. Spring was as much a self- made man as yonder oak was a self-made tree. But the man, although a friend of mine, did not seem to understand the remark. Job Spring is one of the many treasures of the ancient English kingdom, which are dispersed through one of England's many mansions that we call Canada. And there are many like him, with plenty of room in which to grow, and who hold within them a sufficiency of power to hand down for centuries to come the English name, and who know that there is no need that a single Englishman should perish, either for lack of bread, or the lack of a noble human love. H CHAPTER II. I WILL tell of another of these chance acquaintances, because it will help us to understand some of the ways of life peculiar to Canada, and appreciate some of the novel conditions under which a man lives in that ever-improving part of the New World. I made the fresh acquaintance of which I am now to tell, on board a great pleasure steamer, while running down the River St. Lawrence on a trip to the Thousand Islands, which in the Auiumn put on a painted pomp worth -o 'rneying several thouiiand miles to look at. An imaginative person might be excused on first beholding the coloured trees of these Islands, if he believed that the gold and purple clouds of the summer had fallen there from the skies, and were held by some unseen hand among the leaves and branches. The native Indians must have taken their fashions of tailoring from these gay and gaudy princes f^f the earth and sky; and certainly an Indian chief in full costume, in all his magnifi- cence of red and white plumes, his porcupine quills and coloured leathers, is not unlike a maple tree whose leaves have undergone much kissing of the Canadian sun. I had occupied a few monotonous hours in reading a book called " Man and Wife ; or. How to become a Brute in six lessons " — or something like that, and a book more false and hollow it had never been my lot to buy — at least I thought so at that time ; and, in revenge for my folly in buying it, I flung it into the river, where at the moment I would also have flung its writer had my power been equal to my will. This ostentatious act of , because : peculiar )ns under :w World. D tell, on River St. ,c Autumn and miles I on first evcd that lere from le leaves ashions of 1 and sky; s magnifi- l coloured .mdergone ig a book ite in six alse and Light so at .ing it into its writer JUS act of A MAGXIFIC/CXT YOUXG DOCTOR. gg charity or boasting on my part, happened to be observed by a fellow passenger, who, like myself, had nothing else to do but stand bolt upright among several humlred people, and look over the side of the steamer at the rapid river, over whose rippled waves we were going at the rate of sixteen miles an hour. Presently he and I began discussing the demerits of the book I had consigned to a watery grave. This led us on to other things, and ended in our dining together at the same hotel in Montreal, where we stayed that one night — occupying the same doubie-bedded room — and returning to Toronto together in the same steamer on the day following. He turned out to be a young doctor, who had taken up his abode in the region which lies on the (Canadian side of Lake Ontario, between Toronto and Lake Simcoe — a good wide region, sufficiently indefinite for anyone curious to discover the dwelling-place of one whom I may now call my friend. It seems to me, from the little experience I have had in the matter, that what the doctor of souls once was, such is the doctor of physic of to-day in the estimation of certain well-to-do people. No professional man inspires such thorough-going devotion in the female breast as a young and handsome doctor, provided that to ability in his art he adds great firmness of character, coupled with sweetness of manners. This is not to be wondered at ; the con- fessions which some women are ready to pour into the professional ear are of a kind to beget confidence, and inspire trust. It is no doubt this passion for confession in certain women which makes such thorough-paced charlatans of certain doctors ; and it is remarkable liow like a fawning priest goes your thorough-bred money-making fashionable doctor. His dress, including the white necktie, his sleek ways, his complexion, the whites of his eyes, his measured walk, his serene and equable conversation, his universal knowledge, his smiling despotism, his steady and unshaken faith in things long ago exploded, the awful sanctity of his behaviour when in the company of the superior clergy, all show a curious parallel with 100 7///; TI^EASU/iE OF AX AXC/EXT HOUSE. the purely professional priest. It would seem that when to a man — be his vocation the saving of souls, or the healing of bodies — the vocation becomes a mere profession in which tiie money he is to make, or the social distinction he is to win, becomes the paramount object of life, in that same moment do the two quacks beco.ne transformed into the same likeness, especially if the sphere in which they both move be noted for its love of ease, its insincerities, and its fondness for what is only common to the superior brutes who are ever dumb. Then are you sure to see your sleek family physician, or your fashionable doctor and the family priest, or the fashionable parson, of one and the same colour in cloth and in skin, both equally and scrupulously clean ortside, both as empty and sometimes as undesirable within, as a stranded boat on a bank of mud. It was the somewhat free handling of come such subjects as this that established a common feeling and interest between my young doctor and myself — so strong that we became friends, as we remain to this day. I stayed with him several days at his own house. It was the snuggest place a man could desire, and only wanted a wife to make it the happiest — provided she was a wife, and not a milliner or money-monger, or any of the other equally objection- able things which pass under that name. There was a garden of about half an acre, which contained for the most part pot herbs of every sort, vegetables innumerable, and fruit trees ; attached to the garden was a field in which, besides a cow, there were several pigs, numerous geese, and innumerable egg-producers, all hemmed in on two sides with brick walls, and the other two fenced with shingles. The house was built of wood, but was commodious and weather- proof, the rooms large and lofty, and the stories two. At the back was a large yard paved with brick, with dog kennels, in which were housed spaniels, pointers, hounds, and a bull dog with a very observing eye and a curled tail ; there were stables, and two CAXADIAX CHI.liR. loi horses, a four wliccled biij^^y, and a handsome sleigh. The inside of the house was plainly furnished, the bedrooms were like the soldier's quarters, who is above all luxury in that department except that of a clean bed, a tub of water, and a rough towel. A njan servant, as well as a maid waited at table. The dinner was better, both in the quality and variety of food, in cooking and serving, than will be ordinarily found in the houses of very wealthy people in London. The wine was good, the beer excellent, the whiskey Old Courbon, which Prince Napoleon once said was the best thing of the name he had ever known. During the hours of day the Doctor rode out to sec h'.s patients, or he drove out, and then he took me with him. He introduced me to many admirable people whom it was a pleasure to meet, who had cut their way through many troubles, while weighted with heavy sorrows, to safety and repose. Many of these not only had carried on their backs their poor relations, but their sinful relations likewise, and made very long journeys through life witli such impedimenta, coming to rest at last, thank- ful that they had done such service. One evening the Doctor was visited by some ofi'icers of the British army, who were quartered not very far off. They had come to borrow the dogs, and to invite the Doctor and me to a day's sport on the morrow. They remained the whole of a night, which will live in my memory as one ol the merriest a man may spend. ^Ve had all of us travelled far and wide — in India and Africa, in Australia, New Zealand, and Peru ; and from the Pacific to the Amazon, and from the western shores of the Atlantic to the Meta and the Cauca, and heaven only knows where besides, and we were all born on British soil, and not a renegade amongst us. Not with an income of less than five thousand pounds per annum could a man command the social distinction, or find such society and comtorts of life, not to mention a long string I02 THE TREASURE OF AS AXC/I.XT noO'SE. of health-yielding duties, as my friend ioiwd in Ontario, and which cost him certainly not so much as three thousand dollars a-year. But behind those three thousand dollars was a free, open- hearted, brave, handsome fellow, as full of health as he was of knowledge, as modest as he was true of heart, and with only one failing — which was, perhaps, the secret why he had not married, or which kept him from dipping his hand into the bag of snakes culled marriage, on the chance of securing the one being th.at will not poison his life or sting him — and that failing was, that he would always have his own way, and, on all essential and vital matters, think his own thoughts, and carry them out in a perfectly original and masterful fashion. " How came such a magnificent fellow as you to leave Old England?" I ventured to ask once, when we were alone. We were smoking our pipes after dinner, in front of the great fire of logs which bla/.ed on the wide hearth of my friend's dining-room, when 1 put to him that stereotyped question of mine. After a pause, and looking at me over his pipe, out of the corner of his right eye, he said : '• It seems to me that you have asked that question before. There is a dryness about it, and about your way of putting it, that smacks of the diary-keeping man, who is wholly cal- lous to human frailties or individual tastes and feelings, and only looks upon human beings as so mucli raw material for using up in ink. Come, confess." " It is true," I said, " that I have asked that question very often, of many and different people, but never from lightness of heart, nor because I am going to write a book — though if I ever do write, it shall be a book as unlike any other as I am unlike my neighbours. There must be some sort of pleasure in writing books, or so many women would not WHAT liROUGHT YOU HERE f ro3 engage in the occupation ; and one of these days I may try and find out in what that pleasure consists. But I am not thinking about it at present." " Cicnlle and harmless creature/" he replied, in assumed tones of sarcasm. " Might 1 ask .vhat first prompted you to put that question, to whom you first put it, and what answer you re- ceived ? " "Well," I said at once — for I thought I perceived a slight suspicion of my having trespassed on his private alTairs — *' tiic first person I ever put that question to was myself. The occasion of it was my being lost in the Desert cf Atacama, and when I was very near l)ecoming food for condors, those scavengers of the tropical hills \ and the answer I received was so amusing, that I have come to believe there is more fun and humour in us who wander over the face of the earth than may be found in the good mortals who stay at home, and that both the fun and humour are of different stuff. We get into the habit of chaffing and bullying ourselves, which is even more amusing than playing with dogs or parrots. When I went wandering in the dark on that, to me, eventful night, beneath the tropic of Capricorn, I could not help laughing, amidst all my woe, at the question which seemed to come from my house-hold soul to the wandering soul then mounted on the top of a mule, " What the devil was it that brought you here ? " and the answer which the fire-side soul obtained made me laugh, and almost hold opinion with Pythagoras that the souls of animals infuse themselves into the trunks of men, not in Gratiano's sense, as he conveyed it to the immortal Shylock, — for I suppose your worship believes as much in hell as in heaven., — but rather as the snob Malvolio would have it. I need not tell you the answer I gave to myself. I am only accounting to you for having acquired the habit of asking some of the men, whom I met abroad, w'^ u it was that first set them thinking of leaving home." " Very well,"' returned my friend, " 1 need not answer your I04 THE TREASURE OE A\ ANCIENT HOUSE. question cither. But what kind of answer have you received from other folk?" '* Oh," I replied, " one man said that his reason for immigrating was that he was very fond of a garden ; and another that he was liungry." "A very good answer, too, although for that matter I have known men emigrate because they had no appetite \ but go on." "Another said that he came out to America because they insisted that he must doff his bonnet when he went for his wage. He refused, and came out to a land where he could be free. A third said that it was for love." '•Ah! that must have been a woman. Love and pride are potent causes of motion, as well as heat." ** While another declared that his sole reason for leaving Eng- land for the New World was the decline of the drama." " All this," my friend said, " is surprising and delightful. Here is a new object in life for my idle hours, and one that will supply me with a fund of delight ; but then I haven't got that fascinating eye of yours^ or that remarkable impudence, which seems to belong to you as its perfume belongs, shall I say, to the dandelion ? How, in all wonder, did you get at that woman's answer who said that she came out from the '''*ld Home for love ?" " Oh, I flattered the baby," I replied, *• who was caressing its mother, and kissing her in the most delighted manner, which excited my envy, and I made some remark about man being an unthankful; restless, ambitious animal, seldom happy, and always wanting to be in somebody else's shoes." "And whose shoes do you want to be in just now," she in- quired, with a pleasant intelligence. And I said "The baby's," on which, of course, we both laughed, and then she told me her story. " That method is quite beyond me," said the doctor, " and I suspect you to be a Jesuit, for it is a conviction of mine, on which SCIENCE VERSUS HUMBUG. lo: I invariably act, that any fellow who is cleverer than myself is bound to belong to the Society of Jesus ; but I repeat, all this is interesting. Here do we find all the elements of national great- ness, the passion for pastoral pursuits, love, pride, the drama, and the lower appetites, to satisfy which men consent to till our soil, black our boots, dig coal and iron, and brass, sweep chimneys, and do all the other hard and necessary things which certainly neither you nor I could, or would do, and which must be got over if we would live as the superior animals ought to live. Well, I had intended to give a rallying answer to your highly impertinent question, but I relent and forgive you, for there is some admir- able use to be made of this method of pumping people. I shall adopt it and cut you out, for is not competition the glorious attribute which distinguishes the man from the ass ? "Know then, oh, wandering sage," he continued, " that the leason why I left old England was fatty degeneration — peristaltic action — aconite, together with dogmatic condemnation of Dr. Sangrado's treatment; all these at one time or another got me into such hot water with my old dad, who was physician to Bishop Sweetapple, as well as to the Lady Dowager Duchess of Prtchouli, that I was glad to pack up my traps when my old governor suggested it, and give up lies and imposture for the sake of living, as it becomes a man to live, who cares more for fresh air than lavender powder, and prefers the freedom which finds a joy in every new day, to the sleepy monotony that is afraid to laugh lest it should land you on the shore of silence to live in the cold. And now, O sage, take my answer, and add the same to your repertoire^ and to be as epigrammatic as possible write down for your answer 'Science versus Humbug,' and give that as the reason why I, among the many of your acquaintances, left old England, and why I am now here in this new land. The dear old bishop, who was very fat, fell sick of a fever, and at a certain stage of the disorder my old quack father proposed the Sangrado io6 THE TREASURE OF AN AXCIEXT HOUSE. method of letting blood from the Episcopal arm. I not only remonstrated, but was guilty of the indecorum of swearing at the practice of my venerable parent, and all the venerable humbugs associated with him, in their treatment of the case of Bishop Sweetapple. I went even further, and said to the friends of the right reverend prelate that if he were then bled he would infallibly die. Humbug shivered in its shoes, but as Satan and my own fate ^yould have it, I had to compound with Ilumbug ; and to save my dear old father from humiliation in his own eyes, as well as to wash my hands of a set of murderers who commit homicide on principle, I came out here, and I may tell you that I am right glad I did so. '* You are a homoeopath?" I remarked, in an inquiring tone; but he turned on me with so much fierceness for presuming to call him, or label him anything, that I had to declare myself quite ignorant of physic, and I did not care how long my ignorance lasted. We continued on the best of terms, and I never visited his part of Canada without going to see him, and without receiving a warm reception, and I had to promise always to make his house my home when I passed that way. Let us take another case altogther dift'erent, but pointing to the same end. CHAPTER III. Not all the men of whom I asked the reason why they left the old country answered with equal alacrity. Some put on an ex- pression of countenance that was far from pleasant, as if they had been reminded of a matter somewhat associated with pain, while others were glad to have the time re-called to mind when they began life anew, in a new land, under a new sky, surrounded by new faces, and inspired with the strength of new hope. These I foun.' were generally men who had started with a definite idea, ber-t on realising it, and finding each day's happiness to consist in advancing towards it if it were only the advance of an inch — the saving of a sixpence, or the removal from an acre of ground of a handful of stones. It was a habit of mine to stroll outside the towns and cities where I happened to be staying, with the object of discovering traces of English tastes, customs, or ways that could be recognised at a glance, as an old mode or fashion kept up for its own sake in new circumstances and under new conditions. I have made agreeable acquaintances by recognising certain old time words in the talk of people who had come from certain English localities. But this was easy compared with such tricks as trundling a mop — the way of cleansing a bucket — adorning a window with flowers, or paint- ing a door, and dressing out its step. More than once have I amused myself and astonished others by asking certain tidy women who seemed to have much love for domestic cleanliness in dress, if they had not come from such and such a town ; and when io8 Till-: TRi:ASURIi OF AX AXCIEXT HOUSE. with a laugh they answered mc in the adlrmalive, and demanded to know how 1 had found that out, the reply would be, " Well, only in Masston did they use such curtains stretched on thin brass rods across the window — and only in Folkshire did men cultivate gardens with such earnestness and passionate love." One day, being a couple of miles or more outside the little flat town called London, in Ontario, I came on a cottage standing in a garden, that roused in me much violent curiosity. I could not refrain from going to see the person who lived in it, and learning, if possible, if the builder of that cottage and the maker of that garden had not once lived in Masston. The cottage had a wide porch in front, supplied with a settle on each side, and the walls were spread over with honeysuckle and currant trees, v.'hose branches were pinned against the walls in careful regularity. " Good morning, do you come from Masston ? " was my greeting to the solitary man who opened the door. He was a spare built and somewhat timid fellow, not in the least like a man who would of his own accord get up from the place where he had been knocked down, and renew the strife in which he had been worsted. " Masston," was his reply, " no, I did not come from Masston ; but I was born there, and so was my father, and my grandfather." " Did you know anyone in Masston ?" " Why, yes. I knew the Haydons and Mr. Buckle, and old Sparrer — that was when I was a Dame Cumberladge's scholar ; but I left Masston early, and settled in Ampton after my father died. Won't you come in and sit down ? " he said, abruptly, but with evident cordiality. Without asking me if I would take any refreshment, he straightway went and brought a brown stone jug full of beer — of his own brewing — two clean pipes, and a tobacco pot with a leaden damper inside. A ^r.LV /'Kn.-ir VAS.STOX. 109 stretched :shire did lassionate ; little flat anding in could not i learning, ir of that ad a wide the walls 2s, whose •ity. ' was my lot in the from the e strife in Masston ; ndfalher." and old scholar ; my father uptly, but iment, he f beer— of ot with a **This," I said, taking up the straight jug with a wide mouth, ** is Masston ale, and that is a Masston tobacco pot.'' *' Yes, I follow my mother's way of brewing, and tliat tobacco pot belonged to my father ; it is the only thing of his I have, except yonder pair of sugar-nippers, which I saw him make." *' Do you follow your father's trade ? " " Not exactly ; he was a steel toy maker, I am a coach-smith," he said, with much mildness. "That surely is a new name," I remarked; "used you not to be called a whitesmith ? " He did not know, he replied, in a voice which clearly said, " I am a solitary man, I know nothing, except to make springs, brew ray own beer, and dig my own garden ; and although I live more on the past than in the future, yet I do not lead a questioning life. I live on the things which come to me of their own accord." I made myself as pleasant as I could. I spoke of cheerful things. I praised his garden, his cottage, the tobacco, his hospi- tality, and what appeared to be his way of life ; but the more I talked the more silent he became, and a look came into his eyes which made him wear the expression of a man who had once been very tired, and could never get a sufticiency of rest. "I suppose you had to leave the Old Country," I said, leading up to my usual question, " like many others, because there was no woik for you." " No," he answered, with an animation that raised my spirits, and helped me to put my query point blank. *' Well, well," he began, " it is strange that it should be so pleasant to talk to a stranger, but it is like going back to early times to see one who knows the town where we were born when we meet in a strange land." Here he took a long pull at the brown jug, and then with some brightness coming into his somewhat careworn face, he told his story, which was something like as follows : no THE TREASURE OF AN ANCIENT HOUSE. *' If you had asked me why I left Old England a little while after I got here, I could not have told you. I don't mean to say that I didn't know, but that I couldn't tell. I had no words in tny mouth for the job. I had plenty of feelings, and plenty of hope, and plenty of disgust, but I could not have expressed myself well enough to make anybody understand either one or the other. What is very curious is, that after I had lived here for a couple of years, and began to make the garden grow, I began to talk just as when I was a lad. I could not only speak plainly what my thoughts were, but new words came to me every day, just as naturally as the graining comes into the oak ; and I believe that curious welling up of words inside me is owing to nothing else than the fresh air, and living among green things of your own growing, to say nothing of having plenty of work to do, and as much play as you like. " How I came to emigrate was something like this : You must know that when I was born, and for some time after, the gardens in my native town w-ere almost as many as the houses. Every householder had a garden, and our garden was famous for its gooseberries and black currants, cherries and pears, potatoes and spinach, and all the other vegetables. For many a year after the time when I, as a young shaver, was allowed to go into the garden and pull as many gooseberries as I liked, that old garden was the only thing that was a real pleasure to me to think about — it came into my dreams, it stuck to my fancy, and all the more tliat by the time I had grown up, the garden, somehow or other, had gone ; yes, gone for ever, as clean as the days of my childhood had gone. It was eaten up by a brickfield first, then a thundering big manu- factory was built upon it, and, last of all, the garden and the country round it was run through by a railway. " That eating up of our garden was the fate of all the other gardens, and in less than fifteen years there was no garden to be seen, much less to walk in. Still less were there any blood-red or STT. FALLEN AMONG THIEVES. ITl lillle while nean to say 10 words in d plenty of r expressed ;her one or lived here o\v, I began leak plainly : every day, id I believe to nothing !jf your own do, and as : You must the gardens ses. Every nous for its )otatoes and ear after the D the garden den was the )ut — it came lore that by :r, had gone ; 3d had gone. 5 big manu- ien and the 11 the other garden to be blood-red or bearded, or gold-skinned gooseberries to pick. The town became as famous for smoke and dirt, and misery and disease, and ac- cidents which maimed men's limbs, as it was once famous for its gooseberries ' and good beer.* " I, among many another, became a ruined man at the age of thirty. What the process of my ruin was, may I be damned if I know. If I had been the only one among them who became poor and miserable, I should have said it was through my own fault ; but all my neighbours got into the same mess. Not a week passed but somebody came to grief. There was an auction in every street at exactly the same hour every week, some of the neighbours being sold up for their rent. Men with ten children had to give up living in a decent house and to go into pigsties, and huddle to- gether ; then they began to die. Some fell into low habits, others died with their eyes v.-ide open. The women — Ciod Almighty love them — took to tippling ; then their big daughters ran away to other towns, and were never heard of again. We were all brought to horrible straights. Only the masters got rich, and the richer they became the poorer did we become ; and, may I go to hell if it isn't true, that when one of our neighbours had to sell up, and come down and go and live with thieves, it acted like a plague on everybody else. Everybody else, sooner or later, came down too. But the greatest blow was robbing us of our gardens. And when the gardens went, and were covered over with houses and shops, we who had lived, as it were, in the country all our lives, felt as if we were being walled up alive." *' Do you really recollect all that?" I inquired; and my voice, against my own will, sounded as if laden with tears. " Recollect it ! " he exclaimed, looking at me out of his large blue eyes, which had now for the first time, as it seemed, come into view, "No, I don't recollect it; it ain't recollection at all; it's something a tidy bit stronger than recollection. I don't recollect my heart beating yesterday. 112 THE TREASURE OF AX AA'UE.XJ' 1101':.E, ** It was somcwlicrc about that time," he proceeded to say, ** that I got a horrible fever. I was altogether thrown on my back. I had to sell all my tools and my clothes, and my old father's watch and seals, and was as near going on the parish as hundreds of the old men and women of the town had gone already." ** What is the cause of this hatred of the Workhouse among you working people ? " I inquired — not because I was altogether ignorant of many of those causes, but I wanted to hear this man's particular reason for reasons of my own. *' Some of you fellows," I continued, '* look upon the Workhouse as a disgrace." "So it is." "As a deadly insult " " So it is." *' To your existence ; or, as if it were not a place of refuge to which you have a right to fly, but a trap to catch and hold you, from which they will serve you up for somebody's dinner when the order comes." Here there came into my host's mouth and nose and eyes the most abominable sneer I had ever seen mar a human face \ it was not only horribly visible to the eye — you could almost smell it. It wrinkled his forehead, buried his blue eyes out of sight, and crumpled his cheek bones. " You seem to be a clever enough chap," he began to say at last, after regarding me through his wrinkles as a thing to be despised, *' You go to an English Workhouse, the best on 'em, and try to read what is written on the faces of some of the men ; they'll never tell you what they think or feel, because they can't — if they would, mark you, they wouldn't be in that Workhouse, and that's a nut you can try and crack whenever you like to try ; but am J to tell you how I came to emigrate ? " " By all means ; I am not going to let you off telling me that story, and then we can return to the Workhouse afterwards." *' Damn the Workhouse," he cried, fiercely, *' let's have another DRESS I XG A. YD KELPLXG. "3 to say, ly back, father's Lindrods among together is man's fellows," refuge to old you, when the eyes the it was smell it. ight, and |to say at ig to be on 'em, [le men ; can't — luse, and |tryj but me that Is." another jug of ale;" and up he got, and with much cheerfulness went and drew another quart of the wholesome brown beverage, of which we both partook with ctjual grace and thankfulness. " While I was down in the fever," he continued, with a new face, a new voice, and a simple gesture of his right hand, " the gooseberry gardens used to come into my mind as real as when I was a lad. I could smell the strawberries and the nettle-blossoms. I'm blessed if the taste of some of the black hearts and gold beards and jargonelles did not come into my mouth and make it water again. At last, when I was able to get up and walk about, I went straight to the spot where our old garden once grew, and when I found that I was no longer dreaming, but was then standing in a new, dirty street, and for gooseberry bushes there was nothing but long, dead, straight brick walls, and for sunshine falling on lettuces and onions, beans and apples, there was nothing but clouds of black smoke, and beastly mud, and broken bits of crockery, and brick ends, ; id pieces of dirty newspapers, I began to cry like a child. " I got better, and soon got to '.vork again. One day there came a letter from Canada, from an old shopmate. I heard it read, and two lines in that letter opened my eyes, and put new life into me. The two lines were these : ' We have got a splendid garden, and grow our own grapes as well as apples ; and as for peaches, they are worth walking twenty miles to see.' " I said nothing to anybody, but I made all sorts of inquiries, and I read more newspapers than ever I had read before in all my life, but I could never find anything about Canada in any one of them that gave me any light. But I started off at last, with a sort of tremble for my hope that I was going to get a garden of my own, and live among people who owned their own gardens. God knows I never dreamed the half of what I have found it. Here I have a garden twice as big as my old dad's ; all my neighbours have gardens; and one of the blessings of having a garden of your own, and neighbours with their own plots of flowers and vegetables 114 THE TREASURE OE AN AXCIEXT HOUSE. and fruits is, that we can live — live together without talking or drinking or anydiing else, except being up early in the morning, and taking in the breath of the sweetest things that grow. That was how I came to emigrate. I wanted a garden. I lundreds of folk have asked me what I have done after all in coming to Canac'a. 'You are still a working man,' they say, 'and you could be that in the Old Country, where the work is not so hard, nor the winter so long, nor everything so new that it tumbles to pieces for 1 icic of years.' "I just answer them," he said, with a hearty chuckle, "that I've got my own garden, and nobody can take it from me. All my neighbours have got their gardens, and nobody can take 'cm from them ; and we are all hearty and well, and if the winters are long, they arc not cold, and if they are cold the air is fresh, and there is plenty of fuel. Besides, the winters here are a wonderful \ime for rest and for good fellowship. All the time that the soft snow lies on the soil, men's hearts grow closer to one another, and get warm." I have given some slight sketches of the needless misery that exists in England. I could easily have added to their number from personal observation, for I visited the Potteries, and walked through all the streets of Stoke, Hanley, Burslem, New- casde-under-Lyme, Leek, Shelton, and other places, seeing much that was encouraging and full of hope, and not a little of that needless misery which is a burning shame to us all. I pried into the slums of Liverpool, and made acquaintance with the modern vulgarities of New Brighton, and pulled up for rest in the cathedral city of Chester, where I remained a fortnight ; and it will surprise many to be told that even there misery, disease, starvation and death, of the same hideous, needless type, were as common as elsewhere, the particulars of which shall be duly made known if any demand should be made on me to report them. HOPE, THE BEST OF PHYSIC. "S liking or morning, .V. That iidrctls of oming to ' antl you is not so it tumbles kl'j, " that mc. All \ take 'cm vintcrs are fresh, and , wonderful I at the soft lother, and misery that ;ir number eries, and lem, New- tcing much Itle of that pried into Ihe modern [e cathedral irill surprise rvation and :ommon as le known if T have shown how needless is much of this misery. I believe that one of the best means of restoring hope in the breasts of those of our countrymen who are well-nigh past hope, who get drunk in order to forget their sorrows, is to give them a stake in the New Domains we have called into existence. There is no earthly reason why our people should not invest their money in land — own land — and, if they like, cultivate it, live upon it, and be proud of it. Give the great bulk of our people a finger in tiie national pie, connect them with the new life that cannot grow without an increase of freedom, and make them responsible for decreasing the needless misery that exists in their own midst, we should not then be plagued with such pcttyfogging legislators as those who babble and joke about Local Option, Home Rule, and Burying Grounds, for work of a ten thousand times more serious character would press itself upon all our minds, and call us to more noble endeavour. Nor am I sure that the time is far olT when some wholesome work of a novel kind will be begun in this our beloved land, that shall make it increase in wealth, peace, and perhaps godliness ; and if the beginning of that work must needs be attended with inconvenience to some, the fault will be largely due to those who thought too much of their own case and comfort, and too little of the cheerless labours of those without whom no ease is possible, and no comfort can last, PART III.— RETURN OF THE SPIES. The Government of Canada, who are very anxious that accurate information respecting the soil and climate of their country should be spread as far and wide as possible, invited a number of Dele- gates representing Tenant Farmers in the United Kingdom to visit the Dominion in the autumn of 1879, for the purpose of examining its resources, and reporting on its suitability as a field for settlement. In accordance with such invitation, the following Delegates visited Canada : — Mr. Bir.OAR, The Grange, Dalbeattie Kircudbrightshire. Mr. Cowan, Mains of Park, Glenluce, Wigtownshire. Mr. Gordon, Comlongon Mains, Annan, Dumfriesshire. Mr. Elliot, PIc ^bush, Galashiels. Mr. Logan, Legerwood, Earlston, Berwickshire. Mr. Snow, Pirntaton, Fountain Hall, Midlothian, Mr. Hutchinson, Brougham Casde, Penrith, Cumberland, Mr. Peat, Lees House, Sillolh, Cumberland. Mr. Irving, Bowness-on-Solway, Carlisle. Mr. Johnstone, Low Burnthwaite, near Carlisle. Mr. Wilken, Waterside of Forbes, Aberdeenshire, Mr. Bruce, Aberdeenshire. Mr. Wallace, Nithsdale. Mr. Welsh, Eskdale. These gentlemen were instructed that they should freely exer- cise their judgments, the main object being to obtain the results AfOXTREAL A XI) OTTAWA, "7 [ES. iccurate y should of Dcle- rdoiT) to •pose of IS a field )elegates ire. lire. :rland. eely exer- le results of their own personal observations on everything that should come under their notice. In short, they were to spy out the land, and tell what tliey saw. KEl'ORT OF TIIK SPIES. On the 22nd December, 1S79, Mr. James 13igi,'ar presented his report at a meeting of farmers, held in the 'I'own I lull, Castle Douglas. He said: We landed at Quebec on Sunday 21st September, and proceeded to Montreal. The banks of the St. Lawrence below Quebec, and for a considerable distance towards Montreal, arc largely settled by French Canadians, wlu^^c houses look neat and comfortable, but whose holdings are much subdi- vided, and there is nothing in this district which makes it a desirable one for Scotch settlers. Some of the land is marshy, and some stony, and a good deal still uncleared. On our way to Montreal we saw a number of people gathered together to witness what proved to be a trotting match, a sport of which French Canadians are very fond. Montreal is tlie finest city in Canada, and the farmers in the neighbourhood grow considerable quantities of potatoes for that market, which realize about ^10 per acre. They also find a good market for hay, butter, and other produce. From Montreal to Ottawa we went by steamer on the Ottawa river, the scenery of which is very fine. The farms along this river vary from 100 to 150 acres, two-thirds cleared, and depend for their markets very much on the lumber trade, the greatest industry in this district. On the steamer we met a good many farmers, who had come from Scotland twenty-five to thirty years ago, poor men, but who now owned farms of So to 150 acres. They spoke of their success with pride and satisfaction, and were evidently comfortable and independent. We visited for several days the Dominion Show at Ottawa, which was a great success. The cattle classes were exceedingly good, especially shorthorns. Ayrshires were also good, especially the cows and bulls ; the latter iiS REPORT OF THE SPIES. were, wc think, equal to any we have seen. Devons ranked next ; and Herefords were good, but not numerous. There were fully forty entries of Galloway cattle. Sheep were a fair sliow, and there was a large and very excellent display of pigs. Draugiit horses were not a large or important class, few show- ing any Clydesdale character, but were more after the type of van horses in England. The Canadian general-purpose horse is re- quired to combine activity and pace with draught, and is similar to the general run of Irish horses. A large variety of harvesting and thashing machines was ex- hibited, the chief novelty being a machine to lift and bind grain laid off either in swathe or sheaf froni a side-delivery reaper, but not yet quite perfected. There was a large show of grain ; wheat and pease were very fine, barley and oats fair ; mangolds and potatoes were good, but turnips rather coarse. The show of fruit was exceedingly fuie. ^V^e made a careful inspc^ction of the dairy department. There was an excellent show of cheese, many of the lots being nearly equal to finest Scotch cheddars. The butter was also fine. The average yield of cheese per cow is about 300 lbs. The cost of manufacture is about ]4,^. per lb., and of collecting the milk abo.it 5s. per cow for the season. There are very large deposits of phosphate of lime in this district, a good deal of which has been exported to England. We drove into the country and visited some of the mines where it is found. We also visited a chemical work where it is manu- factured, and where they succeeded in overcoming the difficulties of dissolving it which have made it unpopular in this country. The deposits of this phosphate are very large, and are likely not only to be an important source of wealth to Canada for ex- port, but also of great use to the farmers when they have learnt their value. On our way from Ottawa to Toronto, we saw about sixty cattle ranked ep were splay o( ,v show- 3 of van 56 IS re- similar was ex- id grain reaper, ■ grain; langolds shew of 1 of the e, many 5. The cow is per lb., n. in this ngland. is where is manu- fficiikies country, kely not for ex- e learnt :ty cattle TWENTY BUSHELS PER ACRE. 119 in a field of good clover, about a fourth of which were bulls. The bulls cost ^4 each in spring, and some bullocks bought recently ^(). The bullocks were strong and in good condition, but lacked (juality. T valued them at jQi^ a-head in our market. We left Toronto for Manitoba on the 30th September, taking steamer at Sarnia for Duluth — a sail of five days. I was anxious to visit the famous Dalrymple Farms, as well as the Maple Farms adjoining it, in which we have an interest. ^Ve found our visit very useful, as we there got details of the cost of cultivating wheat on a large scale, which we could not have got on as good authority in ^Manitoba, but which are applicable to that province. We had about 1,000 acres in crop last year, part of it raised on shares and part by our own cultivation. Farming on shares we pay the tenant cost ot first breaking — 2j^ to 3 dollars per acre — (dollar, equal 4s. 2d.; and cents., efjual ^d., or 100 cents, dollar); find seed, \]z bushel per acre, lend steam thrasher, and pay taxes — re- ceiving one half of the produce ; the rent paid by a twenty bushels cvop being about 4 dollars per acre. We also calculated cost of producing an acre of wheat and value of produce as follows, the farm being close to railway station: — Produce, say, 20 bushels at 70 cents. Ploughing, sowing, harvesting, &:c. h^CC^Ll ••• •■• •«• ••• Rent charge, S per cent. ... Interest on plant ... $14.00 ,. 86.50 .. 1.50 1. 00 1. 00 10.00 Profit ... sr4-oo Our crops for three yeai^ have averaged fully 20 bushels. We also made up a statement of capital necessary to purchase 120 REPORT OF THE SPIES. and cultivate a section of land in this nei^^hbourhood, as follows : — 640 at 89 ... Breaking 500 acres, say 8::Jj House and buildings 13 horses ... Harness ... 5 waggons 4 sulky ploughs 4 pairs harrows 3 seeders ... 2 rollers (?) 4 self-binding reap I hay mower I hay rake... Sundries ... ers ...$5-760 ... 1,250 ... 1,500 ... 1,950 160 ••• 375 320 60 195 So ... 1,200 90 ... 40 ... 1,000 Total ^13.980 Or ;^2,796 The above does not include thrashing machine, which may be hired. The first cost of land may seem high at 9 dollars, as plenty of land can be bought for 4 or 5, or even less, but not so near a railway, and as we have sold some at 10/2 dollars, we have taken the above sum in our calculations. The calcula- tion is on a basis of 450 acres in wheat annually, 50 acres in oats for horses, and 140 acres in grass and hay; for though at present plenty of hay may be cut on the prairie, the country is being so rapidly settled, that by-and-bye the settler would be confined to his own iand. Of course a settler could begin on a section of land with much less capital by restricting his operations at first, but, in that case, part of the land would be idle. 70 cents may be considered rather a low price for wheat, as we have sold this year THE DALRYMPLE FARMS. 131 at 75 cents to 77 cents ; and some who waited longer got 90 cents to 100 cents for No. i wheat, but we prefer taking a minimum figure as a basis. The soil here consists of a rich black vegetable mould, 12 to 14 inches deep, on a friable clay subsoil, rather of a marly character. Next day we drove over the Dalrymple farms, which consists of 70,000 acres in different places. On this division they had about 12,000 acres in crop last year, yieldin,', on an average, about 19 bushei: per acre. We first saw on the horizon a dark line, \\\\\c\\ as we approached proved to be a gang of thirteen double ploughs, each drawn by four horses, and turning two furrows, 15 inches each in width, and 3 to 4 inches deep, going after each other on a furrow a mile long. On another section seven double and six single ploughs were at work, and on another eleven double ploughs drawn by four mules 'each. The horses were similar to second-class 'bus horses, and showed signs of work; but the mules were in fine condition, and seemed to stand the work much better than horses. There are four or five steadings on the farm, with excellent accommodation for men and horses. In one shed we saw fourteen self-binders, and four or five steam thrashers. In another nineteen seed drills and a pile of harrows ; in others, spare parts of reapers, ploughs, &c., and a row of waggons outside. Each of these double ploughs travel from 18 to 20 miles a day, and turns over about 5 acres daily. The crop is cut down by self-binding reapers, cutting down 12 acres a day, and attended by a driver and two stokers. It is thrashed out in the field, the straw burned, and the wheat taken straight to the cars on a special siding. Each machine thrashes about 1,000 bushels daily. Wages for ploughmen are 18 to 20 dollars a month, and board. We were very kindly received in Winnipeg. It is situated at the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, both o. which are nivigable by steamers for many hundred miles, and is increas- ing very rapidly in importance. For some years prior to 187 1 the '>M>H>«w^i>WK««i>^«: I2L REPORT OF THE SPIES. population was stationary at about 400. It is now stated to con- tain 12,000 inhabitants. In order to see as much of Manitoba as possible, our party divided, part going west as far as Rapid City, on the Little Saskatchewan. I only went as far west as Portage-la- Prairie 65 miles, and afterwards went to the district on Tobacco Creek, at the foot of the Pembina Mountains, about 90 miles south-west of Winnipeg. The first journey took nearly four days, the latter five. We travelled in sprmg waggons, holding four persons and some baggage, drawn by a pair of horses, costing us about 24s. a-day. The road is the great high- way of the North- West, and is traversed daily by trains of Red River carts, carrying goods to the North-West, and bringing back furs and other produce. These carts are constructed entirely of wood, and drawn by oxen or ponies. They carry a load of Soo to 1,000 lbs., and some go 1,000 miles, to the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Near Winnipeg we passed some good farms of dry land. Some 10 miles out we passed a copse wood, but there is no heavy timber except along the banks of the Assiniboine, on the left. There are a good many half-bred settlers on the banks of this river, their claims being very narrow, but extending back from 2 to 4 miles. We stayed all night at an inn at Pigeon Creek. Part of the district beyond this is low and marshy, but at Poplar Point we find good dry land, thickly settled ; and at High Bluff, some 6 or 8 miles from the Portage, is some of the most desirable land we saw N.W. It was rich dry soil, settled and fenced. The crop was stacked in the fields, and on some farms thrashing was going on. AVe called on some farmers from Ontario, who settled here some years ago, and are doing well. The stubble was clean and strong, and we took samples of the wheat, which was very good. We heard very different state- ments of the yield of wheat, varying from 25 to 40 bushels. M'Lean, a farmer near Portage, had 1,230 bushels Fife wheat off 40 acres. Another man, a native of Ross-shire, who was plough- WINNIPEG. U3 o con- oba as :ity, on age-la- ct on about ^ took iggons, pair of Lt high- of Red ig back tirely ot of Soo Rocky ; of dry there is 3ine, on e banks ig back rigeon shy, but and at ome of ry soil, and on farmers ng well, of the t state- bushels, heat off plough- ing his own land, told us that he had cropped it for seventeen years in succession, his last crop yielding 35 bushels per acre. We also saw an Ontario farmer, who came here some years ago and bought 500 acres of land at 10 dollars per acre. He had 300 acres of arable and 200 under timber, the latter being pro- bably the most valuable portion. There is a saw-mill at the Portage, the timber being floated down iho Assiniboine a distance of 300 miles. The price of wheat at the time of our visit was 55 cents at the Portage and 65 at Winnipeg, but it soon after advanced 10 cents to 15 cents. The rate of freight to Montreal is about 34 cents per bushel, but when the railway is opened to ThUnd'^r Bay the rate will not exceed 25 cents, and is put by some as low as 17 cents per bushel. As a field for wheat-raising, I would much prefer Manitoba to Dakota. With regard to the competition of this Western wheat in our markets, wheat sold at 70 cents in Manitoba leaves a good profit to the grower, and will cost, delivered in England, about 43. 6d. per bushel, a price which does not pay the English farmers. It is evident, however, that this Western grain is affecting the Eastern States of America quite as much as this country. The average crop of the United States is surprisingly low, the returns for a good many States being 12 to 14 bushels per acre. This evidently does not pay the grower, and many are therefore giving up wheat and going in more for other branches of farming. Much of the wheat-produc- ing land in the East being thus, for a time at least, exhausted, supplies will have to come from the virgin soils of the West, and as these are rapidly undergoing the same process, the farmers of the United States will, before very many years, be very much on a level with the farmers of this country. The viixiii soU-s of Canada are, however, much more extensive, and will probably be able to send us wheat when the United States have ceased to be an exporting country. In returning to Winnipeg we passed the tents and fires of many of the cart trains encamped for the night, BUB^aMaiMMMiMiiiAMiiiatlMa tS4 REPORT OF THE SPIES. and could hear the bells on their horses and their cattle feeding around, though we could not see them in the darkness. We were heartily glad to reach the first inn. Next day we met many emi- grants going west, and conversed with several. One, a native of Lanarkshire, had first heard of the fertility of Manitoba from an old Hudson's Bay man in Glasgow thirty years ago. He had been over most of the United States as a mechanic, and was now going to land he had taken up, 20 miles west of the Portage. Wc also met Mr. John Henry, of Bogfoot, in the Stewartry, going west with his family. He had sold his Ontario farm of 200 acres at 47 dollars per acre, and taken up 320 acres of land for himself, and the same for each of his five sons, on the Government terms — on the whole, 1,920 acres of fine land, 8 miles west of Rapid City ; and was highly pleased with his prospects. These Ontario settlers are evidently the best for Manitoba. They have had some experience of the country, and are well prepared for the difficulties of pioneer life. Nearer Winnipeg we met a large party of emi- grants from England, with their train of waggons and Red River carts. They had come out in connection with the Dominion S.S. Company to settle on the Company's lands. They halted for their mid-day meal, as the weather was fine. Many of them were fashionably dressed, and evidently new to the life they were adopting, and as they had a journey of fourteen days before them, we fear, should bad weather set in, things would not continue so pleasant. They would have houses to build, and many prepara- tions to make ; and were going west far too late in the season. These trains were not without an element of sadness. We met a stalwart, quiet-looking Yorkshireman, with three nice-looking, but evidently motherless, girls, from ten to fourteen years of age. Beaten at home, he was entering a new country to try again. His span oi" oxen were jaded, and evidently interior, and he had already fallen behind the main party. He would require a change of oxen to get over the 150 miles of road to Rapid City. ; feefUng IVe were my emi- lative of from an He had was now Portage, ry, going loo acres • himself, :nt terms 3f Rapid ; Ontario lad some ifficulties y of emi- d River )ominion lalted for lem were ey were )re them, ntinue so prepara- i season. Ve met a king, but of age. lain. His he had equire a pid City. PEMBhXA DISTRICT. 12? The old man's prospects were not bright, but the girls will doubt- less soon find homes of their own. Winnipeg is the best place to buy waggons, cattle, implements, etc. Next day we started for the Pembina district. Crossing the Assiniboine, our road lay for 40 miles south along the bank of the Red River. For 10 miles or so to the La Salle River, the road passes through a rather low and wooded country, most of the timber being small copse. We then emerge on open prairie, most of the river lots being settled and under cultivation. We saw a good many stacks of prairie hay, and some cattle. Prairie grouse were pretty numerous, and we shot twenty-five brace on this journey. The land at Morris is hardly so heavy as nearer Winnipeg. Crops were reported to average iS to 22 bushels per acre. Next day we struck west along the base line, and 10 miles out reached the Lowe Farm, the only house for 25 miles. This farm consists of 19,000 acres, which Messrs. Lowe intend farming on a scale similar to the Dalrymple farms. They have erected a fine house and buildings, and have 500 acres broken for next crop. They have had some loss among their horses, the work of breaking being severe, and the hay and water not suiting horses from Ontario at first. Oxen or mules do better for breaking. They have also had some difiiculty in getting good water, and have put down a bore of 90 feet to the rock, where they hope to find a good supply. Meantime they have to draw supplies some distance. Water is one of the first considerations with the settler. It is rare that water is so difiicult to get as in the case we have mentioned. The water of the creeks is good ; and we made a point of tasting the well water at a good many places we visited. Sometimes it was sweet, and sometimes it had an alkaline or sul- phurous taste, but stock take it readily enough. The Lowe farm is all level prairie, with a little marsh, on which you might drive 126 REPORT OF THE SPIES. a plough for miles in any direction. It is intersected here and there by small channels, which carry off tlie water in spring, but do not impede a plougti or reaper. The soil is a rich, black mould, 1 8 inches deep on a clay subsoil. Our trail for several miles lay through the south corner of the big marsh, consisting of many thousand acres, which is Hooded by the Boyne river in the rainy seasons, but could be drained with little difficulty. It was covered with most luxuriant grass, in some places three to four feet high. We travelled over forty miles, and reached Messrs. Riddel's farm on Tobacco Creek. Messrs. Riddel have several thousand acres of nice, dry land, well situated on the Creek, along which there is some fair timber. Their wheat has averaged fully thirty bushels per acre. This, and the Pembina mountain district, is considered one of the finest parts of the Province of Manitoba. The Pem- bina Mountains are terraces 200 to 300 feet high, well clad with timber, their summits being an immense plateau of level prairie, which is thickly settled nearly as far west as Pvock Lake. This district is fairly well-wooded and grows the wild dog rose, a sign of good dry land. AVe had fine weather for our return to Winni- peg. We drove out to Mr. Gerrie's farm on Sturgeon Creek, eight miles north-west of Winnipeg, who owns 40,000 acres in different parts of the province, and has here a block of 5,000 acres, nearly all dry and well situated. The soil is a black loam of 12 to 18 inches deep on a friable clay loam. A crop of oats, sown on breaking, had been very bulky ; but tlie quality of the oats grown on new land is generally poor. The railway from Winnipeg to Selkirk is now finished. We passed through the settlement of Kildonan, which skirts both banks of the Red River, north of Winnipeg. It was settled by Highlanders from Sutherlandshire in 1S12. The claims are from 5 to 12 chains wide, and go four miles back. Only a small portion along the river is cultivated, the rest being used for hay and pasture. We saw land which had been in wheat from thirty-five to fifty years, and took samples of the wheat soil here and pring, but ck mould, miles lay of many the rainy IS covered feet high. Idel's farm sand acres :h there is ty bushels :onsidered The Pem- . clad with ^el prairie, ike. This Dse, a sign to Winni- eek, eight n different nearly all 1 8 inches breaking, n on new Selkirk is Kildonan, nipeg. It 1 1 2. The iles back, rest being n in wheat wheat soil CANADA-PACIFIC RAILIVA 1'. 127 and subsoil. We also saw some first-rate turnips. We did not see any signs of manure being applied, though we saw manure heaps, the accumulation of twenty years. As there is no decrease of crops the natives do not think it necessary to use manure yet ; indeed, it has been customary to draw the manure on to the ice of the river in winter and allow it to go off in the spring freshets. Others, who had not this facility, had found it necessary to remove their barns rather than remove the manure heap. The cultivated land was clean, and seemed in good condition. On the banks of the river we could tee a depth of i a to 14 feet of soil, all an allu- vial deposit. The settlement of Selkiik, farther down the river, was settled in the same way, and is similar to Kildonan. Return- ing to Winnipeg, we saw a start being made on the first section of the Canada-Pacific Railway, west of this point. The construction of this section is contracted for at 6,000 dollars per mile. Though we spent nearly four weeks on our Manitoba journey, we saw only a very small proportion of the 9,000,000 acres it contains ; and as Manitoba is only the beginning of the immense extent of fertile country which extends to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, we can hardly do more than say that we have had our foot in the north- west. The British possessions in North America are larger than the whole of Europe, and larger than the United States, without Alaska; and as the wheat region through which the Canada Pacific Railway will pass is estimated to contain 160 million acres, the Canadians may well be enthusiastic over their posses- sions. None of the Delegates went west of Rapid City, but the country south to the Assiniboine is reported good dry land, water good, and timber scarce. At Shoal Lake, forty miles N.W., the land is similar, and on to Fort EUice and the Touchwood Hills. At Edmonton, 850 miles, the land is said to be undulating and of the finest description, and those who have visited the Peace River describe it as the finest country of the whole, and say that notwith- standing its high latitude it grows wheat well, while owing to its tmntttimm 198 KEPOKT or THE SPIES, situation on tlic east slope of the Rocky Mountains, the climate is much milder than in much lower latitudes. Most of the land in the Province of Manitoba is now taken up, and emigration is flowing westward to the free grant lands. The land is surveyed in sections of a mile square, or 640 acres — half of these sections, corresponding to the white squares of a draught board, are reserved as railway lands, and sold at fixed prices according to distance from the line of railway. The sections corre- sponding to the black Sfjuares are reserved as free grant lands — each settler receiving 160 acres on payment of a nominal sum, and with power to buy 160 acres more on easy terms, the price varying from i to 2^ dollars per acre. On the whole, I was favourably impressed with Manitoba, and the other delegates whom I met expressed the same opinion. No one who sees the immense extent of fertile soil, and the excellence of its products can doubt for a moment that there is a great future before that country. Nearly everyone we met who had. seen anything of the North-west spoke of it in glowing terms and though it is necessary to allow considerable discounts on the statements of those who have not much experience in agriculture, we were satisfied that settlers with industry, experience, and some capital, could not fail to do well. A man with p^ioo can make a start on a homestead ; a man with ^£200 to ;^3oo can start well ; but as a rule men with more capital have the best chance. Stock do well, but require shelter and hay in winter. There is a good home trade in cattle, large numbers being imported at present from Minnesota. The cattle we saw in Manitoba were good and strong, rather short of breeding, but infinitely superior to the Texas and native Colorado cattle we afterwards saw in the Chicago markets. We think Galloway cattle would suit the country well. Yearling cattle were selling at 12 to 16 dollars; two-year-olds at 20 to 25 dollars; and three-year-olds at 40 to 45 dollars. Draught oxen bring 90 to iSo dollars per pair THE NORTH WEST. 129 limate is land in ration is veyed in sections, anl, are ccording s corre- se grant It of a on easy er acre. , and the an. No Cv'ellence a great k'ho had, terms on the culture, d some make a rt well ; Stock re is a rted at Da were uperior ^ in the uit the dollars ; 40 to er pair according to size, condition, and training. . f.ost of the settlers at present are avoiding the low lands and taking up the dry lands for wheat-growing, which give a quicker return than cattle ; but 2\ soon as stock raising is more general, we think those lands will bt found very valuable. We saw some few Hocks of 50 to 100 sheep. In some districts a spear grass grows, which gets into the wool, pierces the skin, and kills the animal ; but this only occurs at one part of the year, and when the land is cultivated this grass disap- pears. Like cattle, sheep require shelter and hay in winter. The disadvantages of Manitoba are at present bad roads, especially in the rainy season — the long winter of fully five months, the scarcity of wood and of water in some parts, the mosquitoes and black flies, which for a couple of months in summer, and especially in marshy places, are very annoying to man and beast, and particu- larly to new settlers. The opening of the railway will help to get over the first difficulty, and also bring in supplies of timber where needed. Care is required in selecting land where good water can be had. The winter is long and the temperature often very low ; but we were assured that the cold is not severe, as the air is generally still and clear, and that even invalids with weak lungs find the climate healthy and pleasant. There is no cure for the insect plagues, which, however, disappear as the land is drained and cultivated. It is well for the emigrant to be prepared for these difficulties, which we would be careful neither to exaggerate nor conceal. As a field for money-making and enterprise we consider the North-\V est decidedly the best part of the Dominion ; and those who are willing to face these difficulties and disadvantages of pioneer life — difficulties and disadvantages which will be rapidly overcome, and which are nothing to those which the early settlers in Ontario had to contend with — have every prospect of success and independence. It would be a great mistake to suppose that I recommend Manitoba to all who think of emigrating. The pro- 13© REPORT OF THE SPIES. priety of goinj there depends very much on the means and habits of the emigrant. There are many whom I could not recommend to make a change, which would involve the loss of a good many of their present life comforts, and which might be especially hard on the female members of the family ; but young people with health, energy, and some means, accustomed to work, would certainly improve their position and do well. Men of capital might, by residing in Winnipeg, secure for their families and them- selves all the advantages of city life until they chose to remove to their farms. We left Winnipeg on Tuesday, 21st October, and, travelling night and day, reached Chicago in forty-eight hours. We passed over St. Paul and Pacific, Chicago, Milwaukie, and St. Paul, and Michigan Central Railways, a distance of 1,200 miles, on free passes. These railways carry most of the emigrants who go to the north-west at present, and the arrangements are very satisfactory. During the whole of the first day we traversed the expanse of burned prairie we have already described, which often stretched away for miles to the horizon unbroken by a house or tree, but strewn witli numerous bones of buffalo, deer, and other animals, scattered over the surface, or half buried in the soil. Near Kmerson and Cookson we saw some farms of con- siderable size ; on one were excellent buildings, and five or six teams were r- from work. On another we saw ten horses at work 5 a tlirashing machine. There were more than TOO large stacks of wheat in the fields and in the buildings, and it struck us that there was work enough for a steam thrasher, and that the horses would have been better employed ploughing. At night we passed some extensive prairie fires, which were tearing along before a brisk wind and, where the grass was high, leaping to a great height. It was a grand sight. We heard that many settlers had lost houses and crops by recent fires. We spent two weeks in Ontario, which was not sufficient to see it thoroughly, but our visit was cut short by an early fall of snow. TORONTO AND GUELP/f. 131 ind habits commend pod many :ially hard :oplc with rk, would of capital and them- remove to tober, and, ight hours, do, and St. ,200 miles, grants who ts are very iversed the which often a house or , and other le soil, ns of con- and five or we saw ten were more e buildings, ,m thrasher, ploughing, vhich were s was high, i heard that s. cient to see cdl of snow. We visited some farms near Toronto, on one of which we saw stumps extracted by an ingenious machine. Two men and a boy and a pair of light horses were pulling up large pine stumps cxi)e- ditiously. These stun.ps are not ripe for pulling for seven or eight years after the trees arc cut, and in passing through the Province the patches of land under stumps and the snake or rail fences were the strangest features. We visited Guelph. This is one of the best farmed districts in Canada, the stock of cattle on several farms being exceptionally good. The chief attraction here was the Ontario School of Agriculture and Model Farm, an excellent institution, partly supported by Government. They have at present eighty-eight pupils, and have had to refuse many appli- cations for want of accommodation. The pupils study and work half time. They are paid for their labour according to industry and ability, and it is possible for an active lad to make payments for work nearly cover the charges of the school. We were shown over the farm by the Professor of Agriculture. We saw a fine field of turnips tested to average 20 tons per imperial acre — ten or twelve sorts of swedes had been tried. Experiments were also being made with different varieties of wheat. The pastures were sown out with clover and Timothy, and were fairly good, but rather patchy in places. The land is a good, deep, gravelly loam, heavier than similar land here, and not so red in colour ; some parts seemed rather soft and heavy. It was clean and in good order. The stork included good specimens of Shorthorn, Here- ford, Devon, Polled Angus, Galloway and Ayrshire cattle; and of Southdown, Cotswold, and Leicester sheep ; a good many of the animals having been imported from this country. Several of tlie horses were very nearly pure Clydesdale. They are at present barvying on experiments in cattle-feeding with animals of different creeds. We saw parties of students engaged on various farm work, attending stock, and thrashing out experimental lots of grair. We think this is a valuable institution, and worthy ' ' liiiMHliniBi^Bi 132 REPORT OF THE SPIES. imitation in this country. We visited several farms in this district. At Mr. Stone's we saw some very good shorti^orn stock and Cotswold sheep. At Mr. M'Crae's we saw good turnips, and a nice herd of Galloways, includ'-^g some of the principal prize winners at Ottawa. At Mr. Hobson's farm we saw some excellent shorthorns. Mr. Hobson feeds a good many cattle, buying half fat cattle in December and January and feeding till June. He allows \z lbs. to 15 lbs. meal daily and 60 lbs. roots. He also feeds off 400 lambs on rape, buying them in August at IDS. to 12s. each, and making them worth 22s. to 24s. by middle of December. The rape is sown in drills and worked same as turnips. On this farm of 300 acres, 240 cleared, four men are employed in summer and two in winter, with some extra help at busy seasons. Mr. Hobson estimates the necessary capital for such a farm as ;^3 per acre. Of course where pedigree stock is kept it is much higher. We visited a farm of 180 acres, all good land except 20 acres, which was for sale at about ^13 per acre. It was a nice place, near a railway station. The house was new — had cost ;^8oo ; and the buildings fair. Another farm of 200 acres let at 12s. an acre was considered too dear. The soil was a fair sandy loam on a clay subsoil, intersected with a gravelly ridge. The turnips were a very good crop. The divisions of crop on this farm were as follows : — 70 acres hay, 60 acres pasture, 15 turnips, 90 fall wheat, 20 peas, 20 oats. The taxes payable by the tenant were ;^i3, in addition to eight days' statute road labour. This farm was part of a block of 500 acres for sale at ;^i2 per acre. Near Guelph we saw two farms of 400 acres formed by two sons of the late Mr. Gerrand Marchfield. They pay about ;^20o a year rent and taxes, and are said to be doing well. These seemed very desirable farms, in a good situation, and were for sale, price ;^i 2 to ;^ 1 3 per acre. 'We passed through part of the Paisley block, a district settled a good many years ago by emigrants from Paisley, few of whom had been brought up to farming. They CALT, BRANTFORD, AND PARIS. 133 in this )m stock turnips, principal aw some ly cattle, eding till bs. roots. \ugust at »y middle same as men are I help at ipital for ; stock is , all good per acre. as new — n of 200 oil was a ly ridge. p on this turnips, e tenant This per acre. wo sons ;^2oo a seemed le, price Paisley nts from They r. have \n nearly all cases been successful, and possess very com- fortable residences, and tidy, well-managed farms. We next visited Gait, where a large proportion of the people are of Scotch descent. Mr. Cowan, a native of Dumfriesshire, has a good farm of 540 acres in the neighbourhood. He is well-known as a breeder of Leicester sheep. We saw a first-rate flock of ewes. The land is mostly rolling — a deep sandy loam, and free from stones. We went to Bow Park, near Brantford, where we met an old acquaint- ance, Mr. John Clay, junr., of Kerchesters. Mr. Clay had just returned from Chicago, where he had sold 40 head of shorthorns at an average of 60 guineas each, and some Clydesdale horses at handsome prices. We drove from Brantford to Paris through a very nice country. On the way we visited a very nice farm of 540 acres, 80 acres in wood, nicely situated and well laid out. The house was fine but buildings inferior. The land was a deep sandy loam, easily cultivated but not in good order. We saw a 60 acre field of grass sown down five or six years ago, which was the best sole of grass we saw in Canada. This was a most desir- able farm, and was for sale. We went from Paris to Woodstock in Oxford County, and visited Mr. Donaldson's farm of 300 acres at Zorra. Mr. Donaldson is a native of Cumberland and had excellent farm buildings and very good turnips, he feeds a e^ood many cattle, and gave us some details of expenses and returns. He allowed 60 to 70 lbs. turnips, and 8 to 10 lbs. meal and bran daily, which he estimated rather low we thought at 3s. per week. His cattle paid 13s. per month for grazing without cake, and from 22s. to 30s. per month for house feeding. He estimates grazing sheep at 3d. per week, and wintering at 6j^d., or 20s. 6d. per annum. Ewes kept in this way should pay nearly 30s. each in wool and lambs. He estimates cost of fattening sheep in winter at 7^d. per week, including an allowance of grain. Sheep, like cattle, require to be housed in winter, and do well, if not too crowded — forty in a lot being sufficient. Sheep in Canada are 134 REPORT OF THE SPIES. not affected by scab, foot-rot, or murrain. We visited a large cheese factory at Strathallan Station, recently erected on the best principles. The storing room is placed some 20 feet from the making-room, and is connected with it by a tramway. The pig- geries are about 80 yards off. The balance of cheese on hand had been sold at 6^d. per lb. At Stratford we met Mr. Ballantyne, and visited his factory at Black Creek, eight miles off. At this factory they receive the milk of 1,000 cows, and make fully a ton of cheese daily. The cows yield most milk in June, some 26,000 lbs. daily, producing 2,600 to 2,700 lbs. cheese. The worst yield is in July. The milk is richest in October, when 8j4 lbs. milk will yield i lb. of cheese. Farmers sending milk to the factories do not as a rule feed their cows highly, and consider ;^6 per cow a fair return for the season. Mr. Ballantyne said it would not pay them to make good cheese under 5d. per lb. We visited Niagara, and were much impressed with the grandeur and magnificence of the falls. The surrounding country is very fine and largely devoted to the growing of fruit. The neighbourhood of Grimsby and St. Catherine's are also famous for apples, some farmers growing 2,000 to 4,000 barrels, worth 6s. per barrel. The whole of the western peninsula of Ontario is fine, and we would have liked to visit the counties of Kent, Huron, Wellington, Gray, and Bruce, all of which are fine lands, but the ground being covered with an early fall of snow, we had to give up that idea. A fine stretch of land lies all the way from Kent to Lake Huron j the County of Huron being recently settled, land is cheaper than in other districts, and very good land can be bought at £,() to ^\o per acre. East of Toronto, along Lake Ontario, there is some good land, especially in the neighbourhood of Markham, Whitby, and Port Hope, prices reaching ;i^i6 to /'20 per acre; further back round Peterborough the land is more broken, and about half these prices. The land round the Bay of Quinte, is considered the finest barley soil in Canada, and large EXPORTING CATTLE TO ENGLAND. 135 r. ted a large )n the best t from the The pig- 1 hand had iallantyne, At this fully a ton me 26,000 ivorst yield 2 lbs. milk e factories 6 per cow Id not pay with the 5g country ■uit. The amous for th 6s. per io is fine, t, Huron, 5, but the give up Kent to dj land is can be 'ng Lake )ourhood £\(i to 1 is more e Bay of nd large quantities of barley are grown and exported to the United States. Some farmers here grow barley on half their farm, and keep very little stock. The crop ranges from thirty to fifty bushels per acre, worth 55 to 70 cents. The land around Kingston lies on a lime- stone formation, and is light and broken. Wc drove twelve miles east along the St. Lawrence, and saw some fair farms, but were not very favourably impressed with the district. Belleville and Prince Edward's County are good, and contain many cheese factories. Dairy farming is also general around Brockville, butter being made at many factories in that district. We met here a dealer who had been exporting cattle to England. He was paid during spring and early summer, but latterly he had lost money, especially on a lot of grass-fed cattle, which sold for ^13 5s. a-head. He had paid 4 dollars a head forfeit on seventy cattle rather than ship them to England, where they would probably have lost 10 dollars each. Freights in spring and summer, when shipping was briskest, were ;^5 to ;^5 I OS. Montreal or Quebec to Liverpool, and came down in autumn, as insurance increased and shipments fell off, to J[,^ los. This gentleman, said the farmer, was not paid for feeding cattle on corn for less than 5 cents per lb. live weight, and said only such cattle could stand the voyage, and pay to send to England. He estimated the cost of cattle fed in Onrario and sold here as under : — Bullock, 1,600 lb., at 5 cents Freight and expenses to shipping port Ocean freight Insurance 2JE^ percent. ... Keep and attendance on voyage... Commission and expenses in England .£16 9 I o 5 o o 10 10 1 o o o o o o o £'^^ 9 o | IW! J«l>i i lll ii iimm»n»> ~- 136 REPORT OF THE SPIES. Estimated to dress 900 lbs. beef, 6 ^d. ... jQ2/^ 7 o Loss ... ... ... ... 020 900 lbs. beef at 7d., ^£26 4s. 6d. Gain >•« ••• ... ... i 15 6 Bullocks, 1,400 lbs., at $4-65 per 100 ... jQit, 8 o Expenses as above 800 Sold, say, 784 lbs. beef, 6^d. ... Loss ;^2I 8 o 21 4 I o ^11 4d. Or 784 lbs. beef at yd., ^^22 17s. Gain ... ... ... ... 194 This statement agrees very closely with our Chicago calculations, and seems to show that beef cannot be sent here to pay much under yd. per lb., 2^ per cent, is a low rate of insurance, applicable to contracts from ist May to ist September ; from ist September to 15 th September it is 3^ per cent., and increases to 7 per cent, in November and 8 per cent. December and January. We paid a rather hurried visit to the maritime provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, going by rail from Boston to St. John's. From Bangor, in the State of Maine, to St. John's, we travelled all day througli a thickly-wooded country of no agricultural value. We saw numerous saw-mills, but often passed for hours through forests without seeing a house. In many places the heavy timber had been cleared off — in others it was too small for cutting. Much of it was second growth spruce and tamarac, and in some places scrubby birch. Some parts of the forest had been swept by fire, and the remains of giant trees were lying in indescribable confusion. Here and there a giant pine towered above the undergrowth naked and dead, the top broken NOVA SCOTIA. 137 o o o o o I II 4 Illations ay much surance, from icreases )er and nces of ston to John's, of no passed places as too e and of the were |t pine roken off by storm or lightning and the trunk blackened by fire. Some of the heaviest timber had grown where the land was covered by granite boulders, and seemed incapable of supporting vegetation. Where the land was low and marshy, the timber was poor and stunted. During the whole day's journey we did not see 500 acres of cultivated land. Mr. Livingstone, Government Agent at St. John's, informed us that up the Rivei St. John, 100 miles between Frederickton and Woodstock, there is a good agricultural district being rapidly settled, but time did not permit us to visit it. We saw some of the country round St. John's, but it is not well adapted for cropping, the early summer months being damp and foggy. We sailed across the Bay of Fundy to Annapolis, in Nova Scotia, and travelled through the Annapolis Valley, which is about 90 miles long and 4 to 8 miles wide. At the lower end there are extensive meadows reclaimed from the sea, and we saw hundreds of small hay ricks perched on circular stands of stakes 3 or 4 feet high. The soil of this valley varied from heavy clay to sandy loam, and in some places was low and peaty. There was not much under cultivation, the most of it being in pasture or meadow. We saw a good many orchards, the valley being famous for apples. The hills along each side are more or less covered with timber, and resembled somewhat the shores of Loch Ness or Loch Lochy, but are not so high or rugged. The farm-houses seemed neat and comfortable, but we did not see much sign of agricultural enterprise. Crops there are sown in May and reaped in August. On i8th November we went by rail from Halifax to Amherst, and saw no good agricultural land till we reached Truro, which is pleasantly situated, and here we saw the first of the famous grass marshes of the district. These marshes are flat at the upper end of the Bay of Fundy. They are formed by the alluvial deposits of high tides, and are similar to the warp lands of Lincolnshire. They are protected by dykes and sluices, and are very rich, producing crops of two to three tons hay per acre year I -jiiiMiiinimili— — — ■ 138 REPORT OF THE SPIES. after year without manure or decrease. The tidal deposit is large, sometimes reaching 2 inches in high tides. These lands are valued at from J[,\^ to ^£"25 per acre. The adjoining elevated lands are good red soil. We drove from Amherst to Sackville, ten miles through these marshes. The hay is of two kinds ; broad- leaved hay, a coarse grass, 2 to 2^ feet long, and resembling prairie hay ; the other, called English hay, is a mixture of Timothy and other sown grasses, and resembling strong n^ iow or lea hay. The former was put up in ricks of about a ton each, and we saw thousands scattered over these meadows ; the latter was stored in numerous wooden sheds. These meadows were quite a new feature to us, and were the richest grazing lands we saw in Canada. The counties of Picton, Colchester, and Cumberland are the best agricultural districts ; and Grand Pre is called the Garden of Nova Scotia; Westmoreland, in New Brunswick, is similar to Cumberland \ Prince Edward's Island, which we had not time to visit, contains a considerable portion of good farming land. The southern coast of Nova Scotia is rocky and wild, but in the south- west a good many sheep are kept, the winter climate being modified by the Gulf Stream. The sea fisheries of Nova Scotia are valuable, and worth 6,000,000 dollars a year ; and the salmon fishing in the rivers of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick is splendid. They belong to Government, and some are leased to English gentlemen ; but on many streams a fly has never been thrown. June and July are the best months for rod fishing. On one river, last year, three rods killed an average of 2,000 lbs. salmon per day for several successive days. We travelled to Quebec by the Inter-Colonial Railway. The north of New Brunswick is a hilly and thickly-wooded country, and we saw almost no attempt at cultivation till we reached Rimouski, on the St. Lawrence. From this point to Quebec the bank of the river is settled by French Canadians. In some places we saw con- siderable stretches of level land, but much of it is stony, and all eposit is ese lands I elevated Sackville, Is ; broad- esembling f Timothy )r lea hay. d we saw stored in ite a new n Canada, e the best Garden of similar to ot time to md. The the south- late being ova Scotia he salmon ins wick is leased to ever been hmg. On 2,000 lbs. avelled to of New d we saw ki, on the the river saw con- iy, and all ONTARIO AND EMIGRATION. 139 subdivided into narrow seasons, which have not been favourable ones. We saw a good deal of land badly farmed, no exact system of rotation having been followed, but successive grain crops have been grown too long, till wheat is in many cases not a paying crop. Farming in Ontario may be said to be in a transition state from crop to stock raising, as the farmers are beginning to see that they must pay more attention to green crops and stock. The pastures of Ontario did not come up to our expectations, they were generally thin and patchy, but a better system of farming and manuring would no doubt improve them, as the land is naturally good. Very few use artificial manures, yet by-and-by they are likely to come into more general use. A large buyer of barley told us that a few farmers who used superphosphate sent him barley as much as 5 and 6 lbs. per bushel heavier than their neighbours. Labour in Ontario is about 15 per cent, dearer than in this country, but the farms are evidently worked with fewer hands. We were told again and again that no farmer should go there who did not intend to work, but taking the whole year round we think we know many farmers here who work as hard as farmers seemed to do there. We now come to the question of emigration. I feel that there is much responsibility in answering that question. I am satisfied that men with some capital could make more of it in Canada than in this country. I think then; is most money to be made in the north-west, but even in Ontario and the other pro- vinces I think prospects are good. I do not a.dvi'^p people who are doing well here, with a prospect of providing for their families, to change ; but those who are working for nothing, and especially those who have a working family, need have no hesitation in going to Canada. They will find in many parts of it as good farmers, as good houses, as good schools, and as good neighbours MUHMil I40 REPORT OF THE SPIES. as they have here. They will also remain under the British flag. I met many Americans who did not hesitate to say that some day they expected Canada to be part of the United States ; but I have very much mistaken the feelings of Canadians if there is any such feeling on their side of the line. Of course I need not say that considerable capital is required to purchase one of the improved Ontario farms ; but in the Eastern townships, and in many other parts, there is plenty of land at lower prices, which can be bought for less than it would have cost a few years ago. In short, young men and men with grown-up families and small capital sliould go to Manitoba. Men with sufficient capital and young families should settle in the older provinces. With regard to working men without any capital, I think ordinary labourers are as well off at home ; but skilled workmen are well paid, and intelligent men with rising families could improve their position, and give their children a better start in life. In all classes, industry, economy, and intelligence are essential to success. Mr. George Cowan presented his report at a public meeting held at the Town Hall, Stranraer, December 19th, and confirmed, in vigorous language, all that Mr. Bigger has stated. Mr. Robert Peat, who presented his report at a similar meet- ing held at Silloth, Cumberland, among other striking things said : I never met with anyone who had lived in Canada that could be induced to come back to England. To those who think of going out they must make up their mind to work. Anyone who goes there with the thought that as soon as he sets his foot on foreign soil he will make his fortune, if there is anyone here with that idea let me impress upon him that he makes a great mistake. Above all things the emigrant should have good health, be stout- hearted, prepared to do anything that comes to hand, and to adopt himself to the circumstances of the new country in which his lot is placed. He may have many things to learn and many to unlearn; Itish flag, hat some es; but I :re is any required e Eastern f land at have cost grown-up ^en with the older capital, I It skilled ; families itter start ence are meeting )nfirmed, lar meet- gs said : at could think of one who foot on lere with mistake. )e stout- to adopt lis lot is unlearn; A GEA'ERAL STA TEAfENT. 141 anyone who is not willing to attempt this, I would advise him to stay at home. Mr. Irving presented his report of the land at Browness, December ist, 1879. It confirms the preceding. At one of the agricultural shows of the Dominion, he declares that he never saw such a fine gathering of young ladies. Mr. Thomas Johnston made his statement at VVreay, Decem- ber 5th, and gives a graphic confirmation of his fellow-delegates* reports. He adds : The Canadian people, as a rule, are a kind and most hospitable class. The way the original settlers cleared thousands of acres of land in the face of great difBculties is very creditable to them. A person who had never been there would hardly credit the size and quality of the fruits, roots, and vegetables. The roads as a rule are good, and railways are running over the most part of the country. Their farm implements are more lightly and elegantly made than our own, and quite as serviceable. Their schools are free, and perhaps their school system is the most per- fect in the world. The climate is hotter in summer and colder in winter, but much drier than here. The farm buildings are mostly wood, and as they do not stack their crops the barns are very large. !Many of the houses are built of brick, and very elegantly con- structed. The cattle, as a rule, are not so good as we have. The horses are something like our coaching horses. Sheep are very good. The farmers keep up the roads by statute labour, each having so much to do according to the quantity of land he holds. The fences are all made of wood of various kinds. The farmers in Canada are not good farmers, althougli some are as good as we have in England. Their corn market is generally in the street. They bring their grain in waggons, and sell it out of them Canada is a very well-watered country. Mr. George Wilkins' report is very lengthy and exhaustive. He winds up as follows : — To the farmer with from two to five hundred pounds in his mmmmm MMaMMMlMil 142 nEPORT Of THE SPIES, pocket, wlio may think of going to Canada, I would say he will find plenty of partially cleared firms for sale at all prices, and I would advise him to look well about ere he buys, as he will be none the worse of even a year in the country working to others, and if willing to rough it a little for a time, by all means go to the North-West at once, and I am pretty sure he will soon find himself not only his own laird, but independent. To the farmer with capital, I would only say, if he be well at home and have no cause to change, he should remain ; only if anxious to try to better his condition more quickly and inde- pendently than he is likely to do at home for some time to come in farming, he will find either in Manitoba or Lower Canada plenty of scope for his energies, and a good deal more interest for his money. He will find himself surrounded by his own countrymen, go where he will, all anxious for the prosperity of their adopted land, and all loyal sons of their mother country. Mr. James Bruce presented his report at Aberdeen, on February 27th. It contains many striking features. He says: In order to show the prosperity of Canda, it may be men- tioned that the banking capital in the Dominion has been in- creased more than 100 per cent, during the last ten years. Mr. Robert Wallace read his report at a crowded meeting at Penpont, Nithsdale. Among many startling statements he observes, within three years, when that branch of the Canada Pacific Railway is finished which runs to Fort William, on Lake Superior, from Winnipeg, wheat will be grown in Manitoba and sent to Liverpool at a net cost of 26s. per auarter — 3s. 3d. per bushel. Mr. Welsh gave his report before a large meeting of farmers, held in the Lymiecleucn chool, Canonbie, January 20th. It is very able, and enters at great length of detail into everything con- nected with the subjec- " Canada as a Field for Settlement." He" says the scenery in many parts is much like some of our own MUCH PLEASED WITH CAXAPA. U3 ay he will ices, and I he will be to others, eans go to soon find le be well nain ; only and inde- le to come er Canada re interest y his own osperity of ountry. prdcen, on le says : be men- been in- ars. :d meeting ments he le Canada ;i, on Lake itoba and 3s. 3d. per )[ farmers, oth. It is thing con- ent." He f our own country — not certainly as fine as Liddcsdale, more like Canonbio, and the people very like ourselves. Mr. James Palmer, who was also a delegate from Somerset- shire, writes from Canada as follows : — I have great pleasure in saying that I am much pleased with Canada, for the i)rospects are different to what they arc in l-'ngland, especially for farmers. My sons are delighted with the country and the farm. I have purchased for them in all 273 acres, in two farms situated seven miles from this, near the main road towards Exeter, Ontario. They have a good house on each lot, with orchards, out-buildings, &c., and 75 acres fenced and under culti- vation on each lot. The whole cost 7,500 dollars — less than I had to pay rent for land in two years in Somersetshire. I can strongly recommend this country to my friends and others who intend to emigrate. Mr. Hunt W. Chamdre, of Stewartstown, Tyrone, writes a very interesting statement, and says : — I have no hesitation in recommending Manitoba and die Canadian North-West to my countrymen, as the best place for a man to go to who wants to earn money and is not afraid to rough it for a time. He will have many discomforts for the first year or so, will be annoyed by mosquitoes and black flies for about three weeks, but even these pests give way before civiliza- tion, and will, I have no doubt, ere long disappear. I believe any man determined to work and push on, even though he has not a penny to start with, will succeed here, as wages are good; but the man who has ;!^ioo clear to begin with will do better, and the one who has ;!^2oo or ;/73oo or more will do better still, and be saved many discomforts. There are numbers in the North of Ireland disputing about small pieces of land, and paying large amounts for tenant right, who, for half the sum in Manitoba would become the owners of land one acre of which would be worth two of those they fight so much about. mtmm t44 SPIES OF THE SPIES. I have given the names of our Spies, because I believe each of tticin is willing to supply any information to any anxious inquirer on the subject of Canada— its capa. ities, advantages, disadvantages, and everything that can be of importance to all who are about to emigrate. In addition to the above, may be given the valuable Report recently presented to the House of Commons by Mr. Clare Sewell Read, and Mr. Albert Pell, M.P., who were appointed by the Royal Commission on Ai^riculture^ to visit Canada and the United States. It is a most valuable State paper for many reasons, which cannot now be entered into. It confirms in a striking manner our Report of the Spies. A. J. Duffield. " The arable farming around Toronto," observe the Assistant Commissioners, " is decidedly in advance of anything we saw in the United States. The cultivation strongly resembled that of England, and for cleanliness and produce would compare favour- ably with some of its well-farmed districts. The soil is deep and fertile. The country has almost all been reclaimed from the primeval forest, and the labour that has converted that woody region into miles of smiling corn-fields, must have been no easy task. But in the great north-west, the country so recently opened to the over-populated countries of the old world, there is no forest to subdue, or scrub to uproot. The whole is one vast plain, more or less fertile, which can be converted into a grain field by the simple operation of two shallow ploughings. The soil around Portage le Praire is a rich black loam, light of tillage, yet sufficiently retentive to withstand severe drought. In many places there appeared little or no variation to the depth of three feet. In some spots the land is swampy and low, but a few main dykes would dry many hundred acres, and with a soil A FAK'SEUXG POLICY AEEDED. 145 5ve each anxious antages, ance to I Report . Clare ppointed and the ar many ms in a FIELD. Assistant le saw in that of favour- eep and roni the woody no easy recently d, there is one into a iighings. light of ht. In depth IV, but a a soil so friable, no drainage for surface water could possibly be required. This vast region, called by some ' the future wheat granary of the new world,' had not' in S ptember last the advan- tages of any railway. In this respect Canada seems greatly in arrcar of the United States. While in the, latter country rail- roads, made sometimes with English capital, are run through r. country almost unpopulated in oriler to develop it, in the Dominion no railroad is made until it has a population on or beyond it that may be expected to pay the working expenses of the new line. It may be that the original shareholders of the pioneer railroads of the States are often sacrificed, and their line is sold for a small sum to some wealthy company. Cut if Canada is to be developed with a rapidity approaching that of the United States, the Dominion Parliament must spread its railway system somewhat more quickly. A far-seeing policy must anticipate eventual profits from opening a now inaccessible though rich region,, rather than expect immediate payment from the trafhc along the new lines of railroad that must soon be made. " Much has been said against the long and severe winters of Manitoba. No doubt the cold is intense, and that for wcll-niyh five months in the year all field work is suspended. But it is a crisp, dry cold, that is not so unpleasant, and with the first sharp frost and fall of snow the roads that were before impassible become excellent highways for the cartage of timber and of grain. No doubt the grasshoppers did in the years 1875 and 1S76 destroy the few cereal crops of the early settlers. But should they again invade the territory, it is confidently expected that with the increased acreage planted widi grain, their ravages must be distributed over a much larger area, and will not be so severely felt. It is also argued that no Indian corn can be j)ro- duced in that northern latitude, and therefore it will never be a region of cattle and of sheep. Certainly stock must be housed during the winter months, and provender of some kind must be 146 RF':rOR T O F THE SPIES. grown to feed them during that long and dreary season. But there is no reason why abundant crops of natural hay and arti- ficial grasses, such as Timothy, rye grass, clover, and Huncrarian niillet should not be grown in great abundance, and the deep and friable soil seems well adapted for the cultivation of mangolds and other roots. " No man should emigrate to the far west who is not prepared to work hard and live hard. He may successfully transplant an English faniily into this region of *" rude abundance," but he cannot expect to take with him the comforts of an English home. For years all new settlers, but especially the females, must expect to rough it. The old, the sickly, and the faint-hearted should never emigrate, however poor and sad their lot may be in the old country. But to the young, the vigorous, and the courageous, who caunot get a comfortable living in England, Manitoba offers a home that will soon provide all the necessaries of life, and in a few years of steady and well-directed toil, will probably ensure a competency, and possibly a moderate fortune. It may be a very good country for a farm labourer to settle in, but it appears especially adapted as a field for the practical hardworking stalwart young farmer who has a few hundred pounds in his pocket, and who would know how to spend it to the best advantage. "To those who could not endure the rough life of the west, there are many farms of 100 or 200 acres to be bought in Ontario and Lower Canada, at from 50 to loc dollars an acre. These farms may be near a good town or railway, and are well fenced, and upon which decent farm houses and suitable buildings have been erected. There are also in these localities sundry such farms to let at from 3 to 5 dollars an acre ; or they can be hired by the tenant paying the rent in kind by a fixed portion of the produce, while occasionally the farm is worked in shares, the landlord finding all or a portion of the live-stock of the farm. This may be an easy means for a farmer without capital to work mmatttm TESTIMONY. 14/ son. But ' and arti- ^uns:arian deep and mangolds t prepared isplant an " but he ish home, ist expect sd should in the old lurageous, 3ba offers I and in a ensure a be a very ; appears I stalwart cket, and his way up, but it seldom leads to any permanent friendly rela- tions between landlord and tenant. "Our regret at not being able to describe more fully the agriculture of Canada is considerably modified by the fact that, in the autumn of last year, fourteen tenant farmers' delegates from Scotland and the north of England visited the Dominion, and have since written a series of most useful and exhaustive reports. (Signed) "Clare Sewell Read, "Albert Pell. *' To W. A. Peel, Esq, "Secretary Royal Coiitmisston on A^ricuiiure, '*7uly, i83o," the west, 1 Ontario These 1 fenced, ngs have dry such be hired n of the ares, the he farm, to work PRINTED nv W. J. JOHNSON, 121, Ff.EET STREET, LONDON, K.C ' ■^-'•' m "mmmmummmmm DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA. rOMPOSFI) BY EL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA. 1^ DEDICATED TO THE DUKE DE BEJAR, MARQUIS DE GIBRALEON, CONDE DE BENALCAZAR AND BANARES, VIZCONDE DE LA PUEBLA DE ALCOZER, SENOR DE LAS VILLAS DE CAPILLA CURIEL, AND BURGUILLOS. 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